Timothy’s Hot Take on Science Fiction

Hello, good evening and welcome. It is I, Timothy the Talking Cat. For years I have brought to you searing insights into the world of the imagination. Insights so controversial that they have shaken people from their slumber and sent them groggily blinking into the light, stumbling around and saying “it’s two am in the morning, why the hell are you waking me up at two am in the morning?”

But despite repeated pleadings from my fans and detractors, I have always kept my hottest, most searing take on science fiction to myself. It is an opinion SO startling, so mind bending, so subversive of existing social norms that even I, the world’s greatest iconoclast, have looked upon on it and said “no, actually that’s a bit too much even for me.”

All fandom have speculated upon this. When will I publish this? How will I publish? What does it even mean to publish this? Some said that I would promulgate this hot take as the Guest of Honour at ControversialCon’78. Others claimed that I had established my award winning publishing house just for the purpose of creating a collectors edition leather bound box set of my controversial takes that would climax in a final slim volume with just this single, most hottest take. Others claim that I created a time machine to hurl myself back to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and announce it there to create the maximum scandal by alarming Prince Albert but then I set my time machine wrong and crashed into the Crystal Palace in 1936 causing it to catch fire while I ran around shouting “these dinosaurs are rubbish!”

However, now is the time.

I calculated some years ago that cosmic forces will combine to make November 2020 the slowest news month for fifty years. According to my predictions, almost nothing newsworthy will be going on and hence my hot, hot, SciFi take will reach it’s maximum mind-blowing impact right now.

Here it is people. My dangerous visors. Hold on to your bony brain carapace because it WILL be shocking.

OK, you know how in space movies, space ships always fly side to side sort of horizontally like they are planes or ships right? I mean that’s like in every space TV show or movie unless they are taking off from a planet or doing aerobatics (spaceobatics? vacuumobatics?), right, right? OK, well they shouldn’t do that.

Instead, space ships should go up and down right? I mean, it’s space. Vertical is just the direction you are going right? You are either flying FROM a planet (up) or flying to a planet (down). There’s no side to side malarkey in space. Everything is like UP or it is DOWN.

Woah! OK, I’ll let you all just that digest that for a bit and maybe you should lie down and let your heart rate return to normal.

[Camestros] Actually, that’s a smart point Timothy.
[Timothy] We aren’t doing a dialogue bit!
[Camestros] OK, ok. I’m not trying to ruin your big moment. I just wanted to say that for once, you actually have a point.
[Timothy] Shoo, shoo, bad human-whatever-you-are-thing.

Now that I have changed the landscape of science fiction forever, I can retire gracefully safe in the knowledge that I have reshaped a genre.