Brian Trent dot com

After severely spraining my ankle while rock-climbing, I’ve been laid up with books, coffee, and the occasional guilty pleasure video game. News came out this week that a new pill is under development from the University of Texas. What’s the big deal? It has the potential to extend your lifespan by 10 years.

Closer to home, three of my stories were published this week.

The first is one of my personal favorites. “The Theseus Woman” is a tale of obsession and irony: A man who drove his wife to suicide is now laboring at reconstructing her. This is a wicked twist on the story of Pygmalion, and was published in OG’s Speculative Fiction.

Also this week is my nonfiction thought-piece “Was There Ever a Dinosaur Civilization?” at Strange Horizons. I’ve mentioned it before – an analysis of an unusual what-if scenario. Life has been on Earth for some 3.5 billion years. What if human civilization was not the first civilization? What if the snake coiled around the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis is not the villain of the story, but a rightful inheritor?

Walk like a troodon

Arthur C. Clarke was once challenged to write a few stories that could be printed on postcards, and he picked up the gauntlet and ran with it.  His story “Quarantine” was the result, and is one of the cleverest flash fiction pieces I’ve ever seen in the genre.

Well, I was challenged last week to write a story that could be posted on Twitter. A Twitter zine named 7×20 is trying an experiment. Yes, that means a complete story in 140 characters.

My result is the story “The Truth Behind the Cosmic Expressway,” and you can read its epic scope right here.

Now watching: Bullit, Beverly Hills Cop, Training Day, and The Tao of Steve.

Now reading: The collected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Now playing: Red Faction and Cold Winter

Last week I returned from an eight-day cruise through the Caribbean. My travels are typically done on foot, through old ruins or misty mountains, so it was a change of pace being on a floating fortress. Each night the thrum of the engines made me think of space travel. Each morning I’d climb on deck to watch sunrise over the undulating blue… and see our latest destinations emerging from the haze. Actually, it made me a little sad. Where are the mysterious islands and lost civilizations for us today? How can we be Scylax or Marco Polo, pushing into the shadows that gather over our maps to bring new worlds to light?

My girlfriend and I tried pushing out of the tourist traps of each island. San Juan, St. Thomas, Antigua, Tortola, and Nassau where I reunited with my good friend — and college alumn — Yorick. He is a vast repository of information, and as we walked his home island he discussed the invisible Bahamanian culture war of traditionalists versus technologically-savvy entrepreneurs, the ebbs and flows of the criminal underworld, and the history of pirates and privateers and governors (and sometimes how people were all three.)

I’m blessed with very creative, ambitious friends who combine traits often considered diametrically opposite: Rationalist and dreamer. They need not be in conflict; in fact, I would argue that we are trained to divide them from each other, when the root is the same. Personally, I find no difficulty in being a “rationalist dreamer.” I can watch the sunrise over the Caribbean Sea and understand, on a scientific level, why the colors are refracting and unfolding the way they do. Yet this doesn’t cheapen my aesthetic appreciation for the blush of red, blossoming gold, and velvet purples. The same thing with the stars I watch at night. I know
they are simply fusion engines in space. Yet I can also see how they form pictures to tickle the fancy… and I like to imagine if something out there is looking at our own star and wondering the same thing.

I keep a leather-bound travel journal wherever I go, and the pages are looking appropriately weathered. Maybe I’ll upload some of it here, in time. Mark Twain once wrote that “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” Even if there are few places left to explore for the record books, there are always places for us to explore for ourselves. And there’s much to be said for a wonderful traveling companion.

Now reading: The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.

Now watching: Heaven, Run Lola Run, and The Princess and the Warrior (on a Tom Tykwer kick — a very talented director with vision and stories to tell.)