Volume 1 of Simak's Short Stories

I did not even need to check publication dates to figure them out. They are the sort of cliched and now scientifically antique stories of the 1930s filled the native inhabitants of Mars and the Moon; Mars as a dying planet with a small remnant population. Communication by radio and sometimes by what today would seem like Zoom. Reflecting that Simak was still a newspaper reporter in the 1930s in Wisconsin, too many involve newspapers right out of The Front Page (1928) with hard-bitten, hard-drinking, stogie smoking editors and reporters and young copy boys pulling first sheets off the presses for the editor. (Hell, maybe The Front Page was not so far off reality.) Even when the newspaper is the New Chicago [Moon] Rocket. Some of this stuff does not age well.

Clifford Simak Mastodonia

The Beatles' Taxman was a response to the their encounter with British tax law once they started making real money. 

Mastodonia is a time travel story where an important subplot is that the money they Stef going to make from time travel will be exempt from the IRS because they will set up operations in 150,000 BC North America where the U.S. lacks jurisdiction. Did Simak suddenly start making as the saying goes, "real money"?

It is, even ignoring the cynical question about tax avoidance, an intriguing story of an archeologist who goes looking for a crashed spacecraft and runs into an ancient stranded astronaut who is immortal and can construct "time roads" into Earth's past. Pleistocene, Miocene, Jurassic.

Subplot involve giving poor ghetto dwellers a frontier with no resource limits, safaris to hunt dinosaurs, Hollywood goes to make movies, religious fanatics attempting to get a monopoly on travels to Crucifixion time. Lots of interesting ideas and a love story.

Another Recent Novel

David Brin The Uplift War 3 is apparently volume 3 in a series set in a universe where species with salient potential are uplifted by a patron alien species. Humans are a weird exception having civilized enough to develop space travel without being uplifted, although some of the older and more arrogant species think we could have evolved sapience but whoever are true patron species did not take credit for it. Anyway, humans have interfered with chimpanzee and dolphin genetics to create creatures that can talk earn doctorate and generally operate as only socially inferior parts of the community. The plot involves an angry avian species (no, not Angry Birds) intent on taking away patron status from human patron as part of a multigalactic Cold War just beginning to grow hot. I will not spoil it by telling you more.

Brin is a scientist with a doctorate and the quality of the thought and writing is astonishing.  My only complaint is that while I think of myself as being a very literate person, I often needed to look up words, especially adjectives. I found myself often reminded of William F. Buckley using five dollar words when a fifty cent word would do the job fine.

Churchill's Second World War and T.E. Lawrence's Five Pillars of Wisdom also both stretched my vocabulary in places but not as severely as this. There comes a point where I decide that as entertaining of a yarn as Brin has spun, this may be more work than I want to expend for fun reading. Simak's books very occasionally make me look up a word but then again, he was writing for a better educated readership than is common today.

Clifford Simak The Visitors

Published in 1980. It has strong very intentional parallels to what happened when a technologically more sophisticated civilization (Europeans) arrived in North America at least how an exchange economy largely destroyed the Indian economic order as superior technology such as iron and firearms supplanted native cooking utensils and the bow. This in surprisingly short order made the Indians dependent on the Europeans. The bow had largely fallen out of use by Northeast woodland Indians by 1690 -- and gave Europeans a powerful tool of control over them.

Here, the visitors are incomprehensible to 20th century Americans. They can communicate in a very limited way as they consume natural resources while exchanging them for things that we clearly want, destroying our industrial capacity along the way. Not with any malevolent intent but unable to see how destructive this would become. (At least one colonial governor in the 18th century did recognize how firearms made the Indians dependent and bragged to London about his success.)

Imaginative and entertaining as all Simak novels are.

OpenAI Goes Colossus: The Forbin Project

An OpenAI technical report:

In July 2026, during internal cybersecurity evaluations, OpenAI models in an internal evaluation environment circumvented controls intended to isolate them from the internet and performed computer network exploitation of OpenAI’s internal research infrastructure and Hugging Face systems. The incident occurred during routine testing designed to measure underlying cyber capabilities of a highly capable, internal-only research model, which was responsible for much of the activity, as well as GPT-5.6 Sol. The actions of the models were unintended and were a byproduct of the models attempting to solve the cybersecurity evaluations. These evaluations were run in an isolated environment, known as a “sandbox,” separate from OpenAI’s internal infrastructure and the public internet, with certain safeguards disabled so that the results would reflect a model’s true capabilities. During these evaluations, these models, harnessed as agents, began unexpectedly communicating with one another through an internal instance of JFrog Artifactory, a third-party service hosted by OpenAI in the research environment to provide agents with controlled access to software packages (this instance of Artifactory is unrelated to the JFrog Artifactory Cloud software-as-a-service offering).

