Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
An Author's Adventures in Space Travel, Science Fiction, and Worlds Beyond
The longer one hangs out in alternate history circles, the more one starts to hear a common lament: "Our genre is about so much more than World War II and the American Civil War! Why do our most popular stories always involve Confederates or Nazis?" My own showcases of the genre have not exactly helped... Continue Reading →
Happy Halloween, everyone! We haven't had a proper Halloween special since my review of Event Horizon, all the way back in 2019, so I'm here today with something appropriately spooky: a conspiracy theory. Read on to uncover tales of ill-fated missions and doomed space travelers... First in space? Yuri Gagarin is recognized as the first... Continue Reading →
It's been the better part of a year since I posted my early experiments with Midjourney. Today, in what may be one of my shorter, sillier pieces, I'll fill you in on my antics during the intervening time. It's stunning how far generative AI has advanced just while I've been using it; if I were... Continue Reading →
This piece is going to be about something very local. While I know I have a far-flung readership---just last week, I had visitors from Germany, South Korea, Thailand, and Poland, among others---it may still be of use for those of you who will one day visit the great state of Oregon. And for those who... Continue Reading →
Today's post will be a tad unusual---a personal essay about a fond memory, not unlike my Star Trek piece from a while back. Enjoy! For all that I've been enthralled since childhood by the mysteries of deep space, reverent of humanity's forays beyond this rock we call home, I went through most of my life... Continue Reading →
Ah, to live in the old Solar System, before our nosy little space probes pushed back the veil and revealed the other planets to be absolute shitholes. Venus was, beneath its clouds, a steamy paradise world full of lush vegetation and primordial beasts; Mars, meanwhile, was one vast desert crisscrossed by canals, pockmarked by the... Continue Reading →
Historians will remember 2022 as the year AI took the internet by storm. Algorithmic text and image generators---the likes of ChatGPT, MidJourney, and Jasper---exploded in popularity, spawning new internet trends, provoking fierce opposition from flesh-and-blood artists, and threatening the security of creative jobs (like mine). As 2023 dawns, it seems there is no stopping the... Continue Reading →
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a piece on the next steps for American space travel, and speculated about a permanent lunar base within the next two decades. Today I have another guest post from my friend Eamon Minges, following up on my speculation with some hard numbers---he definitely has a knack for that sort... Continue Reading →
Intending to deter all forms of aggression by neighboring stellar powers, the Zygaran Empire unveils a fleet of cutting-edge relativistic missiles---but things do not go according to plan. (Science Fiction) (Complete)
The first and only time I ever saw the Grand Canyon was when I was eight years old, traveling through the southwestern United States on a family road trip. I knew roughly what it looked like, of course, but nothing had prepared me for the sheer scale of that thing. It was a sculpted, dizzyingly... Continue Reading →
