sci-fi Archives · Link Parish

Consciousness Indecision

– or – My Neural State isn’t my Mental State. Is it? In the immensely popular game Fallout 4, players are confronted with an ethical dilemma. Are the Synthetic humans… Human? Can something created vice conceived be truly alive? Intelligent?? Conscious???…

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Muse-ik Musts for Your Inner Fan

Last month I was lucky enough to visit the Queen Studio Experience in Montreux, Switzerland. This November marks the 25th anniversary of the passing of Freddie Mercury. That’s an entry all by itself. Maybe later. As we finished our Switzerland by train trip, Queen…

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A Fan of a Fan of…

I think of myself as a fan of science fiction and fantasy. First and foremost. But nowhere near as big a fan as the late Forrest Ackerman. Not familiar with the name? He was a founding member of the Los…

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Pod People & Edit Evasion

Escape Artists Podcast Network‘s Science Fiction Imprint, Escape Pod, is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. Their Flash Fiction contest is underway. My day job in real life involves work as a proof reader & fact…

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What’s the Deal?

People have Deals. Large ones, small ones. Some of our Deals are plain to see. Others are hidden by accident or design. A lot of us have multiple Deals. Everyone has them. Everyone. Everyone except fictional characters. Right?!? I write…

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COVID19 Coping

A bakers dozen of the images that were bursts of sunshine peeking through clouds of anxiety and uncertainty. Laughter really is the best medicine. Not your cup of tea? Brian Gable’s works in the Globe and Mail seemed spot on…

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COVID19 Chronicle

January The parent of a friend is a viral pathologist. Their daughter is one of many immunocompromised or otherwise high risk friends. They go silent, a fact that, honestly, terrifies me. I’m thinking of the ‘at risk’ people I know,…

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Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Enemy Mine

Wolfgang Petersen—Das Boot (1981) In the Line of Fire (1993), Outbreak (1995), Air Force One (1997), The Perfect Storm (2000)—took over Enemy Mine in 1985. It would be his first English-language film. Enemy Mine was more futuristic melodrama than sci-fi…

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To Experience Becoming

Writers regularly ask one question of other writers. Why do you write? Self-depreciating responses aside, I tend to confirmation bias the responses as “Because I cannot do otherwise.” Part of that is on me. I cannot remember not wanting to,…

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Infectious People

Mags is patient zero. Her contagious laugh carries across the largest, most crowded room. Her smile has been classified by the World Health Organization as a Category B Infectious Biological with an R0 value of 17. Not sure where she…

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None Taller

I was sitting in the waiting room of my health care provider the other day watching a mother read “Things that Go!” to her young child. Seven times. And the laughter in both of their voices. Seven times. The excitement…

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Winter Writeaway

What A week secluded in a cabin far from the intrusions and distractions of Real Life. Where A cabin far from the intrusions and distractions of Real Life. Seriously, What? A few years ago my wife gave me one of…

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Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Soldier

Writer David Peoples gave us Blade Runner, Unforgiven, and 12 Monkeys. He and director Paul Anderson–Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon–delivered Soldier. Essentially Shane in Space, this Science Fiction, One Man Army actionfest starred Kurt Russell. Critics and audiences hated it. My…

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Hooray for Hollywood

Sometimes Hollywood gets it wrong. Sometimes rather a lot really. Sometimes we do, too. Get things wrong. Growing up, I really really really wanted to be an astronaut. I knew the history of the space program, the good and the…

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Crossing the Streams

If you’re fortunate, you love what you do for a living. If you’re truly fortunate, you’ll do what you do for a living… with geeks. A co-worker in my current digs knows that if they send a certain email, within…

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Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Dragonriders of Pern Game

For over thirty years, master storyteller Anne McCaffrey entertained us with her epic science fantasy series the Dragonriders of Pern. The settings intrigued us, the characters grabbed us, and the stories–oh the stories. Two trilogies initially, two short story collections…

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Fakereals, Realfakes

“We all know synthespians are coming. Very soon we will reach a point when we switch on a television or a computer, see an actor or newscaster, and not know if they are flesh and blood and what’s more… not…

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Punk Punk. Who’s There?

“Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction. Why can’t we move past cyberpunk?” That’s the title of a Lee Konstantinou Future Tense article Slate ran in January. The entire article is worth a read. But for me the precious metal…

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Loki Eat World

Life, for all of us, changed for the better two years ago when we added Bacchus to the pack. Moose wasn’t alone anymore and he loved the attention from Bacchus. But puppies are high energy, and Moose, now fifteen, isn’t.…

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State of Fury

What’s better than having a superhero hail from your hometown? Having the coolest man alive hail from there. Ah yup. Well, a character he plays, at least. Thank you Marvel for the shout-out. The good people of Huntsville, Alabama, home…

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TraveLink – Antarctica Pt. 3

The Drake – Heading Out We are late leaving Ushuaia. A storm is passing through and the Port is closed because of high winds. That translates into 15-20′ swells in The Drake and headwinds gusting to 90km/h on Day One.…

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TraveLink – Antarctica Pt. 2

