Free Republic

Way back in 1959 legendary science fiction author and political libertarian Robert Heinlein was quite clairvoyant in predicting the demise of our culture due to misguided progressive policies and beliefs. Much of Troopers’ “future history” is told via high school teacher and former infantryman Colonel Jean DuBois to protagonist Juan Rico (by the way, how is that for diversity — a novel from the 1950s in which the main character is Filipino and whose family speaks Tagalog?). In one scene, students in DuBois’ class are horrified that children couldn’t play in city parks in the 20th and early 21st centuries...

Hubble Space Telescope. The workhorse telescope has given us a photo of the new interstellar comet 2I/Borisov... 2I/Borisov has wandered into our Solar System from the deep cold of interstellar space, but nobody knows from whence it came, or how long it’s been travelling. Boris only the second object we’ve observed that’s come into our Solar System from somewhere else in the galaxy, and the Hubble snapped photos of it speeding along at about 177,000 kph (110,000 mph.) So far, the Hubble images are the sharpest ones yet. Comets contain a lot of water ice and other volatiles. When they...

C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) this summer provided renewed opportunities to study material left by outgassing. Using data gathered by the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), an international team of astronomers found that 2I/Borisov contains cyanide. Since comets and asteroids are essentially material left over from the formation of a planetary system, these studies will allow scientists to place constraints on the physical and chemical processes involved in the formation of extrasolar planets. Basically, it's like being able to study extrasolar planets without having to go there physically. Prof. Fitzsimmons told Universe Today, materials from other planetary systems, delivered to our doorstep—or at...

The team used the Osiris instrument at the 10.4m Gran Telescopio Canarias in La Palma, Spain, to obtain visible spectra - measurements of sunlight reflected by Borisov. By studying these spectra, scientists can draw conclusions about its chemical composition, including how it might differ from comets that were "born" around the Sun. "The spectrum is the red side of the comet's total spectrum, so the only thing we can see in the spectrum is the slope," said Miquel Serra Ricart, from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Tenerife. In coming days, the team will obtain measurements of the...

A comet first spotted by a Ukrainian amateur astronomer looks to be just the second known object to visit our cosmic neighborhood from beyond the solar system. What could be an even bigger deal is that this one was discovered as it's still approaching us. The comet was found by Gennady Borisov of Crimea on Aug. 30, and went by the temporary name GB00234 until very recently. After being watched by several other observatories over the past few weeks, it was given the official name of C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) by the Minor Planet Center on Wednesday. It appeared to follow...

In this collection of potential reading, Mark Yon suggests books that you may appreciate whilst considering your vote. It may have escaped your attention that during this week there are elections in the US. Whilst we do not endorse any particular candidate or party at SFFWorld (and the person mainly writing this is non-US anyway!)  but on behalf of SFFWorld we thought we would compile a list of ten SF books that use politics as an important part of their world. Be warned – not all of these are future visions you may like…

Andrew Anglin, 30, the publisher of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, wouldn’t say where he was. He wouldn’t even say if he was in America. Anglin has gotten a lot of media requests after the Southern Poverty Law Center said Dylann Roof, the man accused of killing nine black parishioners in Charleston, S.C., last week, was possibly a commenter on the Daily Stormer, Anglin said in a Skype audio interview Tuesday. Anglin decided to respond to a Los Angeles Times interview request because -- it’s a small world -- he saw the reporter tweet Monday night about reading “The Forever...

When Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers hit theaters 16 years ago today, most American critics slammed it. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin panned the “crazed, lurid spectacle,” as featuring “raunchiness tailor-made for teen-age boys.” Jeff Vice, in the Deseret News, called it “a nonstop splatterfest so devoid of taste and logic that it makes even the most brainless summer blockbuster look intelligent.” Roger Ebert, who had praised the “pointed social satire” of Verhoeven’s Robocop, found the film “one-dimensional,” a trivial nothing “pitched at 11-year-old science-fiction fans.” But those critics had missed the point. Starship Troopers is satire, a ruthlessly...

Tomorrow is election day here in the U.S., though it’s an off-year, so it’s mostly local elections, bond votes, and the occasional state constitutional amendment. I plan on voting, and I vote every chance I get. In fact, it’s a bit strange that I haven’t already voted because I’ve become a big fan of early voting in the last few years. (Notably, I had to bust out of the hospital to vote in the 2008 presidential primary, so I don’t like to leave things until election day.) Voting and science fiction almost inevitably brings up Robert Heinlein’s novel “Starship Troopers.”...

...The one thing modern education does not do very well is teach critical thinking and this needs to change. In my own life, it was the hall way bull sessions of high school and college that probably did more along this line than any class. In Space Cadet, this took the form of the hall way bull session, but in Starship Troopers it was an actual class called History and Moral Philosophy...

When Robert A. Heinlein opened his Colorado Springs newspaper on April 5, 1958, he read a full-page ad demanding that the Eisenhower administration stop testing nuclear weapons. The science-fiction author was flabbergasted. He called for the formation of the Patrick Henry League and spent the next several weeks writing and publishing his own polemic that lambasted "Communist-line goals concealed in idealistic-sounding nonsense" and urged Americans not to become "soft-headed." Then Heinlein made an important professional decision. He quit writing the manuscript he had been working on--eventually it would become one of his best-known books, "Stranger in a Strange Land"--and started...

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