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I wanted to like Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty. I had quite enjoyed Six Wakes by the same author, and I generally like stories set on space stations. This one had a chic young woman on the cover. Instead, the protagonist is a perpetually complaining brat who doesn’t seem competent to take care of herself, […]
I don’t go to “cons,” but I am going to the Worldcon this year, the annual convention of the World Science Fiction Society. I don’t even know why, exactly. One of the features of a con is the opportunity to meet celebrities, but I can’t say that I’m particularly excited about that. My interest in […]
“Those #@%! Nazis!” I switched off my neural news feed in disgust.My young granddaughter turned her hover chair around to face me. “Grandpa, what’s a Nazi?”The question caught me completely off guard. What is the AI teaching these children? I started to formulate a response in my head, about racism, populism, nationalism, and millions of […]
An often overlooked feature of the Star Trek universe, starting particularly with Star Trek: The Next Generation, is the socialist economy. The words “socialism” and “communism” are never used, and the stories are rarely about economic systems, so most members of the audience have failed to catch on, even with the contrast of the hyper-capitalist […]
What the actual fuck? I get that Trump wants to be as cool as Vladimir Putin. I get that Trump does a lot of rambling. I get that Trump would like to be an emperor. I get that Trump is very stupid. But why is he still talking about this? Using military force to retake […]
Someone should write a book or something about how to raise your children to be politicians. It seems that all of the best politicians and political leaders were raised in politically active families. There’s a reason the United States has a few political “dynasties”. It should be fairly straightforward to write a plan for preparing […]
I was in a corner bookstore, back when such places still existed, looking for something new to read. I had recently read The Far Kingdoms, which I enjoyed, and I was searching for something similar. I stumbled on a stack of paperbacks by Robert Jordan. The cover art was possibly half the reason I was […]
It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that all the world’s political and social problems could be solved if we could just somehow correct the lack of thinking that is all too common. Progressives talk about education. Conservatives talk about religion. So many strive and strategize to make their voice heard above others, […]
One of articles recommended this morning by the Firefox web browser was this one: Moms Are Worried About Their Sons Post-Election, Too. It got me thinking about producing a vlog on the topic of what it means to be a man and how to become one. That led me to think about with whom to […]
A list of my favorite films. It occurs to me that I should examine them for commonalities. “Blade Runner” (1982) — This film is a visual masterpiece. The story, and the novel it is based on, really miss a great opportunity to explore a deep philosophical question, but in both cases it seems that merely […]
