Kevin Singer's Blog, page 12

Where is everyone? (by everyone, I mean aliens)

I’m not alone, not by a longshot, when I say I love the idea of space exploration and possible alien cultures. Look at some of the staples of pop culture — Star Trek and Star Wars, for example. These classic sci-fi stories have given us thrilling images of new worlds and aliens of all sorts. […]

Tiny monsters, continued

Real-life creepy bugs are one of my favorite science-related topics. Not sure why — maybe because it combines monsters and science. Here’s the latest. First, we have book scorpions. I’ve only seen a scorpion in real life once. I was in El Paso and one of the suckers, pincers snapping away, was crawling up a bedroom […]

Doctor Who: regenerated again

What do you do when you create an accidental hit TV show, and your lead actor leaves? If the show is the British sci-fi series Doctor Who, you give your time-traveling alien-in-human-form lead the power to regenerate. And now, with a change of actors on Doctor Who, we have yet another regeneration. The era of […]

Read this story: Wolverton Station

If you’re a fan of horror fiction and haven’t heard of Joe Hill, get yourself to the nearest bookstore now. For starters, check out his short story Wolverton Station. What you’ll get from Hill—and this story—is solid (if not a little workman-like) heart-thudding chills. The plot: Saunders is a corporate hatchet man traveling the rails in England. […]

Tale of the vampire (plant version)

File this under: Evil Nature. The more I study science, the more I’m convinced that nature is home to some of our biggest nightmares. More proof? There’s a vampire-like plant that not only feeds off its prey, but convinces it to let down its defenses. Kind of like this guy (Nosferatu, the first film vampire, and […]

See-through science

Ever wanted to be invisible? Not in the metaphorical sense, but truly transparent? Me either. But for those who do, scientists are a step closer to making see-through skin. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have advanced a process called tissue clearing that basically strips away all the color from the body. They did […]

Pictures worth a thousand words

I’ve never been drawn to the visual arts. My life’s vocation is crafting words into stories that relay emotions, moods and experiences. But thanks to the vastness of the world wide web, I’ve discovered visual artists whose works are as vivid as anything the best wordsmith could create. One of these visual artists is a photographer, M. Funk, […]

Fiction and fear

What are you most afraid of? Spiders? Dogs? Death? Loneliness? Chances are, whatever your fear is, it’s been dramatized. Horror stories are about laying bare our fears. Think of some of the most notable horror stories and at their root you can find a fear. –Bram Stoker’s Dracula is about the fear of sex and […]

Read this story: Don’t Eat Cat

Not too long ago, short stories were relegated to specialty magazines or book-length collections. Want to read a single story? You had to buy the book or subscribe to the magazine. Now, thanks to e-books, stories of any length now have a home, and this has led to a rebirth of the short story as a […]

Bioluminescent creatures in the darkest realms

Life on earth is truly stranger than anything we’ve imagined. Science continually finds more evidence of this. Just one example? Fish in waters devoid of any natural light equipped with light-giving powers of their own. How do these fish manage to produce light from their own bodies? Through a mix of two chemicals. One is called, […]