It's curious. Now that I've created a blog, I wake up thinking of things I should write in it. It's like a gadget I never used before that becomes a necessity the moment I use it. Luckily, blogging is free -- for the moment. I'm afraid what might happen if I borrow somebody's cell phone or iPod.

I'm concerned that I don't know who I'm writing for. Is this to be my private journal, where I can record my innermost thoughts, however hurtful they may be? Or is it like an newspaper column, intended to draw an audience of people who don't know me? Will I at some point share this material with my girlfriend, my family, and my community? R, I hear, keeps more than one blog, perhaps so she can do more than one kind of writing. Until I've decided, I'd better err on the side of caution.

The "necessary gadget" lead this morning reminds me that I'm a creature of habit, tending to do the same things over and over rather than trying new ones. Breakfast, which I eat while my mind is still awakening, is particularly routine. I eat Cheerios with milk almost every morning, as I have since I was a kid. This morning, a red letter warning on the box caught my eye. Referring about the iron-on transfer printed on the back of the box, it said, "Do not iron while wearing the shirt."

This amused me twice, once when I visualized the awkwardness of a person ironing a shirt they themselves were wearing (The editor in me wants to rephrase: "Do not iron any shirt while someone is wearing it.") and then again when I considered the implied insult, that people who eat Cheerios are dumb enough not to recognize the danger inherent in a hot iron. Since it seems that few people in my generation ever iron their clothes (I haven't done so in years.), perhaps clothes irons have become an esoteric technology that requires detailed warning labels.

What happened, I suppose, is that some General Mills corporate lawyer tried to protect his company against the liability lawsuit that's bound to occur after some kid applies a hot iron to a younger sibling. Liability insurance -- argh! I better not get started on that topic, or I'll never get to work today.

The other thing going through my mind this morning is space opera. I wanted to complain that many sf writers' treat interplanetary (and interstellar) space as if it were analogous to a terrestrial ocean. Over the years, this analogy has led to an unrealistic view of space travel that is fossilized even in stories published today. The problem is particularly fresh in my mind because of a beautiful story titled "Lady Be Good" in the April 2006 issue of Analog. It's about the first officer of run-down (space) freighter trying to complete a profitable run against impossible odds.

The author (John G. Henry, whom I know nothing about) understands that humans need a spacesuit to survive outside a ship, a small but significant step up from the days of Buck Rogers. He may understand about free fall, though there's no evidence that his characters ever experience it, even aboard a derelict or a lifeboat. Perhaps their (space)ships have artificial gravity compensators, or perhaps free fall has become so familiar that people never mention its effects. For whatever reason, the effects of acceleration (and the lack thereof) are never mentioned. The time-scale of the story (a couple weeks to travel between inhabited star systems) suggests that Mr. Henry doesn't believe the speed of light is universal limit. Maybe it isn't, but when sf authors blithely ignore Relativity (in a magazine that prides itself in publishing factual science articles) by simply using the word "jump," I feel a pang of concern.

The biggest distortion of space travel in "Lady Be Good" has to do with scale. The story hinges on several close encounters between (space)ships. The first occurs in interplanetary space, when the protagonist is watching inbound shipping. To him, interplanetary space (hundreds of millions of miles) feels "cramped and crowded." He watches the "big ships" with envy, noting how shiny they are. Makes me wonder just how big these babies are, for him to be studying them visually from thousands of miles away! Later, in interstellar space, he encounters (purely by chance) a derelict (space)ship. What are the odds of that, with 2x10^38 cubic miles of empty space in every cubic light-year? How one could detect a derelict even a million miles away is a mystery to me.

The final insult to my suspension of disbelief came at the climax of the story. I don't think it will spoil the ending to tell you that it involves combat and collisions in interplantary space. Mr. Henry expects me to believe that unguided projectiles would be an effective weapon against spaceships that can accelerate fast enough to cross a solar system in a day or two. Millions of miles in which to maneuver, and the "smaller privateer" can't avoid a small cluster of cargo containers.

Don't get me wrong. Despite my ranting, I actually enjoyed the story. I loved the way the protagonist morphed from a cold-blooded smuggler to a big-hearted hero as I got to know him better. I came to understand how much he cared about the people around him. I was delighted that he did the right thing in the end, and it paid off. The story left me with a warm glow.

I just wonder why the author chose to put the story in a trite space opera setting, rather than on the high seas of Earth.

Tomorrow I should write about "Podkayne of Mars" a classic Heinlein juvenile which I find problematic for very different reasons.