{"id":1391,"date":"2007-05-07T09:05:43","date_gmt":"2007-05-07T09:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/05\/07\/thrilling-tales-of-astrophysic\/"},"modified":"2007-05-07T09:05:43","modified_gmt":"2007-05-07T09:05:43","slug":"thrilling-tales-of-astrophysic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/05\/07\/thrilling-tales-of-astrophysic\/","title":{"rendered":"Thrilling Tales of Astrophysics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll is pining for the good old days<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I’m going through one of my “I would kill for some new SF” phases, SF in this case being defined in a narrow and idiosyncratic way. In particular, I want the modern version of those old SF stories where SF writers, having just read some startling New Fact [Black holes could be very small! Mercury isn’t tide-locked! The Galilean moons are far more interesting than we thought!], would craft some thrilling tale intended to highlight whatever it was that the author had just learned.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I suspect this is mostly due to James’s very… particular tastes in science fiction. But clearly, the solution here is to set up a new online magazine specializing in just this sort of thing– James Nicoll’s Thrilling Tales of Astrophysics<\/cite>, or some such. That’ll get him all the stories he could ever want to read, and then some…<\/p>\n

Of course, another issue, as noted in the comments, is that many of the recent discoveries in astrophysics aren’t what you’d call plot-friendly, or, as one commenter put it: “tidally-locked super-Jovians with endless star-driven storms in their atmospheres of boiling rock are impressive scenery but you can’t really use them as setting.” But isn’t this just a failure of imagination?<\/p>\n

So, here’s a Plot Suggestion Open Thread: Pick some recent discovery in astrophysics, and suggest a way to use it in an interesting SF story. You don’t have to write<\/strong> the story (particularly not in my comments, Jonathan Vos Post), just the elevator pitch. There’s got to be something interesting that could be done with an endless star-driven storm in an atmosphere of boiling rock– what is it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll is pining for the good old days: I’m going through one of my “I would kill for some new SF” phases, SF in this case being defined in a narrow and idiosyncratic way. In particular, I want the modern version of those old SF stories where SF writers, having… Continue reading Thrilling Tales of Astrophysics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,33,11,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-in_the_news","category-science","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}