Black Hole Space Travel

I've been thinking about this concept a lot, during the long draggy hours at work, another far out sci fi idea to throw into the maw of my imagination, to be be chewed up and spat out.

It's not the normal view of black hole space travel, which posits them as a sot of wormhole short cut from one place in space time to another. My admittedly very limited research into black holes doesn't lead me to think this is a likely conclusion. But I was wondering if they could be used as a potential gravitational slingshot mechanism, like Voyager 2 and the major planets.

You would have to get in close, because as far as I can make out the sphere of influence of a normal black hole's gravity is not as wide as you might think. But as you get in close, you have to maintain practically the speed of light to maintain a stable orbit around the event horizon. So it makes me wonder if you could use ordinary black holes to accelarate interstellar travel up to near close to light speed, and whether there are enough black holes around to make this practical.

Just throwing something out there...

STORY - The Brain Drain

It's not hard, perhaps, to see where the inspiration for this piece came from.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 01/04/2013

The Brain Drain

As I turned on the television, I had been feeling great all day. I had been running, been cycling, had a great idea for ending world poverty, and after a cup of tea had begun to map out an organo-metallic cure for cancer. An attractive girl had phoned me up to line up a date, and my latest expressionist painting was coming along a storm.

The Adventure Game - a Joy of my Childhood

The Adventure Game was always something that filled me with excitement when I was a kid. Along with Blake's 7, which I'm sure it used to share an evening with in the early 80s, it was something I'd wait to see with all the childish excitment my body could muster.

A feeling I never have any more, ever.

Some wonderful person has been putting episodes online! Here's a bit of the first one ever made, with the charming Juilan Bream and John Williams theme tune, and a somewhat familiar looking future newsreader on duty as a shape shifting dragon.

This is obviously the earliest incarnation of the show - the evaporating floor seen in this clip would be replaced with the more familiar "Vortex" challenge of later years. I remember in particular the "Drogna" - the currency the dragon residents, or Argonds, of Arg. Little plastic discs with a coloured shape on, their value was derived from multiplying the number of sides with the colours position in the "Richard of York Gave Battle" mnenomic - hence a red circle was worth 1, and a blue pentagon was worth 25.

I was so obessed with the Drogna it was a mainstay of my internal aspergic head stories for years.

I used to love the computer game sequence, where early on the team's alpha male would sit at the keyboard of an Apple 2 to play a little text only adventure, where the command "SUBTRACT ADDER" sticks in my memory for some reason. Later on came the BBC model B, and the game Dogran Hole, where a little grumpy space dog would go into a hole in the wall, to be guided by the bloke, again, in a 3D Monster Maze type game. Thus the team would be distracted from failing to work out Lesley Judd was the evil mole, as happened every week.

I was thrilled as anything when Paul Darrow, the immortal Avon from Blake's 7, showed up one week, although his beard was offputting and he met a dismal evaporation fate for failing to remember a "PENTAGON-RED" tile sequence or some similar slip up.

I miss this show. Of course, The Crystal Maze was similar in conception, right down to the idea you progressed by winning crystals, but its charm was negated by the fact the contestants were a bunch of dimwitted yuppie cretins in boiler suits, as opposed to clever people like Heinz Wolff and Johnny Ball. Nowaadays, we have Dale Wintin camping it up at dimwits on lottery garbage output.

The joy of childhood can never be returned. Seeking it drives you mad, but watch these clips and be reminded of it for a little while...

As a final treat, here's David "The Chinese Detective" Yip taking on the Vortex in a later series.

Sci fi at oxfam

 

I love the Oxfam Bookshop, usually some interesting books to be found in sci fi, fantasy, and also UFOs and Cryptozoology which I think are complete bunk, but I enjoy reading nonetheless.

Quantum Entanglement

I think the shoe analogy is the simplest way of describing Quantum Entanglement so that idiots, like me for instance, can understand it, but I can't find that video - you have a pair of shoes in separate boxes, open one and find it's the left one, then you know at that moment, even if it's on the other side of the universe, that the other shoe is a right one. Do this with paired electrons, the same thing applies.

I've been trying to clever, and envisage the use of this theory - as, I'm told by a work colleague, computer games have been doing. It's not something I've seen in any sci fi stuff yet, but I'm sure it must be there. I read about entangled computing in New Scientist, and I saw a you tube vid where someone was saying the concept did not make teleportation a possibility.

I think about communications...if information about shoes and electrons can be essentially transmitted across the universe instantaneously, then can more complex information, or conversations, or information from a spacecraft?

The proper scientists and theoreticians will probably be laughing and queueing up to matter me with logic mallets at this point.

Still, it does open up perhaps more realistic communications concept than any Star Trek "Sub-Space" radio for writing or filmic purposes. Who  knows?

One thing I know is that I don't know!

STORY - I am the Resurrection

Written while listening to the famous Stone Roses track of the same name.

I Am The Resurrection

I was brought down to the shore and nailed so firmly to the iron cross you could have dissolved me in acid and I'd still be hanging there.

In washed the sea and a wreckage of razer shells, mermaids purses and starfish drank the blood from the mud as it settled from my wrists and ankles. Moth faced children laughed at me as they made sandcastles that the incoming tide just bounced off.

This happened every day for three years, until the tide rusted the foot of the cross away and I toppled sideways into the surflife, choking on the sand and salt, being stung by mocking Portugese Men'O War and having my welts pissed on by acid bladdered thugs from the local seaside estate, straight through their tracksuits.

The powers that be decided that I had suffered enough, and when the tide finally washed over by sunburnt head, that was the end of me. The blue sea faded to indigo, then black. It was over.

Then the dawn came, unexpected, out of time. Secured between four horses ridden by saints, slowly moving away from each other, an inch a day...

It never ends.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20/03/2013

Danny Boyle's Sunshine

Sunshine has always been one of my favourite films, yet Danny Boyle was so put off by the response it got he announced he was never going to touch the sci fi genre again, and Prof (Then Doctor) Brian Cox who worked as a science advisor on the film before his current TV omniescence jokes about what a complete box office disaster it was.

I can't understand why, and yet I can understand why.

The film itself suffers from an attack of schizophrenia about 2/3 of the way through. Prior to that it had been a work of hard sci fi, with lots of lovingly constrcuted shots of technologically non far fetched spacecraft heading towards a vivid, beautiful and active sun; a sun that acts as a major character in the film, a sun that causes some of our intrepid group of scientists and astronauts to undergo a kind of solar psychosis.

Then the Icarus 2, the spacecraft on a vital mission to save humanity by launching a manhattan sized nucelar device into a faltering sun, docks with its predecessor, and the film lurches awakwardly into slasher mode - Mark Strong with a growly voice and a bad case of psoriasis rampages around with vibrating knives and an artistic sense of how to pose murdered botanists. You never see the maniac in any other than a hyperactive blurred fashion, which I always assume was done to hide dodgy make up work. It really doesn't work as horror or science fiction, and this combined with its hard sci fi credentials ensured its box office doom.

Yet there is so much to enjoy about the film, I'd happily watch it again and again - this piece is prompted by two viewings last night. The cast, including Boyle's favourite actor of the period Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans and Hiryoki Sanada, is great; the music by John Murphy and Underworlde is stunning; and finally the celstial spectacle mindblowing with a huge sun burning its way into the minds of the characters and the viewers and a simple, affecting scene of the crew watching a transit of Mercury that has become one of my favourite shots in cinema.

I'd recommend this film for late night viewing with a strong rum and coke - turn the lights out, and the sound up, and let its beauty wash all over you.