Hollywood and Netflix love to dramatize historical waves like the California gold rush and glamorize the hardships, but the reality is that during gold rushes, most wealth was generated not by miners, but by those who supplied and supported them. Samuel Brannan, a merchant during the California Gold Rush, bought up mining supplies from around…
Somewhere around 1760, Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.” Ever since then, Eat the Rich has been a rallying cry for inequality. Modern society is based on what we call the social contract, being an understanding that ALL of us are better off if…
Why do we read fiction? It’s pretend. None of it is true. All the great stories from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, whether it’s H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds or Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 A Space Odyssey—they’re all made up. None of them are real. So why do they captivate…
My latest novel, coming out this Friday, is The Minotaur. It’s a tribute to the Polish novel Solaris. I love writing tribute pieces to classic science fiction from the Golden Age, as often these stories are lost in time. They can be dated in styling, technology and pacing, but they still pack a punch and…
Why are my books published (almost) exclusively on Amazon? It’s a good question. I hope this blog post helps explain my position. I get a lot of flak for having my books on Amazon. And I get it. Amazon’s employment practices suck. Although Amazon seems like a monopoly with 40% of US online retail sales,…
When astrophysicists look at exoplanets, they’re not looking for life as such, as life is impossible to detect at a distance of light years. What they’re looking for is an unbalanced equation. Think about rust. What is rust? It’s iron oxide. The chemical equation for your rusting pickup truck is… This is a balanced equation….
Rare events can be common when dealing with large data sets. For example, the odds of being struck by lightning are more than one in a million, but as the US has a population of 350 million, two to three hundred people are struck by lightning every year! When it comes to life in outer…
When the internet came of age in the early 2000s, the hope was that a single source of information would unify humanity. Since then, it’s become more like Pandora’s Box, where what should have been a gift has been corrupted and weaponized against us. Humanity’s crowning achievement is knowledge. Knowledge allowed us to depart from…
IMDB’s description: A biology teacher [trying] to save his ill daughter with a natural cure goes into the jungle with experts and finds a horror that’s larger than life This movie opens during World War 2. A platoon of Japanese soldiers are exploring a jungle. Suddenly one of them comes flying out of the tree…
This was a very strange year for SL FanX Comic Convention. Despite it being the 10th anniversary of the event. Because of the writers’ and actors’ strikes nearly all of the celebrities were not permitted to discuss past, present, or future works. This made for some ridiculous and in some ways pointless panels. At the…
