Popular Culture – Page 8 – Southern Fried Science

The incredible biodiversity of Aquaman’s variant cover: Part four of a six part trilogy.

May 8, 2014May 8, 2014 Andrew Thaler

Welcome to day four of our delightful tour through the weird, wonderful creatures on Michael Allred’s incredible Aquaman cover. It’s all fish today!

Since we’re at the halfway point, now seems like a good time to reflect on why this cover matters so much. I’ve been a fan of Aquaman for a long time, and for all the amazing visuals in the latest iteration of our Atlantean hero, the deep sea remains noticeably underrepresented. Comic books mirror life and it is rare to see deep-sea creatures feature in art, let alone popular art. To have so many deep-sea organisms featured prominently on a piece of genre-crossing pop art is a rare and welcome opportunity to share my love for fangtooths, vampire squid, vent worms, monkfish, fringeheads, and isopods with a new and diverse audience.

Downward with the bestiary of barotollerant glory!

The incredible biodiversity of Aquaman’s variant cover: Halfway Home

May 7, 2014May 8, 2014 Andrew Thaler

Popular Culture, Science

It’s day three of our epic journey through the wonderful deep-sea creatures featured on this variant cover for Aquaman #31. Have you taken a shot at naming all 18 species, yet? We identified species 1, 2, and 3 on Monday and 4, 5, and 6 on Tuesday.

Today we continue with 7, 8, and 9, one of which is is a major fishery.

The incredible biodiversity of Aquaman’s variant cover: Episode 2

May 6, 2014May 5, 2014 Andrew Thaler

Popular Culture, Science

Welcome back to another exciting installment of the incredible biodiversity of this incredible Aquaman cover. Today we’re investigating species 4 through 6, where we’ll meet one of my favorite mid-water fish.

4. Fangtooth (Anoplogaster cornuta)

With the largest tooth-length-to-body ratio of any fish, the fangtooth has earned its menacing name. Unfortunately, this intimidating creature barely reaches 18 centimeters in length, hardly the massive, Batman-swallowing maw illustrated to the right. Fangtooths are among the deepest swimming fish. They can be found as far as 5000 meters down, though they are more common in the midwater (200-2000 meters).

The incredible biodiversity of Aquaman’s variant cover

May 5, 2014May 5, 2014 Andrew Thaler 2 Comments

Popular Culture, Science

Aquaman #31 variant cover. Art by Mike Allred.

Aquaman. Wow. Artist Mike Allred has seriously outdone himself with this incredible variant cover to Aquaman #31, featuring a 75th anniversary tribute to Batman as well as an incredible pastel array of deep-sea creatures. What truly amazing about this cover is that each one of these animals is a real living denizen of the deep right here, on Earth Prime. Sure, the scale might be a little off, and it’s unlikely that a scale worm could swallow a Bat-thyscaph, but the salient details are uncanny. Join me on a tour of the 18 wonderful animals featured on this sure-to-be epic installment of Aquaman’s ocean-spanning adventures. Today we’re looking at the first three, including one of my all time favorite marine organisms.

Attack of the paranormal mermaid romance novel: Why you should never, ever lose a bet to David Shiffman

March 3, 2014March 3, 2014 Andrew Thaler 1 Comment

Popular Culture

Take heed, all those who would dare to gamble against David Shiffman. You will fail.

It seemed innocent enough. I was in the middle of a job search, paying the bills with consulting, freelance work, and science writing while pursuing the next academic appointment. Finally having a bit of time, I wrote a science fiction novel, something I’ve always wanted to do. Sometime last summer, our resident shark fanatic made a dangerous suggestion. “Why don’t you just cash in on the mermaid craze?” “Fine,” I said, “if I don’t land a job by 2014, I’ll write a marine science-inspired paranormal mermaid romance novel.”

It’s 2014. This is Breaching Blue.

Below, for your enjoyment, is the first chapter.

If you’re interested in my other writings, you can check out Fleet and Prepared on Amazon or read my short story, The Lucky Ones, at Nature. And a huge shout-out to Mark Gibson, who writes the excellent marine science blog, Breaching the Blue, and was kind enough to let me use the inadvertently parallel name. For obvious reasons, this is not the final draft.

Chapter 1: Sisters of the Reef

The reef was old. It rose out of the seamount, a honeycomb of chambers piled one on top of the other; each chamber perfectly sized for Janthia and her sisters. This reef was made for them.

Release the Karaqan! How does Aquaman’s latest foe stack up against real ocean giants?