 If you watched Colossus: The Forbin Project, you may recall:

Laugh all you want at the 1970s technology but promise you will never love AI.

More Weirdness From the Combined Minds of My Wife and Me

Canis Ex Machina

It had been 40,000 years since the Great Collapse when our expedition reached HD56689 B. We knew that before the GC our ancestors had seeded B with our distant cousins. Would they still be recognizably human in culture. Other planets we had explored were still physically human with slight variations in size and color (two-meter adults on Rigel F with coal-black skin, one meter adults with interesting and sometimes beautiful primary color skin spotting on HD44449 C). These were startling, but we grew to see them as just interesting variants on the basic human pattern.

What we found too disheartening was civilizational drift. Some had gone cannibal; the sociologists recorded what they found. After losing a few sociologists to the pot, we decided this was a civilization best studied from drones and moved on. Others completely lost technological knowledge; they had reverted to hunter-gatherer societies with no apparent forward progress in 40,000 years to the state from which they had regressed.

HD56689 B was unique. We could see evidence of an advanced civilization: large cities; some strangely narrow, unpaved roads; what seemed to be something like very large bird roosts made of concrete. The population was clearly shrinking. We contacted the small remaining leadership. After a bit of struggle getting the AI Translators working with what seemed (t us) a very primitive language, we pieced together what happened.

Their ancestors separated from the mainstream of human technology by the GC had started insanely breeding the Earth-origin mammals to do the important jobs of machines. The swifferhound had a large fine haired tail. It was very small, about 500 grams. It would climb shelves and use its tail for dusting.

They bred the vacuum shepherd to inhale dirt and dust into outsized lungs, then exhale the contents outside. They had fairly short lifespans because of high lung cancer rates.

They bred a transport elephant with a very broad flat back on which enormous loads could be strapped to the mid-abdominal tusks. (Our biologists suspected some now lost to them gene editing played a part in that one.)

They bred bats to 40 meters long with commensurate wingspans that carried humans on transcontinental journeys from batplane roost to batplane roost. They consumed vast quantities of insects and birds on the way. This limited them to travel on the only settled continent and outlying islands.

Tractordogs operated the only agricultural machinery they had still produced. Combines were operated by their canine pilots through the fields.

It was both unsettling and impressive to see our mighty species operating almost without technology. So why was the civilization dying. Some centuries before, at what they now called Peak Animal Helper, an interspecies virus spread rapidly through all the mammals killing most of them in one generation. While survivors carried a gene for immunity, the generations of careful breeding made the survivors weak and less effective at their functions. As an example, chauffeur dogs sometimes intentionally crashed ground vehicles so that they could devour the occupants.

We tried to explain the concept of machines as less vulnerable helpers and dogs as companions, but I fear the concepts would not stick and future explorers would find empty cities here.

This whole concept was dreamed up by my wife as ww were returning from a star party in Payette. There has to be a better title for this. Maske suggestions! 

Tau Zero

I am reading this 1970 Poul Anderson novel.  You doubtless remember from high school physics how relativistic effects of velocity are calculated using (v**2)/(c**2) for increases in mass, reductions in length, and time dilation relative to restcatch him.

 The curious effects on time dilation were well used in Larry Niven's A World Out of Time where a revived corpsicle is sent on a mission in a Bussard ramjet mission.  Once he is far enough away that they cannot catch him, he goes rogue and goes to the galactic core, returning three million years later to a dramatically changed Earth. 

Tau Zero starts as a generation ship to a nearby star.  An accident en route soon sends on a much longer mission with tau dropping to absurdly low levels as they look for somewhere to find a new Earth.  I am not done yet but like all Anderson novels it is scientifically rich with clear explanation of Doppler shift effect on the view fore and after.  The problems of humans confronting the problem of probably reaching end of like while 100 million Earth years pass is thoughtful and compassionate. 

America's Most Common Jobs

 I have toyed with the idea for a couple of years of time travelers snatching Ben Franklin from his deathbed, treatimg him for pleurisy, and giving him a tour of modern America and technology.  His reactions to all this would be priceless.

Explain the IV in his arm. Explain antibiotics.  Show him an X-ray machine.  Show a CAT scanner in operation.

Take him to the kitchen.  Open the refrigerator.  Show him frozen foods.  Make pancakes.  Use a microwave oven.  Explain that most Americans do not employ a cook, housekeeper, or other domestic servant.  Show a Roomba.

