Dribs and Drabs #3
Just a few quick bits, a few things spotted here and there or passed to me.
We'll start there first. Lou sent me a link to an interview conducted by Gilian Pollack with three Pyr authors over at BiblioBuffet. The authors are James Enge, Kay Kenyon, and Joel Shepherd and the interview is wide-ranging touching on how they came to be published by Pyr, the nature of their works and places within the genre at large, and the writing process itself. One bit which amused me was reading how Joel Shepard received a letter from an agent's assistant explaining to him why the lead character in his fantasy novel, Sasha wasn't really fantasy because the characters and settings weren't those one would find in a "real" fantasy novel.
Do huh?
We're back to the definitions of a genre or sub-genre from the Swords & Dark Magic discussion. "What qualifies as 'real' sword-and-sorcery?" "What is real fantasy?" Anything that's not science fiction or traditional fiction, except for those stories which are. Why get hung up on the minute qualities of a piece in order to shove it into the proper sub-genre pigeonhole? It's literature, not a letter. The classification doesn't have to be that precise. Just decide if the book's any good.
On a disc included with the latest Vorkosigan novel, Cryoburn , by Lois McMaster Bujold, Baen is offering the whole series along with interviews with Bujold and other materials related to the series. We've read several of the books in the group and they are uniformly entertaining, Getting all that for the purchase of a single book is a great value and if you haven't read the series, one to which I"d recommend giving serious consideration.
NASA researchers have discovered two massive bubbles of gamma and X-rays extending from the core of the Milky Way. At present they have no explanation. Uh, the galactic core exploded . That's what happened. Why else would the Puppeteers be moving their homeworld?
No one will forget, but I'll remind everyone about the meeting next week with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as the topic. Pureblood, mudblood, or muggle, drop by to check things out. We don't bite or at least those that do have had all their shots.
Check innerworldsbhm.com for details.
We'll start there first. Lou sent me a link to an interview conducted by Gilian Pollack with three Pyr authors over at BiblioBuffet. The authors are James Enge, Kay Kenyon, and Joel Shepherd and the interview is wide-ranging touching on how they came to be published by Pyr, the nature of their works and places within the genre at large, and the writing process itself. One bit which amused me was reading how Joel Shepard received a letter from an agent's assistant explaining to him why the lead character in his fantasy novel, Sasha wasn't really fantasy because the characters and settings weren't those one would find in a "real" fantasy novel.
Do huh?
We're back to the definitions of a genre or sub-genre from the Swords & Dark Magic discussion. "What qualifies as 'real' sword-and-sorcery?" "What is real fantasy?" Anything that's not science fiction or traditional fiction, except for those stories which are. Why get hung up on the minute qualities of a piece in order to shove it into the proper sub-genre pigeonhole? It's literature, not a letter. The classification doesn't have to be that precise. Just decide if the book's any good.
On a disc included with the latest Vorkosigan novel, Cryoburn , by Lois McMaster Bujold, Baen is offering the whole series along with interviews with Bujold and other materials related to the series. We've read several of the books in the group and they are uniformly entertaining, Getting all that for the purchase of a single book is a great value and if you haven't read the series, one to which I"d recommend giving serious consideration.
NASA researchers have discovered two massive bubbles of gamma and X-rays extending from the core of the Milky Way. At present they have no explanation. Uh, the galactic core exploded . That's what happened. Why else would the Puppeteers be moving their homeworld?
No one will forget, but I'll remind everyone about the meeting next week with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as the topic. Pureblood, mudblood, or muggle, drop by to check things out. We don't bite or at least those that do have had all their shots.
Check innerworldsbhm.com for details.
Brandon-you might want to catch Seth Shostak's piece in the November issue of Sky & Telescope.
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Will do. I saw the cover but have been spending my breaks and lunches reading about some kid with a cut on his head.
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]been spending my breaks and lunches reading about some kid with a cut on his head.
Orestes? Really? I had no idea you were a fan of Greek theatre, Brandon . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_(Euripides)
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Sure. All those classics with Greeks 'n stuff -- "Who Mourns for Adonais?", "Plato's Stepchildren" -- you know the ones.
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It's a short piece, pretty good really, but basically trying to emphasize that the SETI experiment's apparent null result isn't meaningful yet. (I think public interest has declined since the late 90s, and current economic issues may be having an impact on them.) I was hoping Shostak would tell us what he would consider to be a meaningful null result, but instead they always respond with visions of future searches. I think it's not much of an experiment until you define both what constitutes a *negative* as well as a positive result and when you should stop looking.
The reason I recommend it is that he says things I haven't heard radiotelescope SETI people talk about before. For example, he says it's possible that planned giant optical telescopes might accidentally discover some astro-engineering like something Niven might have written about.
Then he goes even further than that.
Remember this is S&T, not Analog.
Obviously being on con panels has rubbed off, or the SETI people are being emboldened by growing scientific acceptance. Still no answer for Fermi.
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I wonder if the radio guys might not be getting a bit desperate, what with the better part of fifty years of listening and nothing more than the "WOW" to show for it. Radio SETI's not sexy anyway and as was mentioned in a discussion one meeting as regards to the discovery of alien life, sooner than we think people will grow bored with the revelation. It's no surprise a fruitless effort would fall victim to public indifference.
That the optical guys might scoop them, either spotting a mega-structure or detecting lots of O2/O3 spectroscopically, though I wonder how conclusively such evidence would be accepted. Spotting Ringworld might be tough to dismiss, but inferring E.T. from a distant atmosphere's composition would draw all kinds of counter-arguments.
As for an answer to Fermi, Doc Taylor had a pretty convincing set of points he ran through during a presentation at ImagiCon last year. It was a summary of Chapter One from An Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion. They kick Enrico pretty hard. I need to breakdown and buy this doggone thing. It looks pretty interesting and useful.
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Well, there's the methane anomaly on Mars, and yet we can send a probe there in ten months. And you're right about O2, I'm already thinking of a non-biological cause for it if I can pick the planet's composition.
SETI has a catch-22 that grows tougher with passing years. To have no positive result from a competent search implies no contactable ETI. To admit that the required technology is beyond our current capability is to make their work superfluous. Either admission tends to make grant requests less competitive.
I'll have to ILL his book. I haven't read it yet because of the beating some reviewers gave it on Amazon.
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