Monday, January 8, 2024

 

Viva Mexico en el Espacio!

It's a bit of good news that a wonderful neighboring country has joined the space exploration family.  Mexico will include a group of mini moon probes in an upcoming mission to explore our great satellite for future scientific work.  Even as the country faces major problems on Earth, it is encouraging that it can sustain the effort to support science and technology in such a way.  Truly, nothing can hold back the spirit of the Mexican people.

 

Thursday, December 21, 2023



 

 HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL IN THE GAINESSCIFI BLOG FAMILY


      

Sunday, September 3, 2023




Hello to Ireland and the Netherlands


It's particularly wonderful to welcome visitors from two delightful countries that I have had the good fortune to visit in person.   Of course, both the Irish and the Dutch speak English at least as well as many of my local neighbors, so you can enjoy our novels Life Sentence and Spy Station, as well as my collection Beyond the Covenant and Other Stories.  We hope you will give them a try if you enjoy exciting sci fi that is rich in alien action.  And if you do, please don't forget to give us a rating in Kindle, Amazon, or Goodreads.

Sunday, August 27, 2023



 It's frightening, it's puzzling, and it's YOURS FOR FREE on Kindle this weekend. Spy Station is 4 star + rated interplanetary espionnage, so try it now by clicking ...

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Sunday, August 20, 2023



Mars: the Total Recall Settlement Option

Some sci fi fans may not be aware that Philip K. Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" provides only a fraction of the plot for the film version Total Recall.  In fact, Dick's story never gets to Mars, except indirectly in memories that may be illusions.  The entire portrayal of life on Mars was added somewhere in the middle of a writing process that involved some forty drafts, with numerous inputs and cancellations from successive directors and producers, and eventually Arnold Schwartzenegger himself, who was the last of many actors envisioned for the lead over sixteen years of production.

  
Even the various features of the Mars segments went through a complicated evolution.  Neither the memorable Venusville scenes, nor the scenes in the reactor, nor the nature of the turbidium mountain itself were part of the original plans.  As has happened with other great films such as Casablanca, we can only thank our lucky stars that a masterpiece emerged from a byzantine and often off-the-cuff creative history.


Nevertheless, the portrayal of the Martian colony contains a great deal that may apply to an eventual effort to settle the Red Planet.  First of all, we should mention the crucial importance of a reliable oxygen supply to the success of the endeavor, as well as the assumption that such a supply will not come easily through some magic wand of terraforming based on human technology.  In Total Recall the first groups of settlers are poisoned by the lack of clean air, which produces the generations of mutants that populate Venusville.   It is only through the deus ex machina of highly superior alien tech that Mars is terraformed at the conclusion of the movie, a virtually last-minute addition that caused much controversy among the filmmakers.  While the dangers of toxicity on Mars have ony recently begun to receive much attention, the oxygen quandary has been known for well over a century now and efforts to solve it seem still as quixotic as the plan in Jules Verne's From Earth to the Moon bring trees in a space vehicle to plant on the lunar surface.


Another item considered in Total Recall (and noticeably absent in The Martian) is the possibility of living inside the planet instead of on the surface.  This clever alternative might even be accomplished robotically, sparing future Mars-farers many of the travails posed by erecting domes or dodging dust-storms.  Robotic construction missions might, of course, involve much time and expense -- but less than trying to provision a colonial garrison.  This is especially true if the robotic crews had access to an adequate atomic reactor to produce electricity without the need for much water or any combustion.  


