Starship Bandits by Jonathan Yanez and Ross Buzzel (2024)

The plot moves along well and the characters are tolerable.  The writing is somewhat flat and clumsy.  Science is disastrous.  I can accept orc-like aliens who look and act human and conveniently speak English. It's like Star Trek.  The authors' biology and physics are terrible.  Haploid insects? Body sizes and strengths that ignore basic scaling laws and biophysics? Every technical detail collapses under the slightest consideration. The bad science overwhelmed everything else and ruined the book for me. Not recommended. 1/5 Stars. 

Will we finally deploy the O'Neil mass driver?

In 1937, Edwin Northrup wrote about an "electric gun" in his (terrible) novel "Zero to Eighty." The book contained diagrams and the author actually built some prototypes at Princeton to prove out the idea, demonstrating it works well. Gerard O'Neill scaled up the concept and proposed a mass driver, aka "coil gun" in 1974.  That same year, O'Neill's "Colonization of Space" paper came out in Physics Today.  Reading that article changed my life. I joined the L5 Society (our song). It seems Jeff Bezos is also one of "Gerry's kids," embracing O'Neill's vision of human space colonization.

Among the key elements in O'Neill's vision is the use of mass drivers to move materials in space and also as a form of propulsion.  Land solar-powered mass drivers on a small asteroid, and use some of the mass of the asteroid itself as reaction mass to push the rock through space and park it in an orbit you want.  Robots assemble a large mass driver on the moon, then send the lunar regolith to a Lagrange point between the Earth and Moon, where solar smelters turn the ore into aluminum to build space colonies (and oxygen to breathe).  As O'Neill said in his lecture tour (that I attended), "The calculations [proving viability] are simple freshman physics."

If you are a "space nerd" like me, you should really read the book or watch the 2023 documentary "The High Frontier." I attended the MIT independent activities period (IAP) where they built a mass driver. I was a founding member of the L5 Society.

The military developed a rail gun for ships and the system is operational, but it will be phased out in favor of other systems that are superior for the military's purposes.

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A new Space company, "Moonshot Space" just came out of stealth and will develop a terrestrial mass driver to move fuel and cargo to low earth orbit. The payloads must be able to survive extremely high acceleration and the scale-up to send over 100 Kg per launch will be interesting to watch.

Perry Rhodan: Zwei Milliarden Hefte und immer noch optimistisch

Vor ein paar Wochen bin ich zufällig über Perry Rhodan gestolpert und war sofort interessiert: Seit September 1961 erscheint jede Woche ein neues Heft, ohne eine einzige Unterbrechung gab es nie. Über 3300 Hefte, mehr als zwei Milliarden verkaufte Exemplare weltweit, allein in Deutschland über eine Milliarde. Das ist größer als Harry Potter, Herr der Ringe und Star Wars zusammen.

Ich liebe die Science-Fiction der Goldenen Goldene Ära, die unerschütterliche Zuversicht, die knappen Dialoge, das pure Staunen über die Weite des Alls. Also habe ich mir die allerersten Hefte im Original besorgt und auf Deutsch gelesen.

Die Geschichte beginnt 1971 mit der Mondlandung von Major Perry Rhodan, der auf dem Mond ein havariertes Forschungsschiff der Arkoniden findet, ein uraltes, dekadentes Sternenreich, das technologisch Jahrtausende voraus ist. Rhodan nutzt die fremde Technik, zwingt die verfeindeten Erdblöcke zur Zusammenarbeit und gründet die Dritte Macht, um die Menschheit vor sich selbst zu schützen.

Die ersten drei Hefte hatte ich an zwei Abenden durch. Mein Eindruck: Das ist genau der optimistische, raketen treibende Raumfahrt-Sound, den ich wollte, schnoddrige Sprüche zwischen Piloten und Wissenschaftlern, harte Physik bei Triebwerken und Bahnmechanik, und auf jeder zweiten Seite ein neuer atemberaubender Einblick ins Universum. Die Arkoniden und ihr sterbendes Imperium faszinieren mich richtig.

Einzig die plötzliche Einführung von Mutanten mit Telepathie, Telekinese und Teleportation in Heft drei hat mich gestört, Parapsychologie liegt mir einfach nicht. Ich weiß aber, dass das ein Markenzeichen der Serie bleibt, also werde ich damit leben.
Fazit nach den ersten drei Heften: knappe 4 von 5 Sternen. Ich lese auf jeden Fall weiter, wahrscheinlich aber nicht linear, sondern springe zu den besonders gelobten Zyklen („Die Meister der Insel", „Aphilie", die Kosmonukleotide). Dreiundsechzig Jahre wöchentliche Zukunftsgeschichte linear zu lesen wäre selbst mir zu viel.

