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
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
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
How’s this for a vibe: you’re waiting on a train platform out in the middle of some vast steppe that makes America’s big sky country look tame, signs posted and flashing in a fluid vertical cursive script, magnetically-levitated locomotives whizzing by at almost the speed … Continue readingChinook Jargon Conquers the World?
In this post, after a long break (thanks, real life, for nothing, says the writer part of me) I return to my roots here: sharing the thoughts I have that are just too long to fit in a tweet, in a format that’s just more…permanent. … Continue readingCinematic Universe?
I know I wrote a whole blog post about how Polina Valentinova, after her record-setting solo space voyage as a teenager in the 1980s, becoming the first person to visit Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (and to complete a full eight-planet tour), with nuclear thermal rocket … Continue readingGleichen and Valentinova: Into the Abyss?
Ah, another week, another update for the worldbuilding for the novel I plan to write. If I spared myself all these blog posts and just wrote it I might have a full-length novel by now. Oh well. 🙃 I’ve never been a pantser anyway. I … Continue readingA Diamond Baron Goes Green?
Well, page girls too, actually. I know almost all of my posts this month have been about brainstorming my story of the Great Christmas Blizzard, the next installment of a saga that begins with “Orphans of Opry Tower”, but hey, it’s my blog, I can … Continue readingPage Boys of the Perfect Storm