An Interview with Tais Teng

Posted on September 6, 2018 by scarywhitegirl

Tais TengToday, we’re chatting with Tais Teng, one of our Battling in All Her Finery authors!

DV: Tell us a bit about yourself!

Tais Teng: Tais Teng (1952) is a Dutch sf writer, illustrator, poet and sculptor. Saddled with the quite unpronounceable name of Thijs van Ebbenhorst Tengbergen, he shortened that to Tais Teng to leave room for exploding spaceships or clever steampunk ladies on the covers of his novels. In his own language, he has written everything from radio-plays to hefty fantasy trilogies. To date, he has sold some thirty stories in the English language and one novel, The Emerald Boy. Phaedra: Alastor 824, set in the universe of Jack Vance, will be published in 2018 by Spatterlight. As a sculptor, his most heart-felt wish is a Star Wars laser cannon to carve mountains or one of the lesser Jupiter moons. He doesn’t share his home with a cat, not even with a gold fish, but a wife and three kids should count for something. Tais Teng is one of the founders of ziltpunk, optimistic climate fiction set in a decidedly Dutch future, with mile-high dykes, hurricane-herders and mangrove islands in front of the coast.

English website: http://taisteng.atspace.com/
art: http://taisteng.deviantart.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/taisteng
Twitter: @taisteng
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/taisteng
E-books: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/taisteng
poems: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/834180
sculpture: http://www.deviantart.com/taisteng/gallery/66691519/Sculptures

DV: What inspired you to write “Why we are standing on the broken wall, clutching swords too rusty to take an edge” for Battling in All Her Finery?

TT: I started with the title and was very curious what would happen next. It is a system I often use: think of a scene or a title and then work forwards or backwards. Being an illustrator often gives me very clear, almost hyper-realistic mind pictures. In this case I saw the storyteller standing on the wall looking at the approaching fleet. I didn’t know until the very end who was standing next to her. The second picture was the queen walking into the village, with her bow and torn mantle. The final one was the queen and the storyteller looking over the valley with the distant cities dotting the green. Then I began typing. Often one mind-picture is enough, though.

You can read a story that uses this system at http://www.deviantart.com/taisteng/art/The-Race-of-a-Thousand-Cursed-Captains-610982880.

As to the heroine, I had just been writing several rather steamy and deeply romantic stories covering most of the QUILTBAG spectrum with my long time writing partner Jaap Boekestein and decided to use a protagonist who wasn’t bothered by all those irksome urges, who was in fact asexual.

DV: You definitely win the prize for the longest story title in the anthology. Do your stories frequently have long titles, or was this one different? What made you choose this title?

TT: Publishers deeply hate long titles. They want two or three word titles, and accordingly, my novels end up with rather succinct titles, just because I want them published. Personally, I love long titles: sentences that sound like prose poems and intrigue the reader. They also make my stories stand out in the index of a book. To offer some of these:

  • She holds the ice and all the oceans in her fingerless hands
  • What avails a psalm in the cinders of Gehenna?
  • An Overview of the Infernal Regions, with some tips for recent arrivals
  • Slow as glaciers and their swords all aflame.
  • Soldier of the Abyss or the True Story of Captain Robert Falcon Scott

My longest book title in Dutch was: Noem mij maar Percy d’Arezzo y MacShimonoseki (Just call me Percy d’Arezzo y MacShimonoseki). This publisher happily had the same sense of humor as I and got the joke.

DV: Did you have any historical inspirations for the culture that your characters live in, or is this a strictly fantasy world?

TT: This is a fantasy world. I wanted the gritty feel of an Icelandic saga, nothing mannered in the high fantasy way with golden tressed princesses and dainty unicorns. You can read another story of this kind at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/167626.

