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Earl S. Wynn on Hubpages

Updated on December 21, 2011

So as the number of "hubs" I've created grow steadily, I've come to realize more and more that people are likely to get lost in the vast sea of data I've ushered forth thus far, especially when my articles are all on so many very different subjects! So, here's an organized list of all my hubs, from RPG resources to science articles, book reviews, and everything in between. Enjoy!

Science and the Future:

  • Active Camouflage: Japanese scientist Kazutoshi Obana's invisibility coat, a truly magnificent piece of work that literally makes most of the man's body invisible by effectively turning the thousands of microscopic reflectors embedded in the coat into one big movie screen. Sound too good to be true? It's just one (albeit the first!) of many prototypes being designed and constructed by scientists all over the world. And when I say it makes him invisible, that's no exaggeration- it's something you literally have to see for yourself.
  • Teleportation as Transportation: Whenever someone mentions "Teleportation" or "Transporters," most people, fans or otherwise, think of the generation-spanning Sci-Fi saga Star Trek, or any number of other shows, novels and films in both Science Fiction and Fantasy, laughing or cracking in-genre jokes like the ever-popular "beam me up, Scotty" and ultimately dismissing the notion as little more than a dream of science fiction whose realization is as yet centuries away. But is it really something that should be brushed off so casually, or is there truly some merit to the idea?
  • The New Heroes: Greek and Roman kids grew up with Hercules and Aeneas, our kids grow up with Mario and Spongebob. Sound incredulous? Think about it- it's all the same hero myth in the end. Whether you go into battle with a shield and spear or an M-16 and kevlar vest depends on the time and culture you belong to- and it's no different in Mythology, with little boys who grow up wanting to be like Odysseus in the past and G.I. Joe in the present, it quickly becomes clear that mythology is an ever present and ever changing influence on culture that's been with us since the beginning and isn't likely to separate from culture any time soon.
  • Cryogenics: This is the realm of cryonics, or as it's more widely known, cryogenics; freezing something (organic or otherwise,) to put it into what essentially is a state of suspended animation. For most of us, Cryogenics sounds like something out of science fiction, something relegated to 20th Century Fox's "Aliens" series, or something so obviously ludicrous (at this point in time, anyway,) that it's nothing more than a money-trap for the rich and gullible.
  • Internet, Computers, and the English Language: Consider a typical 90's sentence roaring through cyberspace with all the blunt elegance of "Sup d00dz!1! 1337 lol! I juz haxx0rd teh p0wer c0! lolz0rz!" or the more contemporary (and grammatically speaking, far more stable) equivalent: "Heyo lol i totaly just like downloded taht new harbl movie lol." With language like that (and worse) showing up in print on public domains, people start to wonder where society went wrong- is it unreasonable to expect at least a fifth grade understanding of the English language from the hordes of people with access to a computer and the internet, some of whom actually hold college degrees?
  • Rayguns and Lasers: Since H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, originally published in 1898, early science fiction was not complete without some kind of raygun or another, (heck, even Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers had their own versions!) But then, handheld weapons that shoot rays of light, especially such things as "lasers," are just a dream right? Oh sure, they say "laser eye surgery," but they aren't actually using light beams, right?
  • A Custom Humanity: What Can Genes Do For You? Will laws become lax enough to bring us a morally questionable future of human hybrids that are traded and treated as livestock or slaves? Will we see a future of ageless and genetically "perfect" clones, or will our careful footsteps into this daunting field result in something more sinister?
  • Crude Technology: A rise is gas prices translates into a rise in the cost of everything, and I do mean everything, that gets shipped, carted, or otherwise shuffled from point A to point B, whether it be through the use of your local delivery service, a cross-country semi burning rubber across several states, or a jumbo jet flying packages and cheap plastic knickknacks from China to Los Angeles.
  • Faster Than Light Travel: It's a mainstay of the genre, a staple, and it's a must for any star system-hopping epic that doesn't want to leave its intrepid crew of laser-wielding space adventurers in a hold playing poker for five years while they outrun the bad guys on a routine cruise to the nearest star system.
