Sometimes I question why I follow so many aesthetic mood-board type accounts on Twitter, why I spend so much time on there, but then I get some real inspiration, often from rather unlikely vectors. Such as this pair of posts yesterday from two different users … Continue readingTaking Earth into the 23rd Century
I know just my last post was “A Beloved from the Stars”, covering my brainstorming for my next story, which I’ve decided I might title “Heart of Proxima”, but I’ve been doing some more work on it, enough to want to share it with all … Continue readingReturn from Thalassa: More Thoughts
Hmm. It doesn’t seem like so long since I wrote my thoughts on “After Thalassa: Squid Brains of Enceladus”, but it’s been almost four months! In the interim I’ve been focusing on other stories, but recently I’ve seen fit to flesh out the concept into … Continue readingA Beloved from the Stars
In my alternate-history science-fiction space opera setting, it’s well-established that first contact with alien intelligence was made by Ilmatar of Thalassa on, well, Thalassa (a planet of Proxima Centauri) around the year 2060. What’s not so well-established is that the Thalassans aren’t the closest alien … Continue readingAfter Thalassa: Squid Brains of Enceladus?
For the entire history of computing to date, and even dating back to the advent of television, glowing screens with a board-like form have been the primary and ever-more-dominant way people consume information. This “glowing screen” or “glowing board” paradigm reached its culmination in the … Continue readingIndistinguishable From Nature: Toward a Ubiquitous Dark Web
After the solar system is colonized, settled, and developed, interstellar colonization is the next step in mankind’s journey through the final frontier. The distances between planets within our own solar system are easily surmountable once enough space infrastructure is built out to allow the mass … Continue readingWorldbuilding Near-Future Interstellar Demography
In the previous post on colonizing the Oort cloud, I pointed out that with sufficiently cheap transportation technology any place within range will be inhabited to some extent by recreational-touristic populations or populations that deliberately seek out isolation. This outermost part of the solar system … Continue readingThe Sun as Gravitational Lens: A Breakthrough Technology?