I just finished Vernor Vinge’s book A Deepness in the Sky. It is a loose prequel to his former novel A Fire Upon The Deep. Both of these are great science fiction books with characters that you will love. These people are surrounded by far future technologies, and they are living in the middle of galaxy changing events.
A Deepness in the Sky won the Prometheus Award for best novel. This award is given out by the Libertarian Futurist Society on a yearly basis. A major theme of the story involves a main character who struggles against his desire to make a “great society” while at the same time realizing the necessity of freedom for everyone. This and the many other ideas throughout the book will keep you reading to the end as quicky as possible.
Someone at MIT has posted information on a Time Traveler Convention that they are having. I’m not all that convinced that time travel will ever happen but the whole idea is rather interesting.
The main idea of the site is that if the convention is publicized enough then time travelers from the future will have heard about it and will be in attendance. A very cool idea and I’m doing my part in publicizing, just in case!
I purchased The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith after reading “Christianity In the Science Fiction of ‘Cordwainer Smith’” by James Jordan. I read lots of Star Trek science fiction growing up and have liked Orson Scott Card’s Ender Series. I found the The Rediscovery of Man to be different in that the scientific part of the plot uses lots of organic elements. It intrigued me that cats were used to assist with space travel. I haven’t read all of the stories yet but the future looked upon in the Instrumentality Cycle are a future much more friendly to nature. In the Star Wars Series Coruscant strikes me as very not organic because of the way there are large metal buildings everywhere and nothing but the people seems to be alive.
I am still reading Journey to Eden. It is beginning to get more interesting. I like the science aspects but am not sure that I like the overall story and how the science is being explained. The main characters are Christian and are showing some support of six day creation. At the moment I am annoyed that the governments of China, Britain, the United States, and Russia are all depicted as evil and almost working together. The good guys are the “religious fundamentalists” which include Islam, Orthodox Jews, and Evangelical Christians. It’s almost as if those three groups are the conservatives who are fighting the secularists on the age of the earth. This makes those in Islam out to be good guys and the Christians while they witness to a chinaman never really witness to their friend Mohammed who is muslim. Seems pretty weak on a philosophical level.
The science claim is that everything is slowing down relative to an imaginary absolute. Earth days are shorter today than they were ten years ago. We can’t tell this because clocks go slower too. Biological time does not change though. This is why Abraham lived longer than people do today. His body and ours have the same time relative to the absolute while everything physical in the universe has slowed. Interesting idea, but I haven’t seen any proof yet.
I will continue to report as I read more.
I am in the midst of reading Journey to Eden. The book was given to me by the publisher as a “Science Fiction” title for the Christian market. The author is trying to promote a new understanding of time. I am 140 pages into the book and at the moment the book seems to be explaining how that time is now going slower than it was in the past. We would never normally know if time was slowing, but because of some bizarre circumstances in the book the main characters discover that it is. This slowing of time means that years happened faster in the past and that the earth is not really as old as it seems.
The idea seems plausible. The old earth people and atheists assume that time is a constant that always goes the same speed. Just like they assume that carbon decay and other such things always occurred at the same rate. If the speed of time fluctuated it means that we would have a hard time telling how old anything really was and use the same length years.
The book is interesting and I will attempt to keep you all posted as I read more.
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