Getting back around to the moon ...

 
Last month we shared a few words about the moon (and some pictures of other moons). If you're craving more information about our Earth's moon, check out Moon Zoo.

And here are a few more items having to do with a moon:

Future eclipses of the moon

" ... Imagine it: a moon at your beck and call.”

The moon and the International Space Station

Just at this crisis, as though she comprehended all this agitation regarding herself, the moon shone forth with serene splendor, eclipsing by her intense illumination all the surrounding lights.

Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata

“I forbid any more mingling with the men from now until the moon’s next rising!”

A crossword puzzle about the moon

I received a little news that way, although I chose not to believe most of it. Assassinated leaders I could accept, but people walking on the Moon?

Moon phases word find

And these guys (as before, turn your volume down LOW!) still really like the moon.

"only in science fiction"

... millions of these planets may circle two stars, astronomers using NASA's Kepler space telescope announced in a separate finding published online in Nature Wednesday—an arrangement considered so unlikely that until a few months ago it was found only in science fiction.

Only in science fiction movies will you see an exploding stomach.

Are black holes 'doorways' to other parts of the universe?  So far, only in science fiction.

Real-time speech translation — once a vision only in science fiction — will become the norm.

... ambitious technology companies introduced pocket computers, hand-held devices that had previously been seen only in science fiction.

Though I am accustomed to encountering the term “singularity” only in science fiction, I have noticed it popping up in the media more and more.

Scenario forecasting has been a military tool for thousands of years but only in science fiction is the writers' imagination the limit ...

This seems like an impossible idea found only in science fiction ...

Fortunately, only in science fiction stories do humans ever come into direct contact with the vacuum of space, but these contacts are often portrayed as having horrific consequences.

The cyborg can no longer be considered a niche character, present only in science fiction ...

Only in science fiction did speculation continue, principally in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction.

By using science fiction to express his worldview, he makes his point that much more drastically, since only in science fiction is there freedom to produce the amount of imagination required to overcome all of humanity’s problems.

And today? What is "only in science fiction"?

"Georgia on my Mind"

Happy new year!  Georgia on my Mind and Other Places, the collection of stories by Charles Sheffield, is the Phoenix Pick free e-book of the month. The code for the free e-book is in our monthly newsletter. Not signed up yet? Subscribe by clicking here to send us an e-mail.

A few things related in some way to Georgia (the US state) and science fiction:

DragonCon

Science Fiction Lab at Georgia Tech

Hugo-Award-winner William McIntosh

Lawrenceville Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Meetup Group

Jack McDevitt lives in Georgia.

Escape Pod podcast (Escape Artists, Inc. in Marietta, GA)

A book published by The University of Georgia Press


And a couple of mentions of said state:

"Dixie Mae had grown up in Southern California, but she’d been born in Georgia–and she was proud of her roots."

“This is a new artifact designed and executed by five previously out-of-work engineers in Athens, Georgia. They’ve mated a tiny Linux box with some speaker-independent continuous speech recognition software, a free software translation engine that can translate between any of twelve languages, and an extremely high-resolution LCD that blocks out words in the path of the laser-pointer.
“Turn this on, point it at a wall, and start talking. Everything said shows up on the wall, in the language of your choosing, regardless of what language the speaker was speaking.”

Last Day, Last Words

The first post of this blog listed some first sentences from science fiction books ... now here are some last ones:


"Sure I know. A boy loves his dog."

He loved Big Brother.

For you.

"Absolutely, a day to remember."

Would I lie to you?

"Perhaps it is at that."

They can hurt.

but let's not shun the sun

Image credit: NASA

The sun arrives each morning as predictably as it left the previous night ... and then there are coronal mass ejections.

Found in science fiction works, words having to do with one star or another:

"Things were difficult for him in a world with two suns. The new sun was tiny and white, while the old one was big and yellow. The new sun circled constantly overhead. It never set, and he could no longer catch things at night."

"The surface of the Sun, barely ten thousand miles below the clear-walled cabin of the Lightrider, was a floor across the Universe. The photosphere was a landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere—the thousand-mile-thick outer atmosphere—a thin haze above it all."

"But the sun doesn't stop at the photosphere; the density of matter falls off slowly with height. If one included the ions and electrons that forever stream out into space in the solar wind—to cause auroras on Earth and to shape the plasma tails of comets—one might say that there was no real boundary to the Sun. It truly reaches out to touch the other stars."

"And the solar storm was blowing gouts of plasma, flooding some of their links with static. The sun was going through rough weather, spewing out big, noisy torrents."

But is the sun always bright and cheerful? Or it sometimes blue?

A few words about the moon ...

Do you like the moon? These guys (turn your volume down LOW!) do.

So many words have been written about one moon or another. How many of these have you read?

"What, exactly, would happen to the Moon without the Earth?"

"What is the first thing we do when awe-inspiring vistas of some faraway moon are transmitted back by our little robot envoys? Why, we reverently name the craters, valleys, and other strange beasts discovered out there."

"Today, with space full of ships, colonies on the inner planets, and Earth's Moon so close that pilots on the Luna run sleep home nights, it is hard to imagine when 'flying to the Moon' was a figure of speech for the impossible, when men who thought it could be done were visionaries, crackpots."

"The moon was very bright tonight."

"The first of December had arrived! the fatal day! for, if the projectile were not discharged that very night at 10h. 48m. 40s. P.M., more than eighteen years must roll by before the moon would again present herself under the same conditions of zenith and perigee."

"Due to the way the ship was positioned above the planet they were supposed to be surveying and evaluating, they had visible moons on almost every side; three completely full ones above them, in relation to the ship’s rotation."

And how well do you know your moons?

fear and dread

Son of Poseidon

child of Gaia (courtesy NASA/JPL)

a priestess of Hera

Second

(Venus - the second planet)
Image credit: Magellan Project,  NASA

A measure of time. The place after first. Something following. A small part, as of a minute ("just a second"). A repeating, as in a second chance. An alternate, as in every second year. Something inferior in rank ... a second vice president, a second chair in an orchestra. A standby in a duel. A gear in a car’s transmission. A reference to something or someone past … a second Pearl Harbor, a second Churchill. And the time needed for a cesium-133 atom to perform 9,192,631,770 complete oscillations.

An adding on. Like this entry.

Some "second" books:

The Children of the Sky, by Vernor Vinge
Sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep

Count Zero, by William Gibson
Sequel to Neuromancer

Cerberus, by Jack L. Chalker
Book II of the Lords of the Diamond series

Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card
Sequel to Ender’s Game

The Garden of the Stone, by Victoria Strauss
Sequel to The Arm of the Stone

The Gripping Hand, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Sequel to The Mote in God’s Eye

Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross
Sequel to Singularity Sky

Queen of Candesce, by Karl Schroeder
Book Two of Virga

The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
Book two of the Culture series

Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, by Frederik Pohl
Second book in the Heechee series

What second books would you like to read?