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Worlds Without End Blog

Curiosity Advances Science Fact, Tomorrow Posted at 11:27 PM by Rico Simpkins

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If, like us, you plan to stay up bleary-eyed, watching Curiosity land and deploy on the surface of Mars, you may want to catch up on what it is you’ll be watching for.

We’ve all probably read about the seven minutes of terror, during which the rover will be perilously hurtling toward the planet surface, hopefully decelerating to a gentle landing.  When those seven minutes are over, we should be getting information from several sources. MSNBC describes the three different ways Curiosity will communicate with Earth:

Controllers on Earth will have three ways of hailing Curiosity as it trundles around Gale Crater. Two are direct links through NASA’s Deep Space Network, a worldwide collection of antennas. It provides both a fixed low-gain antenna, best for basic commands and emergencies, and a pointable high-gain antenna for complex commands.

Curiosity also has a higher-speed ultra-high frequency (UHF) communications system that can send signals to spacecraft orbiting Mars, which in turn would relay them to Earth.

To send back imagery, Curiosity must stay in touch with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey spacecraft, two probes orbiting Mars that each can talk to the rover twice a day. (Odyssey is currently recovering from the loss of one of its three reaction wheels.)

Business Insider scored a geektastic inventory of Curiosity’s space-age toolset:

For two of these special instruments, NASA turned to Honeybee Robotics, a development firm headquartered in Manhattan. Building on previous work for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, Honeybee developed the Sample Manipulation System (SMS) and the Dust Removal Tool (DRT). These tools are critical to investigating Mars’ ability to sustain life — in the past and present.  

Natalie Wolchover, of the The Christian Science Monitor, wonders whether we might be visiting distant relatives:

If life exists on Mars, then we might be ethnic Martians ourselves, scientists told Life’s Little Mysteries. They explained that the small coincidence of having two life-bearing planets right next door to one another gets cleared up if one of the planets actually seeded life on the other — a concept called “panspermia.” According to Pavlov, hundreds of thousands of Martian meteorites are strewn across Earth. These were hurled into space during past planetary collisions (such as the bash that left Mars with a crater covering nearly half its surface). One of these chunks of Mars could feasibly have contained spores that lay dormant during the interplanetary commute to Earth, and then blossomed upon arrival, some 3.8 billion years ago.

The main event should happen around 12:31 p.m. Central Standard Time. The NASA webcast starts at 8:30 p.m. PDT on NASA TV.  If you want to be twitter friends with the rover (who wouldn’t!) follow @MarsCuriosity on Twitter (while there, follow us, @WWEnd).

Read Total Recall for 99¢ on Kindle Posted at 10:05 PM by Rico Simpkins

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Yes, we know.  This remake is slap in the face to the Ahnold.  Even director Len Wiseman seems a little sheepish about it in his latest interview.  Just remember, even the “original” Schwarzenegger engine wasn’t an original, either.  It was an adaptation, of course, of Philip K. Dick‘s classic short story, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.  Before you see the movie, read it!  To commemorate the release of the new film, Amazon has released the story under the latter day title, Total Recall.

GMRC Review: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury Posted at 6:14 AM by Daniel Roy

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WWEnd Grand Master Reading ChallengeDaniel Roy (triseult), has contributed over 30 reviews to WWEnd including this, his second, for the GMRC. Daniel is living his dream of travelling the world and you can read about some of his adventures on his blog Mango Blue.


The Martian Chronicles

There are SF books that age superbly well, staying relevant and believable decades beyond their publication dates. The Martian Chronicles is not such a book; it’s a delicate antique, the fossilized remains of dreams and terrors gone by, of a time when Mars had water irrigation canals, and everyone feared death by atomic war. It may not have remained relevant, but its lyrical beauty is intact.

Martian Chronicles is a series of loosely connected short stories set on the planet Mars; more specifically, on the planet Mars as it existed in the collective consciousness of the 1950s, when the lines slashed across its surface were water canals built by an ancient and alien civilization. In 2012, it reads not so much as science fiction, but as a form of dreamy fantasy, an alternate universe where the science fiction dreams of the Martian wild frontier are true. This gives a charming air of naïveté to the stories, a nostalgia of dreams gone by, made impossible by the images sent back by Viking and Pathfinder.

