Given that my Perihelion essays and book reviews are no longer available online, I'm thinking of reposting more of them here at Steemit.
If I do that, I'll also follow through on an idea that is now two years old:
Publish an ebook of the "Best of" Carol's essays and reviews at Perihelion.
Seeing excerpts of my reviews on book covers is one of the most gratifying parts of being an unpaid (or marginally remunurated) reviewer. This one is a special favorite:
Last year, for the 12-February-17 issue, Sam Bellotto Jr had invited 15 writers to envision the near future:
At “Perihelion,” we thought it would be fun to ask some of our more regular contributors to weigh in on tomorrow—what they think is in store for humanity ten or more years down the pike. Interestingly, the number of votes for a more utopian future far outweigh those for a dystopian one like the kind depressingly popularized in books and movies. Maybe that’s why. But could science fiction writers possibly get it wrong?
I wrote about futuristic fabrics--and graphene.
# Smart Clothing
Ten year from now may not be enough time for revolutionary changes to culture, technology, science, medicine, or politics. Fashion? Maybe. A novel I reviewed for “Perihelion” last year comes to mind:
Jackets include Tasers, tiny enough to hide in the small of your back. How does a jacket keep a Taser fully charged? “The jacket produced power from air. The manual said something about absorbing local electromagnetic charges and storing them in built-in batteries,” the character Kris explains in “The Courier: A San Angeles Novel” by Gerald Brandt. “I didn’t care how the thing worked, as long as it kept my comm unit charged and gave the bike a bit of extra juice when it needed it.”
This reminds me of a beloved Carl Sagan quote: “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” It also reminds me how boring driverless cars would be. Kris drives the hell out of that bike in Brandt’s book, as does another courier in Terry Irving’s novel “Courier,” set in the 1970s, when driving big-ass engines, fast cars, and motorcycles was a novelty and a thrill—and, as long as real men and wild women exist, it’s a thrill that will never go out of style. Maybe gas guzzling rides will be taxed beyond our reach, but the silence of electric cars, the surrender of control to a driverless car, sounds better suited to a colony on Mars or an isolated city, but not the wide open territory I grew up on.
Is Kris’s electro-magnificent jacket just a pipe dream of a science fiction author? No. Fiber-based nano-generators build up electrical energy in clothing from physical movement, ultrasonic waves, and maybe even our own blood flow.
(The rest of this essay is no longer online, but hidden away in archives.)
One review took First Place in the 2017 Preditors and Editors Readers Poll:
The book:
The Review: "Greek Tragedy Over Saturn"
GETTING “SPACED” USED TO MEAN something fairly harmless and fun, but science fiction authors have turned it into a death sentence more certain, more horrifying, than walking the plank. Great adventure stories used to deliver protagonists who’d survive getting planked. How last-century. Two novels in a row, I’ve witnessed spaceship doors open only to have perfectly good people sucked into the icy vacuum of the universe. Oh, I’ve complained. Why invent these memorable characters and go to great lengths to bring them to life and get me to care about them, only to make me see them getting flushed into eternity? It happens in Joe Occhipinti’s “Ashfallen.” It happens in Rhett Bruno’s “From Ice to Ashes.”
Bruno apparently took it to heart last year when I said “Titanborn” reads like a Greek Tragedy.
“Hah!” he tweeted. “Science fiction Greek Tragedy. It's my specialty!”
(Perhaps I will reprint the rest of the review in an anthology)
Cover graphics by Elena Giorgi for "Perihelion Book Reviews"
art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics
