Fantasist's Scroll

Today is Frank Herbert’s Birthday.

Of course, we haven’t had him with us since 1986, the year I graduated from high-school, but his work lives on. Mr. Herbert is primarily known for his seminal work, Dune, and the Dune books that followed. Though, interestingly enough, he never intended to write sequels.
Often refered to as the science-fiction Lord of the Rings, Dune and the books that followed detail an amazingly rich science-ficiton culture. The novels are some of the first to have detailed political and sociological sub-plots, not to mention ecological sub-plots! The way Mr. Herbert used religion in his work is quite interesting as well. In a genre that often avoids discussing religion, he explored the topic in detail and with a depth that was personally inspiring.

There hasn’t been anyone else quite like Frank Herbert and I am in awe of the ways in which he influenced the genre, which is why I celebrate this every year.

Again.
Yep, someone’s on the three-dimensional television kick again. According to this article on News.com, Japanese researchers are predicting fully interactive television by 2020. By that they mean a remote experience that the home user can see in three dimensions, hear, touch and smell. Yes, smell. Though, frankly, why anyone would want to smell something like a football stadium is beyond me. That’s 3/4 the reason to stay home! Well, that and the always superior view on TV.
I’m sure that it won’t take long for some enterprising young lad to pervert this medium, too. I’ll let you fill in the blanks there, but, well, you get the idea.

According to Writer’s Almanac we have three birthdays to celebrate today.

First, there’s novelist Herbert George (H.G.) Wells, who was born in Bromley, England in1866. According to the note I got from Writer’s Almanac, Wells had a job writing biology textbooks until he developed a respiratory illness in his late 20s. Since he thought he didn’t have long to live, he left his wife and ran away with another woman, after which he began writing furiously. In roughly three years, he published all the novels for which we know him: The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds.

It’s also the birthday of the novelist Stephen King, born in Portland, Maine in 1947. His father was a merchant seaman who left the family when Stephen was just two. He has no memories of his father, but one day he found a whole box full of his father’s science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, and that box of his father’s books inspired him to start writing horror stories.
He was working as a teacher when he wrote his first novel about a weird high school girl with psychic powers named Carrie White. He gave up on the book at one point and threw it in the trash. His wife rescued it. Carrie was published in 1973. The hard cover didn’t sell well, but then his agent called to say that the paperback rights had sold for $400,000.

Lastly, but, perhaps, most importantly, today is the birthday of the man who first put high quality literature into paperbacks, Sir Allen Lane, born in Bristol, England in 1902. He was the founder of Penguin Books.

Finally, a personal note. I am not evacuating during Hurricane Rita. I have nowhere to go, really, so I’ll stay and brave it. I’ll blog, as long as I have power and an Internet connection, at Diary of a Network Geek, my other blog. Take care!

Brought to you via LangMaker.com
I love LangMaker, both the program and the site. One of the reasons I dig the site is for all the great links it brings me. For instance, one of my freakish obsessions, er, “passions”, is linguistics in fantasy and science-fiction. So, of course, when I saw that the fine folks at LangMaker.com had posted a link to Tenser, said the Tenso: Linguistics in SF, I got all excited. And, I was not dissapointed. The topics are varied, but always interesting and, of course, about language, linguistics and science-fiction.
Very cool.

Today is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ birthday!
ERB, as he is often known by fans, was born in Chicago in 1875. He is probably most famous as the creator of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, which is a series of stories about an English nobleman who was abandoned in the African jungle during infancy and brought up by apes. His first Tarzan story appeared in 1912, and Burroughs followed it with the novel Tarzan of the Apes in1914. He is also the author of A Princess of Mars, which is the first book in a series about a US Cavalry officer transported “mystically” to Mars, as well as, Pellucidar, about a savage world hidden beneath our own, The Pirates of Venus, about space pirates on Venus. Not to mention his lesser known works, including The Mad King and many others.
For many of us, ERB was our first introduction to science-fiction and fantasy. He was a real writer, by which I mean he churned out novels and stories at a furious rate for one reason onlyL to support his family. He is, in many ways, one of my heroes.
So, Happy Birthday, Mr. Burroughs, wherever you are.

Or, a reactor in every pot.
Well, maybe not quite, but at least they’re getting closer, according to this article at Purdue University News on-line. Researchers at Purdue University have recently established supporting evidence that earlier findings by other scientists, who designed an inexpensive “tabletop” device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions, are, in fact valid. They’ve been working on this for over two years and have finally reproduced good results with their small, deuterium-powered reactor.
According to the article, “development of a low-cost thermonuclear fusion generator would offer the potential for a new, relatively safe and low-polluting energy source. … A cubic kilometer of seawater would contain enough heavy hydrogen to provide a thousand years’ worth of power for the United States. Such a technology also could result in a new class of low-cost, compact detectors for security applications that use neutrons to probe the contents of suitcases; devices for research that use neutrons to analyze the molecular structures of materials; machines that cheaply manufacture new synthetic materials and efficiently produce tritium, which is used for numerous applications ranging from medical imaging to watch dials; and a new technique to study various phenomena in cosmology, including the workings of neutron stars and black holes.”

Wow. I guess all those science-fiction writers were closer to reality than we ever thought, eh? I wonder how long it will be before we have transporters or “stepping disks” ala Larry Niven?

Now this is really cool!
Once again, science-fiction becomes reality with a GPS-enabled, real “Hitchhiker’s Guide”. A prototype traveler’s guide that is more than just GPS-synced maps, this little baby gives you historical information and other tidbits that might interest a tourist based on where it reads you via participating networks. The author tested this on the 850-acre parkland surrounding Ashton Court, which is somewhere in the UK, from what I gather. I’m not familiar with it myself, but it must be a popular tourist destination. In any case, this little bad boy, called an “Explorer”, sees where you are on the GPS grid and serves you multimedia content based on that location. As well as showing you those cool maps that we’ve all come to depend on so much. (You know, I think Gibson wrote about something like this, but more personable, in some of his work, too.)

Anyway, the future is now. At least in prototype-land. Hey, it’s the best I can do for a Friday Fun Link on the same day I’m getting divorced. Get over it!

Well, not quite yet.
But, according to this article on YahooNews, they are sequencing the Neanderthal genome. At least, they’re starting to try and do it. No one, including the scientists involved are sure that they’ll be 100% successful, but, sometimes, it’s the attempt that counts. And, there will be volumes of useful information that will be a by-product of this effort, not the least of which will be a greater understanding of the human genome.
Hmm, Plieocene Park? Well, maybe we’re a ways off from that, but it’s still pretty cool.