author: mark brake

How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science Mark Brake, Neil Hook. The decoding of this cipher is Verne's ... decipher ancient inscriptions... so in natural history one must dig through the archives of the world, extract ancient ...

... torrent of cheap and cheesy Euro- spy movies that taunted Bond's gilded heels in the 1960s. Vesper Lynd is a far cry from that kind of Bond girl. Strong, seductive, exotic, and feminine without ever ending up as putty in Bond's dubious ...

... Steampunk. Doctor. Another notable alternate history is The Difference Engine ... steampunk setting. The history of Doctor Who is full of steampunk. Especially ... robot operated restaurant. Finally, as steampunk is most commonly associated ...

... muggles might become a little like cyborgs, or walking science labs. Through a prosthetic eye, we might have available a whole range of apps and devices. An x-ray vision app might enable muggle military recruits to detect landmines on ...

... Vorlons in Babylon 5 are also perhaps too unbelievable. An ancient and technologically advanced race, the Vorlons are super-psychic energy beings who genetically manipulated most of the younger races with daddy issues. When interacting ...

... Coruscant underworld was a different story. As Sheev Palpatine once said to Anakin, “Do you know the rarest resource on Coruscant, my boy? Sky ... planet during their lifetimes. Future Cities on Earth How does Coruscant compare with future.

... Earth that are still in abundance on Earth? It's possible that the humans on Coruscant evolved to outcompete the other native life-forms, eventually overrunning and urbanizing the whole planet. However, the likelihood of them being ...

... Earth, on Coruscant, or on Mandalore, would have resembled vagabond stars, and they would have beguiled and bewitched sky-watchers for many generations. The planets were small in number. On Earth, only seven of these “wanderers” (the ...

... little success, the Muggles carried on with their weird experiments. They strapped magnets to the birds' wings. They even wound magnetic coils around the pigeons' heads. Even when the Muggles fitted the birds' eyes with frosted glass ...

... Vorlon transport in Babylon 5, the Millennium Falcon and the TIE Fighters from Star Wars, and the Borg cube and the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek. The silhouette of the famous Federation starship has changed little since The ...

... Voight-Kampff machine is a fictional polygraph-type contraption, used by the LAPD, to test whether a subject is an android replicant or human. The machine measures bodily data such as respiration, heart rate, blush level, and eye ...

Communicating the Science and Culture of Astrobiology Mark Brake. Roadside Picnic and the elusive alien In contrast we have Roadside Picnic. The Strugatsky brothers have used the elusive alien to such excellent effect that the text ...