Author: photog
Just a Rant for Today
Today was an insane day. I was enmeshed in a bureaucratic maelstrom of political deadlines and ideological absurdity. People were running around in circles getting signatures on petitions and trying to dot the i’s and cross the t’s needed to beat the clock. And I got gypped out of my day off. But as Camera Girl would say I was the “better person” (I think).
So, I didn’t have much time to look at the news. What I saw was more of the same. Scott Pelley was crying (literally) about Bari Weiss trying to make 60 Minutes slightly less leftist. Graham Platner was winning the Democratic Maine Senatorial primary while reports of his sub-human antics continue to pour in from all directions. Donald Trump was booed at an NBA playoff game at Madison Square Garden. And apparently the California absentee ballot scam is still working effectively six years into the new era so that as long as unlimited time is allowed for fake ballots to be printed up no Republican will ever be elected (or even get past the jungle primary) ever again. Check, check, check, check. Yep, full speed forward and steady as she goes.
And based on my personal experience today and what passes for the news of the day, we have entered the after-time where we no longer worry about getting things back to normal. There is no normal anymore. We just roll with the punches and when we can’t keep our heads above water, we take a deep breath and hope to fight our way back to the surface before our lungs explode. All in all, it’s pretty great.
Okay, end of acerbic rant.
Actually, the day ended pretty well. I had a very nice dinner, watched a fun old movie (American Graffiti) and even sold a few books on Amazon (two paperbacks and a Kindle Unlimited). But it is undeniable that we have passed into a new era where normalcy is no longer a universal concept in our society. Strangeness is the new normal. And we must accept that, to those around us, we are the abnormal ones.
And that’s okay. In fact, I now embrace my status as an outsider with a definite stigma attached. It’s a badge of honor and a qualification for a secret society that lurks in the dark corners of the daylight world made up of vapid adherents of the “normal” world of the stupid and the weak. We can embrace and support the sensible and logical pursuits and actions that have always been there. There is so much reality that can’t be avoided by the stupid that just using common sense will guide us to how we should navigate around the catastrophic errors of our age. A good example has been the green energy revolution. Those who have gone along with the band wagon are now saddled with electric cars they can’t afford to charge and heat pumps that cost too much to heat their homes. By just doing the math you could have seen that coming. And that is the template. Look carefully at the propaganda and avoid the worst of the pitfalls. And most importantly stay away from the cities where we’re told that crime is at an all time low (despite the daily body count in the news).
Okay, have a good day.
10JUN2026 – Quote of the Day
Despair itself if it goes on long enough, can become a kind of sanctuary in which one settles down and feels at ease.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
09JUN2026 – Quote of the Day
Silence is the sovereign contempt.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
10JUN2026 – Photo of the Day
09JUN2026 – Photo of the Day
Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 09JUN2026 – Tregonsee’s Three Pronouncements About Stuff
Long ago my wife and daughters found my pronouncements amusing. I codified them in a set of rules (which became referred to as the Rules of Acquisition after the Ferengi rules in ST: Deep Space 9). I have three related to fiction and opinions
16. Opinions are like certain bodily orifices. Critically important but not something decent people expose in public.
17. In fiction (Written, Visual, or Interactive) I desire a story and escape. If I want morals I’ll hear a sermon, if I want to work at something I’ll go to work and get paid for it.
18. This is not to say a writer or other content producer may NOT provide meaning or morals. Just don’t shove it in my face unceasingly (Remember that orifice in rule 16? You wouldn’t shove that in my face either).
And yes Clarke and Asimov are far more of the “Idea” arm of SciFi. Asimov often has to work to make his male characters two dimensional. His female characters rarely rose to that and are almost literally paper cutouts. Clarke uses some stereotypes in his early short stories, but almost all his stories even the Big ones like 2001 , Childhood’s End and Rendevous with Rama depend far more on story (and the first two are reusing parts of several short stories pasted together) than on character. I think it is why Asimov and Clarke excel in the shorter forms (up to about Novella) but struggle more ion the longer forms. This may also stem from the fact that from mid ’40s to mid 60’s the primary form (and most financially viable form) of Scifi was the magizines either as short stories or serialized for longer pieces. These forms make character development harder I would think.
photog’s Second Law of Science Fiction
Yesterday I formulated my first law of science fiction:
Well, that was so much fun I thought I’d try for another one:
photog’s Second Law of Science Fiction – Thou shalt not bore the poor reader to death.
