MY TOP TEN FAVORITE SCI-FI PHILOSOPHERS

ALSO: TOP SCI-FI BOOKS HERE

1.0 Jules Gabriel Verne (February 8, 1828 – March 24, 1905)

Notable work(s)
"Voyages Extraordinaires"
From the Earth to the Moon (1865
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,  
A Journey to the Center of the Earth,
Around the World in Eighty Days,
The Mysterious Island,  
Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen





2.0 Herbert George "H.G." Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946)




Notable work(s)
The Time Machine 
The Invisible Man 
The Island of Doctor Moreau 
The War of the Worlds 
The First Men in the Moon 
The Shape of Things to Come






3.0 Hugo Gernsbacher (August 16, 1884 – August 19, 1967) A.K.A. Hugo Gernsback

Notable work(s)
Ralph 124C 41+ 
Science and Invention — formerly Electrical Experimenter; published August 1920 to August 1931 
Science and Mechanics — originally Everyday Mechanics; changed to Everyday Science and Mechanics in 1931. "Everyday" dropped as March 1937 issue, and published as Science and Mechanics until 1976





4.0 Isaac Asimov (January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992)

Notable work(s)
The Foundation Series,
the Robot Series, Nightfall,  
The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science,  
I, Robot,  
Planets for Man





5.0 Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008)


Notable work(s)
Childhood's End
2001: A Space Odyssey
Rendezvous with Rama
The Fountains of Paradise




6.0 Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) A.K.A. George Orwell,

Notable work(s)
 Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Animal Farm (1945)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
essays

 








 7.0 Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012)

Notable work(s)
Fahrenheit 451,  
The Martian Chronicles,  
Something Wicked This Way Comes







 8.0 Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982)

 Notable work(s)
 Ubik,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,  
The Man in the High Castle,  
A Scanner Darkly,  
VALIS trilogy,
Second Variety

 





 9.0 Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr. (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986)

Notable work(s)
Dune and its five sequels



 





 10.0  John Michael Crichton (October 23, 1942 – November 4, 2008),

Notable work(s)
Jurassic Park 
The Andromeda Strain 
Congo 
Travels 
Sphere 
Next (the final book published before his death),  
Pirate Latitudes (published November 24, 2009)
Micro (final unfinished techno-thriller)

RIP Ray Bradbury!

Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury in 1975
Born	August 22, 1920 Waukegan, Illinois
Died	June 5, 2012 (aged 91)[1] Los Angeles, California
Nationality	American
Period	1938–2012
Genres	Science fiction, fantasy, horror fiction, mystery fiction
Notable work(s)	Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes

Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Master & the I CHING

Born	Philip Kindred Dick December 16, 1928 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Died	March 2, 1982 (aged 53) Santa Ana, California, U.S.
Pen name	Richard Phillips Jack Dowland
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer and essayst
Nationality	American
Genres	Science fiction Speculative fiction Postmodernism
Notable work(s)	Ubik, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly,VALIS trilogy
Influences Heidegger, Flaubert, A. E. van Vogt, James Joyce,[1] Balzac, Kant, Marcel Proust, Carl Jung, Samuel Beckett, Dostoyevsky, John Sladek, Nathanael West, Jorge Luis Borges,Jack Spicer, Herbert George Wells
Signature

The I Ching is prominent in The Man in the High Castle; having diffused it as part of their cultural hegemony overlordship of the Pacific Coast U.S., the Japanese — and some American — characters consult it, and then act per its replies to their queries. Specifically, "The Man in the High Castle", Hawthorne Abendsen, himself, used it to write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, and, at story's end, in his presence, Juliana Frink, queries the I Ching: "Why did it write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy?" and "What is the reader to learn from the novel?" The I Chingreplies with Hexagram 61 ([中孚] zhōng fú) Chung Fu, "Inner Truth", describing the true state of the world—every character in The Man in the High Castle is living a false reality.

Jules Verne: The Enigma 1,800 Miles Below Us

Reporting recently in the journal Nature, Dario Alfè of University College London and his colleagues presented evidence that iron in the outer layers of the core is frittering away heat through the wasteful process called conduction at two to three times the rate of previous estimates.

The theoretical consequences of this discrepancy are far-reaching. The scientists say something else must be going on in Earth’s depths to account for the missing thermal energy in their calculations. They and others offer these possibilities:

¶ The core holds a much bigger stash of radioactive material than anyone had suspected, and its decay is giving off heat.

¶ The iron of the innermost core is solidifying at a startlingly fast clip and releasing the latent heat of crystallization in the process.

¶ The chemical interactions among the iron alloys of the core and the rocky silicates of the overlying mantle are much fiercer and more energetic than previously believed.

¶ Or something novel and bizarre is going on, as yet undetermined.

“From what I can tell, people are excited” by the report, Dr. Alfè said. “They see there might be a new mechanism going on they didn’t think about before.”

Researchers elsewhere have discovered a host of other anomalies and surprises. They’ve found indications that the inner core is rotating slightly faster than the rest of the planet, although geologists disagree on the size of that rotational difference and on how, exactly, the core manages to resist being gravitationally locked to the surrounding mantle.

Miaki Ishii and her colleagues at Harvard have proposed that the core is more of a Matryoshka doll than standard two-part renderings would have it. Not only is there an outer core of liquid iron encircling a Moon-size inner core of solidified iron, Dr. Ishii said, but seismic data indicate that nested within the inner core is another distinct layer they call the innermost core: a structure some 375 miles in diameter that may well be almost pure iron, with other elements squeezed out. Against this giant jewel even Jules Verne’s middle-Earth mastodons and ichthyosaurs would be pretty thin gruel.

Core researchers acknowledge that their elusive subject can be challenging, and they might be tempted to throw tantrums save for the fact that the Earth does it for them. Most of what is known about the core comes from studying seismic waves generated by earthquakes.

As John Vidale of the University of Washington explained, most earthquakes originate in the upper 30 miles of the globe (as do many volcanoes), and no seismic source has been detected below 500 miles. But the quakes’ energy waves radiate across the planet, detectably passing through the core.

Granted, some temblors are more revealing than others. “I prefer deep earthquakes when I’m doing a study,” Dr. Ishii said. “The waves from deep earthquakes are typically sharper and cleaner.”

RIP Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes, Constancia y otras novelas para vírgenes (fragmento)

“(…) ¿No he aprendido nada, entonces

Estamos rodeados del enigma 

y lo poco que entendemos racionalmente 

es la excepción a un mundo enigmático. 

La razón es la excepción, no la regla. 

El enigma nos nutre, nos sostiene, porque nos asombra; 

y el asombro –maravillarse- es el mar que rodea la isla de la lógica, 

o algo por el estilo, me digo sentado en el aire a treinta mil pies de altura. 

Recuerdo a Vivien Leigh en Anna Karenina,

Recuerdo el recuerdo de una puesta en escena 

de El último emperador por Piscator en Berlín, 

evocada por mi vecino el actor, 

y entiendo por qué motivo el arte es el símbolo más preciso 

(y precioso) de la vida. 

El arte propone un enigma, 

pero la solución del enigma es otro enigma”

Carlos Fuentes, Constancia y otras novelas para vírgenes (fragmento)