Our Antarctic adventure begins on 6 December with our arrival in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We’ll cover that and Ushuaia next post. We chose Silversea & Silver Explorer voyage 7824. The Silver Explorer boards 123 passengers and 119 crew. There are…

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TraveLink – Antarctica Pt. 1

I’m a big history buff in general–but not so much when it comes to treaties. If I was, I’d be a huge fan of one of the most successful treaties in the history of mankind. A living and active treaty…

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Quoth the Raven, Ever Noir

“The most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.” Those are the words of the late Roger Ebert, critic, historian, journalist,…

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Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Dollhouse

Dollhouse was called “The best action show on network television” It was. They said “The Actives are all young hot women.” They weren’t. Fans complained “Fox is marketing this thing like it is Cathouse.” Fox was. Picture the ‘Eliza Dushku…

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What’s All This, Then?

No, this isn’t a travel blog and I’m not a travel writer. I know, two posts in a row mostly kinda sorta more or less no more mkay more than a little focused on travel. One was supposed to be…

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TraveLink – Lucerne

Lucerne was just another in the long list of places that Samuel Clemens beat me to. No matter. Read his comments in A Tramp Abroad, and the recommendations of PlanetWare for sights to see. Mr. Clemens surprisingly fails to mention…

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TraveLink – Hawaii

Samuel Clemens was not perfect. But he embodied many of my writerly goals and ideals. He was the arch to my amateur; the consumate to my clumsy, the major to my… you get the drift. He traveled, observed, recorded. His…

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Happy Noniversary

To my love, my life, best friend, wife. Muse of muses, editor, conspirator, audience and focus group. Beta reader, critic, devotee, advocate, antagonist. Comfort, mainstay. Compass. Because of you, of us, future me doesn’t hate me. Love you, babe.

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No Such Thing

…As bad publicity. In 1946, Kirkus Reviews described Halldor Laxness’s Independent People as “A sprawling, unselective, overlong… A bleak and bitter book, with little to interest or attract the American reader.” In 1955 Laxness took home the Nobel Prize in…

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Scratch!

What’s a seven-letter synonym for ‘Awesome’? Mitch Resnick and MIT’s Scratch. 37 million projects can’t be wrong. Yeah. You read that right. That’s Thirty-seven and six trailing zeros before the decimal. So yeah, awesome. Scratching your head? You can learn…

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Consciously Adapting

This started as research for a class on Hidden Biases. Disappointingly, there was a lot of suitable background material. Most emotionally accessible to me was the 2017 breakout of the top 100 academic and technical high school students in STEM…

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Novel Writing

Growing up there were two main groups of kids: Some went to other people’s houses to play. Some stayed put and had everyone over. I was one of the former. Our crowd hung out at the home of a pair…

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Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Kolchak: The Night Stalker

Fans of The X-Files, of Fringe owe some of our enjoyment to the trail of conspiracy crept in the 70’s by the Night Stalker. Rotten Tomatoes gives Kolchak: The Night Stalker a solid 86%, and 97% of the often overgenerous…

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Fallen Apples

Artificial Intelligence, AI, isn’t going away. It also hasn’t conquered us. Yet. It has provided a looking glass of our own flaws and prejudices and biases. In 2016, Microsoft’s chatbot Tay spent a day chatting with people. The dewy-eyed innocent…

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Haiku

Haiku piqued my interest on several levels. My muse loves the imagery and the syntax. The linguist in me has an intense love-hate relationship with the myriad translations. The form had a rather humble start. Japanese poets would engage in…

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Looper – Time Travel Done Right

Looper is jet bike ride into a dystopian not so distant future. Time travel is used by a future syndicate to send their problem children back in time to be eradicated by hit men known as Loopers. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is…

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Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Green Slime

Man has looked out to space in wonder For thousands of years. Sometimes thinking that life could be somewhere And now — now it’s here! Green Slime!!! One of the best worst movies ever. Kind of sacred ground, if you…

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Appropriately Well

Write it well. That’s probably the single greatest admonition that I, as a writer, can take to heart. Write it well. I can research. Read. Interview. Have empathy. But can I ever truly write well about an experience I have…

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Fearless Creatures, We

We start our lives as such fearless creatures. We create instinctively. Our response to our inner voice is, more often than not, “Sure, why not!” Only later in life do we learn caution, doubt, reflection. Only later in life do…

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Butterfly Catch

The Big Move back across the pond we call the Atlantic was over. Our sole remaining Papillon, Moose, had settled into the new home. But there was something missing. Two somethings. Rocky and Gizmo. Moose has always been part of…

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Pond Jumping

Life, especially the writing life, is about routines. Even for a card carrying Swooper Pantser like myself. All of mine are about to change. Our time in Europe has come to an end. Now the next great adventure. Back across…

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Writers, Right? Part II

We are writers. Right? But what kind? We aren’t talking genre. Yet. Just the basics. Think Meyers Briggs and the four dichotomies. For writers, the preference pairings go something like this: Plotter – Pantser – Basher – Swooper Kurt Vonnegut…

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