User talk:TompaDompa

Good article nominations RfC

Hi TompaDompa,

There is an ongoing Request for Comment (RfC) at Wikipedia:Good article nominations/August 2026 RfC, which you may be interested in because in the past year, you have nominated or reviewed more than one good article nomination. This message has also been sent to all subscribers to the Good Article Gazette. The RfC contains many proposals (33 at the time of writing), which are split into the following categories: nominators, reviewers, reviews, volunteer roles, reviewing initiatives, and others. However, you are more than welcome to add any proposals of your own that you wish to put to the community.

By the end of September, all the proposals will have been closed by an uninvolved editor, either as a consensus for one of the options or with no consensus. At this point, editors will be invited again to develop these proposals into coherent policy and implement them.

Thank you for your contributions to the good articles project, and I look forward to your input! (in solidarity), JacobTheRox^{(talk|contributions)} 16:03, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

TFA

story · music · places

Thank you today for Mesklin, "a fictional planet created by Hal Clement for his 1953 work Mission of Gravity. There are two main things that make it remarkable. Firstly, the real-world historical circumstance that it was based on what was at the time believed to be a genuine astronomical object (either a high-mass planet or a low-mass star), "discovered" half a century before the first exoplanets were confirmed. Sadly, this has since come to be regarded as a spurious finding. Secondly, it is the pre-eminent example of hard science fiction worldbuilding, where the planet was painstakingly crafted to remain within the bounds of known scientific facts and laws while having exotic properties, most notably its high and variable surface gravity that differs by a factor of a few hundred between different points on the surface. Clement wrote an essay detailing the process of designing the planet to have the properties he wanted—"Whirligig World"—that I find to be a fascinating read.T"! --5 Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:04, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

I remember looking at this when it was a FAC and enjoying it greatly. Great to see it on the Main Page. It's a pity it wasn't scheduled a few days earlier to coincide with the eclipse :-) RoySmith (talk) 23:07, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

Suggestions?

Hi. I hope you are doing well. I remember reviewing Mesklin at FAC earlier this year and was pleased to find it on the Main Page today.

While coursework and on-Wiki commitments, like getting an article through FAC for the first time, have taken up most of my time, I have recently been searching for a book that would suit a beginner in science fiction. Do you have any recommendations? I already have Asimov's Foundation, by the way.

I look forward to your thoughts (and your next FAC). Best, MSincccc (talk) 12:51, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

I'm not really all that well-read when it comes to science fiction—I think that Piotrus, Mike Christie, or Wehwalt might be better positioned to provide recommendations—but I'll give it a shot. It depends on what one is interested in, but Isaac Asimov's Foundation is not a bad place to start, and I think I, Robot would also be a good entry point. Asimov started out writing short stories, and these two works are written in a way that benefits from this (I, Robot is of course a fix-up, so it would be weird if it didn't) inasmuch as one can easily read a chapter, put the book down for some time, and then pick it up again later without worrying about forgetting important things from earlier in the book. Coming at it from a different angle, there is a reason "the classics" have come to be regarded as such, and if one does not mind science fiction being rather light on the "science" part, I think Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) are both good books that one does not need to have any previous science fiction reading experience to enjoy. If one wants something more firmly identified as science fiction, however, the Asimov books are definitely good places to start—and there are plenty of additional books in the Foundation and Robot series if they are to one's liking. TompaDompa (talk) 23:14, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

Adjustments & removals

Greetings! I was reviewing the latest version of the Mesklin article and noticed that a small portion that I had contributed (in 2010) was no longer there, as of 23 September 2024, among a very large number of edits that you were making then. Particularly, the "Concept and creation" section was deleted, marked by you as "not needed now" but with no further detail given.

I feel that my contribution, which cited Clement's own observation about a notion that gave rise to several of his stories, would still benefit some version of the "Concept and creation" idea. Is there a better place, in this article or perhaps the one on Clement himself, where it could be put?

Please advise; thanks!

Silverhill (talk) 19:17, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

As I recall, most or all of the things I removed as "Not needed now" were things that became redundant once I added material I found in the various sources I looked at. I see that you added

Clement noted that several of his story ideas resulted from a personal tendency to react contrarily to certain "common sense" assertions, which had the nature of "of course": [some situation] has [some certain characteristic], but of course it cannot have [some other characteristic]. The notion of Mesklin's odd configuration stemmed from the fact that there were science fiction stories that featured low-gravity planets and high-gravity planets, but of course no single planet could have both low and high gravity.

in 2010, and that's something I removed as "Not needed now." in 2024 because I thought it was sufficiently covered by my addition

he wanted to challenge the assumption—present in planetary science and science fiction alike—that while different planets might have stronger or weaker gravity, the gravitational field of a single planet would not display a large degree of variation across its surface

Would that be what you had in mind? TompaDompa (talk) 23:25, 15 August 2026 (UTC)