In my last post I elaborated upon the space opera world I am building, which is also an alternate history of the 20th and 21st centuries and has a near-future-level spacefaring phase. I’d like to take this occasion to announce that I have decided to … Continue readingBeginning the Adventure of writing a Novel
Click here for full resolution. This is my new oil-on-canvas piece, depicting the sun setting on a city floating in the clouds on some alien world. The two spheres contain lighter-than-air lifting gases; on a world with denser air like Venus they could contain airy … Continue readingSunset Flight to Cloud City
The idea of alien life or human colonies on Venus is one as old as scientific speculation and science fiction; the bright cloudy shroud over the surface made Venus for centuries much more mysterious than the other (relatively) Earth-like planet in the inner solar system, … Continue readingWorldbuilding Cloud Cities on Venus
Seasteading, a topic popular in futurist and libertarian circles, is simply the construction of settlements on the high seas capable of sustaining permanent populations. While floating cities dominate futuristic concepts of high-seas settlement, there are many other kinds of communities that would benefit from seafaring, … Continue readingCollege Ships: A Pathway to Seasteading
What if the world had no oil? As modern civilization’s primary energy source, its absence would profoundly affect our way of life, opening up fascinating possibilities for worldbuilding very different yet plausible speculative fiction settings, including science fiction and alternate history. In this post we … Continue readingIndustrialization in a World Without Oil