Urban Honking

The work week is much easier to maintain! It’s Tuesday at 2:38 AM. It’s time to start using my time in a more productive manner. Tonight I ironed some pants for Willow, but that’s not really enough. From 10:30 to 3:30 is my Advantage Time. This week I’ll have twenty-five hours of Advantage Time (excluding […]

It’s a lot weirder on the weekend. I hung out with Steve on Friday night. He came over at 10 and I napped for 30 minutes. That felt weird. Then I woke up at 7am on Saturday. That was also weird. I took the MAX to Clackamas Town Center and on my way back stopped […]

Staying up was easier than I expected. I expect the key to making polyphasic sleeping worthwhile will be how productive I can be from 10:30 PM until 3:00 AM. The first night I played video games and watched a movie because I knew that would keep me awake. As last night night was only day […]

Day one of my polyphasic sleep experiment. I took a half hour nap at 10pm last night, and then woke up and continued playing video games until I got bored. It was only 1am so I watched Bigger, Stronger, Faster. Because movies and video games help me stay awake, I’m using that as a way […]

This isn’t a novel, but the second volume of a contemporary annual design publication called the Task Newsletter, a project by Emmet Byrne, Alex DeArmond, and Jon Sueda. I include it here because Issue #2 is devoted to “Mundane Science Fiction,” a controversial recent sub-genre popularized and manifesto-ed by the writer Geoff Ryman. This blog […]

Part of Bob Heinlein’s storied “Juvenile” series for Scribner’s, Citizen of the Galaxy is a Grade-A galactic bildungsroman. By virtue of it nominally being a book for kids, it skirts some of the more roguish Heinlein themes (fawning speculation over the motives of various ineffably buxom women, for example), but otherwise sticks to its libertarian […]

Not in the wildest stoner prognostications of Carl Sagan, nor the fetid dreams of any sci-fi writer ever before or since, has there been anything like the The Reefs of Space. Not the book, which is fairly standard, but the titular reefs themselves. In Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson’s novel, the Universe is not a […]

One thing that hasn’t been discussed yet on this blog is the major role that editors have historically played in the sci-fi scene. Since the genre was shaped by decades of magazine publishing, the editors of those magazines — rags like Amazing Stories, Galaxy, Analog Science Fiction, and New Worlds — have largely defined what […]

Inventing a future reality is easy. Anyone can say, “in the year 10,000 AD humans will have evolved into telepathic knights,” but to populate that reality with the names of TV shows is much more difficult. I think the particular genius of Philip K. Dick is a combination of killer scenarios (“In the future…”) and […]

Warwick Collins, among other things, is a one-time yacht designer now hell-bent on selling his alternate evolutionary theory to the scientific establishment. Computer One, an exercise in singularity paranoia, is his only sci-fi novel. Computer One is more of a Platonic dialogue than a novel. Plot points move along a discussion-heavy puzzle of theories about […]