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Who You Gonna Call?: Ghost Hunting In Norway
Norway has a ghost problem (including the ghost of a dead Nazi who keeps messing with tourism brochures…)
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Cassini Probe Looks for Life on Enceladus Today
At some point today (Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2015), NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will take the deepest dive ever through the ejecta plumes of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. And this is particularly exciting for me, since while I find space exploration fascinating generally, I keep special tabs on my old friend Cassini. We go WAY back. Scientists hope […]
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Evidence of Second Viking Outpost Found in Canada
Archaeologists have confirmed a second Viking site in the Tanfield Valley on the southeast coast of Baffin Island–suck it, Columbus!
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Finding Yourself by Losing Yourself in Fiction
I’ve mentioned before how I sometime sit in the dark, drinking whiskey, wondering whether this whole “fiction thing” has any redeeming social value. Well, looks like I have even MORE reason to be hopeful that fiction–the lie that tells the truth–can actually make positive change in people’s lives.
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Foresight and the Doomsday Seed Vault
I’ve posted before about the the Svalbard Global Seed Vault: the so-called “doomsday” seed vault tunneled deep into the permafrost of the Norwegian Arctic, but I’d honestly hoped I’d never have to post about a need to use it. After all, it’s stated purpose is to store seeds of key agricultural crops from around the globe so […]
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20 New Lines from The Epic of Gilgamesh Discovered in Iraq, Adding New Details to the Story
Think of it as the Director’s Cut. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest narratives in the world, got a surprise update last month when the Sulaymaniyah Museum in the Kurdistan region of Iraq announced that it had discovered 20 new lines of the Babylonian-Era poem of gods, mortals, and monsters. Incredibly, this came […]
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A Library’s Quest to Save the History of Fandom
Okay–this is cool. The University of Iowa library’s special collections house almost a century of fandom history: everything from 1920s “dime novel” reviews to T-shirts that were auctioned off in protest of the 2002 Farscape cancellation. In 2012, though, it acquired one of the most valuable resources yet: the library of James “Rusty” Hevelin, a lifelong […]
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Sale! “Super Frenemies” to CAPED
Pleased to announce I’ve sold my story “Super Frenemies” to the forthcoming CAPED anthology. In case you didn’t guess, its a superhero theme 🙂 The story was inspired by my son Ben’s desire to watch superhero cartoons…and my realizing for the first time (after a life time of reading comics) just how violent even the […]
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Saturn in G Minor auf Deutsch
Ich habe auf Deutsch erschienen! Word today that the latest issue of NOVA, the German SF magazine, is out. It’s a theme issue on music and science fiction, and includes a reprint (in translation) of my Writers of the Future-winning story “Saturn in G Minor.” The editor tells me my copy is in the mail–can’t […]
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Writing Can Make You Healthier
Normally you hear about the physical toll that the largely sedentary practice of writing can have, usually around weight gain and its attendant complications. But what if there is now evidence that writing can be good for you physically and mentally? Recent research suggests that the “act of writing itself leads to strong physical and […]