West of the Moon

writing and editing

strange horizons, fourth week of february.

Another fourth-week issue of Strange Horizons means no new fiction, but that means I get to pull some stuff from the archives for you, so hurray! February 2001!  Ten years ago!  Wow, I feel old, and even more old as I realize what we published that month. February 2001 marked Alan DeNiro‘s first appearance at [...]

Tags: this week at strange horizons

Strange Horizons, third week in January

In the fiction department, we have “Pinion” by Stellan Thorne, a not-quite-noir story of cops and angels. He cuffed together long lovely wrists, then bent back one wing at a painful angle. The angel cried out with a voice like a tuning fork. “Try to use these,” Greyling said, “and you’ll get a bullet through [...]

Tags: angels, john clute, stellan thorne, this week at strange horizons

Strange Horizons, second week in January

This week at Strange Horizons, we have an utterly brilliant column by Matt Cheney, in which he argues with himself about a book.  And about science.  I am, of course, predisposed to think that this column is brilliant, because I agree with his acknowledged bias towards gendered behavior as social construct, etc etc.  But there [...]

Tags: cassandra clarke, matt cheney, this week at strange horizons

the mystery of mystery.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been reading more and more mystery novels, and I’m curious about the genre.  (Also, totally enjoying the genre, which is why I’m curious.) It actually all started about five or six years ago, on one of the long driving trips.  I was staying overnight in Wall, South Dakota, [...]

Tags: mystery, publishing

sometimes the answer can surprise you.

So, as promised, my favorite reunion story. (Apologies to those of you who’ve heard this three or four times already.) It happened on Saturday night, the year that I was housing coordinator. Saturday is the best night, for reunion workers. Reunion week starts on Sunday, with very intense last-minute preparation, and then the older classes [...]

Tags: personal history, reunion

math on the bias.

One of the projects I’m working on at the moment is a series of articles for an upcoming encyclopedia of world history; I’m writing a set of short pieces for them about various aspects of science and technology in the ancient and early medieval periods. Two of my assigned articles deal with Indian mathematics in [...]

Tags: bias, history of science, teaching

what we’re doing here.

This June, it will be ten years since I first started keeping an online journal. I was going to say something like, “online journal, that’s what we called them before they were called weblogs,” but that’s not entirely true.  Online journals were always much more about personal narrative, telling stories about your life.  They’re by [...]

Tags: personal history, weblogs

Bryant Park and Sigur Ros

For a few months now, I’ve been listening to the podcasts of The Bryant Park Project, a new NPR morning news show. I have mixed reactions to it–it’s a fun radio show, and interesting, but it’s not what I want from NPR in terms of a news show, and I’m extremely wary of the idea [...]

Tags: bryant park project, integrated media

Twenty Epics on Escape Pod.

The newest installment of Escape Pod features Stephen Eley’s story The Dinner Game, from Twenty Epics. ( Lulu | Amazon | BN ) (Also currently available at Borderlands Books in San Francisco and the Barnes and Noble in downtown Berkeley, in limited quantity.) It’s read by Maia Whittaker, who has a beautiful voice, and Stephen [...]

Tags: escape pod, twenty epics

machine translation.

One of the many problems with having so many writers as friends is that their language games aren’t as much fun when I play them. Case in point, the machine translation exercise that David and Ben were playing around with. I took a paragraph from my dissertation, ran it through a few Google translator round [...]

Tags: dissertation