Authors Electric

"If they're everywhere, then where are they?" Enrico Fermi probably didn't intended to coin an iconic paradox with his 1950 wisecrack, but it haunts us well into the space age despite astronomical projections and scifi tropes from Star Trek through the X-Files. The " Pope of Physics " and A-bomb enabler remains as famous for it as for his building of the world's first nuclear reactor under a Chicago football stadium in 1942.   Seek and ye shall find. Sure enough earthly UFO sightings are as plentiful lately as during the mid-century "flying saucer" heyday. Back then the US government kept track of sightings under its widely contested " Project Blue Book ," terminated in the '90s.    No solid evidence of alien visitors was ever found, according to Blue Book's records. But discoveries of earth-like exoplanets that could support the evolution of life have abounded exponentially in recent years thanks to the power of today's e...

A few months ago I held a creative writing class at RHS Wisley, and the subject matter needed to fit the setting. I suppose the first book I read as a child that really featured vegetation as something important was The Secret Garden , by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Gardens are represented as being important and life-affirming, and the gradual transformation of self-centred Mary Lennox and hypochondriac Colin is brought about by the resurrection of a forbidden garden that has been neglected for ten years. However, plants aren’t always the good guys. The Day of the Triffids , by John Wyndham, was a ground-breaking science fiction novel, based around the idea that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Take away everyone’s eyesight, and carnivorous plants that walk can fill a lot of suddenly-vacated evolutionary niches. Plants themselves can provide a lot of really good ideas. Tumble weed is not fixed to one place, and moves freely with the aid of the wind. There are ...