10/13/10 Spacetrawler Secrets



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Got a copy of Barry Deutsch’s Hereville in the mail today. Lovely work. I first admired Barry’s comic “Cast of Thousands” which he drew while at UMass (he mentions this on his bio page), which is when I began doing daily comics with my strip Bruno. Congrats, Barry, on getting published by Amulet/Abrams!

I really have to get my act together on setting up a convention schedule for next year (nothing planned so far except for Stumptown). If there is a sci-fi convention in your town which you’d like to see me at, or if you know the organizers and want me as a special guest or panelist etc etc, let me know.

0 Comments

  1. JKCarroll

    Huh. A terrible secret that will lead to the downfall of Galactic Civilization (such as it is) if it is revealed. Or not. Sounds like “The Light on the Sound” by Somtow Sucharitkul (or whatever he’s calling himself these days); or even “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, who lived in the Pacific Northwest too, if I recall correctly.

  2. Kenshi Morugu

    Hey, what about Frank Herbert’s “Whipping Star”? That had a pretty terrible secret that will lead to the downfall of galactic civilisation, as these things go.
    Space has a terrible power.
    Pushing will protect you.
    Pushing will protect you.
    Pushing will protect you from the terrible secret of space.

  3. “Are you familiar with quantum particle entanglement?”

    Oh, funny. When I was on barracks duty in D.C., we got new hand-held radios, with the latest in encryption, all kind of gee-whiz stuff. The Air Force, who ran the coms, insisted on giving us grunts a brief on how to work the radios.

    Instant snooze-fest as the Eeb, I mean Sergeant, went over encryption theory, frequency hopping and . . I don’t know what all: I fell into a polite, eyes-open, doze.

    A few hours later the senior sergeant interrupted: ‘Hey, I’m just a dumb grunt but … push to talk, release to listen, right? Right. Class dismissed.’

  4. Zachariasmith

    Awesome, I actually understood the stuff about splitting particles and how their rotations are the opposite of each other regardless of distance. I’m really liking the groove the day to day feel this comic is getting. (Day to day feel in a comfortable way not a boring way!)

  5. Christopher

    @Jim, nope, no connection to “Whipping Star.” I’m afraid I haven’t read it, NOR “The Light on the Sound” nor “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Sadly none are on audiobook at the library except “whipping star” which only runs on PC. I keep thinking I should buy one simply for all the audiobook downloads I could then do. 🙁

    @Frank, she did not say, but you’ll find out soon enough. >:-)

  6. Yuri, who got over torture and dismemberment pretty quickly, is now calling something “nightmarishly horrible.” I don’t think I want to know the secret of space trawlers (but I can’t look away).

  7. Christopher

    @Frank, I must admit, I can put up with some of the most boring humans reading audiobooks, but I haven’t been able to tolerate any text-to-speech readers, and I’ve tried several. :-/

  8. JKCarroll

    @Christopher, re: the “text-to-speech readers”: I’ll bet you’ve never tried having one of them read a porn novel, have you? >:->

    Ahem.

    And “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is a short story, the kind they make you read in high school lit class. It won the Hugo in 1974. You can read a description of the plot in the wikipedia entry.

  9. Christopher

    @SeanK, I’ve only seen one or two episodes. What in it were you thinking if was a ref to, I’m curious?

    For the Eebs, basically, I liked the idea of a color and then a number being their naming convention. Cardinal57, Cerise22, Gay17, etc.

  10. Bobulus

    On Babylon 5, the different sectors were colors, with the floors being numbers. One episode, ‘Gray 17 is Missing’, was, about just that: how an entire floor on a space station went missing. (It was a pretty subpar episode, but that’s a tangent)

  11. Christopher

    Wow, that is…. plainly amazing. What a funny coincidence. 🙂

    In Spacetrawler, Gray17 is present, accounted for, and generally useless (although the Eebs seem undeveloped now, they WILL be more in the forefront in book #2).

  12. JKCarroll

    But, if their naming convention is “color#”, what happens when you get two colors that simply clash, like “puce13” and “mauve42”? Does that mean we’re going to meet up with an evil Eeb “Black666”?

    And when can we expect to see Eeb T-shirts, as in “FREE EEBS… with every purchase of 12 or more.”

  13. Christopher

    @Adama, I’m not sure. Bob Goff designed that inverse ladder, as well as the ring-deck and the basic bridge structure and parts (Bob is awesome!)

    But I’m always curious. I looked online for “Jupiter 2 lift” and wasn’t sure what you were referring to. Can you post a link?

  14. Don Ahe

    Maybe this has been mentioned before, ..I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Eebs is Bees backwards and that they are drones building the technology honey for the universe. clever Mr.Baldwin quite clever

  15. Christopher

    Funny that I’ve read stories using ansibles, but did not realize that it used quantum entanglement, and actually thought it might be a new idea of mine. Sigh. I did, however, assume it was unlikely to be possible, and learning about decoherence is no surprise.

    And I ADORE Alastair Reynolds’ work. 🙂

  16. Huh. Looks like my comment got lost in the mail. Too many links, I guess. Oh well, here it is again, in case JKcaroll ever reads these old comments:

    @JKCaroll: Good work spotting the pattern. Up to now I thought Gray17 was a reference to “the Greys”, Cerise22 was a reference to the Marvel Comics character, Mauve12 was named after the flower and Cardinal62’s name meant he (she? it?) was the 62nd bishop for the uneyetarians.

  17. Night-Gaunt

    If you look at human slavery they even came up with a pseudo science reason for why slaves ran away. So it is just a mass means of self hypnosis because it allows them psychologically to use the Eebs to their destruction. To depend on them in fact.

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