Sci Fi Updates: Sailing space and sci fi stories that might save us all! (Plus a micro-rant.)

I've been mentioning that the TASAT Project is now up and running! A way that the very nerdiest readers of sci fi tales from the last 100 years might someday use their story-citing powers to save the world!  Drop by to learn how. Or see my blip about it at-bottom.

Just updated and re-released: Project Solar Sail: 21st Century Edition: A collection of stories and essays about the next step in interstellar exploration: Lightships and Sails propelled by lasers or sunlight! Classic stories by Clarke, Asimov, Anderson, Bradbury and Jack Vance, along with new/updated articles by JPL scientists and others, exploring present technologies and future possibilities for sailing the light fantastic. Edited by David Brin and Stephen W. Potts and - originally - Arthur C. Clarke. 

And another classic updated and refreshed. Not genre, but akin.....John Perlin’s newly re-issued tome is a classic. A Forest Journey: The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization* is a deeply-moving and persuasive elegy to the vital importance of the natural world - the groves and prairies and seas. Not as alternatives to civilization, but as the lungs and sinews and beating heart that allow us - especially our glittering cities - to stand and gaze upward.

*I cited this one in Earth.

== Sci fi updates ==

SF epic poetry! Homer may be dead but not his spirit, as the mighty literary form of poetical epics lives on. The greatest such living bard would be Frederick Turner, whose topics include Genesis: the terraforming of Mars, or the rise of Artificial Intelligence, or the genetic engineering of our organic successors.

Another: Epoch: A Poetic Psy-Phi Saga, by Dave Jilk, is science fiction in the form of an epic poem, with the first fully human-level artificial intelligence telling its own story as a sort of memoir. The book turns much of current thinking on existential AI risk on its head, and raises some uncomfortable questions about humanity even as it lauds our accomplishments. 

(Another mini epic poem by Ray Bradbury and J.V. Post is in Project Solar Sail!)

And there are updated movies. Oooh. The original is fine, but... I'm okay with plans afoot to remake the fine 80s sci fi flick Enemy Mine, based on Barry Longyear’s exquisite, Hugo-winning novella, which you can find on Amazon. (What I absolutely rebel against is the remake of perfect films. I mean carumba, leave Lawrence of Arabia alone!)

Flash fiction is a lovely exercise in rapid creation on the fly. I am pleased to recommend an allegorical fairy tale about a witch and a gargoyle.

== Sci Fi Roundup! ==

The mighty Kay Kenyon has finished her wonderfully entertaining series. Now available for pre-order, book 4, Keeper of the Mythos Gate, the exciting and moving conclusion to The Arisen Worlds. Publication, September 3. If you haven't checked out the series yet, dip in with this excerpt from Book 1.

Bruce Golden’s Evergreen centers around a mysterious artifact + themes of obsession, revenge, and redemption amid timber jockeys, uncouth frontier towns, and into the heart of an awareness so alien it defies common notions of "intelligent life."

One of the fine authors I’ve mentored in my Out of Time YA series (only teens can teleport through space and time!) is Torion Oey. His latest, a fantasy novel, is The Disgraced Mage. 

Tales of the United States Space Force is a new combination of science fiction stories and fact articles about – or related to - America's newest military service branch. Space is critical to the economy and our whole modern way of life, and that makes it a target. Let this volume open some eyes. And one of my classics is included.

 

Winter 1962. A child is discovered in the frozen Oregon woods. Mute and feral, wandering lost, naked and near death… and not entirely human. Nonesuch Man: an illustrated novel  by Steven Elkins.

Two of my out-of-print novels are now re-issued with fine new covers and fresh editing. Earth came in second for a Hugo and is on every “Top Ten Predictive Novels” list you can find. (See below!)

Also Glory Season is a Silverberg/Norton-style adventure on a world where human reproduction has been channeled down wholly new paths… with one of my favorite protagonists, plucky Maia!  The trade paperbacks are luscious. 

