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

On 22 Sep 2024 23:19:21 -0000, kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:

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

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?

>
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.

>
Right, and as the shell gets larger and larger, it becomes less and less
dense.  The radiation still has lots of energy, but there is less of it.
>
We get very high energy cosmic rays here that are very high energy,
enough to easily penetrate through the Van Allen belts and the atmosphere
and my roof.  They leave annoying streaks on the photographic film stored
in my freezer, and they keep on going.  But there aren't a lot of them,
so other than some fogging they aren't a serious threat.

IIRC, the reason computer hard drives began coming with their own
error detection and correction is because, occasionally, a cosmic ray
would flip a bit.

Which isn't much of a problem with 360K floppies or even 20MB hard
drives, but once you get up into the GB (or TB), bit flips start
happening on a regular recurring basis.

This ultimately made SpinRite not as necessary as it once was, as the
hard drives were doing the work themselves.

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.

>
I believe in the second book, Alpha C's nova turns out to have
been assisted, and also that the explosion was assymetric.

>
A CME directed toward the earth might make for something more measurable
here, although it would have to be pretty narrow.

--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"