  • Nanotechnology: Perhaps the most critical difference between Nanotechnology and what might be referred to as "modern technology" is that it requires a different way of thinking to truly comprehend. When someone says "small," or "tiny," we think something about the size of an ant, or a flea; when someone says "Microscopic" we think of cells, but Nanotechnology is smaller yet...
  • Very Light Jets: These new business jets are a part of a new trend, something exciting and wonderful, a brand-new type of aircraft known now by the collective term of VLJ, or Very Light Jet. Initially, the concept of a jet as small and lightweight as the VLJ for civil aviation use seemed so revolutionary that skepticism was high in the early stages of development and it wasn't until the basic design was proven that a handful of companies jumped on the bandwagon, seeing the potential for a fortune to be made, industry heavy-weight Cessna among them.
  • Chronotechnology: Since the beginning of, well, time, or at least since the beginning of mankind's awareness of this wholly separate dimension of movement, humans have yearned to harness it. (think about it- you're constantly moving forward in time, so theoretically, it should be possible to, someday, move not only backwards in time, but sideways as well.
  • Archaeologists of the Future: It's difficult to say what the future will bring, whether the world might fall apart tomorrow or persist on into eternity, but self-preservation is a very human instinct, and the more time we have to advance and be human, the more we'll produce that can be found and studied by the archaeologists of the future, whenever they may come.
  • Artificial Intelligence: How will society deal with machines that think and learn as we do?
  • Transhumanism: It goes beyond religion, beyond philosophy, incorporates the sort of "beyond-thinking" common to Nihilism, and yet carries all the need and patient devotion of a priest waiting for the rapture. It is the idea that we are capable of something more, that we are something more, something greater than just the biological, and many Transhumanists believe that the key to the potential locked away within the human race can and will be found in technology, that perhaps salvation, or just as likely the next step of our development, one where we transcend the simplicity of flesh and become wholly idea, is waiting in the hard, logic-spun embrace of the machine.
  • Cybernetics: The perfect harmony between man and machine, encapsulated within a word that sounds so utterly ominous when it slides across the tongue. Cyborg. Images of half-men forced to depend upon plastic and steel in order to survive flit through our minds at it's mention- names like Robocop, Ziggurat-8, Darth Vader, Inspector Gadget, Ryan Laing, The Bionic Woman, and The Six Million Dollar Man, nearly all victims of some fatal injury that are brought back from the brink of death (or from death itself, in some cases!) to find themselves augmented, made stronger than they were before, better, faster, stronger... or so the saying goes.
  • A Short Theory of Time Travel Mechanics: In truth, the possibilities are virtually endless, and some of those possibilities can get so twisted and convoluted that attempting to puzzle them out only achieves a nasty headache and a potent distaste for Temporal Mechanics, basic or otherwise.
  • ‘Punking In The Emerging Quantum Mainstream: What does it mean to ‘punk? What does it mean to be a ‘punk? To follow or ascribe to or enjoy a given -punk subgenre? While visions of the seventies, eighties and nineties give us images of grunge, anarchy, goths and the Sex Pistols, this is not the now of ‘punk. It is the past, it is the big bang, the violent birth of a universe, the primordial ooze from which something even more amazing has been born.
  • The Future of Science Fiction: Look around you. We live in the future. We live in a time, surrounded by technologies that, just one hundred years ago, would have seemed right at home in a (perhaps) less than perfect science fiction world. Think about it: every day we surf the internet on computers capable of delivering everything from the lifelike graphics of the latest videogames to the complete works of Shakespeare, all in a matter of seconds. Every day we carry with us and use cordless cellphones which fit in the palm of our hands, play music and come with a million applications to adapt them into everything from toys to tools, from devices aimed at home improvement to devices capable of being our home theater away from home. Businessmen regularly ply the skies in jets, Virgin Galactic is selling seats for commercial spaceflights, and 3D printing technology is capable of generating everything from beautiful artwork to car parts (and organs that almost work.) People like me work predominantly from home, cruising the oceans upon oceans of information that make up our global village day after day in search of new opportunities and untapped veins of internet gold. It’s a remarkable time, a time of networking that is half utopic, half cyberpunk– in the purest sense, this is the future. Now is science fiction.

