The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Posts tagged with “Science Fiction”
The Real Infinite Improbability Drive: Cloaking Devices, UFOs, and ESP
Away in front of them a huge white dome that bulged against the sky cracked down in the middle, split, and slowly folded itself down into the ground. … Beneath it lay uncovered a huge starship, one hundred and fifty metres long, shaped like a sleek running shoe, perfectly white and mindboggingly beautiful. At the […]
Psi of Regret: Pitfalls of Prophecy from Patanjali to Paul Muad’Dib
It’s been over twenty years since I last read Dune, but inspired partly by the phenomenal documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, I recently re-read Frank Herbert’s masterpiece and a few of the sequels. Although the latter are uneven, I need hardly say that Dune itself holds up magnificently. It is still the one novel I would put […]
Menopausal Mystics in Space
In my “Psychic Astronauts” post several months ago I thought I was being somewhat original by imagining a hypothetical cost-efficient scenario for our future exploration and colonization of space—one that made use of the interesting (at-this-point-unproven, admittedly highly controversial) notion of nonlocal mind. Specifically, I suggested that highly trained psychic explorers could remote view distant […]
The Orbit of Being (Thoughts on ‘Gravity’)
Back in the day, in English class, we all learned that stories can be broken down into a few basic conflicts: Man Versus Man, Man Versus Himself, etc. The one that always seemed the least interesting to me was Man Versus Nature. You don’t really see this conflict very often. It’s really the hardest kind […]
Mutants, Mystics, and Scientologists (Thoughts on Jeffrey Kripal, Gnosticism, and Sci-Fi Spirituality)
Call me a slow learner, but it took me until my early forties to realize that some of the best and most inspiring things in life, besides girls, are the things I was obsessed with as a 10-year-old boy (i.e., just before I discovered girls). At 10, I was a typical nerdy 1970s kid, curled […]
The Martians’ Horrific Geometry
“He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong…” H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” A surprising number of features on Mars show qualities at least somewhat suggestive of having been sculpted not […]
UFOs and the Midlife Crisis
I’ve obviously been thinking a lot about UFOs in the last couple months—duh—so out of a sense of blogging duty I thought I should get out my DVD of Close Encounters and watch it again, and perhaps comment on it. It has been a couple years. I totally disagree with Spielberg’s overt premise—that ETs are […]
WWKD?
All this talk of nonhumans, transhumans, post-humans. The coming Disclosure. The Singularity. We’re all focused beyond humanity to something else, some future state of being, some other species, something that transforms us and raises us to some new quantum state. The more I think about this stuff, the more I think about Star Trek. The […]
… Speaking of Blade Runner
I have just paused Blade Runner: The Final Cut. It has taken me, what, two years, to watch this version, I guess because I’m so attached to The Director’s Cut that I was afraid of being disappointed. But this version is better (so far). The changes are very subtle, almost unnoticeable (mostly slight editing tweaks), […]