I wrote quite a lot of historical fantasy in my own language: there everything has to be right and realistic, from the footwear (bare feet mostly) to the roots and grasshoppers bubbling in the cauldron. I did two historical fantasy series, one centering on Loki that went all the way from Norway to Baghdad. Another, featuring the great-granddaughter of Baba Yaga, started out in the Dutch Hansa city of Deventer and ended up on the walls of Byzantium.

DV: What’s on the horizon for you?

I am just fine tuning a novel set in the universe of Jack Vance: Phaedra: Alastor 824, which will be published by his heirs at Splatterlight Press. Another novel, Sunrise at Midnight, an alternate history novel with Hannibal sacking Rome and Archimedes kick-starting the Industrial Revolution some two thousand years earlier, is doing the rounds. You can read two English e-book collections of my stories at Smashwords, Kobo, or Amazon: Lovecraft, My Love, and Embrace the Night. I also recently started writing noir detective stories and sold several of them to Switchblade, Low Life Journal, and Black Cat Magazine.

Thanks, Tais!

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Mad Scientist Alum in Many Media!

Posted on September 5, 2018 by scarywhitegirl

We’ve been busy here at Mad Scientist Journal, and so have some of our alumni! From short stories to YouTube to awards, check out what folks have been up to!

Cover art for two collections by Jamie LackeyJamie Lackey has recently published two short story collections with Air and Nothingness Press. Both A Metal Box Floating Between Stars and Other Stories and The Blood of Four Gods and Other Stories can be found at the Air and Nothingness webstore.

Sacred Smokes is a short story collection from Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr., containing linked stories about growing up Native American in a gang in Chicago.

Darrell Z. Grizzle has published a short story collection entitled I Never Meant To Start a Murder Cult, which includes his story, “The Lazaretto Ghost,” which originally appeared in the Summer 2017 quarterly of Mad Scientist Journal.

Thomas Diehl has launched a YouTube channel where he talks about science topics from media, called Fiction Science.

James Jensen’s flash fiction piece, “Skip to the End of the Story, Y/N?,” appeared at Daily Science Fiction in May, and is a brilliantly short read!

A number of MSJ alumni have stories in The Society of Misfit Stories Presents … Volume II, from Bards and Sages Quarterly. Within its pages, you will find longer tales from Rhonda Eikamp, Calvin Demmer, Aaron Moskalik, Stewart C Baker, and Dawn Vogel.

Three MSJ alumni will have their MSJ stories reprinted in the 2018 Write Well Award anthology! “Introduction to the Epic of Centipidus” by Hamilton Perez, which originally appeared on the website, along with “The Drunk God” by Jule Owen and “Strange Attractor” by Rhonda Eikamp, both of which originally appeared in quarterly editions of Mad Scientist Journal, were all selected for this final year of the award and anthology. Check out the full list here!

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An Interview with A. J. Fitzwater

Posted on September 4, 2018 by scarywhitegirl

Author A. J. FitzwaterToday, we’re chatting with A. J. Fitzwater about their story in Battling in All Her Finery!

DV: Tell us a bit about yourself!

A. J. Fitzwater: There is a tale of one squeezed up with the mud through the cracks between bays and grapevine. There is the story where I grew from the purple hair down. There’s also the one where I was lovingly placed, fully formed and full of incandescence, by The Void in front of a laptop. Yet another where I was twisted together from the Words of the Great Mothers. Probably my favourite is I hatched from the egg of a great dragon, seen and unseen within this world. These are my truths.

DV: What inspired you to write “There Is Only the War” for Battling in All Her Finery?

AJF: I’m going to be terribly annoying and say the first image of the story came to me in a dream–that of a floating skull onto which innards, flesh, and skin grew from the neck down. I’ve been told my dreams are excessively weird and vivid.

At the time the story came to fruition, I was contemplating various themes of constant war–that of propaganda, surveillance, secrecy–and the forms in which anger is allowed to be expressed. Or in the instance of women’s anger, not allowed to be expressed. I’ve been asking myself through my fiction for a long time “what does a healthy expression of women’s anger look like?”. Unfortunately, I still don’t have an answer, and this story, with its examination of the full repression of women’s anger–emotionally and physically–goes in completely the opposite direction. But to come at the solution, we need to look at the failures.

