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On Going Home, #1
Installments from Knowing Mars’ Chapter 5 continue this week, which brings us to the half way point of this project. This chapter has a lot of short bits. Today we begin a short three part series from Kyp Ebner that follows this segment from our usual narrator, Matthew Connor. Enjoy!
Earth? Who could have seen that one coming. Though it makes perfect sense, it is perhaps the one place in the Solar System that I never quite expected to be headed to. And yet, here I am.
When I was a kid and they were just starting the Mars Colony I remember wondering why they kept ignoring the topic of Earth-Mars transit. When you you asked teachers in school they’d say something about how round-trip travel was generally unfeasible, but that the data uplink relays were really impressively fast. But we all knew that the data transit was really slow beyond all reason, particularly with the data that we all cared about; and we really didn’t have a clue why why transit was so “unfeasible.”
While we’re better at speeding data transit time, it’s still frustrating even in in the 40s! I have to imagine that the transit technology has changed a bit in the intervening few years, though I tend to glaze over when people talk about interplanetary engines. Having said that, the picture of the ship on the wall in my cabin–that description of this room is perhaps the best example of magical thinking that I’ve ever witnessed–looks quite futuristic, but I suspect that in a few years, it will look as out of date and old as the boxy brick like Mars Colony looks today.
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About
Critical Futures is a review of fun and thoughtful (with luck) science fiction stories; often serialized, but there will be new content every day. Science fiction, for our purposes is a literature of possibility, of adventure, and conjecture: although we endeavor to interpret these descriptors as liberally as possible. Critical Futures, attempts to present the kinds of fictional stories that we know and love, in a form—resembling the blog—that may be a little different than what we are accustomed. I doubt that this is truly “new,” but it seems fitting to call this an experiment in “new media.” Enjoy.Search
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[...] this segment from our usual narrator, Matthew Connor. If you want to catch up you can visit: part one. [...]
Pingback by Critical Futures: a next wave science fiction review — 21 November 2008 @ 12:33 pm
[...] this segment from our usual narrator, Matthew Connor. If you want to catch up you can visit: part one, part two, and part three. [...]
Pingback by Critical Futures: a next wave science fiction review — 21 November 2008 @ 7:23 pm
[...] return this week with another scene from Knowing Mars. This follows Kyp Ebner’s trip back to Earth to resolve a situation on Earth. There were a number of scenes in the story that fall between [...]
Pingback by Critical Futures: a next wave science fiction review — 15 December 2008 @ 12:26 pm