Category Archives: Sci-Fi Saturday

SF: Distress by Greg Egan

It’s official, I really like science fiction author Greg Egan! He’s among the modern science fiction authors; his first SF work, the short story Artifact, was published in 1983, so he’s been writing SF for about 28 years. Like many science fiction authors with a science or technical education, he writes non-fiction as well.

And here’s the thing: If you like your science fiction hard, you want to know about Greg Egan. He writes SF as hard as any I know. For instance, consider a novel (Incandescence) in which a key plot thread involves alien beings discovering (Einstein’s) General Relativity in a completely different way than Einstein did.

He reminds me of Hal Clement on several levels, particularly so in the novel I just cited, as part of it is told from the aliens’ point of view (a common device in Clement’s work).

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Star Trek vs Star Wars

You may have heard about the recent meme battle between Princess Leia (played by the very interesting Carrie Fisher) and Captain Kirk (played by the equally interesting William Shatner).

The battle prize: which is “better,” Star Wars or Star Trek?

It began with a photon torpedo fired from the Enterprise. The warhead contained an anti-Wars payload of roughly one-quarter Mega-grin:

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Sideband #39: “Star Trekking It”

As a quick Sideband sidebar to the Star Trek holodeck article just published, I want to mention a metaphor I use to refer to a common science fiction fan phenomenon. The metaphor has a label: “Star Trekking it.”

A while back I mentioned another metaphor: “doing a Boston.” This is like that. It’s a specific reference applied to a general situation. In this case, the metaphor is a general idea in a specific context: explaining away ridiculous stuff in Star Trek.

And make no mistake, Star Trek needs plenty of explaining!

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Why I Hated The Holodeck

This is a rant about an aspect of Star Trek that always bugged me: the deadly, dangerous, ridiculous Holodeck!

If it seems familiar, you may have encountered it before. I wrote it back when the show (Star Trek: The Next Generation) was still running (1987-1994) and published versions of it then and later in various online venues (FidoNet, USENET, some websites). Long-time friends will certainly recognize the rant if not the writing.

If you were on the net before the web, and you hung out in Star Trek places, you might have stumbled over this.

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