Category Archives: science/fiction

How the Academy Figures Out What Planets to Explore

Over at Centauri Dreams, there’s an article about seeing alien planets up close, and what would be required. (Emphases mine)
Huge space arrays could help follow up our investigations of such a discovery, but Schneider notes that to get a 100-pixel image of a planet with twice the Earth’s diameter some 16.3 light years [...]

Post-pulp

I don’t have much to say other than to nod along with this io9 article by Charlie Jane Anders, entitled Can You Update Pulp Science Fiction Without Being F-ed Up? but I really want to repost this sentence from the conclusion:
And hey, it bears repeating: None of this would be such a problem if [...]

Pumzi—Science Fiction from Kenya

Three things strike me about this. The first is that it looks gorgeous. The second is that it’s interesting that this “last outpost of humanity that doesn’t know that outside is OK” theme is so resilient — Logan’s Run, The Island (which, OK, was more or less a remake of Logan’s Run), Paranoia, Moon’s busted [...]

Homo Floresiensis and the Origins of Human Contact

The existence of Homo Floresiensis is one of the primary things that motivated Human Contact when we first started playing it. This is a three-foot tall hominin that’s been discovered in Indonesia that, while it had a cranial capacity two thirds smaller than ours, was clearly a tool-using, cultural creature, and it looks like major [...]

Life Aboard a Space Station

The vertigo kicks it right after 1:30.
They seem to have biking shoes, around 10:30, over there on the right.
Around 12:30, they’re doing something very practical, but it really looks fun.
(This is from Space Gizmo, which is fascinating every day.)

The Gift

Reportedly, this is already planned as a feature-length film. Has Neill Blomkamp set a precedent here? Is this the way to make movies now? And do you need movie theaters to make it work? Might straight-to-iTunes be a better way to publish?
(Also: I’m not sure why Philips thinks that reducing the resolution is a good [...]

The On-Off Star

I guess this explains the On-Off Star!

Tron vs. Saul Bass

Tron vs. Saul Bass from Hexagonall on Vimeo.

Academy Law

There are several parts of Academy law that will be broadly applicable to the interstellar expeditions that will be the core of play in Human Contact. I’m interested to see how these are interpreted (and ignored) in the course of play — after all, it’ll be years, or maybe decades (or maybe never!) before contact [...]

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