This story exists within a dystopian future America, where the central portion of the country is a political and economic wasteland know as the Tropic of Kansas. The story follows Sig and his foster sister Tania in separate narratives through this harrowing tale of a broken America. Brown paints the picture of this grim future …
Category Archives: speculative fiction
Signatures of Life on Distant Planets
The science of discovering planets around distant stars has made great leaps in recent years, thousands have been found. Of course, what we’re all waiting for is the discovery of life on any such planet, especially intelligent life. In order to find signs of life from a telescope, there would have to be something about …
Ishiguro Wins Nobel!
One of my all time favorite novelists, Kazuo Ishiguro, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. This could not be more well deserved. While there is much that can, and will, be said about his work in the coming days, what really stands out for me is the one foray he made into science fiction, his …
Entanglement a Permanent Feature of Reality
A new paper presents a mathematical proof that entanglement isn’t just a weirdness unique to quantum theory, but something that is a necessary feature of any theory that describes the universe we know. If you remember my earlier blog post about entanglement, you’ll know that I’m obsessed by it. If not, then I’ll quote myself …
Where are all the aliens?
An article in Science presents research showing that the building blocks of life are more prevalent than previously thought. It says a lot of other things too, but this is what I get out of it. This makes me wonder more than ever about the Fermi Paradox, which states that reasonable assumptions lead to the …
Is the Brain Multi-dimensional?
Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain contains multi-dimensional geometric structures, up to 11 dimensions. The scientists are talking about algebraic topology, and how it describes neurons connecting into ‘cliques’, and that the description requires higher-dimensional geometric objects. This is a mathematical concept, and they are not claiming to have measured higher dimensional space-time objects (after all, …
Book Review of Wrestling With Gods
I picked up Wrestling With Gods (Tesseracts Eighteen) because I’m a sucker for speculative fiction that intersects with religion. On the other hand, I rarely read anthologies, preferring novel length fiction. Nevertheless, I can say that I was happily surprised on several fronts. First, the writing is undeniable excellent throughout. Liana Kerzner and Jerome Stueart …
Book Review of WORMWOOD, NEVADA
Tyler and Anna Mayfield, a young married couple looking for their place in life, move to Wormwood, Nevada from Lincoln, Nebraska. In Wormwood they find a desolate town filled with disenchanted people, drug dealers, a meteor impact in the center of town, alien cultists, and eventually actual aliens. A rock-em sock-em science fiction thriller, right? …
Book Review of WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
I’ve often been disappointed by a movie based on a book I like. However, when I find that a movie I like is based on a novel I haven’t read, I often find I like the novel. After the death of Robin Williams, I thought about his movie What Dreams May Come. I love this …
Book Review of VERACITY
I picked up Laura Bynum’s VERACITY because of the interesting concept and strong writing in the few page sample I read. The concept has protagonist Harper Adams living in a dystopian society that formed in the aftermath of a large-scale bioterrorism attack. The interesting part is that this society tries to control thought, and thereby …
Physics and Art 