“Y’all, I’m greatest country star in Nashville!” boomed little Tallulah’s voice as she twirled about in her costume: off-white cowgirl boots adorned with curly golden motifs extending up almost to her knees, and a sable leather riding dress, undergown, the same off-white color as the … Continue readingOrphans of Opry Tower
The space brainstorm continues! In particular, I turn to the question of “what happens with the next lunar landing mission?” and the human spaceflight effort in general; in my alternate-historical science-fiction universe, as I depict in my story “Wings of Fire”, the first manned lunar … Continue readingAfter “Wings of Fire”: A Lifting-Body World?
Don’t ask me how I got into this, but I was reading up on myopia, i.e. nearsightedness, and I was shocked by how common it is — in parts of Asia up to 90% of the younger generation is nearsighted, with Western countries approaching the … Continue reading“She Hasn’t Grown Out of Her Readers Yet”
Garbage. You just can’t get away from it. Not even in Challenger Deep, it seems, the darkest and most distant of all seabeds. Over the course of exploration of this mysterious reach, which started in 1960 but only truly picked up pace in the 2010s … Continue readingA World Without Garbage
I ask: “what if: a bromofluorocarbon world?” “A what?” you might reply. It’s perhaps one of the most underrated of all alternate history what-ifs: it’s well known that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), while inert and non-toxic on the surface, destroy ozone when they waft up to the … Continue readingBeautiful and Terrible as the Dawn
Well, my brainstorming for planets kick continues, now with a little tool for calculating planetary equilibrium temperature (we need better worldbuilding software, after all…), and also with some ideas for a planetary system that was discovered early on but is now often overlooked: Upsilon Andromedae. … Continue readingThe Pale Green Dot, Filtered through a Dream
No, I’m not being pretentious enough to compare my own books to “2001: A Space Odyssey” (though my stories are good; you should check them out! hehehe). But I’ve given some thought as to the stages of life my characters Decca, Georgia, and Henrietta are … Continue reading2065: A Hair Odyssey
In my alternate timeline my sci-fi stories take in, Nikola Tesla gets into electronics, successfully inventing the transistor around the year 1900, speeding up computing as we know it by half a century. But with this newfound windfall, what becomes of his dream of wireless … Continue readingReal Wireless Power: Toward Teslapunk
I’ve covered the fate of the inland seas in my science-fictional alternate history in a previous post, but I assumed that the Salton Sea would just be replenished to its historical peak levels. But what “historical peak levels” are is subject to change in an … Continue readingWhat If: A Larger Salton Sea
The vision for the South Bay cities continues to expand. In particular, the vision of Rosecrans Avenue (among perhaps other areas of the near interior) being turned over into a canal, an inland counterpart of Marina del Rey, only surrounded by Coruscant-esque miles-tall buildings, is … Continue readingSail for the Tall Waters Only