Mars: Warm Fiction vs. Cold Reality. I have been a Mars fanatic since the age of 9, when the twin Viking spacecraft first touched down on the Red Planet in the summer of 1976. Mars has long been a theater for humanity’s collective imagination, a strange realm largely the domain of science fiction. Viking made…
Tag: RayBradbury
San Diego Comic Con 2020 has been cancelled. Here’s to Comic Cons past…
San Diego Comic Con 2020 is cancelled. It’s only been a little over a month since my state went on self-isolation status during the pandemic, and remembering things like going to the movies or going out to eat are beginning to look like grainy silent footage of flapper parties and speakeasies from the 1920s. As…
Celebrating two mighty machines of Mars…
This week it was official; the Mars rover “Opportunity”, the second of two solar-powered rovers that first landed on Mars in early 2004, was declared dead. Engineers at NASA/JPL-Caltech lost contact after a particularly nasty Martian dust storm last year, and contact never resumed. After 15 years on a hostile alien planet, the first rover…
My personal Martian chronicles…
Discovery. A few days ago, I turned on the news to finally hear something other than scandals, angry tweets, and a world increasingly going to hell in a hand basket. There was a headline story about the planet Mars. The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars almost 6 years ago, had discovered organic material on…
Why Sci-Fi?
This post is going to be a personal exploration as much as an exposition, since I’m not quite sure what the final answer to the headline will be, but I’m curious to find out: why do I enjoy science fiction so much? There are certainly plenty of other genres out there. There’s comedy, horror, drama,…