The Hutchamadungles

When I was a kid, back in the 1950s, my father would tell Hutchamadungle stories to try to keep three small boys in the backseat quiet on long car rides. Many of those rides were to visit relatives in that part of Pennsylvania where Pennsylvania Dutch names were on every other mailbox, business, and street […]

Frontiers of Wonder

Twenty years ago Serendipity Systems published my collection FRONTIERS OF WONDER for the Rocket ebook reader. Both company and reader are long gone, so I decided it was time to do a second edition, just $.99 for the Kindle: Frontiers of WonderCollection of essays, stories, and poetry relating to science and…

THE GULLIBILITY GERM

Tom Easton The new strain of fact-resistant humans, first reported in the New Yorker in 2015 (https://www.newyorker.com/…/scientists-earth-endangered-by-…), is actually an infection by Wohlbachia credulensis, according to my story “The Nature of the Problem,” in Alternative Truths III: Endgame, just out from B Cubed Press (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Alternative-Truths-III-Endgame). Wohlbachia is a type of bacterium known to interfere with […]

The Editorial Process

Tom Easton Back in the 1980s, I wrote a computer program that would choose—at random—one of several sentence templates constructed with blanks rather like the sentences in the Mad Libs game. It would then fill in the blanks with nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs chosen—again at random—from user-supplied word lists. I called it a brainstorming […]

The Creative Process

Tom Easton “The self-interest of mankind calls for a general effort to foster the invention of life. And that effort can be guided intelligently only by insight into the nature of the creative process.” —Brewster Ghiselin, ed., The Creative Process (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952) Back in the 1980s, I wrote a computer program […]