There exists a quaint notion in the public’s mind that a SF author’s greatness can be measured by his or her power to predict the future: much attention is given to Isaac Asimov anticipating the Laws of Robotics, or of Arthur C. Clarke having predicted orbital satellites. But reading The Martian Chronicles, it’s obvious that great SF writers do not so much try to anticipate and predict the future, but rather dream of all possible futures.

That’s what the stories in The Martian Chronicles feel like; a dream. They possess a dreamy, ethereal quality, the descriptions filled with a deep sense of wonder and joy at the Universe, a lyricism and poetry that depart in a formidable fashion from the dry intellectualism of Bradbury‘s contemporaries at the time. The stories themselves are enchanting, sometimes gripping; they never grow grim, even if they deal with death, yearning, sometimes murder, sometimes outright war. Some of the stories present arresting imagery to this day: the sight of all African Americans, having given up on ever being granted full civil rights, gathering their belongings and leaving for Mars; or the clockwork rhythms of an automated house, calling the children to breakfast long after Earth has died in an atomic war.

Grand Master Ray BradburyMy biggest gripe with Martian Chronicles is the fate of the Martians themselves, and the relative lack of empathy given to what Bradbury imagined as beautiful, wise creatures. Their fate mirrors that of Native Americans, and perhaps because the novel was of its time, their destruction under the relentless wheels of colonization did not stir much sympathy in Mr. Bradbury. There was a huge opportunity to discuss the human/Martian cost of the American spirit of endeavor, but this is a theme which Mr. Bradbury has preferred should remain untouched.

On a personal note, I began reading The Martian Chronicles on June 5th, 2012, unaware that Mr. Bradbury had passed away on that very day. By a strange twist of fate, despite having grown up with SF stories, I had never read any book by Mr. Bradbury before. I’m glad I finally, if a bit too late, learned to appreciate the greatness of his writings, and why so many authors consider him an inspiration.

When Mr. Bradbury passed away, Humanity has lost a dreamer. But judging by the beauty and grace of this book, the dreamer’s dreams live on.

The Martian Chronicles: Essential and Still Relevant Posted at 3:08 AM by Scott Lazerus

Scott Laz

Scott Lazerus came to Worlds Without End looking for a good list of books. He found David Pringle’s Best 100 Science Fiction Novels list to his liking and is currently working his way through the list. Check out his review of one of the all-time classics of SF below and help us welcome him to WWEnd. Thanks, Scott!


The Martian ChroniclesIt was fascinating to return to The Martian Chronicles over three decades after first reading it. (Ray Bradbury was the first SF writer I read as a child.) It remains beautiful, relevant, and unique.

Bradbury, in a series of linked short stories, presents the history of the exploration of Mars and the subsequent emigration and abandonment of the planet by humanity. The stories include rockets, robots, and Martians, but Bradbury clearly has no interest in scientific extrapolation regarding these SF tropes. Instead, they are used as plot device or metaphor to get at his real concerns about the state of humanity (Americans, especially), at the time he wrote these stories. In fact, if you think too much about the literal events of the book, it won’t work for you. The first Mars expeditions made up in part of yahoos who get drunk and vandalize ancient Martian artifacts? Thousands of people colonizing Mars within a couple of years of the earliest explorers reaching it, bringing with them all the trappings of life on Earth? Almost the entire human population of Mars returning en masse after seeing their home planet on fire as the result of a nuclear war?

Yet these events seem almost foreordained in the context of Bradbury’s themes, which include cultural and racial intolerance, imperialism, humanity’s propensity for violence, the consequences of ignorance, the repression of individuality, and the inability of people to learn from history. Yes, it’s a laundry list of cold war alienation, but the issues take on added relevance and added interest in the SF context. It seems that, for Bradbury, technology merely gives humanity’s unfortunate tendencies new venues in which and tools with which to manifest themselves. The arrival of humanity spreads Earth’s (actually, America’s) culture to Mars, wiping out the Martians in the process through the spread of disease–a point reminiscent of what happened to the Native Americans. Book censors and hot dog stands are not far behind…

Ray BradburyThe telepathic Martians take on different roles in different stories, serving mainly as metaphor rather than character. They serve alternately as victim, nightmare, conscience, oracle, empath, and mirror. They are projections of us and, at the end of the book, we must become them, if there is to be a future for humanity.