Women in war, and the purposely made invisible history thereof, is something that I’ve been interested in recently. From reading Kameron Hurley’s “We Have Always Fought,” I went on to start reading up about things like the Bletchly Girls, the Women’s Land Army in WW1 and 2, New Zealand women in the armed services, women spies, and so on. One of my writing heroes, James Tiptree, Jr., was in the CIA. I’m not an historian by any means, but I felt it incumbent of me to at least have a passing understanding of what my foremothers fought and died for, only to have their achievements erased out of spite, shame, or disbelief, and to pass on the idea that a woman’s anger and strength has a place in the world, and a place in changing the world. I listen to and learn from those voices in such movements as Black Lives Matter, reproductive justice, and transgender rights, justice, and representation, many voices of which are women and genderqueer/nonbinary people.

DV: Your setting for this story seems so vivid to me. Was it inspired by any real-world locations, or made up wholesale?

AJF: I had the first scene in the field of flax in my head right from the start. Flax, the long-leaved brown and green varieties common to New Zealand, especially in swamp areas, is an imagery I like to work into my stories–there’s something familiar and comforting about it, reminiscent of childhood spent in the outdoors.

With the generational family home built into cliffside caves, I wanted to examine a life lived in harmony with the environment–the sun used for lighting, the river used to water the gardens, the thickness of the walls to heat and cool the rooms. I’ve been fascinated with the idea of shaped caves as workable housing environments in SFF ever since reading Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books.

DV: Do you have other stories set in the world of your story, or plans to write more in this world?

AJF: This is a one off story, though I do like the concept of the un-dead’s afterlife and community on the golden sands of a land far from the fear and annoyances of the living. Maybe I’ll revisit it sometime, see what the un-dead get up to in their spare time when they don’t have to fight the living’s wars for them.

DV: What’s on the horizon for you?

AJF: 2018 has been the year of working on Big Projects. I capitalize that because I have always been about short stories, and this year I wanted to challenge myself to write longer things. The first is a collection of stories set in my gaslamp solarpunk world of River City. I have had a few of these stories published, and wanted to flesh out the collection of characters–a bearded lady, a thief with psychic powers, an airship pilot who is a trans woman, a solar powered metal dragon–into a linked set of short stories and novelettes all set in and around a matriarchal, alt-history Northern African city. When it’s complete I’ll start shopping it about.

The second project is a novella about a found family of queer shapeshifters set amongst the forgotten history of New Zealand’s Land Girls in World War Two. It’s complete, and looking for a home.

Thanks, A. J.!

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T.A. Guide for BIO 457: Advanced Experimental Models

Posted on September 3, 2018 by Mad Scientist Journal

An letter by Lisa Mullins, PhD, as provided by Julia K. Patt
Art by Dawn Vogel

Greetings Fellow Plodder in the Academic Trenches,

If you’ve received this binder, it means you have had the misfortune of being assigned BIO 457 as your T.A. post for the semester. My sincere condolences.

I was once like you–beleaguered and overwhelmed, fretting about comps and unresponsive advisors and publications and postdoc appointments. Trust me when I say that to survive T.A.-ing this class, you have to put those concerns from your mind. Study, yes. Fulfill your responsibilities as well as you can. But don’t lose your focus in 457, or you’ll be facing a lot worse than asking for a dissertation extension or disappointing your committee members.

First things first: Unless he’s died or wandered off, Dr. Piotrowski always teaches this class. He is roughly 900 years old, can’t see further than three feet in front of his nose, and sounds like a leaking radiator when he lectures. But don’t underestimate him. I once saw him push a junior biochemistry lab assistant through a portal to another dimension just to see what would happen. Never get between Dr. P and a portal.

