Image: https://www.reddit.com/r/heroscape/comments/k6rwba/roman_legionnaires_x_airborne_elite/ Perils of Temporal Activism. By Ray Tabler The other day I thought about a book I read a few years back, Accidental Warrior-The Unlikely Tale of Bloody Hal, by Colin Alexander. It’s a pretty good story, about an ordinary university student who stumbles through a portal to an…
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Generation Ships
Image from The Starlost fansite By Ray Tabler I just finished reading Braking Day, by Adam Oyebanji, a hard science fiction novel set on a generation ship coasting its merry way to Tau Ceti. I didn’t realize before I started that it’s a YA book. Which I usually avoid, being…
Samizdat Goes Respectable
Image: Final scene of Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Tabler Samizdat is a single coin from the linguistic inheritance bequeathed to us from the cold war. Other questionable treasures of that hoard include words and phrases like iron curtain, gulag, overkill, and mutually assured destruction. It was a crazy time. In…
Tour Guides to Dystopia
Image: Office renovation in the movie Brazil by Ray Tabler This post seems to be appropriate for Black Friday, the day of the year when our flimsy veneer of civilization wears thinnest. Fair warning, the following is a catalog of real, historical dystopia, which could be used to model fictional…
Widely- Vs. Well-Read
By Ray Tabler Image: pbs.twimg.com Author Pam Allyn wrote that “Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out…” It’s tough to live without doing both. Breathing, that is. Unfortunately, most people can get along just fine neither reading nor writing these days. But that’s a subject for…
Concarpetology
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/marriott-carpet Concarpetology By Ray Tabler Concarpetology – The science of identifying a science fiction/fantasy/comic/etc… convention from photographs of the carpet. I just made that term up, concarpetology. I’ve been to a few science fiction conventions. Or, “cons” as the cool kids call them. And one thing I’ve noticed about such…
Booze In Space!
Notes from the Booze in Space Panel, at Archon 47 This past weekend I was at the Archon47 science fiction convention, and was a speaker on several panels. By far the best attended panel I sat on was titled: Booze In Space! “The panel description states: Alcoholic beverages are frequently…
Science Fiction, Fantasy, and the Messy In Between
Where’s the dividing line? Executive Summary You’re busy, so here’s the main points of this essay, laid out and best understood by reference to the accompanying diagram. Science fiction and fantasy both shelter under the umbrella of speculative fiction. Which encompasses even crazier stuff than you typically find in the…