Got a copy of Barry Deutsch’s Hereville in the mail today. Lovely work. I first admired Barry’s comic “Cast of Thousands” which he drew while at UMass (he mentions this on his bio page), which is when I began doing daily comics with my strip Bruno. Congrats, Barry, on getting published by Amulet/Abrams!
I really have to get my act together on setting up a convention schedule for next year (nothing planned so far except for Stumptown). If there is a sci-fi convention in your town which you’d like to see me at, or if you know the organizers and want me as a special guest or panelist etc etc, let me know.
Hey, Chris, the comic isn’t displaying properly.
Hm… not sure why not, but I re-saved it from its original file and uploaded the new version. Seems okay now on my end. Someone let me know if that doesn’t work!
Looks fine from my end-
Looks good on this end!
== John ==
Excellent. I think goin’s good.
I can’t help but feel that this is a very relevant strip (re: how spacetrawlers are made).
The Terrible Secret of Spacetrawlers!
Huh. A terrible secret that will lead to the downfall of Galactic Civilization (such as it is) if it is revealed. Or not. Sounds like “The Light on the Sound” by Somtow Sucharitkul (or whatever he’s calling himself these days); or even “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, who lived in the Pacific Northwest too, if I recall correctly.
typo: The bar-bot synthesizeD them…. (I just want my hard copy to be perfect when it’s available. ^_^ )
Loving this comic.
Hey, what about Frank Herbert’s “Whipping Star”? That had a pretty terrible secret that will lead to the downfall of galactic civilisation, as these things go.
Space has a terrible power.
Pushing will protect you.
Pushing will protect you.
Pushing will protect you from the terrible secret of space.
“Are you familiar with quantum particle entanglement?”
Oh, funny. When I was on barracks duty in D.C., we got new hand-held radios, with the latest in encryption, all kind of gee-whiz stuff. The Air Force, who ran the coms, insisted on giving us grunts a brief on how to work the radios.
Instant snooze-fest as the Eeb, I mean Sergeant, went over encryption theory, frequency hopping and . . I don’t know what all: I fell into a polite, eyes-open, doze.
A few hours later the senior sergeant interrupted: ‘Hey, I’m just a dumb grunt but … push to talk, release to listen, right? Right. Class dismissed.’
Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha. sigh. You guys. 🙂
@Nomi. Fixed! Thanks for letting me know!
Ok, that’s as close to understanding Heisenberg as I’m ever gonna get — thanks!
Awesome, I actually understood the stuff about splitting particles and how their rotations are the opposite of each other regardless of distance. I’m really liking the groove the day to day feel this comic is getting. (Day to day feel in a comfortable way not a boring way!)
I hope there’s no connection to “Whipping Star”, Herbert’s weirdest novel by far. I predict the Spacetrawler secret will be weird but very very funny.
I don’t know if I’m okay with Martina getting so comfortable with dressing the space way.
Also, did I miss when Emily said what she wanted those things for?
@Jim, nope, no connection to “Whipping Star.” I’m afraid I haven’t read it, NOR “The Light on the Sound” nor “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Sadly none are on audiobook at the library except “whipping star” which only runs on PC. I keep thinking I should buy one simply for all the audiobook downloads I could then do. 🙁
@Frank, she did not say, but you’ll find out soon enough. >:-)
Yuri, who got over torture and dismemberment pretty quickly, is now calling something “nightmarishly horrible.” I don’t think I want to know the secret of space trawlers (but I can’t look away).
You know, if you get them as e-books, you can use a text-to-speech synthesizer to turn them into MP3s. There are some pretty good ones out there now.
@Frank, I must admit, I can put up with some of the most boring humans reading audiobooks, but I haven’t been able to tolerate any text-to-speech readers, and I’ve tried several. :-/
@Christopher, re: the “text-to-speech readers”: I’ll bet you’ve never tried having one of them read a porn novel, have you? >:->
Ahem.
