George’s Comments (group member since Apr 15, 2014)

George’s comments from the Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy group.

The Kindle edition of the latest Library Saga novel, "The Ambassador: The Lost Colony," is now available on Amazon. The paperback edition is also available. For local readers, I will have paperback copies available at a substantial discount (and you can get them autographed!). For links to Library Saga books on Amazon, check out my web site at www.tauceti2.com.

For the next five days, the Kindle Edition of "The Methuselah Conspirators" is available for free on Amazon. Called the best of the Library Ship Saga, you can find it here

The new novel in the library ship saga, "The Methuselah Conspiracy," is now available on Amazon. TMC takes place at the same time as the Tau Ceti trilogy, telling the story of the people behind the Pitcairner's struggle against the Methuselah Project related in the Trilogy. The Kindle edition is available now for $2.99, and a paperback edition will be released in the next week or two. The paperback edition will include the novella "The Voyage of the Capek," previously available only as a Kindle book for $.99.

Left Hand of Darkness

It's unlikely that the Sirius system has planets, but in my novella Voyage of the Capek, an automated exploration starship did stop there as a prelude to human visits.

That actor, Jonathan Harris, played a good guy as Harry Limes', played by Michael Rennie of "The Day the Earth Stood Still", assistant on the TV series "The Third Man."

Well, you're probably not going to be able to get into Sir Walter Scott's classics such as Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, etc. which also have a lot of descriptive text.

I think there were "Revenge of the Jedi" posters printed before the name change and that they became valuable because of their rarity and unusual circumstances.

There were really two Heinleins: the Heinlein who wrote books that could be considered juveniles like Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Podkayne of Mars, and so on; and the Heinlein that wrote heavily sexual books like Farnham's Freehold, Glory Road, and others. Starship Troopers stands in the middle, heavy on violence and low on sex (although the movie used both).

For the next 5 days, the first volume of the Tau Ceti trilogy, "Tau Ceti: A Ship from Earth" available free in Kindle format from Amazon.
For more information, see the reviews on Amazon or the web site, https://tauceti2.com

It seems to have become common in the modern (not the original three) networks. Game of Thrones seasons are only ten seasons long, too. I'm not sure how many episodes are in a "Suits" season, but it's not the 21 common in the original networks. There are other examples, too.

I'm putting final touches on my novella, "Voyage of the Capek" which ties up a major loose end of my Tau Ceti trilogy. Also, I'm working on the first draft of "The Methuselah Conspirators", a novel that runs parallel to the trilogy, but from the point of view of Earth, where the main characters are the scientists working on the Methuselah Project.

Well, fairly hard for TV, soft for books.

No. The balloon is a 2-D surface simplifying the idea of a 3-D surface. You're thinking of the balloon as a 3-D object, but I'm only speaking of a spherical 2-D surface; there is no inside in this model. In fact, from Earth's point of view, all the galaxies (except for a few local galaxies that are gravitationally bound into the local cluster) are moving away from us. The same would be seen from any other point in space.

There is no center of the balloon. The universe is represented in 2-D by the surface of the balloon. Good luck with your story, though. Don't mind me; I like to keep my own writing very "hard" science fiction and do a lot of research into the sciences to support that. If everyone wrote like me, we wouldn't have Star Wars.

The big bang was not an explosion in the usual sense of the word but an expansion of space itself. Physicists have compared it to the surface of a balloon with dots on its surface representing the galaxies. If you blow up the balloon, all the "galaxies" move apart from each other, but there is no one point from which they are all radiating.

There is no "place" where the big bang occurred. The universe began as a microscopic speck that expanded into the entire universe. The last vestige of the big bank is the microwave background radiation that pervades the entire universe. We are, in essence, living in what's left of the big bang.

Capaldi played Cardinal Richelieu on a series adaption of The Three Musketeers just before becoming the Doctor.

In general, earlier Heinlein was better than later books.

I remember that speech, except my reply was Tom Clancy. No doubt there are others.