In the pages of Odyssey magazine we have often discussed Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic series of novels and short stories about the terraforming of Mars. The trilogy of novels culminates in Blue Mars when terraforming allows the creation of rivers and oceans on the planet’s surface. Presumably the seeding of these bodies of water came about as a result of fish stocks originating in the oceans of Earth. Fish and other aquatic animals that came from the settler’s home world. Plan

#2 Ocean of Tears “Sharks are beautiful animals and if you’re lucky enough to see lots of them, that means that you’re in a healthy ocean. You should be afraid if you are in the ocean and don’t see sharks.” – Dr Sylvia Earle Humankind has been waging this was for centuries now, on both land and sea, but mostly at sea. A war in which no atrocity is seemingly beyond the pale, including the use of atomic weapons (eight nuclear detonations have taken place inside the ocean, w

“The burning of fossil fuels has altered the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere so rapidly and so abundantly that now we are driving not just the warming trend, not just the sea level rise that is a consequence of the warming trend…but also ocean acidification.” – Sylvia Earle In the July issue of Odyssey magazine we take a look at the rich seam of dystopian fiction depicting worlds that have been overcome by rising sea levels, taking Clive Simpson’s recently publish

[Mural of Ray Bradbury by Richard Wyatt; the mural is located at Los Angeles High School, which Ray attended.] With the onset of the Artemis missions and rockets going up on a regular basis (and with a frequency that exceeds some bus services) it seems we once more live in a science fictional age, with the boundary between the imagined and the actual overlapping like never before. Rocketry was always the stuff of dreams, something Ray Bradbury understood very well when he emp

I tried to imagine what it would feel like. Getting inside the cramped capsule, the heavy hatch closing, strapping yourself in, going through the endless checklists. Waiting for the moment of separation; the sense of floating free of the station. Looking back at the place that had been, for a while at least, both home, sanctuary, and lonely outpost at the summit of the sky. Watching it fall away. And then the ride back down: the capsule ablating, losing layers of itself as th

Their eyes the night before on the pale tracery of the Moon, rotund in a penumbral sky, as finely wrought as da Vinci sketch, the waiting rocket pointing the way like a Norman tower, its ancient roots long-sunk in the tidal wash of a water meadow, trailing pale vapours as from the armoured carapace of a slumbering Quetzalcoatl, the same breath that would soon become an incandescent roar, countdown done, engines on, prayers said, a vibration in the very marrow of their bones

“Artemis” : Greek goddess of the Moon; protector of young women; twin sister of Apollo. Ray Bradbury called it “The Loneliness.” The way everything shrinks down when you leave the Earth, yourself most of all, body and soul. Watching the planet dwindle, that impossible oasis of light in a vast universe made up mostly of empty space. The surrounding dark matter like so much invisible pack ice pressing in. The globe contracting if not to a point then to something little larger

A Metaphor Equation Micro-blog The first Briton in space, Helen Sharman. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterly 1972 film adaptation of Stanislaw...

A Metaphor Equation Micro-blog Zero-G On the way to the launch ...

Remembering Frederick Forsyth (1938 – 2025) A Metaphor Equation Micro-blog Picture credit: Big Issue “It is cold at six-forty in the...

A Metaphor Equation Micro-blog If George Orwell were alive today, would he feel compelled to write Nineteen Eighty-Four ? Probably not....

A Metaphor Equation Micro-blog “One day you’ll drown in that much water, Doctor…” “On the desk by the stern window was the limestone...