Over the years, his experiments have included ice rays, death rays, hypnotic rays, sleep rays, kill-chip implanted super soldiers, undead kill-chip implanted super soldiers, shark-cyborg hybrids, undead shark-cyborg hybrids, contacting chthonic deities, talking apes, extrasensory perception serums, piercing the veil, and a twenty-foot mecha one of our predecessors called the Salad Spinner of Death.

And that’s just in the spring semesters.

More undergraduates go missing in 457 than during study abroad trips to countries flagged by the CIA.

Depending on your level of cynicism and how many intro classes you’ve T.A.-ed for previously, you may be tempted to try to save the students. Don’t bother. I’m not saying undergraduates are expendable. I am saying that in many cases, it will be you or them, and if they’re still drunk from the night before, they might not even feel anything.

Art for "T.A. Guide for BIO 457 Advanced Experimental Models"

If you’ve received this binder, it means you have had the misfortune of being assigned BIO 457 as your T.A. post for the semester. My sincere condolences.

To read the rest of this story, check out the Mad Scientist Journal: Summer 2018 collection.

Lisa Mullins, PhD, is the founder of the Society for Responsibility in the Mad Sciences. Currently a postdoc at [redacted] University, her academic interests include gene therapy, immunology, and preventing the rise of sentient artificial constructs which will subjugate all mankind. She has never sacrificed an undergraduate to a portal of unspeakable evil. Probably.

Julia K. Patt lives in Maryland with the smallest, furriest Elder God and her unwitting orange tabby acolyte, which never fails to make life interesting. Her stories have recently appeared in Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, and Luna Station Quarterly, and she is at work on a novel. Twitter: @chidorme. Website: juliakpatt.com

Dawn Vogel writes and edits both fiction and non-fiction. Although art is not her strongest suit, she’s happy to contribute occasional art to Mad Scientist Journal. By day, she edits reports for and manages an office of historians and archaeologists. In her alleged spare time, she runs a craft business and tries to find time for writing. She lives in Seattle with her awesome husband (and fellow author), Jeremy Zimmerman, and their herd of cats. For more of Dawn’s work, visit http://historythatneverwas.com/.

“T.A. Guide for BIO 457: Advanced Experimental Models” is © 2018 Julia K. Patt
Art accompanying story is © 2018 Dawn Vogel

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Strange Science: Ghost Particles and Their Origins

Posted on August 31, 2018 by scarywhitegirl

Astronomers have long been hoping to observe an object outside of our solar system that emits neutrinos, or ghost particles, and now they have!

Neutrinos are referred to as “ghost particles” because they don’t often interact with any type of matter. They pass through objects at nearly the speed of light, without loss of speed or deflection of their course. Because of this, astronomers can track neutrinos back to their source by following a straight line based on their trajectory.

Recent observations came from three different observatories. IceCube, in Antarctica, has a telescope constructed of glacial ice that can detect neutrinos. In Japan, Kanata (which means “faraway” in Japanese) has an optical/near-infrared telescope operated by Hiroshima University also capable of detecting ghost particles. And MAGIC, the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov Telescope on the La Palma Canary Island, looks at gamma rays, which are associated with neutrinos.

You can read more about the three papers that, taken together, correlate this new information about neutrinos here!

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That Man Behind the Curtain: July 2018

Posted on August 30, 2018 by Mad Scientist Journal
Books for sale on a table.

Selling books at the Handmade and Haute Craft Show.

We had a few new marketing experiments in July. How well did it work out? Well, let’s look at numbers.

The Money Aspect

Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Web Resources: (-$17.06)
Stories: (-$180.00)
Art: (-$741.85)
Advertising: (-$1,661.59)
Processing Fees: (-$22.38)
Printing: (-$33.68)
Donations: $107.71
Online Book Sales: $31.12

Total: (-$3,296.64)
QTD: (-$3,800.46)
YTD: (-$4,187.66)
All Time: (-$27,925.59)

As usual, I try to list costs for art and stories under the month that the stories run on the site rather than when I pay them. (This does not apply to special content for quarterlies, which does not have a specific month associated with it.) Sales are for sales when they take place, not when they’re actually paid out to me. Online book sales reflect the royalties given after the retailer takes their cut. Physical book sales represent gross income, not counting the cost of the physical book. Donations include Patreon as well as other money sent to us outside of standard sales.

