science fiction

Meme Therapy is the name of a science-fiction related blog that’s pretty interesting. They’ve wangled a fair number of mini-interviews of authors, and everyone knows authors have interesting things to say. (cough cough) And—oh!—I forgot to mention!—they have a mini-interview with yours truly today. So, instead of writing a real entry here (that would require work, after all), I’m going to send you over there instead.

Remember Roswell, New Mexico, where an alien spacecraft supposedly crashed in 1947, and the Air Force made off with the wreckage and hid it? (Of course you do.) Remember the movie Alien Autopsy that came out a while back, purporting to show grainy, black-and-white footage of government scientists dissecting the alien bodies found in the wreckage? (Sure you do—if you don’t, you haven’t been reading enough junk journalism.) I think I watched about five minutes of it once when it was airing on TV. Or maybe I saw five minutes of a show about the movie. Whatever. In any event, a report in The Times of London says:

“THE creator of Max Headroom, a 1980s television cyber-presenter, has claimed he was one of the hoaxers behind the Roswell film…. John Humphreys, a sculptor and consultant on Alien Autopsy who has also worked on special effects for Doctor Who, said it was he who made the models for the alien dissected in the original fake footage…. He said he spent four weeks fashioning the models from latex using clay sculptures.

“Rather than being shot in 1947 near Roswell in the New Mexico desert as previously claimed, the film was actually made at a flat in Camden, north London, in 1995.”

There’s something oddly appropriate about this coming from a guy who helped create Max Headroom, one of my favorite off-beat SF shows of the 1980s. Lending even greater synchronicity to this story is the fact that I just recently started watching the old Max shows from digitally archived VHS recordings. (It holds up quite nicely.)

Also funny, in an odd sort of way, is that according to an old report on eonline.com the Fox network, which first released the Alien Autopsy film in the U.S., later released another “documentary” which exposed the film as a fraud. What’s their byline—”Fair and Balanced”? Heh, heh. Yep.

Everyone knows that people—guys, especially—love to blow things up. Being a guy myself, I’m no exception. So I was amused, while reading an article about how Gamma Ray Bursts are probably not going to destroy the Earth, after all (Interstellar Deathray Not Likely to Hit Earth), to see a link to another page entitled How to Destroy the Earth. It’s pretty cool. It’s not about how to destroy humanity, which we can probably manage by just keeping doing what we’re doing now, but about how to demolish the Earth itself. The proposed methods range from nano-agents (NAGs) to strange matter to vacuum energy. Some of the related pages include Why Destroy the Earth? as well as a completely unwatchable video shot on a cell-phone camera. (Okay, never mind the video.)

As I’m sure you all know, there has been some real concern about the possibility of Gamma Ray Bursts torching our home planet. But as you know if you’ve followed the first link above, it’s a probability game, and according to Krzysztof Stanek from Ohio State University and others, the probability of such a burst occurring in our metal-rich galaxy is low, low, low. But not zero. So I think, really, it’s safe to keep worrying about that if you want to.

On the other hand, all this speculation about blowing up a planet is small potatoes. I demonstrated in my novel, From a Changeling Star, how one might blow up a star. Now, that was fun. (Okay, I admit, the engineering details are a little shaky. But it was, after all, science fiction.)

Okay, I’m going back to work on Sunborn now.

Or maybe I’ll just take a nap. All this blowing up of stuff really takes it out of you.