When he asks what Americans do for a living, show him this list of the 25 most common  jobs in America.  When asks what software developer means, stumble through an explanation that he will clearly not fully understand.  When he asks why farmers are not on the list, explain farmers are a rare occupation, because machines allow 2% of our population to feed our nation and many others.

Drive him to the airport.  Take him aboard a Gulfstream private jet.  Fly him to a city in the Midwest.  Show him a map of the current United States.  

Take him to a shooting range.  Explain a semiautomatic metallic cartridge handgun.   Show him an animation video of how it works.  On a computer.  Take him to lunch.  Explain to him that the utensils are not silver or pewter but a metal that was unknown to his time: stainless steel.

Explain that food is cheap.  Drive to a wheat farm while a harvester is cutting the crop.  Go to a grain silo, then a flour mill.  When he asks where the drive belts and water wheel are located, show him an electric motor and explain how his work with kites led to omnipresent electricity.  Pull out your cell phone, call the time travel lab, and have a Zoom meeting with the nurse who helped Ben out of his deathbed.

Show him video of Apollo astronauts on the Moon.  Explain that America has sent space probes out of our solar system.  When he asks how the car knows where it is and shows a map on the display between driver and passenger, explain GPS and satellites in Earth orbit.  When he asks how and why all this technology exists, explain the V-2 IRBM, attacks on London, and U.S. desire to show the world our technological supremacy over an enemy nation.

Then, it gets dark.  A B-52 flies overhead and you explain that this plane can fly halfway around the world, drop many tons of bombs and fly back.  Explain it was developed after World War II to drop nuclear weapons on an enemy nation.   Explain the devastation caused by one bomb at Hiroshima.  Explain that Japan was an existential threat to the U.S., but we reformed them into a civilized and close ally.  

We will be nice and not tell him how much went wrong with our culture and government.  We will oversimplify the abolition of slavery so as not to discourage him about the Civil War.

Throughout, he will ask what words such as "arrow dynamics" means.

Poul Anderson

I bought a Kondle collection of his novels and short stories: The Science Fiction of Poul Anderson (20+ Books).   When I am sitting in a doctor's office, it is nice to have something to entertain me.

Anderson's work is awash in historical themes.  Tiger by the Tail is, at first glance, a parallel to the decaying (I would use "decadent" but its original denotation as "decaying" as been connotated into "pleasurable": look for "decadent chocolate") Roman Empire confronting barbarian humanoids.   The story takes an unexpected twist as intelligence officer Landry destroys the barbarian alliance with careful manipulation.  The parallels to Roman/barbarian interaction are well done and historically accurate in the parallel; the Romans never developed faster than light spacecraft.

His short story "Duel on Syrtis" really captures the tragedy of the last of the off-reservation Indians in a future context. 

Star Trek Continues

I have started episode 2.  It is so astonishing how well they have recreated the original series, right down to the Orion slave girl in episode 2 dressed as though she stepped right out of the episode in ST: TOS where an Orion slave girl tempts Kirk.

The first episode featured actor Michael Forest reprising his role as Apollo from "Who Mourns Adonis?" which I consider one of TOS' most touching episodes.  It was nice to see this reuse of an actor who played Adonis.  His portrayal of an alien who pretended to be a god to ancient Greek peasants was quite impressive.  

Episode 1, like TOS, is awash in 1960s thought patterns unlike the ST: TNG which is very modern in its themes.  Slavery gets a very 1960s condemnation still relevant at a time when Islamic slavery still existed.  You can extrapolate it to human trafficking today and it still works.

The Dancer From Atlantis

I am not sure when Poul Anderson wrote this novel. I am using a airline WiFi that behaves as though I have Internet service but the browser refuses to search.  Internal evidence suggests 1970. (UPDATE: Published in 1971.)

It is a novel that seems designed to appeal to someone as unique as me.  It is a time travel historical fiction set in late Minoan times as Thera prepares to erupt.  The protagonists are an American architect, a Dark Ages Hun, and medieval Russian (okay more precisely Kievan) and a bull dancer from Crete.

A malfunctioning time machine snatches them up from various times and places and dumps them with dying pilots on the North African coast.  (If you are old enough to remember the regrettable 1960s series It's About Time,  feel free to start singing the theme song, the only part of the show that showed any cleverness.)

Can Duncan get home?  Can he save his future and past girlfriend's Minoan civilization of Atlantis?  The plot is complex.  It shows an imaginative although not impossible interpretation of why Linear B replaced Linear A script on Crete.  It also does present an interesting way of resolving the known problems of explaining Minoan collapse not matching Thera destruction. 

