As pointed out in email

One day, sitting around with a group of undergraduate physics students, I listened as one made the bold statement: “If it can be imagined, it can be done.” The others nodded in agreement. It sounded like wisdom. It took me all of two seconds to violate this dictum as I imagined myself jumping straight up to the Moon. I may have asked if the student really thought what he said was true, but resisted the impulse to turn it into an impromptu teaching moment. Instead, I wondered how pervasive this attitude was among physics students and faculty. So I put together a survey and in this post report what I found. The overriding theme: experts say don’t count on a Star Trek future. Ever.

Icons

Quite often Icons produces an odd mishmash of abilities that take some ingenuity to unify. In other cases...
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To my cat Groucho

It is inconsistent to complain that I am brushing out all your fur snarls and then complain that I stopped.

Sci-Fi Radio 25 - The Twonky by Lewis Padgett

Sci-Fi Radio 25 - The Twonky by Lewis Padgett

Lewis Padgett is a pen name for C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner.

This is an example of indirect first contact gone wrong and is in the same sub-genre as Kornbluth's 'The Little Black Bag'. You can generally be sure that dropping unfamiliar advanced technology into an unsuspecting person's hands is going to go wrong but not necessarily how. I do wonder if there is a benevolent purpose to a Twonky, because I am not seeing it.

I think details of the story were changed for the play. The technology is more advanced than one would expect in a 1940s era story and I don't recall anyone dying in the original.

Sci-Fi Radio 26 - Yanqui Doodle by James Tiptree (aka Alice Sheldon)

Sci-Fi Radio 26 - Yanqui Doodle by James Tiptree (aka Alice Sheldon)

This details the program of rehabilitation one soldier experiences after being wounded at the front. I would have guessed this was written over a decade before it was but in fact it must have been among the final stories Tiptree wrote and I should have guessed from the fact that it is set in Central America rather than South East Asia (as would have been the case had it been written during the Viet Nam conflict or in the Middle East or Central Asia, as it might be if it were written now.


Matthew Cheney's The Stories That Predict Us