What are you reading?

I have just started listening to Born with Teeth:A Memoir by Kate Mulgrew, narrated by Kate Mulgrew.

Believe it or not, this is the first biography/autobiography Of a Star Trek actor that I have ever 'read' though I do plan to get around to George Takei's one day.

 

I've never read any Trek alumni's biography/autobiography. Really should do, I'd likely start with Shatner or Nimoy I suspect. I'd like to read Koenig's as well

 

Asimov's Pebble In The Sky

 

The article (Janurary 2015) in Scientific American discussed super earths, suggesting that they may be "archipeligo worlds" with shalow seas dotted with islands.

Theory regarding super earths is discussed in a book, The Life of Super-Earths by Dimitar Sasselov, copyright 2012.

One alternative to shallow seas is very deep oceans-so deep that enormous pressure crushes the lower depths into a solid, a "warm ice" denser than liquid water.

There are further variations on the oceanic super earth, If the planet is far enough from its sun, the surface will freeze into the ice we are familiar with (similar to Europa). If too close to its sun, its liquid ocean will transition into a hot steam atmosphere.

Other concepts:

The pulsar planets being mostly iron cores.

Planets who's make it is disproportionately carbon. The mantle will be silicon carbide and graphite. Volcanism, tectonics, and weathering going to be minimal, and such planets are likely to be deficient in water.

Roughly in the same size range as super earths would be mini-Neptunes.

 

BTW, that Scientific American has article regarding Tau Ceti. It seems that the star sports a dust cloud far, far out; a dust cloud that wouldn't exist if the star had gas giants in its outer solar system. Inner, rocky, planets haven't been ruled out.

Imagine our solar system with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune gone. The rocky inner planets might remain, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. But the outer solar system might consist of solely asteroids and comets.

 

That sounds great. I'll see if I can track it down.

 

The Globe and Mail and National Post.

 

Asimov's The Currents Of Space

 

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett.

 

I'm taking a break from Extreme Planets to read Steampunk, an anthology of SF from the late 1800s, written by lesser-known contemporaries of Wells, Verne, Conan Doyle, et al. Quaint!

 

I bet it is. I din't even know that there were people writing SF back then, except for the names you listed and maybe Poe, in a way.

 

Jack London wrote a bit of SciFi... at least I think it was him I'm thinking of.


Just bought Stephen Baxters Proxima... but somehow I don't think I'll get started reading it before sometime next week...

 

Jack London wrote The Scarlet Plague which was a post-apocalyptic story set in 2072.

 

I didn't know that. I'll look it up.

 

I read it many years ago and I don't remember much about except that I thought that the old man in The Scarlet Plague reminded me of the very old Isherwood from later chapters of Earth Abides by George R Stewart.

But thinking about that it is probably the other way round. I think I read London's story before Earth Abides. I have read Earth Abides three times and I listen to the audio versionof it last year. I might get the free Kindle version of The Scarlet Plague and see if I still think there are any similarities between the two characters. The book is only 58 pages long.

 

I don't remember the title, but I really liked his (short)story about the world uniting to rid itself of a certain nation through biological warfare; testtubes with dissease thrown from balloons! - Now that's old-school SciFi.

 

There's a lot of obscure writers from those days, which are now much more easy to access thanks to POD and the Internet. You can find a lot of free stuff for the Nook and the Kindle, and at the Gutenberg Project.

 

Thanks for the tip. I'll look it up.

 

Faith and Treason: the Story of the Gunpowder Plot

 

The second "season" of Space: 1889 & Beyond