Ed and I watched on Netflix, a program called Prophets of Science Fiction. They had in-depth reviews of the lives and accomplishments of the great thinkers and writers, starting with Arthur C. Clarke. I confess I hadn’t known what a genius he was. He invented the concept of the space satellite.

It is no wonder Clarke never talked to me. I didn’t have a clue. Here was this intellect with a prodigious imagination and I was just this right-brained young thing. He spent all his time talking with Jay (whose nickname was Giant Brain) at the dinners we shared when he came to New York. He walked us back to his room at his favorite New York hotel, the Chelsea on 23rd Street, and showed us a device that he was excited about that had unusual properties. I am sorry to say I can’t describe it – he called it a quasar and when I Googled the definition, this is what I learned: astronomical object with high energy output: a compact object in space, usually with a large red shift indicating extreme remoteness, that emits huge amounts of energy, sometimes equal to the energy output of an entire galaxy. It’s just as well I didn’t talk at these events.

They also showcased Isaac Asimov. What was interesting was seeing what Ike looked like in his younger years. Although I met him in 1956, he had already grown the (ugly) sideburns that defined his look for the rest of his life. Underneath all that, he was nice looking. I can’t imagine what he was thinking when he chose that look.

Ike had an encyclopedic mind and wrote many nonfiction books in his later years that distilled complex ideas into language that explained things to a nontechnical reader. And he invented a robotic world that still resonates.

Other writers in that series that we will watch another time were Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and Philip K. Dick (whom I met but never spoke to).

I recommend this series. You can Google it for more info.

xx, Teal

P.S. In choosing a channel for this post, I again lament the absence of a single category for science and deplore the overkill of having 18 categories for sports. Really? 18??