Category Archives: Astronomy

The Astronomers: Excerpt from A Hairy and Fiery Star

The astronomers, their eyes fixed on the distant stars and their nights sacrificed to the demands of their ethereal trade, were the first to report the comet’s imminent arrival. As if the comet had come from below the plane of … Continue reading

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The Flat Earth Experience

In his The Time Machine Weena tries to throw herself in the fire because she has never seen flames before. She doesn’t know that it will burn her and that she should exercise care. She is a figure of profound … Continue reading

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Ancient Science at the Planetarium

Whenever we think about our ancestors we are inclined to imagine them as moronic, backward troglodytes, dragging their knuckles through lives as brutal and stunted as themselves. In our rather short-sighted and ungrateful vision, they do not hope to compare … Continue reading

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Proof of Alien Life, or at Least of Human Silliness

There has been a lot of excitement lately, in scientific circles at least, about the star that experiences periodic and unexplainable dimming. Conjecture about the causes of the phenomena range as widely as the people who are doing the dreaming … Continue reading

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Science Fiction and the Literary World

In her condemnation of contemporary novels, Linda Miller’s “How Novels Came to Terms with the Internet,” makes several arguments that many novelists—actually she argues all novelists worthy of the name—avoid the implications of the internet in their work by confining … Continue reading

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The Stars of the Herschels and the Books of our Library

I was thinking of Caroline and William Herschel tonight, counting the many thousands of visible stars, not once being daunted by the enormous task. For most people in the cities, who only hear about the stars by report, or see … Continue reading

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