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Critical Mass (Arthur C. Clarke Short Story)
''Tales from the White Hart'' is a collection of short stories by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in the "club tales" style. Thirteen of the fifteen stories originally appeared across a number of different publications; some had no connection to the White Hart in their original version. " Silence Please" was the title of two distinct stories; the version in the book has a different plot from the original magazine version. "Moving Spirit" and "The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch" were first published in this book. The White Hart is a pub (modelled on the White Horse, New Fetter Lane, just north of Fleet Street, once the weekly rendezvous of science fiction fans in London till the mid 50s, when they moved to the Globe pub in Hatton Garden) where a character named Harry Purvis tells a series of tall tales. Incidental characters inhabiting the White Hart include science fiction writers Samuel Youd (also known as John Christopher), John Wyndham (John Beynon), and Cla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
WikiProject Novels
A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is an affinity group for contributors with shared goals within the Wikimedia movement. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within Wikimedia project, sibling projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata, and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration. During the COVID-19 pandemic, CBS News noted the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in maintaining the accuracy of articles related to the disease. Another WikiProject that has drawn attention is WikiProject Women Scientists, which was profiled by ''Smithsonian Magazine, Smithsonian'' for its efforts to improve coverage of women scientists which the profile noted had "helped increase the number of female scientists on Wikipedia from around 1,600 to over 5,000". On Wikipedia Some Wikipedia WikiProjects are substantial enough to engage in cooperative activities with outsi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stephen Baxter (author)
Stephen Baxter (born 13 November 1957) is an English hard science fiction author. He has degrees in mathematics and engineering. Writing style Strongly influenced by science fiction pioneer H. G. Wells, Baxter has been vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society since 2006. His fiction falls into three main categories of original work plus a fourth category, extending other authors' writing; each has a different basis, style, and tone. Baxter's "Future history, Future History" mode is based on research into hard science fiction, hard science. It encompasses the ''Xeelee Sequence'', which consists of nine novels (including the ''Destiny's Children'' trilogy and Vengeance/Redemption duology that is set in alternate timeline), plus three volumes collecting the 52 short pieces (short stories and novellas) in the series, all of which fit into a single timeline stretching from the Big Bang singularity of the past to his ''Timelike Infinity'' (1993) singularity of the fu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Next Tenants
"The Next Tenants" is a science fiction short story by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1956 and included in several collections of Clarke's writings, including '' Tales from Planet Earth'' and ''Tales from the White Hart''. The story describes the discovery by the protagonist of a "mad scientist" living on a remote Pacific island, preparing for what he feels is humanity's inevitable self-destruction. The scientist decides that termites Termites are a group of detritophagous eusocial cockroaches which consume a variety of decaying plant material, generally in the form of wood, leaf litter, and soil humus. They are distinguished by their moniliform antennae and the sof ... represent the best chance for a terrestrial species to form a stable civilization, and so is training a colony of termites in the use of technology. While the protagonist believes the scientist to be crazy, he wonders whether he may, after all, be right. References External l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2022, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1018 FLOPS, so called Exascale computing, exascale supercomputers. For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the TOP500, world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers. Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science, and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fantastic Universe
''Fantastic Universe'' was a U.S. science fiction magazine which began publishing in the 1950s. It ran for 69 issues, from June 1953 to March 1960, under two different publishers. It was part of the explosion of science fiction magazine publishing in the 1950s in the United States, and was moderately successful, outlasting almost all of its competitors. The main editors were Leo Margulies (1954–1956) and Hans Stefan Santesson (1956–1960). The magazine is not highly regarded by science fiction historians, but some well-received stories appeared, including "Who?", by Algis Budrys, which formed the basis for Budrys's novel of that name, and several stories of Robert E. Howard's, rewritten by L. Sprague de Camp to feature Howard's character Conan the Barbarian. Under Santesson's tenure the quality declined somewhat, and the magazine became known for printing much UFO-related material. A collection of stories from the magazine, edited by Santesson, appeared in 1960 from Prenti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Pacifist (short Story By Arthur Clarke)
"The Pacifist" is a science fiction short story by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1956 in ''Fantastic Universe''. It appears in his collection of "science fiction tall tales," ''Tales from the White Hart''. "The Pacifist" describes the construction of a supercomputer in a "cavern in Kentucky". The computer's designer, nicknamed "Dr. Milquetoast Caspar Milquetoast was a popular American cartoon character created by H. T. Webster. The term “milquetoast” has since come to be used for a meek or timid person. Milquetoast may also refer to: *Dr. Milquetoast, a character in " The Pacifis ..." by the story-within-a-story's narrator, works under the harsh supervision of a military General. By way of revenge, Dr. Milquetoast programs the computer so that it will answer purely theoretical or mathematical questions put to it, but when asked to solve a military problem, responds by insulting the General using phrases industriously prepared by the programmer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
