Posted inFun

Worst Science Fiction of All Time

Shoot to kill

July 1995

(I wrote this about six or seven years ago and had it posted to my website where I was a graduate student. I thought that it was lost forever, and I only managed to find it because several people archived it. Truly, nothing ever dies on the web. I thank these kind people. It’s a little worn by time and could stand some editing, but I’ll leave it as it originally was.)

Of course, with a title such as this, I had better be able to prove it. After all, hundreds of books are written in the genre each year. Thousands exist to pick from. And who’s to say another, more awful book than the one I’m about to describe, will appear and usurp the uncoveted title of Worst Science Fiction Novel Ever?

These caveats notwithstanding, however, my faith is strong. In fact, I am so absolutely sure that I’m correct in my choice, that I’m willing to risk the title “worst ever”. More on this later.

Many aficionados of science-fiction were weaned, not with short stories and books, but with TV. So it was with me. I started with the original Star Trek, others perhaps with Space 1999. The youth of today will have to make due with Deep Space Nine or Submarine Show (whatever the name is). These shows eased us into the classics, such as Foundation or Stranger in a Strange Land. If you were lucky. Unlucky neophytes wandered into a L. Ron Hubbard treatise or some pulp boiler, complete with front cover fanged monsters menacing beautiful large-breasted women.

Once these innocents, these hapless souls, enter the morass of disagreeable pages they are lost forever to science fiction. Nothing will ever convince them to reenter the fold. Perhaps it is our duty, then, to purge the field of ill-conceived and poorly executed works?

This supposes that one is able to judge the intrinsic merit of the text. Modern critics claim that it cannot be done. They may be right. But this is academic to our subject: what does watching TV have to do with learning to read science fiction? In this case, everything.

Walter Koening played the lovable and overly proud Russian navigator of the Starship Enterprise in the original Star Trek. He appeared in the Star Trek movies. He also wrote a book. Perhaps he felt an inward pull, a conviction that led him to convey a profound message. Or, like William Shatner, it may be that he was trying to cash in on the series and his personal success and make a buck. You be the judge.

Posted inStatistics

Two differences in perception between global cooling and global warming

As is well known by now, a passel of climatologists in the 1970s, including such personalities as Stephen “It’s OK to Exaggerate To Get People To Believe” Schneider, tried to get the world excited about the possibility, and the dire consequences, of global cooling.

From the 1940s to near the end of the 1970s, the global mean temperature did indeed trend downwards. Using this data as a start, and from the argument that any change in climate is bad, and anything that is bad must be somebody’s fault, Schneider and others began to warn that an ice age was imminent, and that it was mainly our fault.

The causes of this global cooling were said to be due to two main things: orbital forcing and an increase in particulate matter—aerosols—in the atmosphere. The orbital forcing—a fancy term meaning changes in the earth’s distance and orientation to the sun, and the consequent alterations in the amount of solar energy we get as a result of these changes—was, as I hope is plain, nobody’s fault, and because of that, it excited very little interest.

But the second cause had some meat behind it; because, do you see, aerosols can be made by people. Drive your car, manufacture oil, smelt some iron, even breath and you are adding aerosols to the atmosphere. Some of these particles, if they diffuse to the right part of the atmosphere, will reflect direct sunshine back into space, depriving us of its beneficial warming effects. Other aerosols will gather water around them and form clouds, which both reflect direct radiation and capture outgoing radiation—clouds both cool and warm, and the overall effect was largely unknown. Aerosols don’t hang around in the air forever. Since they are heavy, over time they will fall or wash out. It’s also hard to do too much to reduce the man-made aerosol burden of the atmosphere; except the obvious and easy things, like install cleaner smoke stacks.

Pause during the 1980s when nothing much happened to the climate.

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