Month: July 2016

Pierce Brown: “The Winds Will Whisper, the Sands Will Shift”

Photographer Unknown, (The Winds Will Whisper, the Sands Will Shift.)

“And I wonder, in my last moments, if the planet does not mind that we wound her surface or pillage her bounty, because she knows we silly warm things are not even a breath in her cosmic life. We have grown and spread, and will rage and die. And when all that remains of us is our steel monuments and plastic idols, her winds will whisper, her sands will shift, and she will spin on and on, forgetting about the bold, hairless apes who thought they deserved immortality.”

–Pierce Brown, Morning Star

Ian Miller

Ian Miller, Illustration for the Pan edition of Simak’s “The Werewolf Principle”.

In the middle-distant future, Andrew Blake, discovered huddled inside a capsule orbiting a remote star, is brought back to Earth suffering from total amnesia. Over 200 years old, he thinks and acts like a man, but becomes frighteningly aware of two alien beings that lurk within his body – a strange biological computer, and a wolf-like animal. Dangerously possessed, Blake breaks out of the hospital to look for his past… This is a science fiction novel that resonates with today’s science fact so eerily closely, it will challenge and delight readers. This is Sci-Fi Master Simak at his powerful best.

Available as an Audio Book.

Frosted Sand Dunes of Mars

NASA, Frosted Sand Dunes: Mars

In this amazing photo taken by NASA’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on their Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, we see frosted sand dunes on Mars from above. The photo was taken on March 27, 2016 at 15:31 local Mars time.

“Sand dunes cover much of this terrain, which has large boulders lying on flat areas between the dunes. It is late winter in the southern hemisphere of Mars, and these dunes are just getting enough sunlight to start defrosting their seasonal cover of carbon dioxide. Spots form where pressurized carbon dioxide gas escapes to the surface.”- NASA

Kiss at the Station

Photographer Unknown, (Kiss at the Station)

“Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he’d been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.”

― Denis Johnson, Train Dreams