Urban Honking

Martian Time-Slip, a sonnet: Canals lie void of water in the dust, This is the dream…to stand here and see this: See old men die wrapped up in tubes and rust. A home on Mars. Beyond it, space, abyss. Reality inside the schizoid mind? Through blight and death, decrepitude and mold, A child alone to […]

Opportunities can arise quickly and there is not always a need or time for a shareholder vote. The day to day running of KmikeyM.com is handled without direct shareholder control as are some larger scope operational decisions (logo and web design, travel plans, etc). I was alerted to an opportunity recently involving 23andme.com, a site […]

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is one of Dick’s great psychedelic-Gnostic novels. It takes place in a future where global warming has made living on Earth an impossible, expensive experiment in air-conditioning (people vacation in Antarctica, etc); space colonies, which are populated by a forced-draft system, offer an even less appealing life of miserable […]

The North Korean government has made an operating system called “Red Star.”

Despite the fact that very few North Koreans have a computer, let alone Internet access, Red Star is designed to provide a safe operating environment in line with North Kor…

“Consciousness must dream, it must have a dreaming ground — and, in dreaming, evoke ever new dreams.” –Frank Herbert, from Destination: Void Let’s talk about consciousness. Exhibit A: Frank Herbert’s Destination: Void. Destination: Void is a claustrophobic parlor drama that takes place on a massive spaceship called the Earthling, staffed by six Moon-born clones who […]

Arthur C. Clarke, among other things, is famous for a set of axioms known as “Clarke’s Laws.” The most quoted of these is undoubtedly Clarke’s Third Law, which states that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This idea has been roundly exploited throughout the history of science fiction, but never quite as creatively […]

In his essay Man, Android and Machine, Philip K. Dick expounds at length on a vintage neurological point, the so-called “appositional mind” (what we now call the left and right brains). Dick loved the idea of a mind divided into two bilateral, distinct identities: one concerned with reason, and one devoid of it. What most […]

On a future and much-decayed Earth, Of babies there’s long been a dearth — But everyone cheers When a spaceship appears packed with goods of immeasurable worth. Something has gone wrong with mankind: evolution has gone deaf and blind. One guy is somehow exception, and so it’s his perception that the solution is his to […]

Transformations: Understanding World History Through Science Fiction is a book that pairs a range of science fiction stories with elementary “review sections” about world events, ostensibly to lure teenagers into being interested in history. Whether it achieves this goal is debatable, but it did start me thinking about the relationship between science fiction and history […]

Before we begin: I don’t know why I love the “juvenile” Robert Heinlein books so much. They’re a dime-a-dozen at used book stores. I can tear through them in a day, and I know that I should be reading something more intellectual than a novel about a hardy space farmer that was originally serialized in […]