The myth of the starship (NB: As starships do not in fact exist, no starships were harmed in the production of this essay. Also, this is just words. If they upset you, go lie down in a dark room for half an hour then drink a glass of water; you'll feel better.) Actually, I tell a lie. We are 4.37 light years, or 140 million light-seconds, from Alpha Centauri, give or take. And that's the best we've done to date, admittedly without really trying ... This is not an essay about whether we could do better if we tried. The very word "starship" is a concatenation of two other words — star, and ship. The astute reader will have spotted the link to the Apollo Program above. But there's a more subtle difference. As I've said before, the trouble with going into space is that there's no "there" there when you get to the other end of your voyage. Which is why I was asking questions like this and this and this about a month ago. To a first approximation, the best answer I can come up with is "not very". ...
Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction and Fantasy : Issue 84 RPGMapShare.com | Your source for gaming maps and mapping objects The 8 Most Common Sci-Fi Visions of the Future (And Why They'll Never Happen) The future promises to be so wonderous and terrifying that it will exceed even the furthest reaches of the human imagination. Though this is not saying much, as the human imagination has really only been able to think up eight possible futures: An Oppressive Totalitarian State Defining Features: Forcibly proscribed social roles and classes; a creepy, overbearing "beloved leader" and equally creepy propaganda posters on every wall; an ultra-brutal police force; the repression of all written communication and creativity; a huge underclass of drone-like proles paralyzed with paranoid anxiety; a moratorium on rainbows, strawberry ice cream and butterfly kisses. Basically, it's the Cold War-era Soviet Union. Origins: George Orwell's 1984 laid the macabre groundwork for the Totalitarian State future vision, and while the actual year 1984 didn't pan out quite as he thought it would, you have to admit that Michael Jackson's hair catching on fire was pretty terrifying. A Retro-Futuristic Utopia
Aphelion Webzine: Editorial Hello and welcome to the April 2014 issue of Aphelion Webzine! Everyone on the staff has been hard at work to bring you this new issue. As usual, there are plenty of stories, poetry, Flash Fiction, and our Forums section is open for reader comments on each piece. Thanks to the feedback offered to the writers in the Forums, they learn what they have gotten right, and where they could make improvements. Please do visit the Forums and let people know what you think of their work. The beginning of a story often seems to be the most difficult part to write. One tool in that quest is called a Narrative Hook. My most famous example from my own stories is: That's the trouble with time travel, said the man with blue hair. That one simple pair of sentences launched the entire Mare Inebrium spaceport bar series. But to get back to the hook... Try that yourself sometime. Well, there should be loads of new stories and poetry for you to enjoy in this issue. Dan And here's a link to my Sound Cloud page:
Writing and RPG-Related Generators Optimistic Visions of the World After the Oil Runs Out I am fascinated by those that romanticize about a pastoral, back-to-earth, post-industrial society as a 'better place'. Funny how the vast, vast majority of the people with that opinion have never lived nor know anybody well that does live that existence. Just like any vacation, new place, or life change, the novelty soon wears off. Truly - the ideal world is the chaos of possible choice - very similar to the now - that hyper-treadmill that pulls a lot out of you and leaves you tired and burnt out, but somehow, as with a traditional old-school Protestant who has done a hard day's work - you are satisfied, challenged, and better. So, the chaos of possible choice is born out of high tech, high commercialism, pursuit of the intensity of experience, and division of labour — and this is what will save us and push us beyond ourselves... and that means buy, consume, work, play, and go HARD.
www.Traveller5.com - EPIC Adventure System Adventures are best presented when they provide a structure within which the game master can direct player action. The Epic Adventure System allows the Game Master to use any existing characters in a role-playing environment Easy Playable Interactive Checklist The Epic Adventure System makes use of the talents of the Game Master to conduct an adventure set against existing or provided background material. Easy: The Epic System can be implemented with a minimum of effort by the Game Master and with absolutely no new playing techniques for the players. Playable: The Epic System is created to be playable. Interactive: The Epic System provides for interactive participation by the Players. Checklist: The Epic System Checklist provides simple record-keeping for all aspects of the situation. Using a stage play metaphor, the Epic Adventure provides a format for role-playing adventures which maximizes the use of available material and maximizes the participation of the game master. X Act 1 Foundations
The Day Your Car Kidnaps You On the one hand, I think these things will always need an override manual switch, both for safety and because many people would be too creeped out to buy them otherwise. On the other hand, aren't there already OnStar cars that can be stopped remotely if reported stolen and pursued by police? I imagine Google or local law enforcement or some other organization will end up having an override to that manual override... I'm not sure where this lies on the balance between convenient and creepy. Maybe we should wait for the secure, open-source self-driving car made by some collective of benevolent motorhead hackers?
The High Frontier, Redux I'm going to take it as read that the idea of space colonization isn't unfamiliar; domed cities on Mars, orbiting cylindrical space habitats a la J. D. Bernal or Gerard K. O'Neill, that sort of thing. And I don't want to spend much time talking about the unspoken ideological underpinnings of the urge to space colonization, other than to point out that they're there, that the case for space colonization isn't usually presented as an economic enterprise so much as a quasi-religious one. Historically, crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of indigenous inhabitants by disease has been a cost-effective proposition. Here's a handy metaphor: let's approximate one astronomical unit — the distance between the Earth and the sun, roughly 150 million kilometres, or 600 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon — to one centimetre. The solar system is conveniently small. Got that? Next on our tour is Proxima Centauri, our nearest star. We're human beings.
A Chart that Reveals How Science Fiction Futures Changed Over Time One thing that fascinates me about SF is what gets rejected as proper, serious science fiction over time. Up until 1980, there were dozens of short stories and novels published every year about psi powers and telepathy, some of which were nominated for or won the major awards in the field, and at least a few of which were considered the finest the genre had to offer — Sturgeon's More Than Human, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Silverberg's Dying Inside. In fact, John W. Campbell Jr., who was one of the genre's dominant editors from the '30s until his death in the early '70s, was a deep and sincere believer in the reality of psionics. My guess is that as time goes by, we'll see more established tropes of "serious" SF fall by the wayside.
10 Futuristic Places to Shop This is why I run my own Linux on any smart phone I buy. I control what goes in and out, not some company I don't know. That's a good plan. I don't have much expertise with that sort of thing, but if I ever get a smartphone, I'll be sure to learn. Well, this raises a good point though because most people don't really have the expertise to hack their own stuff. The marketing weasels are counting on that. You're right—and I think that's probably likely, as much as I hate to think about a future like that. There's a kind of schizophrenic aspect to it all. I once wanted to be a psychologist. Why you'll never go to space prison Funny, while that may be the intent, the actual population of bored, sick, weak inmates is exceedingly low. And in fact they are not forbidden to exercise - in the systems that have adopted the bodybuilding policy, they were forced into more healthy cardiovascular exercise. Inmates have to earn access to the weight training facility by either completing good behavior milestones or through study and work release activities. The reason this was adopted was simply because the system was generating 300 pound monsters that prison guards were injuring themselves trying to control. The entire no weight training issue is actually a fallacy and in California, inmates categorically eat better and receive better medical attention than many of us have access to. There is no doubt that calorie restriction and isolation have been used to pacify high-level offenders. Quite true! It really breaks down to Federal, State and county.