You are good, You are real, It’s OK to have an option

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A friend submitted a piece to a newsletter, and he’s ashamed of it. In the piece he expressed his opinion. Those opinions are not the the groups opinions.

His opinions are not immoral or criminal. They’re his opinions. Why have the politically correct police made having an opinion a horrendous slight against humanity?

I find stories that are politically correct boring. If everything is perfect there is no conflict.

Look at the best sellers. They’re stories about serial killers brought to justice, even if the hero has to break the law to bring the murders to justice. They’re stories about magic. You can’t have magic because religions forbid it and you have to respect all religions. You can’t have romance stories because it’s shows improper actions to under aged children.

Are we doomed to have the history books rewritten to say that WWII was fought over slavery?

Are your stories going to be banned, outlawed, by a self appointed overseer, when you include a scene out of a real life incidence, when the scene does not meet the overseer’s idea of moral correctness?

Are we on the edge of becoming the Fahrenheit 451 world?

It’s not against the law to have a opinion. It’s not against the law to say something that someone can twist to mean you promote a horrible act.

Are we going to be slaves of the Politically Correct? Are we going to be slaves to the protestor that threaten you with revenge, if you talk to the police about a murder that happened in a police free zone? Are we going to be slaves to trolls that hound people till they commit suicide?

We are fiction writers. We are the last free people.

Stay strong, write on.

Professor Hyram Voltage

Comets, Immortality, and Salads

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Sometime you read a story and it’s not great, maybe forgettable. But the book has an idea and that idea has legs.

Gallagher’s Glacier has a standard plot of asteroid miners treated like slaves rebelling. One of the heroes of the story builds a space ship out of a comet.

Using the fuel or a comet for the body of the space ship has been used in stories again and again. Even today they talk of mining water on Earth’s moon for life support and fuel.

After having a space craft land on a comet it is now a plausible idea to make a space ship out of a comet. Until the landing we didn’t know if the dirty snowball of a comet was solid enough to support anything. The comet lander could have sunk into the surface of the comet.

I can also remember the description of an asteroid made into a spaceship as being made out of one of the more craggier asteroids. Who would of thought, back in the 1950s or even 1980s, that asteroids have craters and lose boulders laying around on the surface.

With modern insulating materials, a comet would make a good interplanetary space ship. With a fusion generator it would make for a interstellar spaceship. Have fuel will travel.

In his Instrumentality series Cordwainer Smith’s has a society that has developed immortality, but limits it to certain people. The age is coming where any device can be duplicate and any medicine can be cloned, I don’t see how the immortality drug could be kept secret.

I always wanted to see stories about secret laboratories on back water planets that were trying to break the mystery of the immortality drug. Or stories attemps to steal the drug. The planet it was made on would be heavily guarded and being the only place where the drug was would be a target of vengeance. Also an example of not putting all your eggs in one basket.

How much would someone pay to live 400 years? How sneaky could you be to get the drug?

The stories would not sell today since the animal derived people in the stories had no rights and were almost slaves.

Still the series investigates what a society would do if immortality was developed. Some books had you earn credit to buy time to live. The Instrumentality stories had a set time limit for that immortals could live. Somewhat Logan’s Run.

The usual add;

Recipe

Salad with bacon bits.

No salad with bacon strip.

Ingredients;

1 bag of salad greens

1 bottle of salad dressing

1 slice of bacon

Directions;

Place handful of greens on plate.

Top greens with two tablespoons of dressing.

Place strip of bacon along side salad.