The Cambias Digression

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

  • Story Alert!

    My story "Object Three" is in the November/December issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Alexander Jablokov described this story as a bonsai space opera. It's got romance, shootouts, aliens, a big mysterious object, and people jumping out of spaceships. I just got my sample copy of the issue and it looks great.…

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  • How I Did It #8: “The Vampire Brief”

    Since Halloween is only a couple of weeks away, it's appropriate to tackle my first horror story, "The Vampire Brief." It's another anthology story, written for the collection Odder Jobs, published by Dark Horse Comics. As the publisher name might suggest, the stories in Odder Jobs were all based on a comic book: Mike Mignola's…

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  • When Metaphors Attack!

    Science Fiction has a problem. The problem is that it is (among other things) a literature of prediction. Writers extrapolate future worlds and new technologies. A huge part of the genre's appeal is simply seeing what the future might be like. The trouble with predictions is that either they come true, or they don't, and…

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  • How I Did It #7: “See My King All Dressed In Red”

    This was the first story I wrote for an anthology, as opposed to a magazine, and it's also the only story of mine (so far) which has come true. "See My King . . . " was written for the anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, edited by F. Brett Cox and Andy…

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  • Fantasies of Freedom

    I've been thinking about stories lately (actually, I always think about stories), and something has occurred to me. In many stories — especially in genres like science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers — one of the attractions is that the protagonists are more free than the reader. Sure, they may be faced by evil overlords or…

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  • Lazy Thinking

    This past weekend I was a guest at the storm-wracked PiCon convention in Enfield, Connecticut. I had a good time, and I hope others were entertained by my presence. I'll be going back next year if they'll have me. So now I'm going to be exceedingly ungracious. At the various panels I attended, I noticed…

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  • Another Slice of Pi

    As I was saying before I was interrupted, I'm going to be a guest at Pi-Con this weekend. Pi-Con is a science fiction convention in Enfield, Connecticut (just south of Springfield, Massachusetts). They've got me scheduled for a lot of events. See for yourself: 8/26/2011 8:00 PM — "Honey! The aliens are attacking again" 8/27/2011…

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  • Off the Launch Pad, Day 6

    On the final day of the Launch Pad workshop we straggled into the lecture hall later than usual and took our seats for Dr. Schmidt's account of What Not To Do in science fiction stories, based on his years in the editor's chair at Analog. He discussed the difference between obviously made-up science and just…

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  • Off the Launch Pad, Day 5

    Friday began with a lecture by Mike Brotherton about galaxies. He began with a little history, about William Herschel's attempt to determine the Sun's position within the Milky Way galaxy by counting the stars in different portions of the sky. This gave a decent rough approximation of the shape, but vastly underestimated the size and…

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  • Off the Launch Pad, Day 4

    Instead of going to class in our beloved basement lecture hall, on Thursday morning the Launch Pad workshop members got some fresh air and sunshine. We drove out to Vedauwoo Rocks east of Laramie for a three-mile hike. It was quite pretty. The rocks are ancient granite, cracked and eroded into mysterious almost-familiar shapes. Around…

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The Worldbuilding Index