Want Fries with Those Celebrity Nuggets?

My latest book– Destinies: Issues to Shape Our Future—came out in July 2020 from B Cubed Press. In it, I discussed (among other things) the prospects for lab-grown meat. The idea goes back to 1912, when Alexis Carrel started “tissue cultures” using heart cells from a chick. The cultures lasted until 1946 (https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/alexis-carrels-immortal-chick-heart-tissue-cultures-1912-1946). It was […]

Doxxing Trump

They tried hard to hush the story up at the time, but we were all using our phones to record directly to the Cloud, where our front desks got it instantly. President Trump was holding a press conference in the Oval Office. The White House had promised it was BIG news that would guarantee the […]

Paper Djinn

There’s a new magazine out there–Paper Djinn Magazine (paperdjinnpress.com). Free to subscribe, and it will show up monthly in your inbox. And they’ve just taken a story of mine. I finished it the morning of July 4, sent it in, and had the acceptance after lunch. Woo! The story is “Djinn Zoo,” one in a […]

Horror for the Throne: One-Sitting Reads

The book is now complete. Editors James D. MacDonald, Tom Easton, and Judith K. Dial have even delivered it to the publisher (Ian Randall Strock’s Fantastic Books), where in early 2020 it will join its predecessors SCIENCE FICTION FOR THE THRONE and FANTASY FOR THE THRONE on Ian’s dealer table at numerous conventions (as well […]

WHY THE ONE PERCENT?

Tom Easton One of the significant trends in recent history has been the increase in the shift of society’s wealth into fewer and fewer hands, those of the “one percent,” who currently own 45 percent of the world’s wealth. This is, in a way, just an extension of the past. People have always sought to […]

The Hutchamadungles

When I was a kid, back in the 1950s, my father would tell Hutchamadungle stories to try to keep three small boys in the backseat quiet on long car rides. Many of those rides were to visit relatives in that part of Pennsylvania where Pennsylvania Dutch names were on every other mailbox, business, and street […]

Frontiers of Wonder

Twenty years ago Serendipity Systems published my collection FRONTIERS OF WONDER for the Rocket ebook reader. Both company and reader are long gone, so I decided it was time to do a second edition, just $.99 for the Kindle: Frontiers of WonderCollection of essays, stories, and poetry relating to science and…

THE GULLIBILITY GERM

Tom Easton The new strain of fact-resistant humans, first reported in the New Yorker in 2015 (https://www.newyorker.com/…/scientists-earth-endangered-by-…), is actually an infection by Wohlbachia credulensis, according to my story “The Nature of the Problem,” in Alternative Truths III: Endgame, just out from B Cubed Press (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Alternative-Truths-III-Endgame). Wohlbachia is a type of bacterium known to interfere with […]

The Editorial Process

Tom Easton Back in the 1980s, I wrote a computer program that would choose—at random—one of several sentence templates constructed with blanks rather like the sentences in the Mad Libs game. It would then fill in the blanks with nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs chosen—again at random—from user-supplied word lists. I called it a brainstorming […]

The Creative Process

Tom Easton “The self-interest of mankind calls for a general effort to foster the invention of life. And that effort can be guided intelligently only by insight into the nature of the creative process.” —Brewster Ghiselin, ed., The Creative Process (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952) Back in the 1980s, I wrote a computer program […]