Hitchhiker's Guide to a Fascinating Mind

YES!!! I found it!!! I discovered my literary heaven. With my kind of prose. 

The kind that breaks all the rules and drowns in its own silliness. Adverb-filled, preposition-sentence-ending, zigzaggingly thoughtful, and riddled in made-up otherworldly names. There's all of it and more in Douglas Adams' masterpiece...

Sunday Snapshots: The BS Cast (sci-fi)

Slightly off-topic: Isn't this the CUTEST ROBOT EVER?!

(No, it's not that kind of sci-fi.)

No, BS does not stand for what you think. It’s actually the title of my sci-fi book, which I’ll keep a secret for now (it's about time travel). Funny fact: it was on this blog for a while and someone may have actually seen it, but I’m hoping nobody did. I like to have an air of mystery, okay? Sheesh.

Anyway, I know it’s Sunday and most of you are hibernating right now, but I hope someone will show up for this very special post… really one of a kind. Wait for it…

How Super Was Super 8?

I was going to write a film review on Super 8 today. But I found myself thinking about reality and happy endings instead. I will, however, share a few thoughts on the movie’s value before I kill the cat.

(Cat lovers, I apologize about this image. I’ll go hug my own cat now.)

Moving on. When I watched the trailer, I expected something completely different. You know… when I saw the alien cube and the train crash, I imagined some kind of Smallville scenario where the alien substance gives people superhuman abilities. And I thought the title referred to 8 kids with those powers.

Check Your Manuscript with Wordle

So I've wanted to try this for a long time. Basically, I wanted to check if I was unknowingly abusing words, and immediately thought of Wordle. In Wordle.net you can make your own pretty clouds in all kinds of shapes. See how lovely mine are? The first looks like a bloated heart, the second like a big fat slug, and the last... well, it looks like a whale on support. 

If you click on them, you'll see the words clearly. Now to the point. What do these words represent? 

They are the words I have used the most in chapters of my current WIP projects. The first one spans the first 13 chapters of my scifi novel, the second the next 17 chapters (NaNo 2010), and the third my fantasy novel's lousy half of a first draft I did for NaNoWriMo in 2009. Ta da!

Time Travel Part 2 (Physics)

('wormhole' painting by Andrew Leipzig)

Science will always be sceptical of science fiction. Let’s face it. IF time travel is a possibility, it is probably a very complex process. Lots of things have to be considered:

1.      How does one manifest in each moment in time? Can there be ‘more’ of you at the same time and place?

2.      How does the past affect the future exactly? If you go back in time and get killed, would you exist ANYWHERE?

3.      How can you affect something that is linear? Time is a progression that cannot be easily defined or predicted. Let alone manipulated like that.

4.      Are there specific ‘places’ that you can travel to and from in time?

5.      Are there any particular points in space or time that hold more weight than others? (I have based one of my novels on this question.)

6.      If you go back, do you know for sure that you’d be able to CHANGE anything? Or would you only be a spectator to the unraveling events?

7.      If you go forward and die, what does that mean to your life? Have you never been born? Have you suddenly disappeared from the face of the Earth?

Time Travel, Part 1 (History)

When you think about the future, what do you imagine? I know I do that often enough to be called a science fiction nerd. If you think about it, science fiction is not just about space and aliens. Sure, I’m as excited as the next person to find life, more so intelligent one, outside of our planet. Like it is said in Carl Sagan’s classic Contact (1985), ‘It would be a terrible waste of space otherwise.’ But science fiction is about so much more than space travel and alien life! It’s about things that could be, and maybe even will be one day.

Are we going to live high in the sky and fly around like in The Jetsons? Is the future going to be a fatalistic kind of Dystopia? Or are we going to discover that reality is actually an illusion like the Matrix? And for the big one:

Are we EVER going to be able to travel in time? Seriously. I want to know!

To answer these questions, let’s take a look at what’s been done so far.