Scary movies and dragon sex
Last week I spent a lot of time thinking about transgression, which means it was an ordinary week except for one thing. I got to consume one of those rare treats: A movie that actually shocked me. I’m...
View ArticleTalking about geeks and gender and sex
Law nerd David Levine just had me on his podcast, Hearsay Culture, to chat about all kinds of things, including female geeks vs. male geeks. I had a lot of fun chatting with him. You can listen to the...
View ArticleOne down, many to go
So I finished my first novel last week. Which is to say, I finished the first draft of my first novel, and therefore I am not truly finished. I’ve decided to take a break from it for a few weeks and...
View ArticleA whole lot of Avatar and whiteness
A couple weeks ago, I published an essay on io9 about how James Cameron’s new science fiction epic Avatar is a movie about white guilt. It was called “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like...
View ArticleNew Short Story: “The Great Oxygen Race”
I am excited that the awesome magazine Hilobrow has published my short story “The Great Oxygen Race.” It’s about a group of drunk asteroid miners on Ceres, the largest planetoid in the asteroid belt,...
View ArticleThe future of sexual fetishism and other ideas
It’s been a crazy few months, and things are only about to get crazier. Since my last update, I published my short story “The Gravity Fetishist” in Flurb. It’s part of the Golden Age-style story cycle...
View ArticleIt’s official: I sold my next book to Doubleday!
Well, I didn’t sell it – my awesome agent Laurie Fox did. But now all the contracts are signed, and I can announce only somewhat belatedly that I’m writing a popular science book for Doubleday about...
View ArticleGetting ready for disasters, and going into outer space
I’ve been writing some articles about different aspects of the research I did for Scatter, Adapt and Remember. Here they are! The Boston Globe: Humans: We Will Survive! Could we make it through an...
View ArticleOne of the most mysterious extinctions in Earth’s history
Here’s my story from The Atlantic this week, talking about the Devonian mass extinction 375 million years ago. It is the most mysterious of the five mass extinctions because there was no spike in...
View ArticleMy latest in the New Yorker: Liquid Fuel, From the Sun
I wrote about a new kind of scientific lab, where researchers from many disciplines are working together to create a working prototype of a solar fuel generator. The idea is to use sunlight to convert...
View Article