Not every story is up to the level of the half-dozen classics in the book, but each does make a contribution to the theme. The format allows Bradbury to make use of his forte–the emotional punch of the short story–while building theme and resonance as in a novel. When I began rereading, I suspected that The Martian Chronicles might not be as good as I remembered, but I think it may be even better, though in ways I probably didn’t see back in the ’70s. Other Bradbury short stories from the late ’40s and ’50s reach the same heights as those in this book, but the added resonance of the links between them makes this the essential Ray Bradbury book. An enduring contribution to SF and to American literature!

Philip K. Dickathon: Martian Time-Slip Posted at 5:40 AM by Charles Dee Mitchell

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Guest Blogger and WWEnd Member, Charles Dee Mitchell, has contributed a great many book reviews to WWEnd and we’ve invited him to contribute to our blog. This is the latest in Dee’s series of Philip K. Dick reviews that he started on his blog www.potatoweather.blogspot.com. We’ll be posting one every week until he runs out of reviews or gets tired of Philip K. Dick books.


Martian Time-SlipPhilip K. Dick just couldn’t be bothered by some of the standard verities of science fiction. He knew SF should often take place in outer space, but whereas other novelists placed their narratives in the 2200’s, 2300’s, or some unimaginable distant future, in the novels Dick wrote in the 1950’s and 1960’s, he thought that 40 or so years was plenty of time for man to start populating the universe. He also didn’t pay much attention to the news coming out from astrophysicists that the weather on other planets seemed to be uniformly bad. Martian Time-Slip takes place in 1994. Mars has scattered settlements and townships, mostly sponsored by national groups from Earth. The exception, and the most powerful group of all, is a Plumbers Union. I assume Dick had had some unpleasantness involving plumbers when he sat down to write this book.

But plumbers are essential to the workings of the settlements. The weather is bearable if a little dry. One good trade-off is that you only weigh about fifty pounds, and housewives slip into halter-tops and Capri pants to visit neighbors. But water is in short supply and closely rationed. Arnie Kott, the vulgarian union boss, is one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet, although that may change. Rumor has it that the U.N. is planning to develop the FDR Mountains, drilling deep water wells and creating self-sustaining luxury living complexes. The land grab is on.

Wikipedia has a coherent synopsis of the book, and I congratulate whoever wrote it. Topics touched on include: schizophrenia (which is almost epidemic), black marketing, adultery, extensive drinking and drug ingestion, pesky neighbors — in other words, it is Dick’s Northern California neighborhood transfered to Mars. Much of the plot hinges on Manfred, an autistic child who becomes a test subject for the main character’s experiments with extrasensory communication and ultimately time travel.

And let’s not forget the Beakmen, the remnants of the Martian race who are now reduced to wandering the deserts or working in the homes of wealthy earthlings. Dick always presents himself as progressive in terms of race and social policies in general, but his portrait of the Beakmen is among his strangest concoctions. Just as he didn’t care much for astrophysics, Dick also didn’t seem to keep up with physical anthropology. The Beakmen are described as "Negroid" and descended from the same source as earthly Africans. (Phil, all homo sapiens come from common stock, long predating any division into races. And so unless you are saying some Central African natives somehow found their way to Mars 30,000 years ago, you are really off on this one.) Also, this is a novel written in the early sixties, and Dick was certainly aware of the Civil Rights movement. So what does it mean that Mars has a society somewhat reflecting the Antebellum South? The word slave is never used, but wealthy settlers have "tame" Beakmen working for them, refer to them as niggers, and enjoy giving them such high-falutin’ names as Heliogabalus. But of course, the Beakmen have deep, secret knowledge. Where was Dick going with this?

This is one of Dick’s enjoyable train wrecks of a novel. I don’t want to slip into biographical criticism, but it reads like a combination of Dick’s marital problems, his extensive experience with psychiatrists, a general dislike of land speculators and plumbers, and some cock-eyed ideas about autism. And as nutty as the whole thing is, the conclusion is not only satisfying on many levels but genuinely strange as well.