For the curious reader of science fiction (scifi) and fantasy
Omigosh, I just realized, it’s been one year to the day since I started this blog! (You can see for yourself. Just scroll to the end. That’s how I discovered it.) It’s been a fast year. A lot of new friends have come to join me here. Let’s celebrate!
I almost forgot! My name’s on that New Horizons spacecraft! Literally.
As a member of The Planetary Society, I am among the thousands whose names are inscribed on a CD carried on the New Horizons craft. The reason is that the mission to Pluto was cancelled over and over by NASA, by Congress, by Bush. Each time, the public constituency for planetary exploration, led primarily by The Planetary Society, rallied around to the cause. And each time, it was restored.
So this really is an example of power to the people.
What a great time to be alive, if you’re interested in space! Today, NASA successfully launched the New Horizons mission to Pluto. Apparently everything is working perfectly, and tonight at 11:00 p.m. EST, the spacecraft will whiz past the Moon. (That’s nine hours after launch. The Apollo spacecraft took three days to make the trip.) It’ll zip past Jupiter a year from now for a gravity boost, and should reach Pluto in 2015, nine years from now.
A few days ago, the Stardust mission returned to Earth bearing grains of Comet Wild 2’s dust in its Aerogel collectors.
A new movie by NASA and MIT scientists shows 10 years’ worth of X-ray images of the Milky Way, gathered by the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer. Watch neutron stars and black holes light up for the camera!
And finally, the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are coming to the IMAX screen in the Disney production, Roving Mars. See fantastic images of Mars on an IMAX screen near you, starting January 27.
It’s easy to become jaded, but this is really cool stuff!
I know I haven’t been present here much lately, but life’s been busy and I’ve been working on Sunborn and doing a little bit of promotion for Galactica. But today seems like a good and important day to check back in. We’ve gotten to where holidays in the U.S. often seem to mean little beyond a day off from school or work, and the banks and post office being closed. So I just want to stop myself for a moment and pause and think about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King.
What better way than to go back to his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. My pastor read a portion of this in church yesterday, and it got to me then, as it gets to me every time I hear it or see the video clip. It’s become so familiar that I can hear it in Dr. King’s voice whether someone else is reciting it, or I’m reading it on the page.
Here’s Martin Luther King, Jr.:
…I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”
And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!
But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
You can read the speech in its entirety at http://www.mecca.org/~crights/dream.html, among other places.
It’s happened again. Christmas has come and gone*, and it’s a new year. 2006. I feel as if I’m in some kind of a time warp, and the world is whipping around me faster and faster and faster.
*Unless you’re like my family and officially celebrate Christmas up through Three Kings Day, which is January 6.
This holiday season was the usual blur, but good. We had family visiting, and I spent a lot of time watching high school wrestling. (The off-season work is paying off for my daughter Lexi. She’s won a couple of matches already, and when she loses, it’s usually a hard-fought match. As usual, I volunteer as announcer for home meets.)
My wife’s job as the managing editor for an online math education program came to an end with the end of the year, so we are in a state of flux right now. The possibility looms that I might have to once more set aside work on the book in order to do freelance or consulting work. We’ll see.
Still, I made two resolutions for the new year. One is to catch up on my financial record-keeping so that I’m not totally swamped when tax time comes around. The other is to finish writing Sunborn! One way or another! (Sleep? Who needs sleep?)
The last packages are wrapped, finally, and it’s time to go to bed. But first I want to wish everyone out there a wonderful, peaceful Christmas, a Happy Hannukah, and generally terrific weekend. Take care, everyone!
Let’s start with the Good. Astronomy Magazine has a year-end wrap-up of the top ten stories of the year. Ordinarily I feel pretty jaded about lists like that, but 2005 really was an extraordinary year in astronomy. Here are a few of the highlights:
Still with the Good, but closer to home, my local paper just ran a nice story about my soon-to-appear novel, Battlestar Galactica: the Miniseries. You can even read it online. (By the way, if any of you sees the book in a store, please post and let me know. The writer is usually the last to know that his book is out.)
All right. The Bad.
What else? Bush. This time it’s news of his almost-certainly illegal wiretap spying on American citizens following 9/11. And he’s still claiming it’s within his constitutional powers! I guess, if you believe you’re anointed by God, you think these things. Like you think it’s okay to be free to torture people, even though you of course would never actually do it.
Did I say that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was safe for the moment? Only a moment, as it turns out. They’re at it again, and this time they might sleaze it through—by attaching it as an amendment to a military bill, which will probably be voted on in the next two days. If you oppose this drilling, as I do, call your senators!
There is Good in all of this, however. Increasingly, moderate Republicans are stirring, recognizing that the radical right has gotten out of control. Kudos to Senator McCain for sticking to his guns on the ban on torture! Thank God for people of integrity on both sides of the aisle. And kudos to the Iraqi people for turning out in record numbers for their election. Despite my criticism of the war, I do want to see things turn around for that embattled nation.
The Ugly.
Manufacturers have been putting lead in vinyl lunch boxes made for children. According to the Consumer Products Safety Commission (quoted at snopes.com), the amount is small. But why should there be any?
So go back and read the Good part. No reason to end this on a downer.
Lots of people like to give personalized, autographed books for special occasions (like Christmas). I have most of my books available for sale, including the majority of the out-of-print titles, and I’m happy to sign and personalize any copy that’s ordered directly from me.
Between now and Christmas, I’m offering a 15% discount on the price of any book that’s listed on my web site. You can see a price list at http://www.starrigger.net/order_blank.htm. (I’m coming in a little late with this, I know. But better late than never, I hope.) Most books are at cover price before the discount. Some out-of-print titles in short supply are priced higher.
If you’d like to take advantage of this offer, just subtract the 15% and tell me it’s because of this offer. This is not a high-tech operation, unless you consider Paypal to be high tech. (Hm. OK, I guess it is, when you get right down to it. But I don’t have a shopping cart or anything like that—just an order blank you can print out and mail, or send by email.)
I now return you to your regularly scheduled wait for a new blog entry.
We said a last good-bye to our elderly beagle, Sam, today. He’d gone blind and mostly deaf, and was failing in other ways. So we took him to the vet to release him from his body. I believe it was the right thing to do, but it’s so hard. Sam had been with us for about eight years. We guessed he was six or seven when we took him in from a family that couldn’t keep him, but they had taken him in as a stray, so nobody knew his real age or his past.
He was a big-hearted little guy, though he was also the most trying dog to live with we’ve ever owned—obsessed with food and prone to accidents in the house. But we loved him anyway. We still remember how he sprang to our cat’s defense when a visiting husky went after her: Sam jumped right into the breach and raised holy hell until we got there to intervene. And when Moonlight (the cat) and Hermione (our boxer) got into a tiff over a fallen piece of cold broccoli on the floor, it was Sam who swooped in and gulped it down before either of them could react. And when our kids were first learning piano, Sam and Hermione formed a wonderful Ahhh-ooohhh! chorus.
Sam’s on the rainbow bridge now, but here he is with his buddies during easier times.
Did I mention that my daughter Julia recently won a cash award for a short SF story she wrote for last summer’s international science fiction writing contest? (It was sponsored by a consortium that included UNESCO, the European Space Agency, and other groups I’ve never heard of—and also, in the U.S., the National Space Society.)
She got word last summer that she’d won the U.S. portion of the competition for middle school aged kids, and that her story was going on for international judging. She didn’t win that final stage, and had assumed that her only prize was the knowledge that she’d won the U.S. section. But several months later, out of the blue, came a check in the mail. At age 13, she’s now earned more per word for a short story sale than I ever have in my entire career! You go!