Re: (ReacTor) Five SFF Books Featuring Frigid, Icy Worlds

On Wed, 17 Jul 2024 16:05:55 -0400, William Hyde
<wthyde1953@gmail.com> wrote:

Paul S Person wrote:

On Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:47:12 -0600, John Savard
<quadibloc@servername.invalid> wrote:
 

On Mon, 15 Jul 2024 14:15:08 -0000 (UTC), jdnicoll@panix.com (James
Nicoll) wrote:
>

Five SFF Books Featuring Frigid, Icy Worlds
>
Celebrate the coldest summer of the rest of your life with some
frosty SF and fantasy novels!
>
https://reactormag.com/five-sff-books-featuring-frigid-icy-worlds/

>
I could comment that your posting is itself a dystopian SF story,
about a world where giant oil companies have managed to control the
political system and hypnotize the populace so as to prevent any
effective response to global warming...
>
if it weren't for the fact that it seems like calling that scenario
"fiction" has already proven to be over-optimistic.

 
One of the two theories I have seen on why the Texas electrical system
died again (if that actually happened;

>
>
According to news stories I have seen, some parts of Texas are not
scheduled to regain power until July 19.
>
When I lived in College Station, TX, I experienced more power outages
per unit time than I have anywhere else (the situation here is
deteriorating, though) but it was never gone for more than a few hours.

It used to be (two or three decades ago, now) that we had power
outages once or twice a year. These were preceded by a loud "pop" and
the cawing of what sounded like hundreds if not thousands of crows.

Almost as if some teenage crow, contemptuous of it's elders advice to
not pick the strange fruit on those weird trees, and done so, been
electrocuted, and blew the transformer.

True story: after one of these incidents, we (and a few neighbors)
were without power for days after everyone else's had been restored.
At one point I got out a pair of low-power opera glasses and saw a
dead crow on top of the nearest transformer. My brothers, of course,
immediately showed their confidence in me by grabbing the glasses and
seeing for themselves. A power company vehicle came by, slowed down,
look at the transformer and then moved off.

One of my brothers chased them down and told them what we had seen (he
wouldn't have done this if he hadn't seen it too) and brought them
back. It turned out that the dead crow had indeed killed the
tranformer, but the tranformer /door/ had failed to open all the way
so it looked OK from the street. Ah, technology!

But as time went on this died down. A few years ago it was more common
to have the power drop and come back up ... and then drop and stay
dropped. And then it dropped only part of the time, recovering on its
own the rest of the time. But it has been a long time since that
happened. Apparently, City Light has improved its delivery system
(both above and below ground).

Not that a major storm knocking down trees and/or poles won't have a
negative effect on the electricity supply. Of course it will. And even
here, where the water table may not be as much of a concern, there are
problems with working on power lines that are underground. Or so I
have read.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"