Opinions on Science Fiction

2011-10-18 to 2011-10-20

My 2011 chat with steampunk and sci-fi author Maarten Hofman

In 2011, Maarten Hofman and I had a little chat on Google+. He'd shared a link to some of the fantastic gadgets that populated his steampunk novel, and this is how the rest of it went. (My comments in green). You can check out his novels on the link to his Goodreads page (and then buy them).

Maarten Hofman , wow, these are amazing! The Farseer doesn't reduce the brightness while enlarging the image?? Whoo! And I love the Talker. What a concept!

Of course the farseer reduces the brightness. The writer of the encyclopedia has a flair of exaggerating things. I'm actually curious whether the valve of the talker would actually work, or if there is a better way to do it. I know the transmission part of the talker works.

Do you have a gyro to stabilize the talker? I suspect the amount of contamination of the incoming signal from ambient light will be significant. Some form of collimator? I mean, phosphorus doesn't have much intensity. What's the distance over which the signal to noise ratio is over 1?

Mere quibbles. These are so cool. :-)

It's a phosphorus compound, and designed to produce more light than regular phosphorus, but you're probably right that it might need a brighter source. I imagine that is fixable, though, given that it is a steampunk device you could even imagine a piece of coal that you blow air on to make it brighter when needed. The key is the way the crystal is cut to filter the ambient light and focus the actual beam. In the story it works over distances of around a kilometer or even more (I'm assuming that the receiving crystal on the side of the mountain uses a form of amplification of the light (which could use a similar valve as well, and a very bright light source) before it sends it into a fiber-optic line to the exchange).

Oh, steampunk! Then phlogiston will do as a source. Pure phlogiston being mined in some remote area of the Andes where it is high, cold and has low oxygen, and so concentrates in the pools on the edges of Lake Titicaca (from the sun's rays). The residents there are able to function well at those heights not because they have better hemoglobin, but because they are exposed to pure phlogiston when they collect it. Too much phlogiston, and people start overheating and turning transparent.

Heh heh.

I abhor the idea of elements. I even wanted to leave the yoga movement class last night because they were talking about the "earth element". So phlogiston isn't going to cut it. I'm currently working on the design of the mechanical microscope, which uses enriched uranium to ionize low pressure mercury causing it to emit UV light of around 185 nm, which would be parallelized using the talker crystal and directed using a pinhole through the sample, and captured on a long strip of silver bromide, which would then be developed using iron sulfate. This is most likely all feasible, the area that I have most trouble with is having the sample move from left to right with about an atom width of variation. I guess lines could be carved into the metal using a directed beam, but it would still be susceptible to temperature changes, which would be inevitable with the presence of enriched uranium and ionized mercury.

Maarten Hofman Can you use moire fringes? These are used in very sensitive instruments to find how much a needle moves, like on etchings in chip manufacture, of the order of sub-microns.

I decided to go with rollers instead of a wheel that drives a shaft. Obviously these could slip, reducing the horizontal accuracy, but this could be reduced by increasing the grip. To ensure there is no vibration, the tray would be gliding over a gel made with specific proteins, that have a groove in the direction of the moment and little bumps in all other directions. If these proteins contain iron, you could align them all properly with a strong magnet. But I will investigate moire fringes as well. I'm currently working on the picture, will update the page soon.

2011-10-07

My eyeroll at an article about why sci-fi needs to propagandise

Duties of sci-fi writers. Hmm, doesn't that put a whole extra load on the poor writer? One of the comments on the original post says, roughly, that science fiction should tell a good yarn first; if it provokes thought and innovation, that's a bonus. I agree with that sentiment.

Link, and extract from iO9's coverage of the original article by Neal Stephenson: