It’s funny how things work.

Random action does not create uniform results.  I’m seeing that in our slush pile.  After a long drought of stories that just don’t work for us, we got a big lump of stories all at once that are really intriguing, and which I’m passing on to the senior editors.

Too bad we can’t afford to buy all of them.  If only more people would click on our ads, we would be able to.  :-(  Alas, the Yahoo advertising scheme doesn’t seem to be working for us.

“The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of “physical reality” indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final. We must always be ready to change these notions - that is to say, the axiomatic basis of physics - in order to do justice to perceived facts in the most perfect way logically.”

-Albert Einstein

…when no one is looking at it. Proven by the latest scientific experiments:

“…physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism — giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).”

From PhysicsWeb.org

When you’re submitting a story to a publication who’s submission guidelines clearly state “Please, NO SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS” and a day after you submit the story, send another note saying you are pulling the story from consideration because you just sold it somewhere else… guess what?

You’ve just pissed off an editor.

After you’ve done that, don’t bother sending anything else.

…I’m not talking about us, but our name sake, the mysterious energy itself.

I ran across a link to This National Geographic Article while clicking around some of my favorite blogs.

Dark energy, if we could only discover its secrets, may make or break the future of the human race. The weird thing about it is that it makes up more than half of the universe. If true, that would mean anti-gravity is more common than regular gravity.

Our good friend and colleague Gloria Oliver sent us This Article about new cloaking technology that comes right out of Star Trek. Looks like ten years from now we’ll have stealth airplanes that are invisible to radar and to the naked eye. This comes right after news of a breakthrough making Teleportation one step closer to reality. Now if we could only figure out how to tap limitless energy and send ships hurtling faster than light, SF would become common everyday fiction. Or not fiction at all.

Can you imagine Star Trek as a reality show?

Reading science journals nowadays is like reading SF. It’s amazing. We’re living in exciting times. If anything, it’s making SF harder to write, and it’s forcing writers to push their boundaries ever farther out in order to keep their fiction from being overtaken by actual events.