My wife and I got lucky. She emigrated from Japan in late December 2019, just days before 2020 rolled around. (My God, what happened to that whole year?) If she hadn’t come in those early […]
The Future is Strange.
The bus pulled onto the shoulder to report the bleeder on the side of the highway. A car had clipped the man’s leg, which bent awkwardly to one side. His hands had frozen into fists […]
(Fiction) The Knife That Killed Albert Gallagher Twice
I pulled Etude down, down, down endless flights of stairs: stairs that curled, stairs at right angles, stairs that cut a straight line, our feet quickstepping across stone. By turn after turn, we descended deep […]
(Art) The Trances of Hilma af Klint
The Guggenheim in New York is running a major retrospective on Hilma af Klint through early 2019. I discovered her only recently as I was doing research for my forthcoming occult mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS. […]
(Art) The Old Gods
There’s a trend in contemporary fantastic art so pervasive that I feel it needs it’s own genre: the casual hierophany, or passing encounter with a god. A hierophany is a manifestation of the divine other. […]
Death by Absurdity
For those still following this blog, join us over at The End of the World Almanac! Life in the future isn’t just strange, it’s lethally absurd.1 Death by Axe Body Spray.Many teenage boys suffer from […]
(Art) The Imaginary Critters of Alexander Ostrowski
I enjoy the creature art of Alexander Ostrowski because he approaches his subjects similar to how I approach my novels, by imbuing the fantastic with a heavy dose of realism such that you can easily […]
(Sunday Thought) My God, it’s full of stars…
Why is 4 out of 5 stars good for a restaurant but near-catastrophic for an Uber driver? Why do hotels and movies have two kinds of ratings but books and consumer electronics only have one? […]
(Art) Balls, Balls, Balls, Balls, Balls
You would think that after collecting and sharing hundreds of BIG BALL images, that would be it. But you would be wrong. Here is Part III. Part I is here and Part II is here. […]
(Art) The Humorous Fantasy of Tony Sart
In addition to his art for tabletop and video game properties, Tony Sart also illustrates the humorous side of fantasy, be it goblin pranks, a fierce warrior on the toilet (in his fuzzy slippers), vampires […]
(Sunday Thought) Fixing the News
What’s worst about social media comes not from the platform itself but the advertiser model. Algorithms, which drive political division and misinformation, were meant to drive engagement for advertisers. The more you’re engaged, the longer […]
(Art) Science Crimes in Progress
The Zero Signal, the first Science Crimes Division mystery, officially releases today in paperback and digital. Here’s what readers are saying: “The imaginative worldbuilding, the complex characters and the sheer scope that’s both shown and […]
