Category: Science Fiction

The Sentinals

Silent they stood, surveying the quiet countryside. It was a matter of time before they would be discovered, yet it mattered not to them; the world would have changed so drastically by that point that none of the sentients would have been much interested.

An Eight-Legged Aslan?

No… it’s just a whimsical illustration for a French edition of Thuvia, Maid of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, depicting a Martian banth (apex carnivore resembling a multilegged lion. )

The Product
[Reading Challenge 2024]

The Product by Marina Fontaine Conservatarian Press, 2022 [ #23  After the fall: A post-apocalyptic or dystopic book. ] This book kept popping up in my Kindle feed, so I chose it for the “Dystopia” category of this year’s challenge. It occurred to me when writing this review that “Russian Dystopia” is perhaps a subset, …

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An ASFR Tidbit

I haven’t been posting much ASFR content on here lately, but I’m pretty pleased by this happy accident of a Midjourney prompt, which was for a futuristic London subway, but came out… skewed sideways as often happens. Female wrongdoers were placed into transportation sarcophagi for their journey to the processing facilities. Such displays acted as …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/15/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 4)

There are interpretations of the Milky Way other than the arms of a distant galaxy. The Milky Way candy bar, invented in 1923 in Minneapolis, is still going strong domestically and globally. Its inventor was one Frank Mars, who gave his name to — you guessed it — the Mars Bar. You’d think he chose …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/8/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 3)

The Greeks weren’t the only ones to create origin stories for the Milky Way. Centuries before them, the Babylonians had their own version: it was the tail of Tiamat, the dragon/serpent goddess of primordial chaos, placed there after her defeat by the god Marduk. Likely the first version of the chaos vs. order megamyth, not …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/1/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 2)

The painting above, by Peter Paul Rubens, offers a different take on the Milky Way’s origins. I like it a lot better than Tintoretto’s which appeared last week. For one thing, it feels more real. There’s a story being told as your eye travels from element to element in the painting. But it’s not the …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/20/24: SFF Theme Burgers (ChatGPT)

Because ChatGPT did such a good job of generating Hawaii-themed cocktails (granted, edited by me to make them more unique and coherent) I decided to see what it could do with hamburgers. Gourmet burgers in fact, themed after science fiction and fantasy books. In this I was inspired by a Seattle coffeeshop where I and …

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