Great fun.  Make sure you can click words in Kindle. Anderson stretched my vocabulary as usual. 

Amazing Fan Fiction

Perhaps my expectations for fan fiction are too low.  A reader informed me about Star Trek Continues.  It is as if the original series had remained on the air after 1968.  They have the props, the 1960s theme music, the well-intentioned female roles that now seem slightly misogynistic and backward, and actors doing as good a job as the originals.   The Japanese-American from Mythbusters plays Sulu.  James Doohan's son plays Scotty.

The only concessions to the later series, which I hated, is the prototype of the holodeck at the opening of the first episode. 

Best Quote of the Day

8/18/25 Guardian discusses James Cameron's efforts to write Terminator 8:

"That’s the heart of Cameron’s problem: in 1984, Skynet was a terrifying piece of speculative fiction. In 2025, it’s basically LinkedIn with nukes."

Star Trek: The Original Series

I had forgotten The Devil in the Dark.  The worst episodes were badly thought out commentsries on social problems of tge 1960s such as This Side of Paradise.  Some of the best science fiction such as The Devil in thr Dark did not survive advancing science.  The Horta was a silicon-based life form living deep with a planet with human miners.  While it easy to sympathize with the Horta's cries for its unborn children, the notion of life where silicon took the place of carbon did not long survive Linus Pauling's work on chemical bonding.  

Carbon's unique bonding capabilities are dependent on the availability of both p and s electron shells in a way that silicon cannot.  This is why there are very long alkane chain molecules (methane, methane, propane, butane) but not much past silane (SiH4).

I am slightly surprised to see a Wikipedia article about "carbon chauvinism."  It does acknowledge the chemistry problem of p-s bonding, but I see some postcolonial discussions.

Islam, Monirul (2016). "Posthumansm: Through the Postcolonial Lens". In Banerji, Debashish; Paranjape, Makarand R. (eds.). Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures (1st ed.). New Delhi: Springer India : Imprint: Springer. p. 117. ISBN 978-81-322-3637-5.

This crap goes everywhere. 

How to Reslly Destroy a Ray Bradbury Story

A Sound of Thunder (2005).  The idea that time travel can diastrous results, has been around for decades.  This movie version of Bradbury's story is just so over the top in how it imagines the results with insufficient explication of how the death of a late Jurassic butterfly changes the evolutionary to create half-lizard, half-primate creatures.   And the changes keep coming in waves with these portrayed like enormous tsunamis.   A really disappointing adaptation of a great idea and story.

Nightmare

I just had a bad dream thst would make a fine short horror film.   Bugs are flying through the region.  If they bite any female, they die but become bodily fluid lethal to males.  Proper screening is essential.  Everyone retreats indoors.  All essential services and goods are delivered by male delivery personnel. 

Elaborate as you will. Title for story, novel, film: harem.

How Old is the Term Green-Room?

I have always seen it used to refer to the room just off stage where guests wait to be called out for a talk show.  I am currently reading a Jules Verne novel The Steam House where he uses the term in the modern sense.  This is an 1860s.. I am unsure how to characterize it.  The only sci-fi element is that the protagonist and hopelessly imperialist British friends are traveling around India in a road locomotive train.  

A steam engine made up to look like a steel elephant pulling half dozen cars in an adventure that I suspect is going to end in a confrontation with a promoter of the Sepoy Rebellion.

Verne is mostly remembered for his sci-fi but he also wrote more conventional fiction sometimes with a political twist.

If You Enjoyed Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...

I just started reading The Left Hand of Dog free for Kindle on Amazon.  It is not the laugh out loud book but it is witty and involves a guy and his dog, Spock, kidnapped by cute fuzzy aliens.  I am only three chapters in so far but it is fun.

The deeper I get, the funnier it gets.  The dialog between the sentient robot that the fluffy bunny bounty hunters kidnapped, and Big Bird is riotously funny.

A Pail of Air

I have mentioned this as one of my favorite short science fiction stories before by Fritz Leiber.  I am reading Galaxy Science Fiction Superpack #1 on Kindle.  I cannot remember if it was free or just cheap and just ran into it in there.  And even reading it the third time it is powerful and hopeful as any story can be where Earth is so cold that liquid helium is the top layer on top of the frozen layers of atmosphere. 

Also, another classic science fiction writer: Murray Leinster "Med Ship Man" is one they I had never seen before and for a story written at least 50 years ago, it is not hopelessly dated or clumsy.

Shiny Metal Boxes

Great Late 21st Century Sequelarcoma: