Wrote (about) more than just sci-fi. His timeline of the development from heliocentric to geocentrism, "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown", is a fun read; table of contents:
> At his death, he had a lot of tabs open on his browser, on a variety topics. He always sought to learn about different things. Some of it was for his writing, some for the extensive family research he has always done, and some of it was just because he wanted to learn more about the universe, the planet we live on, and the people around him.
Just a note to my descendants: do not publish my open browser tabs in my obituary.
I'm a big fan of his book The Wreck of the River of Stars, and think a lot of people here would like it.
The River of Stars is an interplanetary craft, originally driven by solar sail, with snazzy new fusion drives recently added. The crew combines new fusion people and sail traditionalists, and they don't like each other. The story is part engineering, part psychology; everybody does what they think is best for the ship, but they don't communicate well and unfortunate things happen.
Thanks for generously sharing your positive experience!
Historically, these sorts of pleasure reading book recommendations from HN tend to be very good.
Interestingly, Michael F. Flynn has one yet-to-be-published work: "In the Belly of the Whale", which isn't scheduled for release until 2024 [0]. Hope he finished it <3.
Just picked it up digitally, this sounds like such an awesome premise :)
For anyone who enjoys metal (specifically story driven funeral doom) there's a really cool album called Ark by The Slow Death. It's about humanity torching Earth so badly they pool the remaining resources to escape with The Chosen Ones on humanity's last hope, a space ark trying to find a new planet to live on. It's a great, slow story and the band does an awesome job of building the atmosphere the lyrics are portraying.
Note that this is not Michael J. Flynn (age 89) [1], Stanford University professor emeritus and progenitor of Flynn's taxonomy [2] of parallel computer architectures based on the number of concurrent control and data streams available:
- SISD: Single Instruction stream, Single Data stream
- SIMD: Single Instruction stream, Multiple Data streams
- MISD: Multiple Instruction streams, Single Data stream
- MIMD: Multiple Instruction streams, Multiple Data streams
Losing a parent is a sad, sad, sad time. I admire the person that wrote this post because it would not have been easy to do so and yet it was delivered so well.
Read Firestar as a teenager and liked it, so I went to a meet-the-author event at a local bookshop where he was promoting the next book in that series. When he opened up for questions, he responded to mine by mocking my speech (I guess I had a nerdy voice like probably many of us here) and didn't even answer the question.
Really turned me off the author. And that was before I grew older and wiser and came to realize how that series was largely libertarian agitprop and stereotypes of various demographics -- like Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars series from the same era, maybe it is something that only adolescents can really love.
"At his death, he had a lot of tabs open on his browser"
(while it is intended as a testimony to his lifelong curiosity - maybe ponder that no, you really aren't going to get to all of those tabs and can let some of them go...)
I had thought that, like the former president, the former general’s middle initial is J. Turns out Michael J. Flynn is actually a computer scientist of some renown:
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
So is his five-part series laying out Aristotle's first way argument about the Unmoved Mover:
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-way-some-backgrou...
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-way-moving-tale.h...
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-way-part-ii-two-l...
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/10/first-way-part-iii-big-...
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/11/first-way-part-iv-casca...