Science Fiction

Some of the sci-fi books I read during my childhood had this great endpaper…

The Peripheral, William Gibson, 2015. ISBN 0670921556.

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, 2000, ISBN 978-0-316-46244-0, Orbit Books print edition 2020.

I recently read this book because I vaguely recalled reading it as a youngster. For the first third of the book, my recollection seemed correct, but then the book diverged from what I remembered. Maybe I didn’t read it back in the late 60s after all.

Space flight historian Michael J. Neufeld wrote an article about Wernher von Braun’s advocacy of space stations, Wernher von Braun’s Ultimate Weapon, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2007.

An expanded version of that article appeared as ‘‘Space superiority’’: Wernher von Braun’s campaign for a nuclear-armed space station, 1946–1956 in a journal, Space Policy, 22 (2006) 52-62

I watched the Star Trek (original!) episode The Enemy Within the other day.

Here’s a video (youtube of course) review of both Starship Troopers the movie, and Starship Troopers the book.

It’s long, but worth it.

The first workable proposal for a space program is apparently Wernher von Braun’s Project Mars. Project Mars is a work of fiction, but it lays out a space program that could probably take humans to Mars with the technology of 1955.

Project Mars (the book) didn’t see print until 2006, although it’s technical appendix was published as The Mars Project. in 1953.

An intelligent species (or confederation of species) might choose to use base 7 for their numeral system, no matter the exact number or nature of digits at the terminal end of their manipulative appendages.

Even entities with 8 terminal sub-appendages might use base 7.

In my post about Lester Del Rey’s 1956 sci-fi thriller Mission to the Moon, I criticized Del Rey’s cis-lunar flight orbital mechanics. Del Rey had his moon missions leaving from a polar orbit around the earth. This struck me as very odd - all real lunar and interplanetary missions have left from a more-or-less equatorial orbit, or maybe even fly directly into an interplanetary orbit. I thought Del Rey had completely misunderstood orbital mechanics, or had mis-read von Braun.

I was wrong.