Month: December 2025

Let Jake Barter Work on That for a While

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Now that I’ve assumed the persona of Jake Barter, my whole life has changed.  Jake Barter is no ordinary man.  At the very least he has the training of a double nought secret agent and the social connections of Bruce Wayne.  His resume is a combination of special forces operator and philosopher king.  And because of this I told Camera Girl that she needed to treat me with much greater respect and an almost religious awe.

I don’t think she “gets it” yet.  You know what they say about a prophet in his own country.  Well, that goes double for a pseudonymous author.  I think I may now begin to write the memoirs of Jake Barter in my spare time.  I think he will be a picaresque character who gets involved in serious situations like wars, revolutions and social movements and ends up causing things to go south in horribly predictable ways based on his sloth, greed and phenomenal incompetence.  His only redeeming qualities are monumental overconfidence, enormous likeability and unbelievable luck.  I’m thinking I’ll start him off as a special advisor to Trump on constitutional law and then take it from there.

But seriously, I am thinking about new characters for future stories and I think the next thing I do will have a strong humorous streak in it.  And this is because I do enjoy making fun of things I don’t like and combining that with a writing project should make it a lot of fun for me.  But what I must do is decide if it will be in the same “universe” as “The Sniper.”  So far there isn’t a lot of humor there and maybe it would be better to separate a new project from a place with so much trauma lurking around every turn.  And that’s fine.  Making up multiple fictional worlds allows the author to escape from any traps he’s gotten himself into in the old ones.  You can get tired of a scenario or you just need a break from figuring out how to keep your characters from either getting killed or solving all their problems.  After all, either of those paths ends the story.  So, you have to be constantly threading the needle to maintain the overall “problem” but still carve out a piece of plotline to make the present installment interesting.

I think I might want to do an extraterrestrial story.  I’ve played around with some short story / novella length things in the past but they just petered out.  I think this time I’ll try to storyboard a whole bunch of stuff first so I have a direction and enough plot lines and an overarching direction for the thing before I get really started.  And what is currently completely stymying me is deciding what kind of Earth this will be.  Will it be like the actual current day disaster we are living through or will it be some kind of “day after tomorrow” where we’ve gotten our act together and learned how to live like human beings.  Well, I’ll let Jake Barter work on that for a while.

Europan Trilobites

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I was watching a YouTube video about the material that a NASA probe brought back from an asteroid.  This asteroid apparently is in a near Earth orbit and so this mission was able to reach and return from this tiny world in just a few years with its cargo of sand and gravel.  By the look of the asteroid, it’s not even a solid piece of rock but a bunch of space junk that gravitated together out in the lonely stretches of interplanetary space.

But as unpromising as this locale seems to me, apparently, it was a bonanza for science.  This one kilometer flying gravel pit somehow contains an astonishing collection of organic molecules that hint shockingly about being the precursors or even the aftermath of life.  A slew of amino acids and even some precursors of the RNA molecule showed up in this sampler that NASA recovered.

Now, reading this I immediately began to question in my own mind whether these organic molecules started out on Earth and were ejected into space during one of the asteroid collisions that befall this planet every once in a great while.  After all, if rocks from Mars have ended up on Earth (as has been claimed by geologists) then surely debris from Earth could have contaminated nearby space and ended up on this neighboring rock.  But the writers of this report have information that dates this asteroid to very ancient times.  In fact, they claim it’s older than the planets and could possibly contain material from completely outside the solar system.  Well, who knows?  Despite assurances I think it’s fifty/fifty whether it’s originally terrestrial organic material they’re looking at.

But suppose it really is extraterrestrial in origin.  In that case, I think that eventually we will find that life existed on Mars in the past when it possessed abundant water.  In fact, it’s entirely possible that life exists cryptically below the surface of Mars at a depth where temperature is higher and reservoirs of water exist.  And if organic molecules are floating around the solar system, it seems likely that some of the larger Jovian and Saturnian moons with their liquid water oceans will also turn out to contain life.

Now here’s the thing.  I would make a small wager that when these life forms are found, they will be shown to have a relationship to terrestrial organisms.  I say this because I think they will be descendants of microorganisms that have managed to be ejected from Earth and drifted through the solar system until they reached environments that they could adapt to.

