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  #41  
Old 09-14-2021, 07:29 AM
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MarkB. MarkB. is offline
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Well, then it sounds like you have some reading to do.

Amazon has a number of collections of the first five books of the series, which are the only ones worth reading. Unfortunately, the racy Frazetta covers are gone. I'm not sure these books warrant a leather-bound cover but when you consider the stories date to 1910, you get proto-Superman and proto-Star Wars mixed in with some fairly ham-fisted Victorian romance.
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  #42  
Old 09-15-2021, 07:25 AM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MarkB.
Well, then it sounds like you have some reading to do.

Amazon has a number of collections of the first five books of the series, which are the only ones worth reading. Unfortunately, the racy Frazetta covers are gone. I'm not sure these books warrant a leather-bound cover but when you consider the stories date to 1910, you get proto-Superman and proto-Star Wars mixed in with some fairly ham-fisted Victorian romance.
Most science fiction that is that old doesn't interest me. Just as Carl Sagan couldn't enjoy Star Trek (which, as he wrote, "thoughtful friends have told me I should view as allegory")--and my father, a Fire Chief, couldn't enjoy the 1970s TV show Emergency! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency! (because it made too many factual errors, for the sake of the stories, than he could overlook and suspend disbelief for)--we know too much now (which the old science science fiction authors [and scientists themselves] didn't know back then) than I can suspend disbelief for, and:

Star Trek must drive chemists batty, because of the totally made-up *natural* elements (not artificial ones; there ^is^ a theoretical "island of stability" for very heavy ones), with names such as dilithium, calorinium ("which forms explosive mixtures with hydrogen"), invidium, etc., that are frequently mentioned in the episodes and films. (This even happens occasionally with more recent hard science fiction [hard SF, which holds scientific speculation and extrapolation to an absolute minimum, being based on known scientific laws and theories]; the storyline of Poul Anderson's 1970 novel "Tau Zero" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero --which first appeared in the form of a 1967 story titled "To Outlive Eternity"--depended on the "Big Crunch" following long, long after the Big Bang, which later cosmological research showed is not the case, making the story and novel obsolete.)
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  #43  
Old 09-15-2021, 08:42 AM
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The "phoney" chemistry/elements/medications on Star Trek is really absurd.
#1 aspect of show that is awful/cringe-worthy/facepalm-causing.

If they offered Unobtainium and Stinkonium I would however approve.
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  #44  
Old 09-15-2021, 10:25 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ghrocketman
The "phoney" chemistry/elements/medications on Star Trek is really absurd.
#1 aspect of show that is awful/cringe-worthy/facepalm-causing.

If they offered Unobtainium and Stinkonium I would however approve.
"Unobtainium" can also refer to meta-materials (chemical compounds, or physical arrangements of atoms or molecules, such as unusual crystal lattices [with special properties]) that are extremely hard and expensive--almost impossible, but not quite--to make. One in particular that I read about in the 1980s was "the totally invisible wine glass." Materials science and related technologies (such as in optical coatings) had, by that time, advanced to the point that it would be possible to make a wine glass that had no detectable reflection or refraction, making it invisible. But the article (in Omni, Popular Science, or Popular Mechanics) also said that unless some important use was found for such an object, it would cost so much to make--as much as a new weapon system--that no one would spend the money to do it. (I suspect that it will be done someday--if it hasn't already been done in secret--when even more advanced technology makes it far less expensive.)
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  #45  
Old 09-15-2021, 04:58 PM
Ltvscout Ltvscout is offline
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Topic, gentlemen.
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