Sheila's LiveJournal

I have another blog about elements of science fiction up at the SFWA Nebulawards site:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/things_that_go_bump_in_the_dark/

This is a review of District 9:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/district_9_review_we_have_met_the_alien_and_he_is_us/

I'm packing for Westercon in Tempe, over the July 4th weekend. I already took the greyhounds to stay with my daughter. The cat and I will spend a romantic night alone together here before my plane leaves tomorrow morning. I'm sure he's thrilled!

I'm especially looking forward to a panel Sunday morning with Stan Schmidt and Juliette Wade on creating alien languages.

My latest musing on life and science fiction is up:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/fantastic_voyages/

If you haven't seen it yet, do so this weekend. The new STAR TREK movie is well worth seeing. The young actors are excellent in their roles, not obviously trying to ape the mannerisms of the original cast but managing to suggest them in subtle ways. We get explanations for all manner of puzzling things in the series -- such as why Kirk calls Dr McCoy "Bones" (not as a nod to the old slang term for doctor: sawbones). The special effects are gorgeous. The plot is exciting. And we have the added pleasure of an appearance by Leonard Nimoy as the later Spock, courtesy of some handwaving rubbery science for which I willingly suspended my disbelief.

But for me the best part was when Uhura declared herself a "xenolinguist" and defined "xenolinguistics!" Since I first coined that term back in a story and an article on alien communication in AMAZING back in 1988 (the online Oxford dictionary of sf terms confirms this), I was quite delighted to have Paramount give it its blessing! Take that, NASA -- which has been playing with the prefix "exo."

CERN's  Large Hadron Collider went into action today in its giant circular tunnel under Geneva. The scientists involved say they're searching for the Higgs Boson, the so-called “God  particle,” but others claim they're risking creating a black hole that will devour the Earth and us with it. Nevertheless, we're still here right now, so maybe the doomsayers were wrong and we dodged the bullet?

I wouldn't be a science fiction writer if I didn't come up with another explanation of what happened.

The Black Hole was created as predicted. We're falling into it right now. But you remember learning about the Schwarzschild Radius in physics class – that boundary from which no light can escape? Well, that's where we are right now. We're at the event horizon and time has slowed for us but we don't know it.

That's the beauty of it. To an alien observer watching from the far corners of the universe, we appear to be falling into the black hole they created in Geneva, falling and falling forever. Time is standing still, or so it appears to our alien.

To us, it's just this interminable election season.