Friday, December 09, 2011

A December to Remember




Above is a picture I took of Itzhak Perlman at a Kimmel Center concert. Being there, with him, was an amazing experience. I had no idea the violin could be played with such (I lack the appropriate word) precision (perhaps the better word would be love).

If you are interested in speculative flash fiction, or curious about speculative flash fiction, or have 30 seconds free, I encourage you to read my story Textual Relations in this month’s issue of AntipodeanSF—a science fiction magazine and podcast (AntiSF Radio) out of Australia. When you read the story, I think you’ll scratch your head at how it could be read during a podcast. When asked to record it, I politely declined in favor of one their professional reader. 

Here is AntiSF Radio version of Textual Relations. If you fast forward to about 25:45 seconds you'll here it. Please keep in mind it is meant as a visual piece, loaded with deliberate text abbreviations. So, feel free to LOL.
Also for a quick read, check out the very very very short story I wrote: You Reap What You Write for One Forty Fiction. It is Tweet-sized for the attention-span challenged. (Not anyone reading this blog of course! But read anyway.)

I've completed my two part series on the probability of intelligent life existing outside our solar-system for the Abandoned Towers: News & Blog. So read this month’s Science for Fiction (S4F). Last month, using the Drake Equation and a certain set of assumptions, I calculated 600 communicating civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. So how come we haven’t heard anything from them?  This month I use the Rare Earth Hypothesis to address this question—known as the Fermi Paradox. The paradox addresses the contradiction between the high probability (Drake Equation) of extraterrestrial life capable of communication and the absence of evidence of such life. So check out this month’s S4F.

Finally, do you like good science fiction? If yes, I suggest you check out Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy tales of challenging the norm!  It’s an original anthology by the gang who publish the sleek Crossed Genres magazine, edited by (dare I say) the visionary Bart Lieb. Click here to see my work in Crossed Genres.


Happy Holidays.  The next round is on you.

Gadget