Re: Five SF Books Set in the Future... of 2020

On 9/22/24 15:09, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Bobbie Sellers  <blissInSanFrancisco@mouse-potato.com> wrote:

But I happen to be curently reading "Aftermath" by
Charles Sheffield which is set in 2026 published in 1998.
  In this novel the world is suffering a double crisis.  Alpha Centuri
has gone supenova and the radiation hit the Suuthern Hemisphere
and set offgsome very unpleansanbt weather but the wave of hard
radiation causes a EMP and wipes out all computers not in
Faraday cages.

 This is written by someone who is unfamiliar with the inverse square law?
--scott

I dunno what Sheffield is familiar with aside from excellent story
telling skills. But the microchip ending event is the very hard radiation delayed by the expanding shell of the supernova.
Within the story the effects are credible. In real life asfawk
Alpha Centuri is not the correct sort of star to become a supernova. In
the story that point is raised and then dropped because in the world
of the story it happened regardless of supernova theory.  Also in this
version of reality we have not developed a treatment for cance that
involves removing the telomeres of the cancer cells.
It reads though like hard SF and is written. If in 2026
Alpha Centuri for some reason goes nova or even supernova we will
hail Sheffield as a prophet.
I hope it does not happen because prophets have had crazy
ideas for thousands of years.
bliss
--
b l i s s - S F 4 e v e r at D S L E x t r e m e dot com