And “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is a short story, the kind they make you read in high school lit class. It won the Hugo in 1974. You can read a description of the plot in the wikipedia entry.
So maybe there is some truth to that “crazy” aliens theory about how spacetrawlers are made.
@JKCarroll, ah. Yes. I see. That is a utopia in a stark light isn’t it.
While I’m eagerly awaiting for the spacetrawler secrets to unravel, I do suspect that Dimitri is the living refutation of Emily’s interpretation of the Heisenberg ‘sex’ principle…;-).
Hmm. Is the name ‘Gray17’ a reference to Babylon 5?
@SeanK, I’ve only seen one or two episodes. What in it were you thinking if was a ref to, I’m curious?
For the Eebs, basically, I liked the idea of a color and then a number being their naming convention. Cardinal57, Cerise22, Gay17, etc.
On Babylon 5, the different sectors were colors, with the floors being numbers. One episode, ‘Gray 17 is Missing’, was, about just that: how an entire floor on a space station went missing. (It was a pretty subpar episode, but that’s a tangent)
Wow, that is…. plainly amazing. What a funny coincidence. 🙂
In Spacetrawler, Gray17 is present, accounted for, and generally useless (although the Eebs seem undeveloped now, they WILL be more in the forefront in book #2).
But, if their naming convention is “color#”, what happens when you get two colors that simply clash, like “puce13” and “mauve42”? Does that mean we’re going to meet up with an evil Eeb “Black666”?
And when can we expect to see Eeb T-shirts, as in “FREE EEBS… with every purchase of 12 or more.”
This may have been brought up before, but is that a Jupiter 2 lift that Martina’s stepping out of?
@Adama, I’m not sure. Bob Goff designed that inverse ladder, as well as the ring-deck and the basic bridge structure and parts (Bob is awesome!)
But I’m always curious. I looked online for “Jupiter 2 lift” and wasn’t sure what you were referring to. Can you post a link?
From “Lost in Space”. Could _not_ find a good photo of the actual set, but here’s a good photo of a highly detailed model someone built. You can also just see the edge of it in this photo.
It’s exactly that. Neat! 🙂
Maybe this has been mentioned before, ..I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Eebs is Bees backwards and that they are drones building the technology honey for the universe. clever Mr.Baldwin quite clever
@Don Ahe, true, but the the Eebs are snappier dressers.
Damn, I’m late.
But the strip reminded me of the Conjoiner_Drive. The above linked conspiracy theorist strip seems to support either this or a transfer of their “essence”, since they have magic psychic powers letting them nullify decoherence and mathematics.
Funny that I’ve read stories using ansibles, but did not realize that it used quantum entanglement, and actually thought it might be a new idea of mine. Sigh. I did, however, assume it was unlikely to be possible, and learning about decoherence is no surprise.
And I ADORE Alastair Reynolds’ work. 🙂
Space Trawler fan art from @rdapplesalmanac's Don Ahe posted today! http://bit.ly/dov8CL "Fan"-tastic! 🙂
Huh. Looks like my comment got lost in the mail. Too many links, I guess. Oh well, here it is again, in case JKcaroll ever reads these old comments:
@JKCaroll: Good work spotting the pattern. Up to now I thought Gray17 was a reference to “the Greys”, Cerise22 was a reference to the Marvel Comics character, Mauve12 was named after the flower and Cardinal62’s name meant he (she? it?) was the 62nd bishop for the uneyetarians.
if the eebs can keep a secret that shows they have will.
so why do they need to change the way they define inteligense?
@SamN, in this case, being able to keep a secret does not necessarily show willpower. 🙂
seeing as you are the author i will take your word for but it XD good Web comic by the way
If you look at human slavery they even came up with a pseudo science reason for why slaves ran away. So it is just a mass means of self hypnosis because it allows them psychologically to use the Eebs to their destruction. To depend on them in fact.
They remind me of the Vulks in Robert Cham Gilman’s novels from the 1960’s.