Category Archives: Personal history

Frank M. Robinson’s SCIENCE FICTION OF THE 20TH CENTURY: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY

Posted on Wednesday 16 September 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m beginning to explore and read or reread various histories of science fiction. Robinson’s is a coffee-table book, published in 1999, that had sequels from the same publisher about fantasy and horror, by different hands: Randy Broecker and Robert Weinberg, … Continue reading →

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The Methodical, Cheerful, Bluntness of Isaac Asimov

Posted on Wednesday 19 August 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I switched gears a couple weeks ago, after reading several recent (2014 and 2015) novels, to spend some time revisiting one of the 20th century’s most acclaimed science fiction authors, Isaac Asimov. It’s hard to tell, at this point about … Continue reading →

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Bay Heat

Posted on Monday 17 August 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

It was a hot and hazy weekend, very unusual for the Bay Area. When I stepped outside at 7am Saturday morning to pick up the newspapers from the driveway, there was a distinct smell of smoke in the air, as … Continue reading →

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Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

Posted on Friday 26 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Lewis Thomas was a pediatrician and doctor, who became president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and who wrote a series of short essays which were first published in New England Journal of Medicine in the early … Continue reading →

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Revisiting Carl Sagan’s The Cosmic Connection

Posted on Friday 26 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

The Cosmic Connection, published in 1973, was the first popular book by Carl Sagan, after some academic tomes and an anthology of essays about UFOs, who later gained much fame as the author and host of the 1980 book and … Continue reading →

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James Morrow: We’re not tourists on this planet, we’re citizens

Posted on Wednesday 24 June 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Many thoughts resonate with me in the James Morrow interview in the June issue of Locus, which I excerpted here. E.g., That’s the great gift of the 18th-century Enlightenment, that insistence on a conversation that must never stop, a conversation … Continue reading →

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Bodega Bay and The Birds

Posted on Sunday 24 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Today we took a mid-Memorial weekend day drive, from Oakland. We’d planned a drive up to the Russian River area, thinking to drive up the coast with a stop in Bodega Bay for lunch. We left at 11am; it took … Continue reading →

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Instant Insanity

Posted on Thursday 21 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Does anyone remember this? Wikipedia: Instant Insanity This was a puzzle that was produced in the late 1960s, a stack of four plastic cubes, with the sides of each cube a seemingly random pattern of red, white, green, and blue … Continue reading →

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Settling in, Catching up, Puppygate

Posted on Monday 20 April 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m two or more weeks behind posting links and comments, though not without collecting them in my blogposts word doc, so I’ll be catching up eventually — I think this next week. The context is settling in to our new … Continue reading →

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Unpacking Books

Posted on Friday 20 March 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Still unpacking boxes of books. It’s curious that, whether I packed the boxes, or the moving service’s packers packed the boxes, you’d think that boxes would be packed and stacked in a relative order to what was on the shelves. … Continue reading →

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