Tag: Blogging A to Z challenge (2013)

New book coming soon!

So the A to Z blogging challenge is coming up again this year, and to get ready for it I’ve decided to put together my posts from last year into an ebook! I’ll be releasing it at the end of this week, probably around Friday or so. Here’s the cover: The space art is a… Continue reading New book coming soon!

What I’ve been up to lately (besides short stories)

It’s been a while since I did an update post, so I figure I should do one of those to let you guys know what projects I’m working on. There are quite a few of them, and I’m happy to say that the writing is going quite well! If I don’t post on this blog… Continue reading What I’ve been up to lately (besides short stories)

Z is for Zenith

Has space opera passed its zenith? Sometimes, it certainly looks that way.  All the major stuff seems to be reprints of past series and reboots of decades-old franchises.  Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Ender’s Game, Dune, Babylon 5–all the big names seem to have had their start at least a generation ago.  At… Continue reading Z is for Zenith

Y is for Yesteryear

They say that the golden age of science fiction is about twelve years old.  That’s definitely true for me. My first exposure to the genre was Star Wars: A New Hope.  I saw it when I was seven, right around the height of my dinosaur phase.  Everything about the movie completely blew me away, from… Continue reading Y is for Yesteryear

X is for Xenocide

This post isn’t just about the third book in the Ender’s Game series–it’s about the genocide of an entire alien race, which is actually a fairly important trope in science fiction. Of all the evils of our modern era, perhaps the most heinous is the systematic extermination of an entire race or ethnicity.  These acts… Continue reading X is for Xenocide

W is for Wagon Train to the Stars

When Gene Roddenberry pitched the original Star Trek series back in the 60s, Westerns were all the rage.  Consequently, he pitched his show as a “wagon train to the stars,” where a bunch of quirky characters on an awesome starship travel from adventure town to interstellar adventure town, exploring and pioneering the final frontier. Sound… Continue reading W is for Wagon Train to the Stars

V is for Vast

If you don’t know anything else about the universe, you should know this: it’s big.  Really, really, REALLY big. How big, you ask?  Well, for starters, take a look at Earth in the picture above.  Can you see it?  It’s the pale blue dot in the beam of starlight on the right side of the… Continue reading V is for Vast

U is for Universal Translator

In science fiction, whenever two characters from different planets or different alien races have to interact with each other, they almost always speak the same language or have some sort of universal translator that magically makes them able to communicate with minimal misunderstandings.  This is especially common in Star Trek, though it happens in just… Continue reading U is for Universal Translator

T is for Terraforming

[NOTE: this post is a reprint of an earlier post from the Trope Tuesday series, which you can find here.] One of the problems with interplanetary colonization is that Earth-like worlds are fairly rare (though possibly not as rare as we once thought). In our own solar system, the only other world that comes anywhere… Continue reading T is for Terraforming