fiction
NASA’s first new wind tunnel in 40 years will turn science fiction to fact
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Flying cars. Space tourism. Safe reentry for astronauts coming back from Mars. These technologies are still science fiction, but some won’t be for much longer, according to Charles “Mike” Fremaux, NASA Langley Research Center’s chief engineer for intelligent flight systems. To test these concepts, particularly in regard to public and military …
Technology really can be stranger than fiction at times
I’ve been reading and rereading novels of the great writer Ursula K Le Guin over the past year, and they have had me thinking about the difficulty of writing about technologies that will (or won’t) be in use in one’s imagined future worlds. Much has been written about the influence of science fiction on eventual …
Northeast Indiana health experts separate facts from fiction on COVID-19 vaccine
NORTHEAST INDIANA, Ind. (WPTA) – Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb confirmed Indiana’s first COVID-19 case on March 6, 2020. After that, like much of the country – and the world, the coronavirus began to spread quickly throughout the Hoosier state. In December, Indiana had over 8,000 infections reported in a single day. But a few days …
Trump’s fiction on health care, voting fraud
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump made a dizzying array of misleading claims about voting fraud and falsely asserted that he was the one who ensured that people with preexisting medical problems will be covered by health insurance in opening remarks at the Republican National Convention. A look at his statements Monday: HEALTH CARE TRUMP: …
Oliver Letwin, the unlikely merchant of technological doom | Politics
Oliver Letwin’s strange and somewhat alarming new book begins at midnight on Thursday 31 December 2037. In Swindon – stay with me! – a man called Aameen Patel is working the graveyard shift at Highways England’s traffic HQ when his computer screen goes blank, and the room is plunged into darkness. He tries to report …
The Aeronauts: Facts about fiction in Eddie Redmayne’s new film
Image copyright The Aeronauts Image caption Eddie Redmayne plays James Glaisher in The Aeronauts but his real-life expedition partner makes way for a fictional character A new film tells the story of a record-breaking balloon flight. It’s based on a real-life ascent, but how accurate is it – and does it matter? Eddie Redmayne is …
Caroline Criado Perez: ‘No one ever changed the world by being nice’ | Books
The book I am currently readingDeborah Levy’s The Cost of Living. After years of reading almost exclusively men, I’m now addicted to sharp female writers like Levy who write about what it is to be a woman. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of the excitement of recognising how I see the world in a …
Beware Greta Thunberg’s science fiction — the end of the world is not nigh
Thunberg, 16, is in New York at the invitation of the United Nations, having already established herself as a public figure in Europe by leading mass truancies to protest against climate change (“Fridays for the Future”). Rather than flying, she sailed across the Atlantic in an “emissions-free yacht in order to spare the earth’s atmosphere …
‘Science fiction has conquered the world’
THE MAN WHO CREATED THE WORLD OF GAME OF THRONES ON SNOBBERY, FANDOM AND WHY DUBLIN’S WORLDCON NEXT WEEK WILL BE LIKE A FAMILY REUNION George RR Martin has only missed one World Science Fiction Convention, aka Worldcon, in three decades. “I came to my first one in ’71 in Boston, Massachusetts, with eight stories in …
German sci-fi fans lap up dystopian tales of Brexit Britain | World news
The scene is Europe, about 40 years from now. Climate change has turned the Netherlands into a swamp and Portugal into an economic powerhouse, thanks to wave-energy plants paid for by wealthy Brazilian investors. Across the continent there are fears about Christian fundamentalist terrorists carrying out arson attacks on abortion clinics. Europol use walkable holograms …