And really this should be the first law because it really is essential. Honestly, if the reader is interested, he will probably forgive anything else; excessive use of time travel, repetitive battle scenes, gratuitous sex and violence, even scurrilous attacks on political enemies. As long as the story keeps the reader’s interest, it’s a success.
Now this is an iron law for any kind of fiction. But because different genres have different readers it behooves the author to pay attention to what his particular genre considers interesting. So, if you write romantasy you must make sure you include plenty of female protagonists being ravaged by minotaurs or some other equally absurd mythical beast.
But if you write science fiction and especially if you write hard science fiction you have to make sure you can pass the science literacy test when it comes to the gadgets and phenomena that you hang your tale on. So, that’s step one.
Step two is to make the characters and the plot interesting. And this is where some of the best hard sf writers are found lacking. For myself, personally, Arthur C Clarke seemed to have a hard time writing characters that were actual people. Most of the time there just didn’t seem to be a recognizable human being on the page. And I’m not saying he was a bad writer. He wasn’t. He was quite skilled. It just seemed that he didn’t care about the human aspect in the story. Now compare this to Isaac Asimov. When I recently (four or five years ago) reread the Foundation books I thought the plot was at times marginal. But even the less developed characters seemed to have recognizable voices and personalities. Asimov managed to make the characters seem somewhat alive. And live humans are interesting to live humans. And since the people buying books are (for the most part) live humans it becomes critically important to write characters that appeal to the book buying public.
And that is why even the most technically savvy sf author must (in my opinion) learn how to simulate human characters. And that is okay. Because we don’t expect Tolstoy. You can make the characters resemble almost any humans you’ve ever met. In fact, it’s better if you mix it up and include a bunch of different types. This will help to avoid the serious problem of all your characters sounding and thinking exactly like you. And believe me, that is a big problem.
So, I guess the second law means that a good science fiction writer must also be a good writer in general if he doesn’t want to fail miserably.
Is Astrophage Science Fiction?
Last week I reviewed “Project Hail Mary” and I approved of it as high quality science fiction. But am I being consistent? Should I be calling it fantasy? In other words, can a story based on a completely impossible premise be considered science anything? So, let’s talk about this.
Andy Weir used a microorganism of extraterrestrial origin as the basis for his story. This lifeform which he called astrophage had a complement of remarkable properties that made it both the source of an existential threat to human existence on Earth and the key to human interstellar travel. Astrophage can convert light into mass and it can also convert mass into light. This is “explained” by claiming that it can harness the energy produced when neutrinos and their anti-matter opposites (which apparently are also just neutrinos) annihilate each other forming light. So somehow, the living cell can store neutrinos and then harvest them to produced light that can be used as a motive force to propel the astrophage at velocities approaching light speed.
Okay, this is gibberish. None of those things can be done in a particle accelerator, never mind inside the protoplasm of a cell. So, all of this is no different than E. E. Doc Smith pointing to his “inertialess” drive that allows the Galactic Patrol and their Boskonian enemies to hurtle through interstellar space at many time the speed of light. It’s just hand-waving to allow the action in the story to occur in a time period that allows for a fun story.
Now, granted, Weir at least restricts his velocities to the limit that General Relativity permits. And he allows time dilation and other relativistic effects to govern the fate of his astronauts. But having his starship reach 0.92 c is based on an energy production method that is completely inexplicable by any physics or biology that we can point to.
So, why isn’t that fantasy?
I think I’m going to invent a rule of science fiction.
photog’s First Law of Science Fiction – Thou shalt not change more than one basic law of physics when making a good story.
So, if Andy Weir wants astrophage to have a biological basis for matter/antimatter conversion then everything else about his story has to be “legit.” So, he can use astrophage as his workaround for amazing energy density for things like interstellar flight but everything else still requires the laws of physics, chemistry and biology to work the way they do in the real world. Now some folks might begrudge him xenonite because somehow, he turned a noble gas into unobtanium but there’s enough wiggle room in chemistry so that depending on what else besides xenon is in xenonite we could imagine all the properties of this make-believe material without calling down the lightning of the gods of the periodic table.
So, I think that’s fair. If you only make up one crazy make-believe MacGuffin to allow for the action in your story then I won’t cry foul and demote the story to the depths of the fantasy dungeon. I mean, who could ask for more than that.
08JUN2026 – Photo of the Day
