An interesting visual guide to fictional megastructures, like Larry Niven’s Ringworld, Arcologies, and Dyson Spheres:
Megastructures: The Visual Encyclopedia is part science book, part inspirational artbook. It contains everything from orbiting space habitats to solar system spanning stellar engineering projects. Each of the 40 structures in the encyclopedia includes a scientific explanation, followed by paintings and diagrams that bring the concept to life.
A fun piece on William Gibson’s latest work of speculative fiction, Agency. I’ve read a bunch of his bibliography, but my favorites (in order) are still Neuromancer and its sequel, Count Zero.
Here’s an interesting bit of history on writing Neuromancer:
“I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics of the language of people who were already working in the field. I’d stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science fiction convention listening to these guys who were the...
You may have thought the entire 14th century was pretty bad, or maybe 1918 with its flu pandemic and millions of war casualties, but how about the 6th:
A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine...
Wolfe’s work, particularly his Book of the New Sun “tetralogy”, is some of my favorite fiction. He just passed away a couple weeks ago, and this is a great piece on his life leading up to becoming one of the most influential American writers. I recommend it to everyone I know interested in sci-fi. Even reading this made me want to dig up The Shadow of the Torturer and start reading it for a...
Ben Hoen from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab gave a lightning talk at Geo2050 about this project, a map and database of the operational wind generation capacity in the US. The map currently reports the country producing around 90 gigawatts of wind power. They also publish the raw dataset for download.
One of my favorite science fiction authors. Talks about his work, industrial design, speculative architecture, and risk models.
This is part three of a series on Isaac Asimov’s Greater Foundation story collection. This post is about the first installment of the Robot trilogy, The Caves of Steel.
We’re still early in the timeline of Asimov’s epic saga. The short stories in I, Robot set the stage for dozens of future novels that take place in the same universe and along the same timeline. The far-future stories of the famous Foundation series have threads leading all the way back to the “3 Laws” and the Robot series, which starts off the action on...
This is part two of a series on Isaac Asimov’s Greater Foundation story collection. This part is about the short story collection, I, Robot.
Picking up with the next entry in the Asimov read-through, I read a book I last picked up in college, I, Robot. This is the book that cemented his reputation in science fiction. His works on robots are probably his most well-known. He was an early thinker in the space (he even coined the term “robotics”), and wrote extensively on the subject of artificial intelligence. After reading this again, it’s incredible how much...
This is part one of a series of essays on Isaac Asimov’s famous Greater Foundation story collection. In this first one I discuss the time travel mystery The End of Eternity.
The prolific science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published an astonishing body of work in his life. Though he’s probably most well-known for his stories, collections, and postulations about robots (and, therefore, artificial intelligence), he wrote a baffling amount speculating on much bigger ideas like politics, religion, and philosophy. The Robot series is one angle on a bigger picture....