If (magazine)
''If'' was an American science fiction magazine launched in March 1952 by Quinn Publications, owned by James L. Quinn. The magazine was moderately successful, though for most of its run it was not considered to be in the first tier of American science fiction magazines. It achieved its greatest success under editor Frederik Pohl, winning the Hugo Award for best professional magazine three years running from 1966 to 1968. ''If'' published many award-winning stories over its 22 years, including Robert A. Heinlein's novel '' The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress'' and Harlan Ellison's short story " I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream". The most prominent writer to make his first sale to ''If'' was Larry Niven, whose story "The Coldest Place" appeared in the December 1964 issue. ''If'' was merged into ''Galaxy Science Fiction'' after the December 1974 issue, its 175th issue overall. Publication history Although science fiction had been published in the United States before the 1920s, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Ultimate Melody
"The Ultimate Melody" is a science fiction short story by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1957. The story describes the work of a physiologist who attempts to discover the connections between music and the rhythms of the electrical pulses in the brain. He believed that all "hit-tunes" were merely poor reflections of an "ultimate" melody, and he built a machine to search for this tune. By the end of the story, he succeeds, but the influence of the melody is so powerful that he becomes completely catatonic. The piece was later anthologized as the sixth story in Clarke's ''Tales from the White Hart ''Tales from the White Hart'' is a collection of short stories by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in the "club tales" style. Thirteen of the fifteen stories originally appeared across a number of different publications; some had n ...''. The story has been cited as an example of the literary motif of an apocalyptic work of art, found more famou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Armaments Race
"Armaments Race" is a science fiction short story by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1954, and later anthologized in ''Tales from the White Hart''. Like the rest of the collection, it is a frame story set in the pub "White Hart", where the fictional Harry Purvis narrates the secondary tale. Plot This comic story discusses the career of Hollywood special effects man Solly Blumberg after he is hired to create mock weapons as set pieces for a science-fiction serial named "Captain Zoom". Blumberg becomes involved in what is effectively an arms race as he creates weapons for both the protagonist and his adversaries. The weapons he creates become increasingly elaborate, until he accidentally creates a real functional piece and "makes the studio disappear", upon which he is sacked. The story is told from his prison cell, where he is questioned again and again by military experts, demanding to know what he had built. Publication "Armaments Race" was first publ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patent Pending (short Story)
"Patent Pending" is a science fiction short story by English writer Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1954. It was also published as "The Invention". It later appeared in his collection ''Tales from the White Hart''. "Patent Pending" is a frame story, purporting to recount a scientific tall tale told by a certain Harry Purvis at the (fictional) "White Hart" pub in London sometime in the 1950s, during a discussion of literary censorship (at the expense of the censors). A review of ''Tales from the White Hart'' in ''Fantastic Universe'' called attention to "Patent Pending" as an example of stories in the collection that had a "haunting gleam of plausibility", which, according to the reviewer, gave the collection a "peculiar charm". Plot summary The story within a story tells of a French scientist who successfully finds a way to record and play back brain waves, allowing experiences to be replayed by other people (rather like the feelies in Aldous Huxley's ''Brave New Wor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Giant Squid
The giant squid (''Architeuthis dux'') is a species of deep-ocean dwelling squid A squid (: squid) is a mollusc with an elongated soft body, large eyes, eight cephalopod limb, arms, and two tentacles in the orders Myopsida, Oegopsida, and Bathyteuthida (though many other molluscs within the broader Neocoleoidea are also ... in the family (biology), family Architeuthidae. It can grow to a tremendous size, offering an example of deep-sea gigantism, abyssal gigantism: recent estimates put the maximum body size at around for females, with males slightly shorter, from the cephalopod fin, posterior fins to the tip of its long cephalopod limb, arms. This makes it longer than the colossal squid at an estimated , but substantially lighter, as it is less robust and its arms make up much of the length. The Mantle (mollusc), mantle of the giant squid is about long (longer for females, shorter for males), and the feeding tentacles of the giant squid, concealed in life, are . Clai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adventure (magazine)
''Adventure'' was an American pulp magazine that was first published in November 1910Robinson, Frank M. & Davidson, Lawrence ''Pulp Culture – The Art of Fiction Magazines''. Collectors Press Inc 2007 (p. 33-48). by the Ridgway company, a subsidiary of the Butterick Publishing Company. ''Adventure'' went on to become one of the most profitable and critically acclaimed of all the American pulp magazines."No. 1 Pulp" ''''. The magazine had 881 issues. Its first editor was Trumbull White. He was succeeded in 1912 by [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
