Reading with Robert Shults at Borderlands

On Saturday at 3 pm, I’ll be reading my recent story “Laser Shades” at Borderlands Books in San Francisco. I’ll be appearing with Robert Shults, who recently launched his fascinating photo book, The Superlative Light. See this account of his project in the New York Times.

Here’s Robert and me at the Rosicrucian World Headquarters in fabulous San Jose, California.

My story was written to fit into Shults’s book. The book contains lovely and sinister photos of the Petawatt Laser Lab in Austin, Texas. And my story is about a guy who uses a superpowerful laser to try and raise his dead wife from the dead.

“Laser Shades,” oil on canvas, February, 2014, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

While I was working on the story, I wasn’t quite sure about how to end it, and then I made my new painting as a way of previsualizing a big scene. The guy in the painting is wearing special laser-proof shades and he’s (rather unwisely) holding a fetal “egg” in the path of a yottawatt laser beam. A yottawatt is about the power of the Sun. That zapped egg is going to hatch out some kind of weird person, so look out!

I recently placed a recording of me reading this story online, so check out my Podcasts feed.

(Note that Feedburner only shows my most recent podcasts. For older audio files, see my Podcasts page, which runs back to 2005.)

But don’t just listen at home, come on out and meet me and Robert Shults. Borderlands Books Cafe on 870 Valencia Street in the Mission district of San Francisco, 3 pm Saturday, November 8.

The saucer is waiting for you.