Brian Trent dot com

My article “Crying Wolf on Mars” came out this week in Strange Horizons. It’s a look at the historical search for life on the Red Planet. People thought there were canals, jungles, and giant faces there. Most of the claims have been discredited, some are in limbo, and a few others are awfully promising. Personally, I’d just be happy if they found fossil shales. If I had to bet on life in this solar system behind our precious homeworld, I’d put my money on the moons Enceladus, Europa, and Titan.

A piece on video games as art — a much-debated subject nowadays — has been accepted for publication in Clarkesworld – to be published early next year.

Also this week, my good friend Marty Lang unveiled the film he made with trainees at the Connecticut Film Industry at Quinnipiac College. My brother David Michaels and best friend Gary Ploski are featured as well.  Check it out and tell me what you think.

Several short stories and poems of mine were accepted for publication this week, making it a pleasant way to begin the many-shadowed chilly turn of October.

“Checkmate” is my first steampunk story, to be published in the Hugo-award-winning magazine Electric Velocipede.  Set in a mechanized Victorian England in which wars are now fought by elite chessmen combatants instead of armies, “Checkmate” is a story which first occurred to me when I was 12.  I tried to write it several times, setting in the far future or on some distant planet, and the tale always dried up before I could begin. A steampunk setting turned out to be exquisitely appropriate, and I wrote it in one week.

“A Holiday in Necropolis” is a poem that continues my exploration of death, technology, and mind-uploading. It will be published in Dreams & Nightmares – an apt venue for the grim “holiday party” which the main character is hosting… just as he hopes none of the attendees will notice that not everyone in attendance is alive any more.

For nonfiction, my piece “Crying Wolf on Mars” will be published in Strange Horizons next week. It is an analysis of the ongoing (and probably ill-fated) search for life on Mars. Emphasis is on the way scientists have unintentionally “cried wolf” several times – thinking at various times that there were canals, forests, or alien structures on the Red Planet, only to be proven wrong every time. The latest discovery of methane, and the impending analysis of the mysterious “dark dune spots” on the planet, have tickled astronomers’ fancies anew.

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Ever wonder how language will continue evolving?

I was at the gas station today, lost in thought, when I sort of zeroed in on a cell phone conversation from the passenger of a nearby car.  She was talking about uploading, downloading, ripping this song and burning that one, and polished it all off with a reference to her “bff’s facebook page.”

It made me think. Languages are like organisms. They grow, change, adapt, cross-pollinate, and evolve.  Some die out.  Others spread out in a kind of quasi-genetic imperialism.

English started life as a Germanic tongue. The Roman conquests infused it with some Latin, and the Norman invasions imported a much-needed classiness — supplying a new range of metaphors and linguistic concepts.  The colonialism of Britain spread English around the world and the Internet clinched the deal. It’s certainly the world’s first second language.

But I expect it to develop into a creole with other powerful tongues and the leet-speak of the texting age. Five hundred years from now, what we call “modern English” will be as outdated as the untranslated verses of Chaucer.

Now watching: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Ghost World, The International, Nightwatch.

Now reading: The Known World by Edward P. Jones