Edward M. Lerner's Blog: SF and Nonsense, page 26

My 2016 Capclave schedule

The fine folks of WSFA (trying saying that quickly five times) have published the programming schedule for this year's Capclave: "Where reading is not extinct." The 2016 version of this annual DC-area regional con runs from mid-afternoon Friday October 7 into Sunday afternoon October 9.

Capclave mascotI'll be attending only Saturday, October 8th -- but pretty much all that day. Here's my (hectic!) schedule for Saturday:
11:00 - 11:55 am: Alternate & Secret History  -- Salon A
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Star- (and Moon-) Struck

Today, a few astronomy topics of note ...

To begin, it's been discovered that the Sun has a slew of unobtrusive, heretofore unsuspected neighbors: "Astronomers Find 165 Brown Dwarfs in Solar Neighborhood." How near? All within 160 light-years.

(For those not familiar with the term, a brown dwarf is a not-quite star. It's a gas ball far larger even than Jupiter, and yet not quite massive enough to fuse ordinary hydrogen into helium. Some brown dwarfs, it is believed, are sufficiently massive to...

Things aren't always what they seem

I know, I know ... things usually are what they seem, else the universe would be in chaos. "Things are often what they seem" is among the eponymous rules of my 2003 short story, "By the Rules." But accepting first reports of, well, anything at face value is risky. A few cases in point ...

Suppose the Zika virus endangered "only" pregnant women and the unborn, as we were, for a long while, assured. That would be horrible enough. The situation may be worse than that. Per a more recent study, "Zi...

Dark Secret ... disclosed :-)

I'm delighted to announce the publication of Dark Secret. This is my latest novel (number fourteen, if anyone is counting)—and an epic adventure with the very survival of humanity at stake.

When the experimental ship Clermont is urgently recalled from a long-range test flight, neither Dana McElwain nor Blake Westford, its captain and crew, imagines that they are about to embark on a much more urgent voyage—or that this new mission will determine the fate of the human race.

A gamma-ray burst—th...

The final frontier

Stamp out mediocrity ;-)2016 being the 50th anniversary year for Star Trek, you can guess what inspired today's subject line. But this post is about the actual frontier, about astronomy news, not fiction.

Based upon data collected by the Dawn space probe, NASA scientists have a new understanding of the dwarf planet, aka the largest asteroid, Ceres: "Ceres interior structure gives hints of early life." (That's "life" as in active geological processes, not as in protoplasm wiggling about.) Ceres...

Con-fusion / Writing updates

A few days ago, after taking a circuitous but scenic route, I finally made it home from MidAmeriCon II (aka Worldcon 2016) in Kansas City, Missouri. I had a great time there visiting with friends old and new. I took part in four panels and attended others, gave a reading, and held an autograph session. I had wonderful conversations around the convention center, and in the dealers room, the green room, the SFWA suite, the hotel lobby, and at many a meal.

Getting goonie at the conI'm exhausted....

Eight years! Yowza!

The first post here at SF and Nonsense appeared on August 25, 2008. That's basically eight years -- and almost five hundred posts -- ago. That first post was "So why am I here?" Looking back -- and somewhat to my surprise -- I've pretty much stuck with my topic.

Today, rather than post anything new, I invite you to explore some of (the quite a lot of) what's already here.
Check out the most popular posts (scroll way to the bottom for those).Find a topic of interest within the tag cloud (right-h...

A physics extravaganza

For today's post: exciting goings-on from the wide world of physics. We'll begin with "Latest search for dark matter draws a blank."

If only the hunt were this simpleDark matter, you'll recall, is hypothesized stuff that (a) exhibits its presence through its gravitational effects on familiar/normal matter, for example on the rotational characteristics of galaxies and (b) doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation, of which ordinary light is an example (hence the "dark" part of the name)....

Dark Secret inches closer ...

Things are cooking!

Learning from experience I won't hazard a specific date, but I'm confident Dark Secret will be released soon. Till then, here -- and much classier than my PULP-O-MIZER design -- is the publisher's cover.


More news as it happens :-)====================== from Edward M. Lerner's "SF and Nonsense"

Schrödinger's frog goes ...

qubit ... qubit.

(Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week.)

ANYway, I'm newly home from attending the Schrödinger Sessions, an intensive two-and-a-half-day program on quantum mechanics and its applications/implications aimed specifically at SF authors. For the 2016 version of the program, about twenty authors participated.

Probability distributions of an electron in an atomThe Schrödinger Sessions is orchestrated by the Joint Quantum Institute (joint referring to a partnership between the Un...