Art last month included additional costs for interior art for Battling in All Her Finery.

As mentioned last month, we hired a publicist and decided to upgrade our Hootsuite account. The monthly rate wasn’t prohibitively high, but  it had to be paid for a year in advance. That stung a bit.

Well timed with the rise of our publicist hire, we decided to participate in the Smashwords Summer/Winter book sale. A lot of our older quarterlies were free, and our newer books and bigger anthologies were heavily discounted. We had 242 books bought from us, 159 of which were MSJ related. Unfortunately, most of those were free books. We made $7.88 from these sales, $5.90 from MSJ titles only. On the one hand, it’s a bummer we didn’t make more cash. On the other hand, we know all too well how hard it can be just to give books away. Hopefully we have some return readers in the mix.

Submissions

We were closed to submissions in in July. Our all time acceptance rate is 35.7%.

Followers

Below is the social media following we had at the end of June.

Patreon: 28 (+0)

Facebook: 1,999 (+14)

Twitter: 640 (+10)

Tumblr: 318 (+9)

Mailing List: 159 (+6)

Google+: 65 (+0)

Instagram: 135 (+9)

Traffic

Last three months:

July 2018: 1,297 visits, 964 users, 1,953 page views, peak day 90 visits.
June 2018: 1,899 visits, 1,271 users, 3,125 page views, peak day 109.
May 2018: 1,713 visits, 1,353 users, 2,512 page views, peak day of 82.

Last three Julys:

July 2017: 1,216 visits, 914 users, 2,210 pages views, peak day of 84 visits.
July 2016: 848 visits, 647 users, 1,534 page views, peak day of 47 visits.
July 2015: 1,509 visits, 1007 users, 2,753 page views, peak day of 120 visits.

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Review of Paper Girls Volume 1

Posted on August 29, 2018 by scarywhitegirl

Cover art for Paper Girls Vol. 1It’s summertime and the graphic novel stack is threatening to overtake the hallway, so we’ll be talking about some of the graphic novels we’ve accumulated that we think you might enjoy!

Paper Girls Volume 1 (Image Comics, 2016) starts out with young girls doing their early morning paper route through their neighborhood and gets weird fast. There are possibly alien life forms and technology, time travel, and substantial peril for the protagonists. It’s set in 1988, and there are all sorts of great visual nods to the late 80s.

I really loved this book both because of the weird stuff going on and also because I was about the same age as the protagonists in 1988. So even though I wasn’t a paper girl, and even though I didn’t have such weirdness in my life, a lot of it felt nostalgic for me, from the normal things they were dealing with to the fashion and hairstyles. Oh, those bangs!

Paper Girls is written by Brian K. Vaughn, also known for Y: The Last Man and SAGA, and this volume is illustrated by Cliff Chiang (known for his work on Wonder Woman), Jared K. Fletcher, and Matthew Wilson. Because of the weirdness, I suspect that this is the sort of series that is best read all at once, rather than waiting for the next issue/graphic novel to appear. There are four graphic novels out to date, each one collecting five of the comics. It looks like there will be more in the future, too, and I’m looking forward to reading the whole series!

 

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An Interview with Blake Jessop

Posted on August 28, 2018 by scarywhitegirl

Author Blake JessopToday, we’re talking with Blake Jessop, the author of “Cuirassiere,” one of the stories that will appear in Battling in All Her Finery.

DV: Tell us a bit about yourself!

