Author notes

166 - High Levels of Anxiety

El Cid

on June 26, 2017

Introducing Bitsy the Robot, and once again Ethel the creepy toon A.I. Apparently Ula isn't coping well with the captain bogarting her boyfriend. But such are the hardships of space travel. It could be worse.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:
I can't take credit for the term “psychogen,” as I picked it up from an Alastair Reynolds short story, Spirey and the Queen. I'm sure I reference Reynolds a lot; I've read several sci-fi authors over the past few years, but he's one of the few whose work I consistently enjoy. Spirey and the Queen is one of my favorite short space opera stories that I've read lately.



This will be our last week of triple updates. I crammed in as much as I could before the Drunk Duck Awards voting starts, but next week it is upon us! Hopefully no one's had much trouble keeping up. Speaking of the Drunk Duck Awards, my For Your Consideration page should be going up at the DD Awards site at some point today. It's pretty lame, and it may or may not contain embedded subliminal messages that may or may not fry your cerebral cortex, but you are morally obligated to go check it out. Sorry, but you have no choice.

***Click here to check out my snazzy FYC page!***



Okay, so I posted a blurb not too long ago about how Planet Nine may not actually exist. But now researchers are saying there may actually be another, much closer, undiscovered planet in our solar system. After analyzing the orbits of objects in the Kuiper Belt, researchers Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory noticed that “something” appears to be tugging objects on the outskirts of the Belt slightly out of the plane they should be orbiting in. If their calculations are correct, then the most likely explanation is a Mars-sized object orbiting about 50 astronomical units from the sun. That's a bit further out than Pluto, which orbits 39.48 astronomical units out, on average.



I was taken in by the Planet Nine hype, so I'm going to hold off on jumping on the Planet 10 bandwagon just yet. There are other explanations for the tilt; for one thing, it could be several smaller objects causing it rather than one big one. And in any case, so long as we stick to the IAU's stupid definition, Planet 10 will technically not be a planet. Even though it's the size of Mars.