THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER

Robert McCall was the dean of American space artists and his painting of a proposed moon base (for the 1960s Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey) still haunts my dreams. It might have come true but for the wasted billions spent on the stupid Democrat (JFK & LBJ) war in Viet Nam. Now with Uncle [...]

I’ve yet to read a bad science fiction story by Brit author Eric Brown and Kings of Eternity, a tale of conferred immortality is certainly one of his best. It’s his characters and their inner lives that make the books as interesting as they are, even when the plot is as imaginatively intricate as it [...]

Real scientists (as opposed to those corrupted by the federal dole) know the climate is far too complicated for any computer model yet devised to measure what’s happening today, let alone a hundred years in the future. Like they say, GIGO:  garbage in, garbage out. So this is not a surprise: “49 former NASA scientists [...]

I covered the first landing of the space shuttle in 1981. The first space ship. They did real work, hauling satellites to orbit, until the Challenger explosion in 1986. After that, it was busy-work and and increasingly boring. And the disintegration of Columbia over Texas in ’03 showed it was still dangerous. I remember the shuttle-inspired first [...]

Riding one of the (now defunct) space shuttle’s Solid Rocket Boosters to 41 miles high and back again to splash down in the Atlantic. Even the audio is orgasmic. Via Instapundit.

The usual shrill babble and punchy trailer clips are flogging John Carter, Disney’s remake of Edgar Rice Burrough’s 1917 novel Princess of Mars, but it looks like a kiddie combo of Hercules and Avatar. The bad guys burn coal, you see, and are damaging the Martian atmosphere. Uh oh. John Carter is a Confederate soldier [...]

SpaceX’s new rocket motor (for propulsive landings, just like the ones in the scifi stories) has “shock diamonds” in its plume. The phenom was first seen in the 1950s in the exhaust plume of the Bell X-1, the first craft to fly faster than the speed of sound. The “diamonds” are more visible in this [...]

Michael Flynn’s third installment in his January Dancer series falters nae a bit, with such lines as these: “A faint band of red has cut the throat of night and bleeds across the eastern horizon.” I’m only half through this one but it’s already safe to say it’s as good as the first two about [...]

  Had a bumper sticker by that title, years ago. Back in the 80s, I believe it was, when talk of O’Neil’s orbiting colony at L-5 (left) was rather more popular than now. But it should be, again, in some form, avers aerospace guy Rand Simberg. Exploration, per se, makes no sense. Unless we go [...]

I’ve read a lot of Robert Sawyer’s scifi, and enjoyed most of it, but this conclusion to a trilogy (and, indeed, the first two books, Watch and Wake), takes the prize. It’s a bit preachy, as others have said, but the AI’s achievements, particularly the takedown of a dictatorship, justifies most of it. Sawyer’s usual [...]