August 2017

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The news arrived of the death of the British writer Brian Aldiss. It happened last Saturday, August 19, 2017. His family didn’t report the death causes but he had just celebrated his 92th birthday.

It’s impossible to measure the impact that Brian Aldiss’s long career had in the field of science fiction on readers as well as on writers who considered him as a source of inspiration and had stories included in the anthologies he edited. Various colleagues described him as a man with an intense passion for literature and poetry who spent all his life reading and writing.

Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper (Italian edition)

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The novel “Little Fuzzy” by H. Beam Piper was published for the first time in 1962. Itìs the first book in the Fuzzy series. It can be freely downloaded from the Project Gutenberg website.

Jack Holloway is a Sunstone prospector on the Zarathustra planet on behalf of the Zarathustra Company. During his work, he comes across small creatures he names Little Fuzzies and soon realizes that they show signs of intelligence, an event that can dramatically change the planet’s status.

The Zarathustra Company has a charter on the planet based on the fact that it’s not inhabited by sapient creatures, if the level of intelligence of the Little Fuzzies got recognized the corporation would lose part of the control of the planet’s resources. The decision becomes the subject of a harsh legal battle in the form of a murder trial.

Extract of sedimentary rocks (Photo courtesy Stuart Hay / ANU)

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An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research that provides an explanation for the rise of animals on Earth. According to a team of researchers led by the Australian National University (ANU), animals evolved at the height of a series of events. There was the end of the glacial period known as Snowball Earth and the spread of algae, which became together with simple substances a crucial source of nutrients that allowed more complex organisms to emerge.

Trace Memory by David Llewellyn

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The novel “Trace Memory” by David Llewellyn was published for the first time in 2008.

In 1953, the explosion of a box sent to Torchwood Cardiff before it reached its destination kills the people who were handling it except a boy named Michael Bellini. 55 years after an alarm is tringgered in the hub and when Captain Jack Harkness and the members of his team in service search for its cause and find out Michael Bellini’s presence. The boy is confused and doesn’t know what happened to him after the 1953 events.

To find out if a temporal anomaly carried Michael Bellini through time, the boy is questioned to get at least some useful information to begin the investigation. Soon the situation becomes stranger because the Captain and his team members realize they’ve met Michael in the past and Jack knows him better than anyone else. Who are the mysterious men in bowler hats who seem to be chasing him and what do they want from him?

The digging of Patagotitan mayorum's bones (Photo courtesy Museo Egidio Feruglio)

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An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the Royal Society B” describes the study of the most massive titanosaurus discovered so far. Called Patagotitan mayorum, it was about 37 meters long (122 feet), about 6 meters (20 feet) tall and its weight was estimated at 69 tons, which make it the largest animal that ever lived on the mainland. It lived in the late Cretaceous, between 95 and 100 million years ago, in today’s Patagonia, Argentina.