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The Old Cosmonaut And The Construction Worker Dream Of Mars
"The Old Cosmonaut and the Construction Worker Dream of Mars" is a 2002 science fiction short story by Ian McDonald. It was first published in the anthology ''Mars Probes'' and received positive reviews upon release, with several critics considering it the best or one of the best stories in the anthology. Synopsis The story follows two characters in parallel universes, both with dreams of Mars exploration: a retired Estonian cosmonaut and a young Indian labourer. The cosmonaut was scheduled to go on the first human mission to Mars when the space program was scrapped, and still longs for the red planet. The construction worker has a low-paying job operating a remotely controlled robot on the surface of Mars as part of a terraforming effort. The two end up meeting each other in a "quantum space" where their universes come into contact. Publication history The story was originally published in the 2002 anthology ''Mars Probes'', edited by Peter Crowther. It was later republishe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ian McDonald (British Author)
Ian McDonald (born 1960) is a British science fiction novelist, living in Belfast. His themes include nanotechnology, postcyberpunk settings, and the impact of rapid social and technological change on non-Western societies. Early life Ian McDonald was born in 1960, in Manchester, to a Scottish father and Irish mother. He moved to Belfast when he was five and has lived there ever since. He lived through the whole of the 'Troubles' (1968–1999), and his sensibility has been permanently shaped by coming to understand Northern Ireland as a post-colonial society imposed on an older culture. Career McDonald sold his first story to a local Belfast magazine when he was 22, and in 1987 became a full-time writer. He has also worked in TV consultancy within Northern Ireland, contributing scripts to the Northern Irish Sesame Workshop production of ''Sesame Tree''. McDonald's debut novel was ''Desolation Road'' (1988), which takes place on a far future Mars in a town that develops around ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ares Express
''Desolation Road'' is a 1988 science fiction novel written by Ian McDonald. It was McDonald's first published novel. The plot takes place on a far future Mars in a town that develops around an oasis in the terraformed Martian desert. McDonald published a sequel, ''Ares Express'', in 2001. Plot In the future, scientist Dr. Alimantando is trekking across the desert of a terraformed Mars and meets a humanoid "greenperson", who claims to have traveled through time to make sure Alimantando is in the right place at the right time to fulfill his destiny. It comes in the form of a 700-year-old sentient ROTECH environmental engineering module, or orph, which lies dying in the desert. It bequeaths itself and its resources to Dr. Alimantando, who dismantles the machine and uses its components to build his own oasis in the desert, which he names Desolation Road (instead of Destination Road) after consuming too much wine. Over time, several people find themselves at this settlement in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Short Stories Set On Mars
Short may refer to: Places * Short (crater), a lunar impact crater on the near side of the Moon * Short, Mississippi, an unincorporated community * Short, Oklahoma, a census-designated place People * Short (surname) * List of people known as the Short Arts, entertainment, and media * Short film, a cinema format (also called film short or short subject) * Short story, prose generally readable in one sitting * ''The Short-Timers'', a 1979 semi-autobiographical novel by Gustav Hasford, about military short-timers in Vietnam Brands and enterprises * Short Brothers, a British aerospace company * Short Brothers of Sunderland, former English shipbuilder Computing and technology * Short circuit, an accidental connection between two nodes of an electrical circuit * Short integer, a computer datatype Finance * Short (finance), stock-trading position * Short snorter, a banknote signed by fellow travelers, common during World War II Foodstuffs * Short pastry, one which is rich in butte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Fiction Short Stories
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek man ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mars Trilogy
The ''Mars'' trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson that chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars through the personal and detailed viewpoints of a wide variety of characters spanning almost two centuries. Ultimately more utopian than dystopian, the story focuses on egalitarian, sociological, and scientific advances made on Mars, while Earth suffers from overpopulation and ecological disaster. The three novels are ''Red Mars'' (1992), ''Green Mars'' (1993), and ''Blue Mars'' (1996). ''The Martians'' (1999) is a collection of short stories set in the same fictional universe. ''Red Mars'' won the BSFA Award in 1992 and Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1993. ''Green Mars'' won the Hugo Award for Best Novel and Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1994. ''Blue Mars'' also won the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1997. '' Icehenge'' (1984), Robinson's first novel about Mars, is not set in this universe but deals with similar themes a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson (born March 23, 1952) is an American writer of science fiction. He has published twenty-two novels and numerous short stories and is best known for his ''Mars'' trilogy. His work has been translated into 24 languages. Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes and feature scientists as heroes. Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award. Robinson's work has been labeled by ''The Atlantic'' as "the gold-standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing." According to an article in ''The New Yorker'', Robinson is "generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers." Early life and education Robinson was born in Waukegan, Illinois. He moved to Southern California as a child. In 1974, he earned a B.A. in literature from the University of California, San Diego. In 1975, he earned an M.A. in Eng ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mars In Fiction
Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, has appeared as a Setting (narrative), setting in works of fiction since at least the mid-1600s. It became the most popular celestial object in fiction in the late 1800s as the Moon was evidently lifeless. At the time, the predominant genre depicting Mars was utopian fiction. Contemporaneously, the mistaken belief that there are canals on Mars emerged and made its way into fiction. ''The War of the Worlds'', H. G. Wells' story of an alien invasion of Earth by sinister Martians, was published in 1897 and went on to have a large influence on the science fiction genre. Life on Mars appeared frequently in fiction throughout the first half of the 1900s. Apart from enlightened as in the utopian works from the turn of the century, or evil as in the works inspired by Wells, Extraterrestrial intelligence, intelligent and human-like Martians also began to be depicted as decadent, a portrayal that was popularized by Edgar Rice Burroughs in the ''Barsoom ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James K
James is a common English language surname and given name: *James (name), the typically masculine first name James * James (surname), various people with the last name James James or James City may also refer to: People * King James (other), various kings named James * Saint James (other) * James (musician) * James, brother of Jesus Places Canada * James Bay, a large body of water * James, Ontario United Kingdom * James College, a college of the University of York United States * James, Georgia, an unincorporated community * James, Iowa, an unincorporated community * James City, North Carolina * James City County, Virginia ** James City (Virginia Company) ** James City Shire * James City, Pennsylvania * St. James City, Florida Arts, entertainment, and media * ''James'' (2005 film), a Bollywood film * ''James'' (2008 film), an Irish short film * ''James'' (2022 film), an Indian Kannada-language film * James the Red Engine, a character in ''Thomas the Tank En ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Di Filippo
Paul Di Filippo (born October 29, 1954) is an American science fiction writer. He is a regular reviewer for print magazines ''Asimov's Science Fiction'', ''The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction'', ''Science Fiction Eye'', ''The New York Review of Science Fiction'', '' Interzone'', and ''Nova Express'', as well as online at ''Science Fiction Weekly''. He is a member of the Turkey City Writer's Workshop. Along with Michael Bishop, Di Filippo has published a series of novels under the pseudonym Philip Lawson. Antonio Urias writes that Di Filippo's writing has a "tradition of the bizarre and the weird". His novella '' A Year in the Linear City'' was nominated for a Hugo award. Early life Di Filippo was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Critical reception Antonio Urias praised the collection ''The Steampunk Trilogy'' (1995) in a brisk review, writing in summary that the tripartite book "contains three bizarre and occasionally humorous novels taking the reader from Queen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Literary History
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes''. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. In English grammar, " a", and its variant " an", are indefinite articles. History The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also written 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, which consisted entirely of consonants (for that reason, it is also called an abjad to distinguish it fro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Worldbuilding
Worldbuilding is the process of constructing a world, originally an imaginary one, sometimes associated with a fictional universe. Developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers. Worldbuilding often involves the creation of geography, a backstory, flora, fauna, inhabitants, technology and often if writing speculative fiction, different races. This may include social customs as well as invented languages for the world. The world could encompass different planets spanning vast distances of space or be limited in scope to a single small village. World building exists in novels, tabletop role-playing games, and visual media such as films, video games and comics. Prior to 1900 most worldbuilding was conducted by novelists, who could leave imagination of the fictional setting in part to the reader. Some authors of fiction set multiple works in the same world. This is known as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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