Tap dancing with cosmology. Essay. 1100 words, 6-minute read. The Center Cannot Hold By Ray Tabler Galileo Galilei was a pioneering, renaissance astronomer. But he is most famous for being dragged before the inquisition for daring to state that the Earth orbited about the Sun. Trouble was that the Catholic…
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Business As Usual During Alterations – A Review
When the music changes tempo. Essay. 1100 words, 6-minute read. Business As Usually During Alterations – A Review By Ray Tabler There are some short stories that lodge in the memory, popping up unexpectedly years later when events stir the sediment of the mind. Such a story is Business As…
1941 – More Dangling Threads
An underappreciated classic. Essay. 500 words, 3-minute read. 1941 – More Dangling Threads By Ray Tabler Recently, a friend (Dharma Windham) posted about re-watching a movie, Stephen Spielberg’s 1941, a 1979 screwball historical comedy. The film is set in Los Angeles, weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, not an obvious…
The Care and Feeding of Heresy
Heresy is the whole point. Essay. 600 words, 3-minute read. The Care and Feeding of Heresy By Ray Tabler There are no limits upon the writing of science fiction and fantasy. Any crazy, improbable, even impossible situation the human mind can conceive is fair game. The only constant is the…
Novel Lengths Revisited
A more commercially-focused dataset. Essay. 800 words, 4-minute read. A few months ago I posted an essay which looked at the word counts/page lengths of novels over the past century, or so. (https://raytabler.substack.com/p/novel-lengths-over-the-years) This was an effort to verify (or disprove) the anecdote that novels used to be a lot…
The Diesel-Powered Starship, Incoming!
My latest novel releases soon. Early copies of my latest book, The Diesel-Powered Starship arrived yesterday! She’s not out officially until September 30. But you can order ahead from here: https://histriabooks.com/pro…/the-diesel-powered-starship/ As a bonus, the good people at Histria Books have featured The Diesel-Powered Starship in their ad on page…
Booze in Space!
Notes from an Archon 47 panel, Essay, 1000 words (5-minute read) Can’t believe I neglected to post this essay here on my website until now. Well, here it is, almost a year behind the times, but still jam-packed with useful info. 😉 Booze In Space! by Ray Tabler This past…
Rogue Moon
A review. 700 words, 4-minute read. Rogue Moon, A Review By Ray Tabler Rogue Moon is a 1960 science fiction novel by Algis Budrys, and a very strange read from the perspective of 65 years after publication. I’m not a scholar of Budrys’ work, and have only sipped at his…
Reactionless Drives
Fiction & Fact. Essay. 1900 Words, 10-minute read. Reactionless Drives By Ray Tabler A staple of science fiction is the reactionless drive. That is, a means of propulsion which moves a space ship without the use of rockets or jets. As Matthew McConaughey said in the movie Interstellar, “Newton’s third…