Book Reviews:

  • Space 1889: Following the vien of the subgenre known in literary circles as Steampunk, Space 1889 takes the technology and ideas of the industrial revolution that much farther with solar-powered boilerships that plow through the heavens and send the people of an increasingly expansionist British Empire, their allies and their enemies into the untapped depths of the solar system.
  • Starship Troopers: The book, however, was alot more interesting and appeals to a much larger audience (in my opinion). It's philosophical, it's gritty, it's real. When Johnny Rico goes through boot camp, it isn't the glorious ride through co-ed showers and laser ranges that we see in the movie-- it's closer to the reality, it's harder, much harder, and every minute keeps you right there through it all.
  • Catcher in the Rye: Published in 1959, this novel, which is considered by many to be a classic and important piece of American literature, has got to be one of the most hated novels from that list of books you're forced to read in highschool. It's like "Lord of the Flies"-- you read it because you have to, because the school says you have to, and there's going to be a test on it.
  • The Five Fists of Science: The year is 1899, and the only thing standing between J.P. Morgan's demonic hordes and their goal of world domination is the dynamic duo of scientist Nikolai Tesla and famous American novelist Mark Twain. Be there as Nikolai Tesla (AKA, the Master of Lightning, the Millionaire Playboy, etc.) battles ferocious beasts of light and energy with his towering "Tesla-Tronic Dynamo" and finally takes the fight to Morgan himself in a battle to prevent the end of the world itself!
  • Scar Night: A truly vivid and well illustrated read, Alan Campbell's Scar Night is full of gorgeous and competently fleshed-out imagery, making it the kind of visually staggering read that would lend itself well to film. Set in the city of Deepgate, a massive steampunk-esque metropolis suspended over an equally massive abyss by a network of gigantic chains, Scar Night is the tale of a young man named Dill who isn't a man at all-- he is the last of the angels who serve Ulcis, or so it is said.
  • Altered Carbon: Imagine a world where the mind has been digitized, where every man, woman and child in the universe has been downloaded into a "cortical stack" that sits in the spine and runs whatever body it's attached to, whether it be the body a person was born in, a genetically-engineered and boosted custom form-- or someone else's body entirely.
  • Front Lines: "Front Lines" was fun to read. There were a few chills and thrills and a few laughs and smug smiles to be had, with the usual one or two stories that read like a soldier's account of Iraq cloaked in a thin layer of sci-fi or someone's D&D match, but all in all I enjoyed it. Sucked it right down, even.
  • Beyond the Safe Zone: I picked this little gem up at my favorite bookstore when it went out of business. *sniff* All that aside, I have to say that I haven't read anything quite like this before. It was wierd, but in a good way, which made it really interesting, though most of it was about as solid and real-feeling as a hypnotically-induced acid trip.
  • Tognazzini And The New Duchamp: I think the theme here is that all great art, all truly fresh art is like Duchamp’s art. It’s unique, it creates a wholly new form of beauty by putting the ordinary into action in unexpected ways (the cheese coat, the spaghetti, the lying in the bathtub crying “we’re here! We’re here!”) This is the art of today, it is the ordinary made extraordinary in ways that shake up the stagnant mind and bring the fantastic to reality.
  • Studies in Voix de Glace (Voice of Ice): Ifland gives us this idea of a honeyed reality that turns sickly sweet as we read, taking the reader from reality as a confection to reality as a sticky thing with a deceptive sweetness, a sweetness behind which death seems to linger.

Writing Resources

  • 101 Writing Prompts To Inspire You: Compiled here are 101 great ideas to get you inspired and working on your next writing project. Want to tell a story, but have no idea where to start? That’s where writing prompts come in.
  • 101 Great Times and Places to Write: Just in case prompts aren't enough to get those creative juices flowing!
  • How To Write A Whole Book In 8 Hours: It's tricky, but you can do it! Find out how in this informative hub!
  • 101 ways to get people interested in your website: It can be hard sometimes, but marketing is still a very important part of writing for a living!
  • How To Write Killer Book Reviews (And Make Money Doing It): The title says it all-- Learn how to write book reviews that will start making you money! Cash, free books, contacts in the industry-- Book reviews are your key to getting where you want to go as a writer!
  • Steampunk: Imagine a world where steam technology became more widespread and versatile than petroleum and electricity, a world where the zepplin and the blimp were the kings of the sky, where the romantic, progressive, and stylish conventions of the Victorian Era were never abandoned in favor of plastics, streamlined chrome, and mass production.
  • The Wicked Side of Cyberpunk: Despite the fact that Cyberpunk is in and of itself inherently wicked (in the "awesome" sense) there are some technologies and ideas that really stand out from the rest. These are the technologies that grab us and make us cringe to think about, ideas and fragments thrown off from that bleeding edge where existing science collides with the realm of gritty and dark possibility. These are the ideas that prove to us that nothing has a wicked side quite like Cyberpunk.
  • Space Westerns
  • Weird Westerns
  • Form And Function in Fiction
  • Dieselpunk
  • Tribalpunk

Pyrography Tutorials:

Pyrography: Literally, fire writing. This ancient greek art is a fun way to create powerful, shamanic works of art using little more than recycled wood, a soldering iron and (optional) a little acrylic paint.

Satire

When it comes to satire, I like to play with the notions of authority that rise from dry, academic language. Most of my satire here on Hubpages reflects this idea and utilizes it to make the reader reconsider various ideas presented by both the fictional "author" of a given piece and society as a whole.

Galleries

Photography is one of the hobbies I like to indulge as a writer. Some of my hubs which you may enjoy are collections I've put together of pictures I've taken in different areas around the world.

Fiction and Poetry

Everything Else:










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