The Strange Freedom of Old Sci-Fi!

Reading older sci-fi has made me think a lot about how, as time goes on and scientific discoveries are made, the universe of "plausible" science fiction narrows. A century ago, there were so many things that we didn't understand, or where our only understanding came from mathematical models untested in the real world.

Einstein wrote his famous paper on special relativity in 1905, but it took decades for that theory to be backed up by significant experimental data. Hell, there was a man named Herbert Dingle who was the president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 through 1953--not a crank or kook! In the late 1950s he managed to "un-convince" himself of special relativity and he spent the rest of his life trying to explain what he discovered (or thought he had discovered) was wrong with it.

It's worth noting that, just because a mathematical model is created to solve a particular problem (in this case, the apparent constancy of the speed of light), that doesn't mean that no other models exist that could also explain the same phenomenon and have different forms. Models with very little data to back them up should be met with some skepticism!

But think about all the discoveries that got data to support them over time (special relativity included)... each time that happened, some gap that science fiction authors could play with and still be "plausible" got closed up.

It's easy to forget that 50, 80, 100 years ago, authors were dealing with very different explanations about how the universe worked. One of the things that happens when you're writing in those olden days is that you could write a "hard" science fiction story hypothesizing a stable nucleus at high atomic number, or faster-than-light travel, or other things.

The video above contained some of my musings on the topic of how "not knowing" can sometimes open up paths for authors to write plausible works that we instinctively reject as impossible today. That means that works that could be seen as "hard" sci-fi 100 years ago might be classed as the softest of soft sci-fi today. Something to think about!

Okay, This Time It's Actually Released! (The Chasm of Color)

Stupid me, I made a post on Monday that said (New Release!) in the title but I ended up looking over my final draft one more time on Tuesday and found a couple more tiny things to change.

Now, finally, The Chasm of Color is out in e-book form!

I'm trying to figure out Amazon's print on demand stuff, so I'll add posts for the paperback and hardcover versions when they come out.

For updates, join my mailing list! You can choose whether to get only emails for Chasm stuff or hop on the general list:

The Scientific Setting of The Chasm of Color (New Release Imminent!)

The front cover for The Chasm of Color. Photo is edited from one by Matt Donders, via Unsplash.

The Chasm of Color is almost done! I made my final pass through the story today, and I've brought it up over 15k words with some additional character details and interesting thoughts and reactions (I hope). That makes it technically a "novelette," somewhere between a short story and a novella.

The Chasm of Color, a sample

Part of my cover photo, edited from a picture by Matt Donders, courtesy Unsplash.

My next work is another fun bit of science fiction, with another reference to the luminiferous ether, as in What the Soul Still Fears! However, instead of a story set in the modern day, The Chasm of Color takes place at around the same time as the Michelson-Morley experiment, in the late 1880s.

The protagonist, an assistant professor at the fictional Lexington University, has read the Michelson-Morley paper but is not convinced. However, he is unable to figure out a good reason for his uneasiness, until one morning over a year later...

Primo Ancient Pulp Sci-Fi: A Review of "Triplanetary"

In the last week, I read through E.E. "Doc" Smith's book Triplanetary, which is a very weird book in a lot of ways. Most of it was written in 1934, but Smith added a bunch in 1947-1948 to link it up with his Lensman series.

Today, we have to read it with a healthy, thick grain of suspension of disbelief, but it's a pretty cool book with some fun ideas, especially considering it was written nearly a hundred years ago.

Check the video for full details!

What the Heck Is a Crookes Tube? (Lovecraft story talk)

Image of Crookes tube in operation, from D-Kuru, CC BY-SA 2.0 AT, via Wikimedia Commons

I didn't know until yesterday that August 20th was H. P. Lovecraft's birthday! It seemed like a worthy time to go through a couple of his stories, so I read two of them last night: Under the Pyramids (written with Harry Houdini, of all people), and The Shunned House.

My Story Has a Laser... (math)

Time for more fun with real physics!

In my most recent novella, I talk about a laser in use by Luca's group in an interferometer.  Initially, I just wrote "The best measurements they had suggested that the beam might be expected to increase in size by one percent over a hundred meters, a fairly difficult feat, considering the diffraction limit at that wavelength," but damn it, I can do better than that, so let's go!