Unfortunately, Total Recall does not address the issue of feeding a Martian colony, other than that the inhabitants of Venusville seem to somehow have access to huge supplies of alcohol.  We now know that it could not come from The Martian's little garden of potatoes, since the soil fortuitously used in the latter film now appears to be highly toxic to most of Earth's flora.  Here, we may find a solution in another sci fi classic, Outland.  The mining settlement in that film featured a very extensive vertical greenhouse that plays a major part in the violent finale.  It is conceivable that such a facility could be constructed in the shelter of a sunlit Martian canyon wall that would avoid some of the abrasive dangers of dust storms.  Perhaps another contribution could be supplied by Einstein's favorite vegetable, mushrooms.  It is only with tongue in cheek that we can mention the name of The Mole People, where a subterranean remnant of Sumerians is kept alive largely by edible fungi.  Such underground farms could, though, certainly make a contribution to the diet of humans on Mars, should a cavern system be excavated beforehand.  


At least one other problem must be overcome in order to achieve a community based on human Martian troglodytes: marsquakes.  Recent research shows that they are much more frequent than previously believed.  There is clearly more we need to know about the deeper nature of the Martian core and its movements before we can invest in the type of venture suggested by Total Recall.  Geological stability, at least within manageable parameters, is a must to support a sub-Mars colony.  Just comparing Mars settlement to that of the New World in the Age of Discovery, we should realize right now that we face definite limitations to the number of failed missions we as a planet can support.  The disappearances of the viking communities in Greenland and Newfoundland, the Portuguese colony on Cape Breton Island, Gosnold's post in Cuttyhunk, the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, or the French port in what is now South Carolina offer ample evidence that even less hostile environments than Mars can gobble up groups of humans who face difficulties in contact and resupply.  

Surely, some of these issues will also present themselves in the nearer future as we attempt to develop ressources on the Moon.  A viable colony there is, after all, a likely necessity before we can move large masses of people and material to Mars.  Perhaps there we can begin to work on solutions to the bigger problem.  As we do so, it may be advisable to avoid some of the mistakes made in the New World experience, where humans fighting amongst each other forced many efforts to collapse.  It may take the unity of all Earthlings to undertake the colossal challenges of interplanetary living.


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Monday, August 14, 2023





 Top 10 in 2 Kindle categories

Thanks to all the new and old fans for putting us on top of the charts during the FREE PROMOTION that ends tonight. Our whopping, alien-filled adventure Life Sentence will bring you pleasure. Please give us a great Amazon and/or Goodreads review! We promise more Forlani stories to come.


Saturday, July 29, 2023

Batman Could Only Have Developed in America

      Not many characters from speculative fiction are uniquely associated with the United States.  Superman, despite "Truth, Justice, and the American Way," is from a distant planet.  Monsters are almost always foreigners: the Mummy from Egypt, Wolfman from the Celtic Lands, Frankenstein from Germany and Switzerland, Dracula from Transylvania, the Gillman from the Amazon Basin, Godzilla from Japan, Mothra from the South Pacific, etc., etc.  Wonder Woman hails from Atlantis and Green Lantern got his powers from somewhere out in the universe.  Silver Surfer caught a space wave from out beyond, as well.  

     But Batman is firmly rooted in the good old US of A more than any other, because his very name would not make sense elsewhere on Earth.  Consider that in Berlin he would translate as Flying Mouse Man, in Paris as Bald Mouse Man, and in Naples as Peep-Peep Star Man.  Further back, in the ancient Roman Empire, he would have been Little Evening Thing Man.  Even among the Brits, with whom we occasionally share a common language, his name could not have caught on, for it would suggest a flunkie serving a military officer.  And so it goes.  Not nametags that exactly would make a criminal tremble.  

     So we must be grateful for our homegrown hero, even if he dresses less patriotically than Captain America.  He is so much one of us, both in his strengths and his weaknesses.  Empowered with his belt full of technological wonders and beset with periods of emotional anxieties, Batman looms over Gotham like the ghost of our national imagination.  Whether the rest of the world will ever truly understand him, we know not.  Yet our own visceral bonds to him will never fail.  Hail to this Dark Knight in a land that dubs no knights of its own.  May he always lurk in the alleys where our fears wait to assail us, offering the salvation he could never give his own privileged family.  Batman is America.