The Alternate Timeline series highlighting news from the realms of science, tech, history, and pop culture that will help fuel your imagination.
It’s nothing fancy. I just happen to read a lot of headlines and articles to spark ideas for my own work, and in doing so, I often wish there was a space for all of the headlines that tickle the sci-fi part of my brain to hang out. This is my attempt at making that happen.
So, let’s jump in with some headlines and quotes that caught my eye in previous month’s!
One Cool Quote
“Deep time” is a term that refers to the geological history of Earth. It requires the brain to reorient its scale, to think about time in billion-year chronologies, rather than days or months. It can cause some wrestling with the twinned significance and insignificance of our lives. At one point during the show, a quotation from Albert Einstein flashes on the screen: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” What we know is limited. What we can imagine — especially for ourselves — is limitless. The concert is punctuated with visuals that offer a sense of Beyoncé’s cosmology: graphics of her soaring through expansive galaxies, including a winged robotic version of the singer astride a rocket navigating outer space. The imagery is suggestive of other ways of being, outside of Earth, known and unknown…
Indian Science Fiction [SF] cinema has & had a lot of chances to enlighten history of providing striking portrayals of the future, alternative worlds, sleek rocket ships, cyborgs, deadly ray guns, time machines, and wormholes through hyperspace, but until quite recently, no black people. For decades it seemed as if science fiction cinema was the symbolic wish fulfillment of America’s staunchest advocates of white supremacy.
Darth Vader is a aural cypher for the black actor James Earl Jones, who uses his distinctive baritone voice, vocal delivery, and timbre to infuse emotion into the film’s charismatic villain. The off-screen voice of Jones plays a significant part in inviting the viewing audience to experience blackness aurally, as the intergalactic voice of doom, while disavowing the presence of blackness except as a visual symbol.
When September ends, the South West Monsoon withdraws from our coast. The river is the sky, Amazonian, in her strength, stops flowing and dry air from the North West slides in to suck out life and water from the earth, plants, grass, insects and animals.
This morning, even before the October sun was halfway up the blue sky, the temperature was 31 degrees Celsius, but it felt like 38, according to the weather report. In Thane Creek, the waters separating the Islands of Mumbai and Salcette from Mainland India, the water still plays strange tricks on my dehydrated mind. I had planned to write about sedimentary rocks and here I am writing about still waters.
October Heat, Mumbai’s second summer, is here. Stay hydrated.