Edward M. Lerner's Blog: SF and Nonsense, page 21

Making the world safe for frogs (and other diversions)

Frequent visitors to SF and Nonsense may have inferred my scientific/technological interests lean most often toward physics, astronomy, and space exploration. True enough. That said, other items are sometimes too quirky or too important not to catch my eye. Herewith several such -- and, I'll venture, you'll also find them noteworthy.

After all, who doesn't want to read "Dinosaur Extinction Allowed Frogs to Conquer the Planet."

The mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs paved the way for a...

Water, water everywhere (but beware which sort you drink)

One of my longtime favorite novels is Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, in which a major plot element is "ice nine." This is a form of H2O, not naturally occurring in nature, that's crystalline at room temperature. A seed crystal of ice nine turns all regular water in which it is in contact to more ice nine. Bear in mind that we are about 90 percent water. Quite the unique doomsday device ...

Highly recommendedToday's post isn't a book review (although I highly recommend Cat's Cradle ; we're talkin...

A month to savor

Happy days :-)

My novelette "My Fifth and Most Exotic Voyage" is the cover story in the September/October issue of Analog. (And what a great cover it is! Hat tip to Eldar Zakirov.)

Who is the narrator? Well, who dressed in that distinctive manner made four famous voyages? You might suppose this to be Christopher Columbus ... but not so.

And in the September issue of the Grantville Gazette (Universe Annex), the reluctant detective of "The Company Man" (perhaps you met him in the May issue) return...

Look! Up in the sky! Dark awesomeness.

My most recent post having been about the awesomeness of last week's total solar eclipse, why not post more generally about astronomy/cosmology news? Exciting things are happening in the broader (heh!) field -- as these four recent articles from Cosmos attest.

Pink: most normal/visible mass. Blue: where most mass seems to be.What we (think we) understand about the distribution of dark matter is inferred from observations of the motions of stars. A small fraction of stars move much faster than...

Awesome!

I'm newly home from Columbia, SC, where the wife and I went to see the solar eclipse. For both of us, this was our first total eclipse.

Wow, Just, wow.

The nearby photo isn't one I took. Plenty of photogs better than me are filling the web with eclipse imagery. I just wanted to take it all in. The excitement and expectancy of hundreds of people all around. The near-totality moment the crickets woke up. The pink sunset tinge looking west over Lake Murray, while the (mostly obscured) Sun rem...

An olio portfolio

Notwithstanding -- and more likely related to --  my most recent post (Weird process, this writing), the writing has been progressing smoothly over the past week. Lots of deeper back story worked out and retrofit, where appropriate, into the novel presently under construction. Lots of new text added. (We won't, however, speak of the single paragraph in the original, high-level outline that has transmogrified in my latest plans into five future chapters. Those wounds are too fresh.)

A veri...

Weird process, this writing

A couple weeks back, I reported being in fast-and-furious writing mode. More recently, the work has continued fast and furious ... but I've been cranking away for more than a week without adding, or even changing, a word in the novel in progress. (The first draft is at about 70K words, so more than half complete. The book's working title is Déjà Doomed.) 

For anything beyond a short story -- and often for those -- I write from an outline. After dozens of novels, novellas, and novelettes,...

The dreaded elevator speech (or, can a book be pitched in a very few words?)

In marketing, it's called the elevator speech. The scenario: you happen to find yourself on an elevator with the ideal target for pitching your idea/product/self (a venture capitalist, editor, hiring manager, or whomever). You have, perhaps, fifteen seconds till he or she gets to their floor and exits. What do you say? How do you get him or her to "take a meeting?"

For writers, there's an elevator-speech variant: when a prospective reader (at a con or bookstore signing, say, or just happening...

Bigger than a breadbox

I've found myself, over the past several days, pounding out text for a new novel at a splendidly prodigious clip. (The new book? It's a near-future technothriller set on the Moon. Thanks for asking.) My authorial philosophy is: when in the zone, stay there.

So: switching gears from committing novel to serious blogging is off the table (well, the keyboard), at least for a few days.

But should my loyal visitors suffer? Of course not! I recently came upon, in Cosmos, a brilliantly written overview...

Auto oddities

My miscellany folder seems to have accumulated way too many items related -- in one way or another -- to cars, traffic, and/or their future.

When I was little, I so wanted one of these ...
You know what's a nuisance? Keeping car tires properly inflated. Even more of a pain is patching or replacing them when one gets punctured. Hence, I was delighted to see "Airless tire concept could change tires forever." Imagine: an airless tire made from biodegradable materials using a 3-D printer. Wonderful...