#JustFinished Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice.
Rice weaves a gorgeous follow-up to Moon of the Crusted Snow. About 12 years have passed since the power went out, and the Anishinaabe in what was the northern Ontario province are in need of a new home as local resources are dwindling. Moon of the Turning Leaves follows a group south and east as they search for a better place, preferably in their ancestral lands.
Reading a simple sci-fi space opera, humans against space spiders, mindless fun, and then ...
The protagonist's spaceship has to rendezvous with a space station orbiting Mercury. Fair enough. The narrator talks about how the station has to stay in the planet's shadow. OK, that makes sense. Summer's a bitch that close to good old Sol.
They then go on to say that Mercury is tidally-locked to the Sun. ARGH!
It's not. It's rotation period is ⅔ of it's orbit period (88 days), meaning the planet slowly turns to toast it's whole surface. That's been known since the 1960's. Frown.
Then, more egregiously, states that the station orbits at around 1,000 km from the planet's surface. WTAF?
A geostationary orbit for Mercury (needed to stay in shadow) given it's mass and rotation period, would be 240,420 km from the surface. Angry grimace.
'Scavengers Reign' is one of the best #SciFi#tv shows I've ever seen. HBO –oops, sorry, 'Max'– killing it is so dumb. I don't trust #Netflix much more in this sense, but if the show can have a second life there then so be it. While season 1 was pretty self-contained, I really want to keep exploring this fascinating world.
Summer 1979. I'd finished my first year at college. There is no internet, but a frenzy has been whipping up among weird kids for this movie for months.
One of the chief sources of information for nerds was Omni Magazine (In the US and UK). I had subscribed to it for its entire lifetime.
There was a long feature on H.R. Giger in the November 1978 and his eerie art with creatures that combined biology and machine-like elements. It put me over the edge.