Are you guys digging the new poem theme? It’s getting a lot of hits!
“Thursday’s child has far to go…” What exactly does the poem mean by this? It’s mysterious. But, I’ve tried to put together some “far to go” lit and entertainment links to match the theme.
It has never (yet!) been a serious possibility, but the proposal to rename Uranus does keep popping up. And not simply because it sounds perverse in English no matter how you stress it, but because it violates the theme of the planets in our star system having names of gods in Latin.
“Uranus” was simply a Latin transliteration of a Greek god’s name. Moreover, the Greek Ouranos was god of the entire sky, so it’s a little weird to give a single planet this name.
Unfortunately, since Uranus was named (after a political fracas caused when William Herschel tried to name the planet he discovered after himself and then after the king of England) the other big Roman deities have mostly been scooped up. Ceres and Pluto are dwarf planets, for example. Vesta is an asteroid and Janus a satellite of Saturn.
The difficult thing about creating a fictional alien species is that if they are too familiar, they seem inauthentic. Slap some bumps on the forehead and voilà : every Star Trek alien ever. And, the Star Trek franchise eventually had to explain this phenotypical homogeneity (ask a fan, but it’s in a Next Generation episode) to keep the credibility of the milieu intact.
On the other hand, to seem scientifically authentic aliens have to be … unfamiliar? Unrelatable? What’s a better word?
Alien.
However, if you take the creative process step-by-step, you can work outward from simple premises to alien species that are both inhuman yet believable and understandable. Continue reading
With the recent explosion in the discovery of extrasolar planets, there has been some discussion about the naming convention astronomers use to identify new worlds, a system that some find confusing. To be fair, the system is very scientific: each new object discovered is given an alphabetical identifier suffixed to the name of the primary star. So, the first planet found circling Fulanis (not a real star) would be Fulanis b, the second discovered would be Fulanis c, etc., with Fulanis a being the star itself.
As simple as this system is, however, it’s difficult to appreciate its elegance if you’re not a scientist. And it doesn’t reflect the way humans normally think of places. Imagine if newly discovered islands had been identified this way, with Atlantic b as the first discovered in the Atlantic, Pacific d as the third discovered in the Pacific, etc.
Not very user-friendly. Continue reading
In a damn* interesting piece yesterday at Talk To YoUniverse, Juliette Wade discusses how writers can navigate the differing perspectives of characters inside and outside a culture group.
She uses her own experience as a foreigner in Japan who speaks Japanese “too well,” but lays out a set of general principles writers can use to make the meeting of any two cultures seem more authentic, whether they are writing historical fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, a modern realist tale about culture clash, or even a story about the distinctive culture of a single family.
Enjoy “Insiders and Outsiders.”
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* Taking Mark Twain’s advice. Sans editors.
During conservation work at Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate, built in the 1500s by Suleiman the Magnificent, workers discovered a 100-year old Turkish hand grenade in the core of the wall.
Israeli antiquities experts believe that someone stashed the grenade in the middle of the wall through some broken stone during the last years of the Ottoman Empire.
But, what if there were another explanation? What if someone from our near future slipped back in time to visit the Grand Sultan during the height of Ottoman rule, making a pit stop in the Empire during World War I to pick up supplies and weapons?
Perhaps the grenade ended up in the wall as it was being built. A good writer could really build a story around that.
On this day, 18 June, in the year 1178 in Canterbury, England, a group of monks reported seeing a strange “flaming torch” on the moon, which caused the moon to “writhe” like “a wounded snake.”
Bizarre and unexplained real-world events like this can be the jumping-off point for a good science fiction story. Did these monks see an explosion, perhaps a meteor impact as some scientists have suggested, or was something more strange going on?
A backwoods skirmish in an interstellar war? A rift in the spacetime continuum? The appearance of a time-travel machine from our own century? The arrival of several alien probes?
Of course, such an event could also be worked into a fantasy story. Perhaps the moon became the last refuge of the dragons, and the monks were witnessing their fiery departure from Earth.
Here is a translation of the incident, as recorded by Gervase of Canterbury:
There was a bright new moon, and as usual in that phase its horns were tilted toward the east; and suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of this division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and, to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterward, it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance.
What sort of story do you think could be built around this strange incident?