Wer jemals Heinlein-Jugendbücher, Doc Smith oder frühes Star Trek möchte und ein bisschen deutsche Heftroman-Ästhetik erträgt, sollte Perry Rhodan unbedingt einmal probieren. Es ist die längste und wohl optimistischste Zukunftsvision, die je geschrieben wurde, und sie läuft 2025 immer noch weiter. Ich berichte, wenn ich tiefer ins All vorgedrungen bin.

Crystal Soldier by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller (2006)

I started Crystal Soldier because my usual favorite authors have not released any light, enjoyable space opera in a while, and I wanted something new to fill that gap. Unfortunately, this book did not work for me at all.

The science feels flimsy, the world-building is unconvincing, and the antagonists never seem to have meaningful motivations. Even though the prose itself is clean and the editing is competent, the story is slow and the action lacks weight. The close-quarters combat scenes in particular are so implausible that they pulled me out of the narrative rather than drawing me in.

What frustrates me most is how poorly recommendation systems categorize works like this. They keep lumping together hard science fiction with fantasy, supernatural elements, and loose world-building. This book is another example of that failure. It sits much closer to fantasy than to any credible science fiction tradition, and it left me bored from start to finish. 1/5 Stars.

Consciousness is an illusion

I saw this interesting pop science article about new advances in neuro-technology for paralyzed people that included some serendipitous discovery about measurements of unconscious thoughts.  I went down a rabbit hole looking up qualia, sentience, and consciousness.  So I chatted with some of the AI chatter-bots about my understanding and weakly-held, strong belief that consciousness is an illusion.

Here is a (long) response from one of them that concludes consciousness is real and exists, but it is different from how we currently understand what it means.  I still feel that if consciousness does exist, it is radically different from our misperception of what it really is.

Here is a different response (shorter) that agrees with me and includes better rebuttals against the counter-factuals and strong negative references I found to my hypothesis.

Halcyon Years by by Alastair Reynolds (2025)

The book struggles with structural mismatches. Reynolds folds a hard-boiled noir detective story into a large-scale space-opera setting, but the elements clash. The noir props—paper files, land-line phones, cars, firearms, physical beatings, arson, low-tech murders—sit awkwardly beside robots, interstellar ark ships, and higher technologies. The mystery reveals its clues too late, which blunts the investigation. The pacing drags in places and the finale feels overloaded.

The book's strengths keep it afloat. The resurrected Yuri Gagarin as a hard-boiled detective is bizarre but effective. The characters are well drawn. The high-tech background holds together. The setting has scale and ambition.

Entertaining but unsatisfying. 3/5 stars.

StarGods: Star Carrier 9 by Ian Douglas (2020)

The book has minor flaws. Many characters ascend into "the Singularity," and political squabbles dominate much of the drama, action, and combat. Long-term security and the demands of perpetual vigilance are largely unresolved. The Enlightenment-era spirit of exploration is overshadowed by a seduction of utopic cyberspace.

Despite these issues, the novel succeeds as a conclusion. The storylines resolve convincingly within the universe Douglas built over the series. The characters remain engaging, and the scale of the narrative delivers the expected spectacle. 5/5 stars.

Contact by Joshua T Calvert (2025)

The book opens well. The setting is imaginative, and the mystery promises intrigue. The android characters have personality and humor, giving the story early momentum.

Then it collapses. As the mystery unravels, the plot turns chaotic. Sudden "alien magic" contrivances pile up until the ending negates everything that came before. The story depends on a chain of deus ex machina twists that feel careless and unearned.

A strong start wasted by a disastrous finish. 1/5 stars. Avoid this one.

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (2025)

This book collapses under its own thesis. The author ignores centuries of progress in life expectancy, public health, infrastructure, medicine, and standards of living. Instead, he romanticizes a mythical pre-industrial past, lamenting our supposed surrender to "the machine." His vision of history erases violence, starvation, disease, and labor exploitation. The result is a nostalgic fantasy built on false premises.

The critique of modern digital life—social media, online services, and passive entertainment—has some merit, but it rests on exaggeration. The author dismisses personal choice and human adaptability, assuming we are helpless before technology and the enshittifcation of social services.

The argument is shallow, moralizing, and historically blind. 1/5 stars.

A kiss before dying by Ira Levin (1953)

During his promotional tour for his first-ever novel (after 50 movies), Woody Allen commented that this book is the best book he ever read.  Intrigued, I grabbed it and added it to my reading list.  The writing is, indeed, fantastic.  The book pulled me in right away. The main character, Bud Corliss, plans his path to a millionaire's wealth through charm and cold calculation. He courts women, spins lies, and kills without a flinch.

The author builds the story through three sisters' viewpoints, one per section. The story slowly reveals Bud's well-planned grift. All of the characters, especially the three sisters, feel real and complex; Bud's steady narcissism is extremely unsettling in quiet ways. I was deeply immersed in his calculated risks and plans.

The book examines ambition without limits: how one person's polish erodes trust and safety, a reminder of everyday deceptions. This book is one of my top five reads this year. It's worth your time for Levin's clean tension. 5/5 Stars.