m. c. de marco

Via GeekPress: [The] Lord of the Rings as Property Law. and Property Law in The Lord of the Rings. The latter features an itemized list of all ways, licit and ill, in which the One Ring is acquired by its various ill-fated possessors. For example:

I. Acquisition by Creation.

Get in on the ground floor of Lunae planum with Virgle:

Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.

Via GeekPress: Cracked.com lists The 8 Most Common Sci-Fi Visions of the Future (And Why They’ll Never Happen).

When and if man ever breaches the womb of our solar system and is born in earnest as an interstellar being, only one thing will be certain: It will be exactly like sailing. That, or the old West. Ever since Kirk set course by the stars and made way for the final frontier, the space opera’s core concepts have been those of the sea: long voyages, a tight-knit crew and the unspoken threat of scurvy.

At Making Light, Jim Macdonald debunks a classic alien abduction story at, I must warn the reader, great length:

Today [September 19, 2007], this very day, forty-six years ago, Betty and Barney Hill drove down U.S. 3, right past my house and into history. They were about to become Patient Zero for Alien Abductions with Weird Medical Experiments, Missing Time, and Big-Eyed Extraterrestrials.

Via GeekPress: Bookshelf titles from the future.

Via del.icio.us scifi: an old BoingBoing post, Brooklyn residents: just say no to space elevators! My favorite line was:

Don’t sit idly by and let this elevator cast its impossibly long, cold, and very narrow shadow over our homes!

Some fun from the news aggregator:

Folksongs Are Your Friends: Things Jim Macdonald has learned from British folk ballads [Making Light]

Poorly-chosen Scifi and Fantasy names: SFX magazine column by David Langford: issue #38, May 1998 [via del.icio.us scifi]