January 31, 2014January 31, 2014 Andrew Thaler 1 Comment

Popular Culture

It’s been more than 2 months since we last discussed the patron saint of Southern Fried Science, the one and only Aquaman. The Atlantean übermensch has a new lead writer, Jeff Parker, who’s teamed up with Aquaman veteran Paul Pelletier to produce an engaging and visually stunning story. After the epic conclusion to Throne of Atlantis, Aquaman is off on an entirely new adventure. Unfortunately, this new quest puts our hero in the path of a gargantuan guardian of ancient Atlantis, the Karaqan!

The Karaqan is big, but just how big is it? How does the Karaqan stack up against living sea creatures? Could an arthropod ever get as big as the Karaqan? Most important, if Aquaman does successfully slay the Karaqan, just how much Old Bay would we need to steam it?

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5 fantastic nautical science fiction novels

January 27, 2014March 4, 2018 Andrew Thaler 5 Comments

Popular Culture

Enterprise versus Enterprise. From ForeignPolicy.com

One thing I’ve discovered by publishing my first work of nautical science fiction is that the field is incredibly small. There just doesn’t seem to be that many SciFi writers taking their stories out to sea. This seems strange to me, as most of the great space operas are really nautical tales. There’s a reason that TV Tropes has an exhaustive list of entries under “Space is an Ocean” (and, for that matter, “Space Whale“, because we can’t ever have enough Moby-Dick-in-Space stories). It isn’t a coincidence that the US Navy has named at least 7 ships Enterprise (FYI, the aircraft carrier CVN-80 Enterprise is actually bigger than the starship NCC-1701 Enterprise).

So here are my 5 favorite maritime science fiction stories.

Title page for 20,000 Leagues by Jules Verne

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne.

The Grand Daddy of maritime science fiction, 20,000 Leagues still holds up. Even though the science is dated, Verne’s insight shines through, predicting the deep-sea gold rush more than 100 years before we even knew about the geologic formations that would produce seafloor massive sulfides. Considering that almost one-fifth of all deep-sea hydrothermal vents are currently at risk for deep-sea mining, Captain Nemo’s declaration that “in the depths of the ocean, there are mines of zinc, iron, silver and gold that would be quite easy to exploit” is particularly prescient.

Are you Prepared for the end of the world? An excerpt from my latest novella

January 8, 2014January 8, 2014 Andrew Thaler

Popular Culture

Prepared: A novella from the world of Fleet went live in the Amazon Kindle store this afternoon. This short story expands on the world the we first encountered in Fleet, where sea level rise and global pandemic have reduced human civilization to a few scattered enclaves. In Prepared, we are taken to the beginning of the end, the fall of the last major coast metropolis, where a small group of doomsday preppers are making their final stand.

You can find Prepared on Amazon and at Smashwords. Nook, iBook, and other editions are coming.

Excerpted below is chapter 1: Bug Out.

25 signs that you were a conservation child of the 90’s

December 22, 2013December 22, 2013 Andrew Thaler

Conservation, Popular Culture

The 90’s were a big decade for the environmental movement. The media landscape was filled with environmentally-themed programming. Major laws in the US and internationally were passed to protect the planet. Formative events galvanized, diversified, and sometimes radicalized the conservation community. And, like many other of our generation, we came of age right in the middle of it.

Here are 25 signs that your laid the foundation for your environmental ethic squarely in the 1990’s. Happy Holidays from Southern Fried Science.

1. Captain Planet taught us that “The Power is Yours!”

You knew this would be on the list, so let’s get it out of the way. Moving on.

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A scientist writes science fiction – thoughts on self-publishing my first novel

December 16, 2013December 17, 2013 Andrew Thaler 1 Comment

Popular Culture

Early this month, I completed and self-published my first science fiction novel through Amazon’s Kindle Direct publishing service (and, a few days later, as a paperback through Createspace). The ideas for the book were conceived over a long week in August, while vacationing with my parents at a rental house in St. Michaels, Maryland. Wandering through the low-lying eastern shore towns started me thinking about the kinds of stories we would tell hundreds of years from now. Thus, the central conceit of Fleet — that it was not a tale of environmental devastation but of people living their lives in a post-sea-level-rise world — surfaced.

Writing Fleet was a marathon. All told, from the first day that I started outlining characters and deciding what the central story of Fleet — uncovering a human disaster caused by desperation and betrayal, then buried at sea — to the day I hit publish on the Amazon server, Fleet took a little over 3 and a half months, during which time I was also moving across the country, finishing several scientific manuscripts, and looking for a job.

Having now had a few weeks to decompress, I think it’s a good time to reflect on the book, what I tried to accomplish, and where it goes from here.