Michael Gogins

Atwood proves herself a master science fiction writer in these books, the first two of a trilogy (the third has not yet been published). Spoiler alert: this review begins with plot summaries!
Oryx and Crake tells the story, in reverse via flashbacks, of how Crake, a genius with a grudge against the world, designs both [...]

The Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) has now awarded first prize in its annual essay contest to Louis Crane for Stardrives and Spinoza. This is a follow-up to Are Black Hole Starships Possible? by Crane and Shawn Westmoreland, which I have already commented on below.
The theme of this year’s contest is “What is ultimately possible in [...]

By a strange coincidence, only a few days after I read the proposal for a dark matter engine, I find on the arXiv another, probably even more significant proposal by Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland of Kansas State University: Are Black Hole Starships Possible? (http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803).
The gist of Crane and Westmoreland’s paper is that physics appears [...]

Dark matter rockets, or rather reciprocating ramjets, are proposed by Jia Liu in http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1429. Dark matter particles annihilate on collision. The spacecraft opens its engine to sweep in dark matter, closes the opening, and compresses the dark matter until it annihilates to produce energy. This is as efficient as it gets. The other [...]