“This isn’t Mars.”
“What?”
“According to our results, this planet only arrived in our solar system in 1908.”
“Then what happened to the old Mars? And where did the insects come from?”
To be continued in THE FOURTH PLANET.
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And then the murders began.
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Are you quoting something here?
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No.
But observations as late as 1905 seemed to show canals on Mars. Those at the close opposition in 1909 did not. And most of the supposed ocean basins turn out to be highlands. So if I’m going to incorporate more bad Mars science into this story, I need a sort of topographically-inverse Mars to replace the original. Not, you know, just having massive sandtorms just sweep over failed canals.
Lowell had already imagined that Mars was drying out, and Martians were turning to increasingly desperate solutions.
So I’m tempted to borrow from Doctor Who, where Mondas is a mirror of Earth, flung from the solar ystem, forcing the people to embrace drastic solutions, becoming the Cybermen in The Tenth Planet.
Of course we knew about Old Mars before Replacement Mars, so Old Mars is THE FOURTH PLANET.
If there’s anything else you want to squeeze in, please do. I’d like to brainstorm the most over-the-top b-movie plot we can.
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Somewhere in there, please include this type of character:
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But that’s just wrong.
And let’s incorporate the face on Mars.
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Aliens began by interfering with our attempts to probe the luminiferous aether.
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I was thinking it sounded vaguely Dr. Who-ish.
I would watch that episode if it existed.
I’m still disappointed that “The Pyramids of Mars” spent all its time in a manor house.
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I got a letter to me from Uganda, forwarded to me from where I used to work. The associate director is retiring soon, and I guess in cleaning out his office he found it and some other things, so he packaged them up and sent them to me. Over my career, I had gotten a few (not many) requests for reprints of one sort or another (before the internet really got going) from various countries (including Cuba and Rumania, if I recall right). So I assumed it was one of these, from someone not connected to the internet.
It wasn’t. It was a letter from a young woman requesting money ($1900) to help her go to midwifery school.
Now was this a snail mail Nigerian prince-like scam? Or was it real? If so, did she get to go to school? It was clearly hand-written (I don’t think printers and fonts have gotten that sophisticated), so if it is a scam they must hire people to write these letter over and over? She has very nice hand-writing.
But it started out Dear, without a name. My name was nowhere on the letter.
Very strange. Some nice Ugandan stamps, though.
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Ha! Now I don’t feel so overly-suspicious. Thanks.
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Found the original article that the letters responded to. Why did they not include a link?
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Wow, these just sound so similar. Included with the letter was a report card of sorts (exemplary of course) and a death certificate of the mother. All fake no doubt. The return address was also a PO box.
Most wicked scam? No, I think selling fake vaccines and promoting Ivervectin, and Jim Bakker’s selling $1000 miracle bill-paying blankets are worse.
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One of the songs the band I’m in will be covering is “Junior’s Farm” by Wings, which contains the word “Eskimo”. I wanted to know if I should change it, as “Inuit” would cut off the rhyme (the next line has the word “snow” at the end of it), but not the rhythm, as both words are three syllables long. So, of course I had to find out because that’s just the way I am.
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Modern racebikes do things that ye olde riders would have dismissed as sorcery.
Watch his back wheel:
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Thread. But, a minor spoiler:
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With some transgender people asking to be called the plural “they” rather than “he” or “she,” the English major in me begins to feel desperate.
The English major in the author seems to have forgotten that singular “they” exists. Kind of makes me wonder about the credibility of some of the other opinions they express in that article. 
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That is, predicted the fiction of today.
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