Fiction
Headstart Elan
Pre-conception screening hadn’t turned up anything, so the Kieslowski-Millers spent their entire discretionary health stipend on a Headstart Elan package for Harriet-to-be. Most parents of healthy children did. Continue reading
A Stroll Down Memory Lane
This photo was taken at our summer house in the Hamptons. That’s me on the bottom! My uncle, above, was a notorious prankster. I remember spending days in his subterranean laboratory on our estate, helping him pipette various strains of his recombinant Ebola virus, or fixing his home-made calutron to separate out the isotopes of uranium.
Etcheverry, Cordel, Fomalhaut
“Your first task,” he said trying to mime the body shape of the creature. “Is to convince it to evert its gastrocysts. It will only do that if you can offer it something enticing. I found quite by accident that it is overly fond of anything tannic. Leather, for instance.” Continue reading
Choose Your Own Adventure
1. You awake in a white room. My God, you’re colorblind! No, wait, you’re not. Gradually you remember why you are here. The supervillain-psychiatrist Doctor Praetorian has imprisoned you in the monochrome room until you work through issues stemming from your experience, as a child watching through a keyhole, of witnessing your mother ritualistically whitewash … Continue reading
Double-cross with Crème de Menthe
“Afar off the towers of Florence. And she wandered as though in a dream o’er wavering seas of barley touched with crimson stains of poppies. All unobserved he came to her. There came from his lips no wordy protestations such as formal lovers use. No such eloquence was his, nor did he suffer from the … Continue reading
Le Garçon de l’Eau
. Héro instantané. Ajoutez juste l’eau. . Vive le différence! While France is justly celebrated for its long tradition of brilliant and challenging cinema, Hollywood specializes in taking that brilliance and grinding it into slick pablum. In 1998, while millions of illiterates thrilled to the spectacle of Adam Sandler playing an angry manchild in “The … Continue reading
Make brains! Make Brains! or, The Laser of Life and Thought
Planetary atmosphere are entropy pumps. The surface of a atmosphere-clad planet is out of thermodynamic equilibrium, providing an inversion of available free energy, in the same way that a laser works through pumping a population inversion of metastable states. Life can be approximated as a classical refrigerator, using the locally available disequilibrium to pump out … Continue reading
Incredible Adventure Stories
Michael Dukakis bestrode the deck of the Alejandro Jodorowsky, his washboard abs rippling. The mighty battleship cut through the turbulent seas, and cold, salty spray crashed over the bow. “Maybe I should put a shirt on,” Dukakis mused. On the bridge, surveying the horizon with steely gray eyes, Dukakis pulled a crisp white tunic over … Continue reading
Fictive Dream: Disease
I had invited the personification of Disease to meet with me in my castle, which was partly in the physical realm and partly in a sort of dataspace. When she arrived, she looked like a woman in a robe of ragged lace, with long, tangled hair and solid white eyes.
Exposé
Not long ago I found myself sitting in a secluded booth toward the back of a Washington, DC-area steakhouse with a man whose name I can’t reveal, because he is one of this country’s leading psi-warriors. “X-men, Jedi, whatever you want to call them,” he told me, “are real, and they live among us.” In … Continue reading