Blake Jessop: I’m a thirty-seven-year-old Canadian author of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. I majored in English literature and political science at McGill in Montreal, and lived in Australia for a few years to get a master’s in creative writing from the University of Adelaide. While I was there, I met and worked with some excellent writers, notably Dominique Wilson and Emmett Stinson, who bought into the style I wanted to develop; action-packed speculative fiction in a fancy and literary style. My beard is getting grayer all the time … but I remain convinced it’s a good idea.

DV: What inspired you to write “Cuirassiere” for Battling in All Her Finery?

BJ: I like using calls for submissions as writing prompts, and Battling in All Her Finery leapt out at me the second I read the requirements. Leadership in the first person feminine is a wonderful premise, and it gave me the feeling the heroine was dictating her story to me. The action and heroic tone owe much to Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe series, of which I am an unashamed fan. As for Colette herself, many of my stories have a soundtrack, and she strode into my mind, fully formed and gripping her sword, while I listened to a power metal song about the Battle of Poltava.

DV: Your story is alternate history, but it rings very realistic as well. Are there aspects of the story that the casual reader might not realize are historical, or that they might not realize are fictional?

BJ: I went mildly off the deep end researching “Cuirassiere.” My understanding of Napoleon’s 1805 campaign was hazy, so I did a lot of reading, and Alistair Horne’s How Far From Austerlitz ended up being my bible. I took some liberties with the battle itself to keep the narrative brisk, but otherwise the way Colette fights her war is a fair facsimile of the real thing, right down to the weather and bicorne hats.

As realistic as I tried to make the story, I like blurring the line between history and myth. The story’s villain is as historical a figure as Napoleon … but only in Russian legends. The details of his appearance are accurate and carefully researched. Was he actually at the Battle of Austerlitz? Horne doesn’t seem to think so, but it was a long time ago, and I have an open mind. Either way, the mixture of historical battle and Russian mythology allowed me to tell Colette’s story in giant theatrical strokes.

DV: Your story is structured to alternate between the present and flashbacks told in diary entries. Was this the structure that you knew you would work with from the beginning, or did it fall into place as you wrote?

BJ: The first draft of “Cuirassiere” didn’t have the diary entries, just recollections by the heroine about her brother and training her men. It was clunky and there was a lot of exposition. I wrote the first few diary entries to give myself a better idea why Colette was so determined to go to war, and found they were my favorite parts of her story. They made her human. I kept them, and later put them in reverse chronological order so we can discover Colette’s past at the same time she admits it to herself.  The process of creating this structure was difficult enough that I seriously considered giving up entirely, but once I had it in place, the story worked.

The earliest diary entry was the very last thing I wrote, after even the battle’s grand finale, and it made me feel like I had managed to genuinely figure out who Colette was.

DV: What’s on the horizon for you?

BJ: I’m currently writing a lot of short stories with the aim of building the reputation and relationships required to seriously undertake a novel. I have a habit of writing heroines, so some of my recent work will certainly appeal to readers of Battling in All Her Finery. “Halo of Storms” in The Razor’s Edge is military science fiction about drones, rebellion, and a lonely cyber-soldier named Violet. I also have a steampunk fantasy story out this month in Fire: Demons, Dragons and Djinns. Both are very different from “Cuirassiere,” but if you want fiery lady heroes … I can guarantee that a lot of things will get set ablaze. You can also follow me on twitter @everydayjisei.

As a closing note, I’d like to extend a firm thanks to everyone reading, and to all the good souls who Kickstarted Battling in All Her Finery. Without you, Colette wouldn’t be battling at all. Cheers!

Thanks, Blake!

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Last Confessions of a Deranged Physicist

Posted on August 27, 2018 by Mad Scientist Journal

An essay by an anonymous physicist, as provided by Chris Aldridge
Art by Ariel Alian Wilson

The time came when I had no choice but to go forward by going back, for the sake of both my own sanity and physical life. So many wrongful turns had brought me ruinous failures and hardships; I saw my life as beyond conceivable repair. I hated everything about my existence. I hated being married, being a parent, and losing the old life I had when I was free and careless.

