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FTL Flavors: Summary

This is the sixth and final installment of my series on the different flavors of FTL. We’ve warped through hyperspace and jumped through wormholes… or something like that. To clear it up, here’s a...

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Mars One and Death

Mars One is a project to start colonizing Mars funded by a reality TV show of the volunteers who go. It looks quite serious, and they seem to have a reasonable technical plan for getting four...

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What Genre Are Superhero Movies?

Let me start by saying I don’t have the answer to that question. Superman is an alien, so Sci-Fi, right? But Hellboy is a demon, so is it fantasy? Or do those two just fall into completely separate...

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Guilty Pleasures

There have been plenty of high-profile flops over the years, particularly in the realm of SF movies. The party line is that they were bad ideas, they ruined the book, or that that particular sequel...

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Starships Measured in Tons

Someone once asked me why I measure ship sizes in my space operas in tons of displacement. Well, here’s the short answer: I didn’t like any of the other measurements. For the long answer, let’s look at...

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FenCon 2013

I was at FenCon over the weekend. No, I’m not posting as in-depth a recap as I did for WorldCon, but here are a few highlights. On the interstellar wars that populate so much space opera, there are two...

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World-Building in Public

I’m considering a blogging experiment. I have a number of things to flesh out in my Hudson Confederacy universe, and I think I might just start publishing them as blog entries here. They won’t be...

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Data Visualization

A friend of mine works at a company that specializes in data visualization, and it got me to thinking about computer displays in science fiction. There’s not much flash to the ones we write about, but...

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That’s Not Even a First World Problem

Recently I’ve been seeing more and more of my friends recognize that the problem they’re grappling with is a First World Problem. The local store stopped carrying their favorite brand of jelly, so now...

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Tatooine and the Three-Body Problem

I recently ran across a blog post that pointed out that Tatooine (the Star Wars planet of double-sunset fame) could never exist because of the problems inherent to the 3-body problem. Specifically,...

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