Stargates: The Theory & Practice

Doors and Portals and Stargates, Oh My!

Call them Stargates, Jumpgates, Fargates, Hypertubes or just an invitation to every unwanted pest from the far reaches of the Galaxy to visit, they are absolutely necessary if we are to have the glorious Science Fiction action we desperately need.  But could they actually be built?  We look at what modern physics has to say:  how to glue black holes together to build a wormhole, how to avoid the dangers of spaghettification, radiation poisoning, and paradox noise, and just what it would take to build one in practice.

This was a talk I did at the last Philcon, went over well.  And I had a lot of fun doing it.  I’ve got it up as a talk on slideshare.  And I may do variations on this at the 2017 Balticon & also Capclave.

It is the kind of subject you can go anywhere with!

Tales from the Miskatonic University Library about to escape into the world!

The Tales from the Miskatonic University Library is not only at the publisher (PS Publishing) but on the awful verge of being actually published. Darrell Schweitzer & I have just reviewed the signing sheets: apparently there is to be not only a regular edition but a special, limited, & elder-signed edition as well!

So, the list of the authors & their stories:

1. Don Webb. “Slowly Ticking Time Bomb”
2. Adrian Cole. “Third Movement”
3. Dirk Flinthart. “To be In Ulthar”
4. Harry Turtledove. “Interlibrary Loan”
5. P. D. Cacek. “One Small Chance”
6. Will Murray. “A Trillion Young”
7. A. C. Wise. “The Paradox Collection”
8. Marilyn “Mattie” Brahen. “The Way to a Man’s Heart”
9. Douglas Wynne. “The White Door”
10. Alex Shvartsman. “Recall Notice”
11. James Van Pelt. “The Children’s Collection”
12. Darrell Schweitzer. “Not in the Card Catalogue”
13. Robert M. Price. “The Bonfire of the Blasphemies”

And — triskaidekaphiliacs rejoice, triskaidekaphobes despair — there are exactly thirteen stories. Quite by coincidence! (& nothing to do with the fact that thirteen is my personal lucky number.)

And you get intros by both Darrell & myself. Quite a range of stories: funny, grim, grimly funny, paradoxical, and terrifyingly straightforward. Our ultimate criteria was that both Darrell & I enjoyed reading them — and hope you will as well!