The Cambias Digression

Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.

  • This Con Will Be Amazing!

    This weekend Amazing Stories is sponsoring a virtual science fiction convention: AmazingCon! It features readings, panels, special events — all the good parts of a convention without the hotel food and travel expense.  I'm doing two events: a reading from my work in progress at 3pm on Friday, June 12; and a panel on Worldbuilding…

    jamescambias

  • Time For Tea!

    There's an excellent series of online readings organized by Sarah Smith, Brookline's Grande Dame of Fantasy and Science Fiction, called Teatime Readings. I did one last week, and now everyone can enjoy it here. The first half of the video is me reading a chapter from The Initiate, and the second half is a question-and-answer session…

    jamescambias

    ,

  • Work In Progress: The Billion Worlds

    A while back I started thinking about the distant future. What can humanity expect if we don't invent a magic FTL drive, don't go extinct, and our civilization mostly putters along the way it has been since the invention of agriculture? I described some of my thoughts in this blog post from 2018. Extrapolating with…

    jamescambias

    ,

  • Historical Perspective

    Like most of the rest of the world I've been thinking about diseases lately. What I've been thinking about is how mild the coronavirus epidemic has been. No, stop shouting at the screen and look at some numbers.           The Spanish Flu: the post-World War I influenza epidemic caused 17-50 million deaths; I've seen the…

    jamescambias

    ,

  • Kitchen Report: Tortillas

    The little locally-owned supermarket up in Greenfield has a good selection of Mexican items — I don't mean Mission brand tortillas or Paul Newman salsa, I mean stuff like masa flour, corn husks for making tamales, and big bags of dried beans. This probably has something to do with the fact that this is farm…

    jamescambias

  • Kitchen Report: The Elvis

    If you suddenly went from poverty to vast wealth, and could have more or less anything you wanted, what would you eat? Well, if you were Elvis Presley, the King of Rock 'n Roll, you'd have a sandwich. Specifically, a peanut butter-banana-and-bacon sandwich, sometimes on an entire loaf of bread cut lengthwise.  Today for brunch…

    jamescambias

  • Kitchen Report: Bucatini Alla Flamande

    These weeks of enforced leisure have inspired me to go ahead and do some cooking projects I've long put off. I did the first of them this past Saturday, a dish called Bucatini Alla Flamande. It's a molded pasta dish — you line a pudding basin or a rounded double boiler with semi-cooked bucatini, line…

    jamescambias

  • New Story at the Decameron Project

    Seven centuries ago, the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a series of stories, presented as tales told by a group of travelers seeking refuge from the Black Death in a house near Florence. The tale-telling takes place over ten nights, giving the work it's title: The Decameron. In the present era, our plague isn't quite…

    jamescambias

    , ,

  • Astronomical Notes

    The big stargazing news this spring is Comet ATLAS (it's in all caps because it's named for the acronym-titled instrument which discovered it, not the ancient Greek Titan). It's been getting some attention in the skywatching and pop-science press because it has been brightening much faster than expected as it has approached the Sun. Right…

    jamescambias

  • Big Podcast News!

    My short story "Treatment Option" will be the lead episode of the new DUST studios podcast series Flight 008, which releases tomorrow, March 25. You can listen to it here. There's even a nifty trailer video! This project began as a Web-based fiction collection, Seat 14C, which was part of an XPrize Foundation look at visions…

    jamescambias

    ,

The Worldbuilding Index