My fortitude was bombarded by the cannons of languish, my emotional state trying to stand on increasingly shaky ground.

Surely people would have thought me crazy, and perhaps I was, driven by the brain-crushing and maddening desire to turn my course, or make it so it never happened in the first place. The mission seemed impossible, but I knew there just had to be a way. Time was merely an illusion, and existence itself a compilation of matter and energy that could be moved, changed, and transformed. All I had to do was find the universal reins and jerk the head in my preferred direction. I knew it might put me in disfavor with the gods, but like a terminally-ill patient being eaten away, my pain drove me to all achievable measures to escape the torment.

~

Day 1

There was presently no known way on Earth to create a tear in time and space. The only thing in the universe capable of that kind of power resided in the form of a black hole, or a dead star.

The main problem was reaching such a vacuum in something that could survive the flattening pressure and destruction so that I could make it to the other side. The second problem lay in catapulting myself ten years back in time, where I would be able to shift the rusty railroad tracks of my life just in time for the engine to once more pass. It was frightening. No one knew what would happen to someone or something that entered a black hole, but I thought it had to be better than my current circumstances.

~

Day 2

It was not possible for me to leave the Earth’s atmosphere, that much was clear. I had no means by which to accomplish such a feat. Not to mention, I had no idea where any black holes stood in the solar system or beyond. Even if I had, I would have died before reaching their location. One feels like they’re in a prison with the key just a few feet outside the cell, being possible yet also impossible to reach.

I would have to create a star as the first step, small enough to be on the Earth yet with the same frequency as a sun. Then I would have to make it die at its highest point of generation. It would be just small enough, yet strong enough, to create a tear in time and space that would allow things through without inherently bringing about their demise.

Fortunately, the elements that made up Earth’s own sun were also found on the planet itself.

~

Art for "Last Confessions of a Deranged Physicist"

I began gathering the material to build a ship-like structure to shield me from any possible dangers. No one actually knew the pressure that a black hole emitted, but since mine was going to be so incredibly small in comparison, it was possible to construct a barrier strong enough to stop it from harming me should there be any immediate threats.

To read the rest of this story, check out the Mad Scientist Journal: Summer 2018 collection.

The fragmented lost journal of a missing and deranged physicist is found by future readers who have no idea how it ended up in their world and time period, but his story turns out to be a strong lesson for all ages and races.

Chris Aldridge is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction originally from Thomasville, North Carolina. He was born in 1984 in Asheboro, and received his education from Columbia College of Missouri. Find him online at www.caldridge.net.

Ariel Alian Wilson is a few things: artist, writer, gamer, and role-player. Having dabbled in a few different art mediums, Ariel has been drawing since she was small, having always held a passion for it. She’s always juggling numerous projects. She currently lives in Seattle with her cat, Persephone. You can find doodles, sketches, and more at her blog www.winndycakesart.tumblr.com.

“Last Confessions of a Deranged Physicist” is © 2018 Chris Aldridge
Art accompanying story is © 2018 Ariel Alian Wilson

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Strange Science: Fun Facts about Stars

Posted on August 24, 2018 by scarywhitegirl

Public domain (https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080312.html)

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration does more than just launch spaceships. They also do a significant amount of research on our solar system and beyond. One of their key fields of research is on stars.

In addition to giving some basic information about the formation of stars, the NASA website also talks about the different types of stars and their lifespans–the smaller the star, the less heat it gives off, but the longer it lasts. And when these stars break down, there are plenty more things that can happen to them, including going supernova and/or becoming black holes. And then the whole process might just start again, depending on what’s left after the death of a star.

The NASA page on stars also includes links to some of NASA’s latest research, which at present includes stories on failed supernovae, cosmic rays, and a beautiful bubble of gas circling a star! If you’re looking to learn more about stars, the NASA page is a great place to look for fun facts and discoveries!

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