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Worlds Without End Blog

The COVID-19 Reading Challenge Posted at 8:00 AM by Rico Simpkins

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COVID-19: The Novel Coronavirus Novel Reading ChallengeAre you feeling a little stir crazy? Does your reading material suddenly seem a little to irrelevant to our current shared circumstances? Us too! Yes, our website is full of books that can distract you from the problems of our everyday lives, but what if the story you want to read IS the thing we’re living through.

That is where the COVID-19: The Novel Coronavirus Novel Reading Challenge comes in. Strangely enough, many folks find some kind of relief or distraction in reading books about pandemics. So for this challenge we are going to read about some fictional pandemics to help take our minds off the real one raging outside. Pick one of four different reading levels and then pick from among any books in our database having to do with diseases – real or alien. If you think we’re missing any books (SF/F/H) that you believe should belong in our database, let us know and we’ll add them.

Here are a few suggestions to get you started.


The Last ManThe Last Man
by Mary Shelley

Not only is Ms. Shelley credited with writing the first work of science fiction, she also wrote the first outbreak novel as far as we can tell. Yes, Sophocles wrote about a Theban plague in Oedipus Rex, and the residents of Noricum suffered their own (fictional?) epidemic in Virgil’s Georgics, but plays and poems, being more ancient forms of literature, could never be science fiction. That art form couldn’t blossom until the arrival of the novel, which, as its name suggests, was an art form oriented toward the new. And science certainly felt new and exciting in 1826, when Shelley wrote her exploration of the outbreak sub-genre only 10 years after the legendary year of no summer inspired her fascination with medical aberration and catastrophe.

The Last Man is set in the 21st century, and, while descriptions of technology will strike contemporary readers as quaint, some of Shelley’s predictions are accurate enough. England has become a Republic thanks to a royal exit. The story’s plague starts in the walls of a major city in the East (in this case, the Near East: Constantinople) and travels across oceans to infect the known world. England’s Lord Protector, as now seems prescient, finds the country unprepared for an epidemic and flees, hoarding provisions. Charlatans and faith healers hawk cures that don’t exist.


Love in the Time of CholeraLove in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Gabriel Garcia Márquez essentially invented magical realism, which is not only a WWEnd sub-genre, but is regarded as a whole genre of its own. Love in the Time of Cholera might not be as overtly fantastical as the iconic One Hundred Years of Solitude, but Garcia Márquez was still working his way from ordinary realism to his new style of writing. In this story, a very real outbreak of cholera was commonly diagnosed, and the protagonist’s own heartbreak — the mystical force we all know as love — presents the same symptoms. Love manifests itself as disease, and, in this world, they may as well be the same thing (sound familiar?). Unlike The Last Man, this novel doesn’t offer a parallel to the physical epidemic we are all experiencing so much as it presents a meditation on the sickness that has visited all our hearts at one time or another.

Shakespeare once commented in his mythic pair of sonnets that Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love. Unlike cholera, the most human of afflictions has no cure… and never will. So if you’d like to distract yourself from the comparably boring affliction of COVID-19, we recommend adding Love in the Time of Cholera to your reading list.


Station ElevenStation Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel

We think of epidemics as if they always come from somewhere else. But the 1906 contagion precipitated by “Typhoid Mary,” the swine flu epidemic of 1976, and the decade long measles outbreak in the 1980s were all homegrown. This is also the case with the “Georgian Flu” that torments the characters of Station Eleven. If you’re looking for a deep study of epidemiology, this isn’t the book you’re looking for. This is about what happens after a disease topples civilization the way only big pandemics like the bubonic plague could. The story really gets going 20 years later with a troupe of traveling actors who struggle to bring entertainment to anyone who is left.

Station Eleven will soon be a 10 episode series on the upcoming HBO Max platform. While HBO Max looks to go online earlier than expected (in May), the series only started filming in January. It’s unclear how many if any episodes finished filming before production companies interfered with their schedules due to COVID-19. Yes, the irony of an post-pandemic TV show being interrupted by an actual pandemic was not lost on us.


WWEnd Roll-Your-Own Reading ChallengeThe COVID-19 reading challenge is just one of 30+ Roll-Your-Own Reading Challenge themes that you can join. You can even create your own custom theme, determine your own requirements, and host your challenge right here on WWEnd. What’s more, you can share your challenge with other members, friends, family, reading groups, and even your own blog followers.

New Trailer for Star Wars IX Posted at 1:44 PM by Rico Simpkins

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Senate Hearings on a Space Force Posted at 11:03 AM by Rico Simpkins

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Watch the Senate query experts on the need for a Space Force. This is a live feed as I type this, but when it ends, you can still watch it from the beginning.

