Um. Yeah. Like, I’ve, uh, never done this before…
Back with more science, space, and etc. posts soon!
Holy smokes, how many months??
February 17, 2026
ChatGPT is frighteningly good at writing literary analysis…
August 5, 2025
🧾 Conclusion
Adam’s Stepsons takes the core questions of Blade Runner and distills them into a tight, character-driven drama. It lacks the sweeping visuals of Villeneuve or the noir cityscape of Scott — but it delivers something arguably more intimate:
A quiet horror — and quiet triumph — in the collapse of identity, where the artificial doesn’t just mimic life…
It replaces it.
Over the weekend (my first with no student work to grade — finally! — since April), I decided to ask our “old” friend ChatGPT if it could analyze my sci-fi novella Adam’s Stepsons. Really, I was just curious what it would say.
It said…a LOT.
It correctly interpreted the title (something that many readers apparently didn’t get). It correctly identified the main themes as part of a “post-humanism” sub-genre of science fiction. And once I gave it three short excerpts (from the near the end of the story), it gave a frighteningly accurate thematic and symbolic analysis of the entire novella…just from three short excerpts of a total of about six pages.
I won’t copy all it gave me (you all can go try on your own and see what it says!). But let me share what the program thought were key themes:
Continue ReadingLong time, no…
August 5, 2025
Hi, everyone. I haven’t written a blog post in a very long time.
For various reasons.
I’ll see if I can start posting a few entries on recent science events in a few days (for starters, four astronauts finally arrived at the ISS, the first replacements following the Boeing Starliner fiasco).
But for right now, I want to follow up this short post with some analysis I got from our friend ChatGPT…
…about Adam’s Stepsons and Bringer of Light. Stay tuned!
Fifteen years and counting…
February 21, 2025
Hi, everyone. I know I haven’t posted in a while now (about three months).
Things happened. I’ll see if I can deal with that in a post this weekend before returning to regularly blogging about astronomy and etc.
Winter is still here! (In the northern hemisphere.) Going on walks and hiking in 3C windy weather only makes hot chocolate taste that much better…
☕️
Interstellar! If only…
September 26, 2024
According to Thorne, who served as a consultant on the science of Interstellar, quantum mechanics could hypothetically explain a way to time travel via wormhole. So far, it’s a thought experiment that leads to the conclusion that you’d lose information along the way—not very practical.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a62175728/interstellar-travel-wormholes
First off, I’m incredibly annoyed at the way WordPress has screwed up the “quotation” function. It seems they are more focused on encouraging bloggers to use AI to write.
Uh. I don’t need AI. I blog. The end. WTH is the point of using AI to write my thoughts? It’s already being trained to USE my blog in the first place! Idiots.
OK. Second, the Popular Mechanics article I’m linking to is entitled “Interstellar travel is possible if we break into a higher dimension, scientists say.”
Only, that is NOT what scientists say. It’s still a thought experiment!
Continue ReadingSorry for the long absence…
September 2, 2024
Haven’t posted anything in about five or six weeks. Sorry!
I was going to initially post something about the Boeing crew that got stranded on the ISS, but NASA kept delaying their decision to use SpaceX. It was a given that they’d have no choice.
Boeing, quite obviously, cannot be trusted to spend millions of taxpayer’s dollars and make a proper spacecraft.
Anyway, I’ll start posting something more interesting soon.
In the meantime, here’s a Star Trek TOS selfie by Catwoman. I mean Lee Meriwether. (S3:14, That Which Survives)
Winner of “Best Short Story – Sports”! 🥇
May 11, 2024
My short story “Two Strikes Against” was selected as the Winner in the inaugural Next Generation Short Story Awards! (Official list to be available next week.) UPDATED: Link here https://shortstoryawards.com/winners.php?year=2024
Basically it’s a story about a Japanese baseball player on Mars, with a twist. It got rejected a couple of years ago by several scifi magazines, so I figured why not try the sports category.
Especially since there was no scifi category.
Just grateful and thankful for the award. I hope you all get a chance to read the story!
(FWIW “Marsball” is mentioned by characters in an early chapter of Bringer of Light. In fact, I was going to call the story that. Very glad that I didn’t in the end!)
Short story short listed!
May 6, 2024
One of my SciFi short stories has been shortlisted for an award (newly created category).
More details when they are available!
(FWIW I referenced the short story in the beginning of Bringer of Light, when Overseer Martin Velasquez asks about the results of a “Marshall” game. Worldbuilding…)
IndieReader Approved!
April 16, 2024
In BRINGER OF LIGHT, M. Thomas Apple crafts a satisfyingly complex future where mankind has moved off Earth but must fight and struggle against the harsh realities of physics—and each other—in order to survive.
https://indiereader.com/book_review/bringer-of-light/
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Check out my author interview at Literary Titan!
April 1, 2024
M Thomas Apple Author Page 