Terrific covers and Open Road allowed me to insert about 80 page breaks in Earth that give this edition a really classy look and feel.  Don’t miss free chapters and trailers on my website.

== Stories that predicted well? ==

I mentioned predictive tales? Well, whenever exploring new territory, you might ask the natives? What profession spends a lot of time seeking and extrapolating on 'signals from the future?" 

The top 10% of near future science fiction novels generally contain riffs to portray answers to the questions: "If this goes on..." or What if...?" From John Brunner's astonishingly prophetic 1968 books Stand on Zanzibar and The Shockwave Rider to Frederik Pohl and Ursula LeGuin and Nancy Kress... to my own Earth and Existence... to Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future, which has proved so influential that the UN is pondering naming a new agency after it.

 

Start here? 8 Books That Eerily Predicted the Future.   

Which circles us back around to TASAT or There's A Story About That.  

The idea cropped up well over a decade ago. In those days, whenever I was in DC for NASA meetings, I would always stop - on my way to Dulles Airport - at a little agency in McLean Virginia, to give a talk on 'future threats', some of which (alas) have come true. At the third of these talks to the Protector Caste, it occurred to me that these people - mostly super smart and sincere public servants - had very little clue about the vast number of thought-experiments in science fiction that have spun out dramatically dangerous possibilities. Very often about unexpected dangers that loom suddenly, when the present speeds into the future.

I blurted: "Suppose someday you encounter something strange - maybe very strange. You form a committee to look into it and give advice." (I have been on several such 'consultant rolladexes'.) "Shouldn't that committee have access to past ruminations that might have already explored similar ground? Tales that maybe poked at the first assumptions that you might mistakenly make, if you ever face a similar situation?"

The purpose of TASAT is to enroll folks who have read a lot of sci fi tales and who might be able to provide that very service!  See the full explanation at TASAT.org!

Lately, the first beta testers have been citing past tales about tech-sabotage, that eerily foresaw the recent "pager caper" wherein explosives got inveigled into an adversary's unsuspecting hands. Citations included Eric Frank Russells's Wasp and Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You, but it goes back even a century!

The TASAT project has stumbled many times. Turns out we needed Mr. Todd Zimmerman, expert programmer, to finally make it happen. (Thank you, Todd!)

And now we're hoping many of you will try out TASAT in the current beta and give feedback... because who knows? You may be the one to cite a story that shakes a false assumption, and maybe thusly save us all!

== A final grumble ==

Okay, it still kinda hurts. But my tribute to the recently-late Vernor Vinge... my friend and one of the greats of science fiction - can be found here.

So, what’s my grumble? The travesty - also raised by Harry Turtledove - that one of the best and most visionary SF authors of all time – Vernor – was never named Grand Master of SFWA - the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.  

(Hey, changing SFWA's name from the parochial 'of America' was long overdue.) 

But as for neglecting Vernor - despite many campaigns on his behalf?  No writhing excuse for this dismal spurning is anything other than masturbatory justification of pure bigotry, of the kind that George Orwell described in Homage to Catalonia. The same righteous circular firing squad behavior that demolished the left in the 1930s Spanish Civil War, opening up a path for Hitler & Mussolini. Or frippy fads like Nader and Stein, that led to the destructive presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, and could do it to us, again. 

Likewise, it is – today – the very essence of self-destruction, narrowing, cauterizing and neutering what should be an inspiring and multi-directional literature of progress.

Was that a Heinlein-like, old man shouting-at-clouds grumble rant? Sure, but prove me wrong, in comments? 

Or how about maybe let's try a gesture that will both re-establish some justice in our field and broaden -- rather than narrow-down -- a progressive, future-seeking coalition? It could begin with a simple act to honor one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time.

Nancy Kress for Grand Master of SF. 

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Rant mode off, now.  But always on standby mode. ;-)

Have a great weekend. And check your voter registration.