Falcon Heavy Launch Imminent Posted at 4:47 PM by Rico Simpkins

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UPDATE: The launch has been scrubbed for today (April 10) due to high wind shear in the upper atmosphere. Dang bomb cyclone! It is now (as of this edit) scheduled for tomorrow, April 11, at 6:35 EST. 

SpaceX is launching its Falcon Heavy tonight at 6:35PM as of this posting. Of course, it could go later in the evening or even be scrubbed. At any rate, it appears that the livestream of the event starts around 6:35 on the East Coast. You can see the event here:

Fun fact: Not only will be the first time a Falcon Heavy has launched with a commercial payload (Arabsat-6A), it will also be the first Heavy to use all Bloc 5 boosters.

Joker Trailer Does Not Disappoint Posted at 10:18 AM by Rico Simpkins

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I never thought anyone’s performance could rival Heath Ledger, but, if this trailer is any indication, I could be disastrously wrong.

Captain Marvel Trailer 2 is out! Posted at 4:42 AM by Rico Simpkins

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The highly anticipated 2nd trailer for Captain Marvel confirms that the quasi-controversial old-lady punch from the last trailer was pretty darned justified. Also, 1:52 pretty much settles the question of her power levels. It looks like we have a new contender for most powerful Avenger.

Origin airs on March 8th.

Life Imitates Art Posted at 8:16 AM by Rico Simpkins

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Presented without comment:

Hat tip: Tom Gauld (for Friday’s Guardian Review).

Flight Proven Posted at 3:38 PM by Rico Simpkins

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One of the reasons we read science fiction is to find out what happens next. My favorite science fiction sub-genre is near future, precisely because I want someone to tell me what to expect a decade from now, a year from now, a month from now.  Half the fun is discovering the future through speculative fiction. The other half is watching it come true. That is why I started writing this series of blog posts about near future developments, starting with last year’s Greetings Carbon Based Gases.  Today’s topic:  the gravity well.

Tonight, sometime between 2227-0030 GMT (6:27-8:30 p.m. EDT), SpaceX will launch a “flight proven” rocket for the first time.  “Flight proven” is Elon Musk’s euphemism for “used.”  It was only last April when the rocket in tomorrow’s launch performed its last mission, The CRS-8:

If and when that rocket launches successfully, today, Musk will have accomplished something thought impossible not too long ago, even quite recently.  As we reported in 2012, it costs $10,000 per pound to launch something into orbit.  At least, it did back then.  Today, Musk says he charges $2,500/lb and aims to have that down to $1000/lb this year, when the Falcon Heavy comes online.  Knocking one zero off of NASA’s flight costs is a remarkable achievement, but Musk has predicted he’ll do it again ($100/lb), and some have even speculated a fantastical cost of $10/lb in about 8 years.

Even if that last prediction doesn’t pan out, the consensus seems to be that $100/lb is the point at which many of our sci fi fantasies could come true.  That’s good news for science fiction writers, who Neal Stephenson has said have been too pessimistic, as of late.  So, what can budding new sci-fi writers reasonably predict in the wake of tonight’s launch?

Ryan Faith over at Vice had one idea of how it would go (bolded emphasis added by mois):

“SpaceX wants to get prices down far enough to encourage new users because that’s how they can really start incorporating space in the economic mainstream. Such a change could allow for economies of scale, getting a meaningful slice of global capital flow, industrial synergies, and more.

Once you get to that point, you can start talking much more seriously about building big space stations — the kind of thing dreamed up by 2001: A Space Odyssey. It wouldn’t be like the International Space Station, but more like a big Hilton with a fancy cocktail bar. Granted, drinks at that interstellar cocktail bar could be twice as expensive as normal because of shipping costs — but hey, the views of Earth would totally make up for it.”

In the spirit of Mr. Musk’s iterative approach, I will add more ideas as the evening wears on.  Please feel free to add more in the comments section.

As I type this, it is T-minus 2 hours to the launch window, so I’m going to hit “publish,” for now.  Check this post for post-launch updates.

UPDATE: In case you missed it, watch the day’s coverage of the launch here:

UPDATE: Success!

Iron Fist Trailer Posted at 10:21 AM by Rico Simpkins

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The last Defender arrives March 17:

Where No Streaming Service Has Gone Before Posted at 10:34 PM by Rico Simpkins

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CBS will be going all Netflixy with the Star Trek universe: