Michael F. Flynn has died | Hacker News Reader

Michael F. Flynn has died

tofspot.blogspot.com

103 pointsdanielam35 comments

Wrote (about) more than just sci-fi. His timeline of the development from heliocentric to geocentrism, "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown", is a fun read; table of contents:

* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

So is his five-part series laying out Aristotle's first way argument about the Unmoved Mover:

* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-way-some-backgrou...

* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-way-moving-tale.h...

* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-way-part-ii-two-l...

* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/10/first-way-part-iii-big-...

* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/11/first-way-part-iv-casca...

> At his death, he had a lot of tabs open on his browser, on a variety topics. He always sought to learn about different things. Some of it was for his writing, some for the extensive family research he has always done, and some of it was just because he wanted to learn more about the universe, the planet we live on, and the people around him.

Just a note to my descendants: do not publish my open browser tabs in my obituary.

I keep those types of tabs in Private windows.

If you leave them open and then die, they will not be private anymore.

what a weird thing to say lol

At least not without some creative editing.

I'm a big fan of his book The Wreck of the River of Stars, and think a lot of people here would like it.

The River of Stars is an interplanetary craft, originally driven by solar sail, with snazzy new fusion drives recently added. The crew combines new fusion people and sail traditionalists, and they don't like each other. The story is part engineering, part psychology; everybody does what they think is best for the ship, but they don't communicate well and unfortunate things happen.

Just purchased it in hardcover based on your quick summary.

Edit: I'm not the only one -- copies are going quickly it seems, and I've already found a new paperback going for $100

Once an author is deceased, does it become okay-ish to download their content from z-lib?

gulp

To be fair, when I find an amazing book, I typically end up buying a physical copy even when I've already read it. And even if the author has passed.

Thanks for generously sharing your positive experience!

Historically, these sorts of pleasure reading book recommendations from HN tend to be very good.

Interestingly, Michael F. Flynn has one yet-to-be-published work: "In the Belly of the Whale", which isn't scheduled for release until 2024 [0]. Hope he finished it <3.

[0] https://www.fantasticfiction.com/f/michael-f-flynn/

In a post on his blog in April of this year he said it was done and passed to the publisher.

Just picked it up digitally, this sounds like such an awesome premise :)

For anyone who enjoys metal (specifically story driven funeral doom) there's a really cool album called Ark by The Slow Death. It's about humanity torching Earth so badly they pool the remaining resources to escape with The Chosen Ones on humanity's last hope, a space ark trying to find a new planet to live on. It's a great, slow story and the band does an awesome job of building the atmosphere the lyrics are portraying.

Note that this is not Michael J. Flynn (age 89) [1], Stanford University professor emeritus and progenitor of Flynn's taxonomy [2] of parallel computer architectures based on the number of concurrent control and data streams available:

- SISD: Single Instruction stream, Single Data stream

- SIMD: Single Instruction stream, Multiple Data streams

- MISD: Multiple Instruction streams, Single Data stream

- MIMD: Multiple Instruction streams, Multiple Data streams

___

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Flynn

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn%27s_taxonomy

Nor Michael Thomas Flynn

AKA Q

In the country of the blind is a great speculative historical sci-fi thriller, and was how I first learned about Taylorism. A fun read.

https://books.google.com/books?id=2MrNykSR2WkC&newbks=1&newb...

I'll second that and add in The Nanotech Chronicles, which was way ahead of its time in pondering implications of nanotechnology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Flynn_(writer)

I am sorry for your loss. I hope that you have many happy memories of your time with your dad that can provide you some comfort as you grieve.

oh no! I just read Eifelheim 2 weeks ago, it was a lovely book!

one of the hidden gems i urge every sf fan i know to read.

Losing a parent is a sad, sad, sad time. I admire the person that wrote this post because it would not have been easy to do so and yet it was delivered so well.

Read Firestar as a teenager and liked it, so I went to a meet-the-author event at a local bookshop where he was promoting the next book in that series. When he opened up for questions, he responded to mine by mocking my speech (I guess I had a nerdy voice like probably many of us here) and didn't even answer the question.

Really turned me off the author. And that was before I grew older and wiser and came to realize how that series was largely libertarian agitprop and stereotypes of various demographics -- like Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars series from the same era, maybe it is something that only adolescents can really love.

"At his death, he had a lot of tabs open on his browser"

(while it is intended as a testimony to his lifelong curiosity - maybe ponder that no, you really aren't going to get to all of those tabs and can let some of them go...)

Note that this is not Michael T. Flynn who is a retired general and former adviser to President Trump.

Correct but I probably wouldn't have felt the need to mention that in this memorial thread.

It's a good clarification. I initially assumed it was the other person.

I thought the same thing as well.

The middle initial being included is often a subtle but pointed hint to that effect.

I wasn’t sure if it was the Trump advisor because I don’t know his middle initial. I hadn’t heard of the writer, so I appreciated the clarification.

Yeah that's who I thought of; the only Michael Flynn I've heard of.

Michael Flynn is an extremely common Irish American name.

Thank you. I was rather confused to see this in HN.

I had thought that, like the former president, the former general’s middle initial is J. Turns out Michael J. Flynn is actually a computer scientist of some renown:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J._Flynn

I didn't know his middle initial, so I thought the post was about the computer scientist, to be honest!

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