Computer spreadsheet and computer programming skills are a plus, spreadsheets in particular will make your life much easier. Receive notification by email when a new comment is added. Which brings me to Jerry Pournelle’s “Those Pesky Belters and Their Torchships“3, the lone non-fiction entry in this essay. He is surprisingly flammable.
It’s not that the series has not been a success. Something I was reminded of while watching the third, most famous movie version of The Maltese Falcon: the works to remake in one’s own image aren’t the classics but the almost-classics, the works whose central conceit was much better than the final product. Even better is the fact that even a bad remake would still almost certainly be superior to the original. The 5th century was in general a dismal time to be a great empire in the Old World—if it wasn’t waves of Central Asian barbarians threatening invasion, it was climate-changing volcanoes and/or plague. Which brings me to Jerry Pournelle’s “Those Pesky Belters and Their Torchships“ 3, the lone non-fiction entry in this essay. It is assumed that the reader has enough knowledge to know the difference between a star and a planet, high school mathematics, and enough skill to use a pocket calculator.
This is why in his Codominium empire books, ships and cities have defensive energy fields which are also used in the ships’ drives. To withdraw your consent, see Your Choices. Due to a lack of military power and representation, Belters are constantly oppressed by the planets. nextbigfuture.com. I will use as my example Kelley Armstrong’s Otherworld series, specifically the lyncanthropic Smurfette Elena Michaels books. The technical term is Hard Science Fiction. I suspect this is because the bar tends to be higher for women authors.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). For dramatic effect I made the exhaust a blaze of blue. Click on the link and I'll explain in detail.
(Sorry fans of The Expanse.) Now, my inclusion of this may surprise some of you. If you are lucky, you are either too young or too not-Canadian to have been exposed to my next candidate, the venerable television show The Starlost. How does one go about defining the performance of these atomic-powered cruisers? Where are the analogs to China and Persia, to the Gupta Empire, to Kadamba and Axum? Fred Pohl and Jack Williamson’s The Starchild Trilogy is one of the series that made me think of the idea in the first place. Having created this delightful backdrop, the pair then told perfectly conventional tales about heavy-handed dictatorships with ambitions of total rule and mad scientists bent on creating stars in their hidden laboratories1.
Those are words we typically reserve for rules controversies, scoring gaffes, or worse yet, etiquette infractions. If anyone wants an essay on “books I wish someone would use as a springboard for executions that are actually good,” just ask.
Some day I’d love to read about werewolves whose behavior is based on that of actual wolves. Thank you for keeping the discussion, and our community, civil and respectful. After all, the original trilogy won a Hugo for Best All-Time Series in 1966 and Foundation’s Edge won a Best Novel Hugo in 1983. It also allows for gas-giant moon systems to form polities. The image was created by the author, using the astonishingly powerful open-source program Blender 3D. Though horribly simplistic, they are far better than just making up your figures. This 1974 piece poked a bit of fun at authors like Larry Niven, whose gravity-well-shy Belters zoomed around on overpowered rockets apparently unaware that saving 11 km/s getting off planets is a hollow savings if you routinely expend thousands of km/s travelling from one orbit to another. Schwab Vampire Story, Something in the Water, Something in the Air: Kaaron Warren’s “The Diesel Pool”, Never Say You Can’t Survive: Find Your Voice and Make It LOUD. Poul Anderson’s The Makeshift Rocket may have had its roots in Anderson’s desire to sell something to John W. Campbell (who was all too fond of stories featuring handwavium-based reactionless space drives).
Alas, updates to this website are very sporadic and far in between. Pournelle points out the plot-rich potential of settings with more modest propulsion, which still allows for an asteroid belt with many polities rather than one. This website is dedicated to Robert A. Heinlein and Sir Arthur C. Clarke.And for planting the seed, Jerry Pournelle and his "A Step Farther Out: Those Pesky Belters and Their Torchships". BTW, one of his essays “Those Pesky Belters and Their Torchships” points out there’s very little reason to have a civilization in the asteroid belt. Someone did write the werewolf books for which I was yearning: Carrie Vaughn. The Makeshift Rocket cover art by Ed Valigursky (Ace Books, 1962), 3: Writers looking for an ambitious expansion of Pournelle’s essay might want to look at Winchell D. Chung Jr.’s exemplary, Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), © 2020 Macmillan | All stories, art, and posts are the copyright of their respective authors, Almost-Classics: SF Concepts and Settings That Deserve Better Execution, In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, “I am done being reflexively supportive” —.
Both presented their brash, unadulterated opinions on whether Hatton’s wardrobe decision was, in fact, good in the hood. While this site originally focused on rocketry equations, as you can see it has grown to encompass other topics of interest to science fiction authors and game designers. Sometimes it turns out the series one wants to read has already been written.
I've got about a five year backlog of data that is yet to be incorporated. What a setting! Long before people could look up information online, he would search out information which provided the hard facts and statistics which would allow him to do the quantitative analysis that would refute the very common doomsday assertions that were being pushed in the 60s and 70s. There is also a poster of the Atomic Rocket Cruiser Polaris. That may seem an excessively audacious proposal but to quote my review of The Makeshift Rocket, “it failed by a lot less than you would expect from ‘rag-tag rebels attempt to heist an entire god-damned country.’”. 2: The Fenian Raids were a 19th century attempt by Irish nationalists to steal Canada so they could then blackmail Britain into granting Irish independence. Both sides made salient points, both made good jokes, both made bad jokes. This document gives some hints and equations that will allow back-of-the-envelope calculations on such matters. The program should have been entertaining. Based on a premise by Harlan Ellison, The Starlost was set on a generation ship whose inhabitants had forgotten they were on a ship and who certainly didn’t know it was headed for a star. Those are words we typically reserve for rules controversies, scoring gaffes, or worse yet, etiquette infractions. The nomograms can be downloaded from those pages, or printed versions can be purchased from 3: Writers looking for an ambitious expansion of Pournelle’s essay might want to look at Winchell D. Chung Jr.’s exemplary Atomic Rockets. It’s not as if a galaxy more closely modeled on the real-life 5th century CE world would have derailed Asimov’s decline and recovery plot. I mention it here because I object to how little influence that essay has had over the following decades. Not to mention official Atomic Rockets coffee mugs and blank journals. Those born in the outer belts, not only have never seen the horizon but have lived their entire lives in a low gravity environment.
This weekend, Tyrrell Hatton won a golf tournament and started a war. All comments must meet the community standards outlined in Tor.com's Moderation Policy or be subject to moderation. I’m glad I still have a paperback copy of Pournelle’s A Step Further Out which is a collection of his science fact articles. If the Galactic Empire had been more faithfully modeled on historical Rome, then it would have been one of several major powers.
It’s full of wonderfully zany ideas, from an entire ecosystem fuelled by living fusion reactors out in deepest space to living stars willing to share their mentality with billions of people. Announcing the Winners of the the Inaugural Ignyte Awards!
Her Kitty Norville series features a woman protagonist whose values are firmly modern, Abusive behavior on the part of her local pack turns out to be not an essential element of lycanthropy, but a reflection of the fact that her local pack is primarily composed of bullies and jerks. The background image of Earth is courtesy of NASA. Unsurprisingly for a veteran writer whose career began in the jazz age, Williamson’s fiction was firmly rooted in the pulp era. Rome had company in its decline; the Gupta Empire and Persia were sorely pressed by invaders, while the Liu Song Dynasty replaced the Eastern Jin dynasty. Belter is a term used to refer to persons born in the Asteroid Belt or the Moons of the outer planets. For just a few dollars a month you can help break the log jam and allow me to get this website polished and tuned. The delta v requirements regardless of the efficiency of your rockets means it’s easier to have a base of operations at Earth rather than in the belt itself. The author crafted the mesh using blueprints of the Polaris from the Spaceship Handbook. There is a larger version of the image here. In response to the cuts and changes to his original concept and story, Ellison had his name removed from the credits and is listed under the pseudonym “Cordwainer Bird.” There’s nothing wrong with the basic premise, though, as a multitude of novels from Orphans of the Sky to Captive Universe prove.
They work and mine in horrible conditions to bring goods to Earth and Mars. The engine and the torchship pages explain how easily do some of the calculations using Nomograms. Whovian, Sherlockian, and just a geek in general.
The actual stories themselves, as it turns out. You must be a registered user to subscribe to threads. This site was mainly intended for science fiction authors who wanted
Consequently, they don’t tend to produce lazy works flawed in the specific ways needed to trigger my “write something like this but good” reflex. Patreon is sort of like a cross between Kickstarter and medieval artist's patrons. In a pejorative meaning, they are also called Skinnies, because of their altered physiology due to growing up and living in a low gravity environment. There are almost a million asteroids more than a kilometre in diameter in the asteroid belt (twenty five million if all you want is a Little Prince-sized estate). This week's featured addition is BDM EXPLORATION CARRIER, This week's featured addition is METASTABLE SUPER-EXPLOSIVES, This week's featured addition is ASAPH-1 MISSION TO PHOBOS, Cody Thompson - Designer of Anu's Command, Atomic Rockets coffee mugs and blank journals. But are such rockets possible? What it was, in actuality, was the sort of poorly written, ineptly produced, badly acted sci-fi hackwork that really highlights the potential benefits of macular degeneration.
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