September 2012

The Forge of God by Greg Bear (Italian edition)

2

The novel “The Forge of God” by Greg Bear was published for the first time in 1987. In 1996, Jupiter’s satellite Europa suddenly disappears. An alien starship is found in the Death Valley and an extraterrestrial creature brings very bad news for the future of the Earth. The discovery is kept secret by the U.S.A. government, instead the Australian one announces that they’ve been in contact with other aliens who claim they have come to help humanity on the road to unprecedented progress.

The Space Shuttle Orbiter Endeavour atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft over Los Angeles (Photo NASA/Jim Ross)

1

Yesterday, the Space Shuttle Orbiter Endeavour arrived in Los Angeles after a long journey atop the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA), the 747 specially modified to carry the Space Shuttles, which can’t fly on their own as a airplane. On October 12, they’ll start the complex operations to trasnport it to the California Science Center, where it will be exposed in the Samuel Oschin Space Shuttle Endeavour Display Pavilion from the end of October.

The pyramid-shaped rock Jake Matijevic photographed by the Mars Rover Curiosity (Photo NASA/JPL-Caltech)

0

On the way to the place called Glenelg, the Mars Rover Curiosity stopped to study a small pyramid-shaped rock. Over the last week, the Mars Rover Curiosity has also worked to its astronomical mission taking pictures with its Mast Camera (Mastcam) of the two moons of Mars, Deimos and Phobos, as they passed in front of the Sun.

The TV show Firefly

3

On September 20, 2002, the TV show “Firefly” made its debut on Fox. “Firefly” is set in 2517 in a colonized solar system after Earth, overpopulated and exploited to exhaustion, has been abandoned. Planets and moons in the new solar system have been terraformed but with different results. The rich have taken the best planets, where they live in cities where they have the most advanced technologies. Instead, the poor had to go live on moons where conditions are at the limit of habitability and technology is limited so in many ways they look like the old west.

2

Damon Francis Knight was born on September 19, 1922 in Baker, Oregon. During his life he’s been a science fiction writer, editor and critic. He was also the founder or cofounder of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), the National Fantasy Fan Federation, the Milford Writer’s Workshop and the Clarion Writers Workshop. He died on April 15, 2002 in Eugene, Oregon, where he lived for a long time with his wife Kate Wilhelm, also a science fiction writer.