Gerhard > Recent Status Updates

He sacrifices himself by blowing up the well that gives Tak access to this world. He screams: “GOD FORGIVE ME, I HATE CRITICS!”

“Beautiful night,” I said.
“Someone once told me all those stars were dead,” said Gibson, “but he was an asshole. It’s just old light, from thousands and thousands of years ago, that’s only reaching us now. We’re looking back in time, staring at fragments of the past scattered above our heads.”

I’ve decided that gods may be just another kind of creature. I don’t think they have a form, or none beyond the ones we give them, which we create from what’s familiar to us, whether frightening or consoling. Some gods endure and some don’t.

Shaw asked him if he had read The Aleph, a story by Jorge Louis Borges in which a single point in space appears to contain all other points.

“Dropped a long way, did he?” she observed, leaning over the corpse with a tortured groan of metal. “Front’s all flat, isn’t it?”
“Er, yes,” replied Abbot Listrum. “He fell from the bell tower.”

“Brother Gorm . . . er, the late Brother Gorm is in the cold storage. Brother Ansel will be delighted if we would move him farther away from the cheese.”

“Wait!” he called, already wondering whether a dried sheep’s tongue might look rather human enough that nobody would ask any uncomfortable questions, should he substitute one for the other.

They'd get over it, Bill told himself. They always did. But whenever they argued, he saw it like a dent in their armor, not enough to bring them down, but to weaken them.

As he knew from his reading, British schools had a long tradition of bullying. Not every school was straight out of Heartstopper.

The fish goggled at him from eyes of turquoise glass inset above its archaic, fat-lipped mouth. We were here before you arrived, it seemed to be warning him silently: We’ll be here after you’ve gone.

It was all hospitals and sports parks, mud and child murder up there. ‘But some surprisingly nice pubs, too.’

The bleak, water-filled hole on the outskirts of town was a local legend. Since there'd never been any digging around there, it couldn't have been an actual quarry, but the city had labeled it as such to counteract local lore that said its origins were extraterrestrial.

"Have you lived here forever? I mean since you were born? Mum talks about this place like it's some kind of fantasy, like The Ministry of Magic or something."

Some Indigenous cultures have traditions of viewing landscapes and humans as a cooperative whole, a relationship where the line distinguishing human and landscape is blurred. They tend to be more holistic as opposed to the West’s predominantly mechanistic and materialistic associations with the land and its characteristics.

So now that resource extraction capabilities are beginning to dawn on us, who owns the Moon? By international space law standards, it would be no one in particular and everyone at large. After all, the Outer Space Treaty designates outer space resources as the “province of all mankind.”

In 2012, NASA astronaut Don Pettit took unpaired knitting needles manufactured from different polymers in his personal crew preference kit to the ISS. The intention was to demonstrate the behavior of water drops when the needles were charged, to make an educational video. Nonetheless, the presence of knitting needles in space caused delighted reactions from knitters and crafters on Earth...

Finally, space holds the promise of vast, untapped profits for private spaceflight and space mining companies. This potential for wealth increases both the motivation for and the ability of spaceflight companies to evade regulations, ignore safety concerns, and exploit workers in pursuit of a fortune for their shareholders.

Humans have entered space without healing themselves here on Earth. These humans are carrying trauma that informs their perspective and ultimately their actions, which are affecting the rhythm of the entire universe. Probably most disturbing is that our space exploration is being planned and carried out by white, cis, heterosexual-presenting, wealthy men who seem to be borrowing from the colonial playbook.

And, of course, decolonizing space cannot happen without decolonizing Earth. Speculative fiction’s potential role is to enable us to imagine these possibilities through story, the oldest means of communicating across generations and peoples.

Those of us who cannot afford the extremely expensive ticket to travel into space can still ride along by watching our screens back on Earth. This is often how many space projects are sold, whether they be short-term or long-term, or privately or publicly funded: all people participate in space exploration because its pursuit can be seen by all...

The space exploration status quo is decidedly W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), male, white, politically libertarian, and nondisabled.

Taking the chair by the front window, he stuck on his glasses and threw himself into a book he'd been reading for days. Odd that it had been categorized as romance, he thought. There wasn't a single hockey player in sight.

“Our South African publishing industry is kak—you can gain international interest in terms of awards, but it’s nothing to aspire to in terms of the deal size or distribution. Günter is your ticket to an actual career.“

“The spirit is here, uncontrollable, angry. Do not worry for now. Its evil is not strong enough to overpower you, yet. We will cleanse you today and give you remedies to cleanse the house. This will be the ceremony: the removal and therefore the burial of the evil spirit. It will cost R2,500 each.”