Traveling at the speed of light

Image of
"2001, a Space Odyssey"

Actually, the title of this post is wrong. Traveling at the speed of light is impossible, because it would take infinite energy to accelerate to that speed a body with rest mass greater than zero. What I am going to talk about here is travel at relativistic speeds (close to the speed of light), which means more than 10% of the speed of light (i.e. 30,000 kilometer per second).

The 25 science fiction stories I most liked

Isaac Asimov

In the United States fiction is classified depending on the length of the work, with four subsequent stages:

1. Novel, any work that has more than 40,000 words.
2. Novella, a work between 17,500 and 40,000 words.
3. Novelette, between 7,500 and 17,500 words.
4. Short Story, less than 7,500 words.

Naturally, the limits are not strict, and in practice they depend on who classifies each book. In Spanish, however, we have fewer categories:

1. Novel.
2. Short novel, which applies to works of intermediate length.
3. Story, with few characters and a simple plot.

What would be an undeniable miracle?

In 1972, sci-fi writer and publisher Lester del Rey launched a challenge to three well-known authors of the genre: Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg and Gordon R. Dickson. All three should write a novella on a specific topic: the effect of an undeniable miracle (the sun standing still) on human society. The three authors responded to the challenge, and the three stories were published jointly in a book entitled The day the sun stood still. In this post we shall consider the first of the three, written by Poul Anderson, whose title is A chapter of Revelation.

In a post in his blog, Pablo (a.k.a. sinopinionespropias) specifies which, in his opinion, should be the characteristics of an undeniable miracle:

1.      It must be a prophecy.

2.      Its materialization should not depend on people.

3.      Your probability must be negligible and calculable.

4.      It must be as concrete as possible.

5.      It must maintain the same demonstrative force with the passage of time.

6.      It must make sense at all times.

Extraterrestrials in literature

Extraterrestrials can only appear in two types of literary works: in essays, or in novels, and in the latter only in the genre of science fiction. If an extraterrestrial appears in any novel, the novel automatically becomes science fiction.

Science fiction literature shows very many types of extraterrestrials:

• Fully humanoid, such as the red men in the Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who are so humanoid that they are even fertile when mating with terrestrials, as shown by the two sons of John Carter and Dejah Thoris, despite the fact that Martian women are oviparous (!!!) To this group also belong the aliens of The People series by Zenna Henderson, who are only different from us by their mental abilities, and those of Perelandra by C.S.Lewis, also titled Voyage to Venus.
• Partially humanoid, such as those in Star Ways by Poul Anderson, whose women are also capable of falling in love with terrestrials. This novel develops a typical Anderson argument: extraterrestrials who differ culturally from us in their ecological view of the world, but who are fated to be defeated when confronting terrestrials, who are much more active and aggressive than they are.