June 4, 2012
Retro-futurism is a trend in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced prior to about 1960. Characterized by a blend of old-fashioned ‘retro’ styles with futuristic technology, retro-futurism explores the themes of tension between past and future, and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology.
Primarily reflected in artistic creations and modified technologies that realize the imagined artifacts of its parallel reality, retro-futurism has also manifested in the worlds of fashion, architecture, literature and film.
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June 4, 2012
Alternate history is a genre of fiction consisting of stories that are set in worlds in which history has diverged from the actual history of the world. It can be variously seen as a sub-genre of literary fiction, science fiction, and historical fiction.
Since the 1950s, this type of fiction has to a large extent merged with science fictional tropes involving cross-time travel between alternate histories or psychic awareness of the existence of ‘our’ universe by the people in another; or ordinary voyaging uptime (into the past) or downtime (into the future) that results in history splitting into two or more time-lines. Cross-time, time-splitting, and alternate history themes have become so closely interwoven that it is impossible to discuss them fully apart from one another.
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June 4, 2012
The Family Trade is the first book of a British writer of science fiction and fantasy writer Charles Stross’ alternate history series ‘The Merchant Princes.’
The first novel introduces us to journalist Miriam Beckstein, who finds herself in a parallel world in which her extended family holds power.
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June 4, 2012
‘The Theory of Interstellar Trade‘ is a paper written in 1978 by economist Paul Krugman. The paper was first published in 2010 in the journal ‘Economic Inquiry.’ He described the paper as something he wrote to cheer himself up when he was an oppressed assistant professor, caught up in the academic rat race.
Krugman analyzed the question of how interest rates on goods in transit should be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light. This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer.
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June 4, 2012
‘Ship in a Bottle‘ is a ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ episode (season six) where a sentient holodeck character, Professor James Moriarty, puts the Enterprise in jeopardy in his quest to be freed from confines of holographic environments.
Data and La Forge are enjoying a Sherlock Holmes holodeck program when the two notice that a character programmed to be left-handed was actually right-handed. They call Lt. Barclay to repair the holodeck, but as he checks the status of the Sherlock Holmes programs, he encounters an area of protected memory. He activates it to find the artificial sentient Professor James Moriarty character projected into the Holodeck, who appears to have memory since his creation (‘Elementary, Dear Data’ in season three: Geordi asks the holodeck to make a Sherlock Holmes villain that can defeat Data, creating a foe more powerful than originally planned).
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June 4, 2012
An impossible bottle is a bottle that has an object inside it that does not appear to fit through the mouth of the bottle, a type of mechanical puzzle.
The ship in a bottle is a traditional type of impossible bottle. Other common objects used include matchboxes, decks of cards, tennis balls, racket balls, Rubik’s Cubes, padlocks, knots, and scissors.
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