Antipodean issue 152 now online!

Editor Ion of the flash fiction online magazine Antipodean issue 152 is now online at Antisf.com

Here is a table of contents for this month's magazine.

Welcome Home, Johnny Ace By Onil Lad

Drinking Stories By Marie Hodgkinson

Episode 4.5 By Michael Frissore

Ninja Nemesis By Crisetta Macleod

The Storms By Steve Duffy

An Accident Going Somewhere To Happen By Shaun A. Saunders

Damned Humanists By Wes Parish

Sweet Dreams By Nicole Rendall

Synaesthesia By Kevin J. Phyland

Blame Games By Gitte Christensen


I have read this month's stories and this is certainly a keeper. I hope you enjoy it!

NASA Mission Finds Earth Candidates in Habitable Zone

NASA Kepler Mission continues to pay dividends. NASA reports that Kepler has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, the region around a star where water could exist on a planet's surface in liquid form. Five of the potential planets are near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of smaller, cooler stars than our sun. More investigation will be needed to determine if the bodies are indeed planets as well as more data on size and orbit.

Read the complete NASA article HERE

NASA's Kepler Telescope Discovers New Planetary System

Scientists using NASA's Kepler space telescope, have discovered a six planet system, designated Kepler 11, who's planets are made up of a mix of rock and gases. Kepler 11 is a yellow dwarf star, much like our own sun, located about 2,000 light years from Earth. According to the team at NASA's Ames Research Center, Kepler 11 is amazingly compact, amazingly flat and there's an amazingly large number of big planets orbiting close to their star. In other words, Kepler-11 has the fullest, most compact planetary system yet discovered beyond our own!

As much as the Kepler 11 system resembles our own, there are many startling differences. First all the planets are at least twice as large as Earth and stranger still ALL the planets orbit their primary at least twice as close to their primary with the inner most orbiting ten times closer to its star than Earth. Five of the planets of Kepler 11 orbit closer than any planet in our system. Think about that for a second....between Mercury and Sol, squeeze in 5 more planets! Now THAT is compact!

Oh and lets take a look at the science that is going on to detect these planets. First off, unless you have been in a cave for a few years, you understand that Kepler is not resolving the planets directly. Kepler measures the luminosity of a star. When the star's brightness fades, Kepler infers that a planet has passed between it and the star. The more a star fades, the larger the star. So, we are looking at a dwarf yellow star like our own. So it's a fairly dim star and small, plus it 2000 freakin light-years away! You do the math.... So 2000 ly distance away, a speck travels in front of the star, dimming it ever so infinitesimally! Imagine the calibration it takes to do that level of science!

Check out the complete story at Science daily

A Most Unusual Rocket Launch

From the IO9 article:

• This music video by the Portland Cello Project showed last weekend at the Seattle Science Fiction Short Film Festival, and it's a weird, moving story of a crustacean who just wants to escape the bounds of Earth.

Portland Cello Project - 'Denmark' from Two Penguins Productions on Vimeo.

10 Greatest Star-ships of all Time!

Charlie Jane Anders, writing for the IO9 blog has put together a list of the 10 greatest starships of all time. The list doesn't contain just the prettiest or the biggest but, as she writes,

• ...."for the purposes of this list, we're going by the definition of "starship" from the venerable "Starship Smackdown" event. Which means, a starship has to travel between star systems, and ideally ought to have a crew and a mission. So no Serenity, sorry."

But under that criteria I say, as she did also, feel free to write in and disagree.

10) The Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)

9) Space Battleship Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato)

8) SDF-1 Macross (Macross/Robotech)

7) NSEA Protector (Galaxy Quest)

6) Moya (Farscape)

5) SSV Normandy (Mass Effect)

4) Rama (Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke)

3) Battlestar Galactica (new version)

2) U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D

1) Millenium Falcon

Now I KNOW there is going to be dissension here. First us old TOS guys are bound to say Falcon better that Enterprise?!!! NFL! And a D class? well, a D would kick major ass. But all that aside, read the original IO9 article HERE to get a jist of the complete idea of how the choices were made. I have a couple of ideas but I will let you people take a run at it first. So, ideas? Suggestions? Death threats?