William Hunt Jr. has created a gallery of character portraits from my novel The Last Legends of Earth using Wonder, an AI image generator. This medium is so condign with science fiction, I’m moved to display some of his portraits here along with quotes from the novel. The images occupy the synapse between text and […]
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Dreams That Love the Yew
Who speaks for the Kenning Stone? Not Merlin. Merlin speaks for no one since Nimue beguiled him. Though he raised the great stone from Cimmerian caverns to clasp Excalibur, the wizard could not lift himself above lust. The Wiccan women he took as lovers stole his power. In the enchanted forest of Brocéliande, he wanders […]
Grothendieck
Mathematics dates our wound from the time of the ancient Sumerians1 and their sexagesimal number system. This is the wound we suffered when, after 300,000 years of human existence, quantity became more important than quality. Mathematics cuts deeply into what we know. And we bleed a new strangeness that shames us into facing what we […]
An Eye for an i
We’ve unraveled across 13.8 billion years from some infinity. And now, look at us! We are an arrangement of atoms with an eye for i, iota, the mathematical expression √-1 … i2 = −1 … x2+ 1 = 0 … that famous imaginary number so useful to meeting our world realistically. Perpendicular to the Cartesian […]
From Eternity to Here
In the Beginning, you are there. So am I. And everything else, too. Before the trillionth second of time, everything is light – an eternal event, because for photons, there is no time. No space, either. The instant a photon appears, it arrives at its destination – even if that’s the other side of the […]
Of Fire and the Invisible in Itself
At the center of every atom, energy of imponderable intensity rages. This is the chromodynamic binding force of gluons, which holds quarks together inside an atomic nucleus. It is a furious fire that has been burning since time began. I say ‘furious’ because 99% of the mass in the atomic nucleus consists of this chaotic […]