Richard Leis

Month: June 2015

  • Musings: Fuck, Writing DOES Have Negative Consequences

    I wrote a short response to the paper pointing out the Dark Enlightenment as a worrying contemporary example of where an ethic of expediency can lead. The response wasn’t what I expected.

  • Pluto and Charon in Color and in Tantalizing Detail

     [Post edited on Monday, June 22, 2015 to correct my misunderstanding about the provenance of the remarkable color image below.] Tonight I was browsing the latest raw images of Pluto and Charon taken by New Horizons today from only 27.7 million kilometers away and I realized that when you zoom in, Charon is just beginning…

  • New Horizons at Pluto

    This is it! Pluto is the last of the classical nine planets to be visited by a spacecraft from Earth. The New Horizons spacecraft will take close-up images and capture other useful data as it speeds by Pluto and its moons on July 14, 2015. This will complete the imaging grand tour of our solar system…

  • Fairy Tale Review Fairy-Tale Files: Once Upon a Microchip

    “In ‘A Toy Princess,’ a fairy tale from the 1877 collection On a Pincushion by English writer Mary de Morgan, an emotional and expressive princess named Ursula grows up in a kingdom of such incredible politeness that its subjects have demonized almost any form of empathy or feeling.”

  • The Years of Fantasy and Horror

    I remember fondly buying a few editions of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling in the 1990s. I was in my twenties and while many of the stories and their level of craft were opaque to me at the time, I felt I had stumbled onto a…