Of course, it’s possible that life on Earth also came from space.  Experimentation with hardy terrestrial lifeforms has shown that they can exist in the vacuum of interplanetary space for surprisingly long periods as spores.  I guess the interesting question is just how advanced is the life that we will find in the rest of the solar system.  There is a big difference between finding bacteria, algae, lichen or moss on Mars or a jellyfish swimming in the oceans of Titan as opposed to finding the xenomorph.  Well, I won’t be greedy.  I’ll split the difference.  I’ll settle for a Europan trilobite.

Tom’s World – 04DEC2025 – The End of “Our Democracy”

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TomD

Here’s a column by Christopher Chantrill, whom I’ve been following religiously for several years. He has several uncommon, shall we say, takes on the political landscape.

A Commoner Manifesto Pushing Back Against the Revolution of the commoners Christopher Chantrill Dec 03, 2025

“Our situation is not whether to have a republic or democracy. Our situation is what to do after the failure of the educated-class project of the last 150-200 years. Obviously, the educated class wants to hang on.”

…

“Problem for any ruling class is that, at the end of the dynasty, the rulers are not sending their best: Biden, Harris, Walz: see what I mean? And so, even though they have sat majestically on the throne for decades and won world wars and saved workers and blacks and women and gays from a fate worse than death, when it comes to the crunch, they don’t have the ability and the skills and the cojones to realize that they have screwed up, that their regime is incompetent and corrupt, and that dynasties don’t last forever.”

Hailing Frequencies Open!

photog Book Reviews, Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews, SF&F Movie Reviews, SF&F TV Show Reviews, Star Trek, TV Reviews , , ,

Back in the 1960s we had a tv show called “Star Trek.”  It starred William Shatner as James Tiberius Kirk, the captain of the starship Enterprise.  And for one hour every week Kirk and his crew of four hundred able-bodied men (and women) warped their way through the galaxy seeking out new life and new civilizations and boldly went where no men had gone before.

And wherever they went Lieutenant Uhura kept them (mostly) in contact with the Federation using a form instantaneous contact called sub-space communication.  I say mostly because something called sub-space interference would be invoked whenever it would be useful to the plot for the Enterprise to be incommunicado.  This would allow Kirk to show initiative and break with inconvenient policy like the Federation’s Prime Directive against interfering in the technological development of more primitive civilizations.  Of course, Kirk broke this rule about a million times in the course of the show.  But you know, there was dramatic tension while they sorted out their feelings about this rule.

But getting back to sub-space communication, it was instantaneous.  Which was needed to make the stories work.  After all, radio waves are electromagnetic waves and propagate at the speed of light.  The Enterprise travels many times the speed of light (maximum about 1000 times the speed of light).  So normal radio communication is essentially useless for them.  They could beat their radio message back to Earth by a factor of as much as a thousand-fold.

But here’s the thing.  Suppose you want to write a story where faster than light space travel is impossible but instantaneous communication with other stellar systems is possible?  What would be the dramatic possibilities of such an arrangement.  Well, basically, it allows the writer to imagine radically different cultures and organisms sharing ideas and information across the entirety of the cosmos.

You could have a supremely old race teaching a young one how to avoid all of the dangers that it experienced.  And they could teach them about their future.  Suppose a race on a planet is circling a star that is about to explode.  What would they want to pass on to the universe?  Maybe some religious insight or a supremely beautiful musical composition or maybe just their name; so, they would not be forgotten after they die.

Now of course instantaneous communication is as completely untethered to scientific reality as warp drive is.  But I can still see how using it in a story without FTL space flight would present story lines that aren’t as well-explored as ones where FTL space flight exists but “sub-space” communication does not.

Now all this being said, I will say that Lieutenant Tawny Madison, played by Sigourney Weaver in the movie Galaxy Quest really improved on Lieutenant Uhura’s performance as communications officer.  Her costume was significantly skimpier and showed much more cleavage than Lieutenant Uhura ever did.  And Madison didn’t need to wear an ear piece to hear the computer tell her what the ship was doing.  All she had to do was repeat what everyone else could hear over the ship’s speaker system.  Now that was progress.