Look . . . up in the sky . . . it’s . . . !
Taking my mind off the third day of the summer’s First Heat Wave: thanks to a very nice mention by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, the book has now soared to #1 on Amazon’s high-tech SF ranking! (Yeah, I know Amazon rankings aren’t worth obsessing over. And that this is a blink-and-you-miss-it moment anyway. And that by the time you click on this link, the book’ll probably be locked in a relentless battle for 180th place. But as of right now: here I am ahead of Gibson, Stross, Stephenson, and the whole lot of them. That ain’t no UFO, baby, it’s THE MIRRORED HEAVENS!)
But this morning I want to talk about IFOs, actually. Specifically, aircraft. Specifically, passenger aircraft. Two cool links came in this weekend from our informant Topdog. The first is a slide show of aircraft graveyards in Arizona and California. It’s as haunting as it is surreal. Especially some of the interiors, which make you wonder who sat in them and when, and all the lives and moments that passed through them. And now these planes just sit there with the sand drifting over them.
While their newer (or maybe not so new) brethren fly overhead. The second link Topdog sent over is SkyVector: online aeronautical charts! Man, this stuff is cool. You can plot in flight routes and see all the data. So if you’re gonna attach balloons to your lawn-chair and then go for a spin, this is how to do it.
You know what? I have more I want to say about aircraft, but I’ll save it. Every second I don’t hit “publish” on this blog post is a second in which Gibson and the rest of them will be putting boot-prints on my back as they reclaim first place. I’ll be back later with some thoughts on Nazi plans to bomb North America. In the meantime, if you want me, I’ll be camped out in the freezer.
Tags: books, future of war, Mirrored Heavens, novel, science fiction, scifi, SF
June 9th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Speaking of lawn-chairs and balloon flights, remember Larry Walters’ flight over the skies of south Los Angeles?
My favorite quote from an FAA spokesman, “If he had a pilot’s license, we’d suspend that. But he doesn’t.” Let’s be thankful for that!
More on the event that was undoubtably all the rage the summer of 1982–a simpler time.
http://home.earthlink.net/~quade/lawnchair.html
Hey, since he had a BB gun, is he the first “weaponizer” of space?
June 9th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Actually, a priest in Brazil tried a similar trick earlier this year. He had a GPS system, a satelite phone and flotation equipment, just in case he was blown out to sea. But none of it helped him when he was . . . blown out to sea. They never found him.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7360416.stm
June 9th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
The aircraft graveyard evokes the famous scene in the movie: The Best Years of Their Lives.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Make that “The Best Years Of OUR Lives”!
April 21st, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Hey I have been reading your website for the past week or two and it is pretty cool, how many followers do you receive?