Dead Astronauts, by Jeff VanderMeer

Posted on April 11, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 9 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still running a little behind but not catastrophically. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

I’ve long been a fan of Jeff VanderMeer’s writings. His 2009 horror science fiction novel Finch is one of my favorite books of all time, and his Southern Reach trilogy is one of my favorite trilogies of all time. I haven’t read anything by him recently, however, so I decided it was time to check out his 2019 novel Dead Astronauts.

Dead Astronauts is a sequel to VanderMeer’s 2017 novel Borne, with the same setting (kind of — more below) but different characters. I had read Borne when it first came out and only dimly remembered it but feel I can safely say one doesn’t need to read Borne to follow the newer book (kind of — more below).

Continue reading →
Posted in Science fiction | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Choose Your Own Adventure Cryptid Chronicles: Mothman, by Cristin Bishara

Posted on March 29, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 8 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Still running a little behind but not catastrophically. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Sometimes I end up reading a book just out of spite! In this case, it so happens that I follow author Cristin Bishara on Threads and a week ago she was lamenting that someone accused her of using AI to write her Choose Your Own Adventure book Cryptic Chronicles: Mothman (2025). This made me so irritated I immediately went out and ordered a copy.

For one thing, it makes me pretty angry to see talented authors getting their hard work accused of being AI generated, and so I wanted to show some support. It also happens that I’m a little behind in my reading goal for the year, so reading something short and light would help to get me back on track. Also, I have always had a great fondness for the Mothman legend, and The Mothman Prophecies (2002) is one of my favorite movies of all time!

Finally, I’ve been reading Choose Your Own Adventure books since the very first one, The Cave of Time, came out in 1979! Going back and visiting the series again was a nice bit of nostalgia for me.

Continue reading →
Posted in Entertainment, Horror | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Posted on March 22, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 7 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Running a little behind but should be able to make it up pretty easily. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Back in 2024, I read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow, a modern fairy tale set in the Jazz age of Mexico, and was charmed by its creativity. Moreno-Garcia is a Mexican-born Canadian writer and her works are steeped in Mexican culture and history, making them a wonderful departure for someone like me who is often reading works set in the United States.

A few weeks ago, I decided to check out Moreno-Garcia’s follow-up 2021 book Mexican Gothic, which as the title suggests is a gothic horror novel.

The book is a slow-burn of mystery and dread set in 1950s Mexico that builds to a genuinely horrific revelation!

Continue reading →
Posted in Horror | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Coulomb’s remarkable experiment in electricity (1785)

Posted on March 19, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Though people have studied and been fascinated by electricity and magnetism, including such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, we can really trace the beginning of modern electromagnetic theory to one specific experiment in 1785, in which the French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb quantitatively measured the force between two electrically charged objects. The law of attraction he found, known as Coulomb’s law, set the stage for all of our understanding and progress in electromagnetism, including the computer and internet you’re reading this on.

I was a little bored this week and it so happens I have an electronic copy of Coulomb’s original paper1 of 1785 and decided to translate it from French and write about it! As always, I used a mixture of my own crude understanding of French combined with Google translate to do this. Coulomb’s experiment is truly amazing, important and beautiful and it was quite fun to see the details of how he did it.

Continue reading →
Posted in History of science, Physics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Talking falling feline physics in the NYT!

Posted on March 12, 2026 by skullsinthestars

It so happens that the falling felines research that came out recently, and that I blogged about last week, has been getting a lot of news attention! A journalist at the New York Times contacted me for comments about the research, and the article came out yesterday! Wanted to share the link here and include a snippet of the article for my own records.

Though I tend to argue that we largely understand the mechanisms by which cats flip over, there are some subtleties in the motion that are worth exploring, and it is fascinating that people are still fascinated by the problem to this day!

Posted in Animals, Personal, Physics | Leave a comment

Incarnate, by Ramsey Campbell

Posted on March 8, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 6 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Running a little behind but should be able to make it up pretty easily. As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Ramsey Campbell has long been acknowledged as one of the masters of horror fiction and is probably my favorite horror author of all time. Flame Tree Press has been publishing his new novels for a while now and have started reprinting some of his classic books, and they sent me a complimentary copy of the most recent reprint, Incarnate, which was first published in 1983.

This was a double happy surprise for me — not only am I always happy to get a complimentary copy of a book by a favorite author, but once I started reading it I realized that I somehow had never read Incarnate before! (This in itself is not surprising, because Campbell has such an extensive bibliography it’s easy to miss a book if you haven’t been systematic about it.)

Incarnate is a fascinating, compelling, intricate book and one that stands out from a lot of Campbell’s other novels in ways that I will elaborate on below!

Continue reading →
Posted in Horror, Lovecraft | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

New falling cat paper just dropped!

Posted on March 7, 2026 by skullsinthestars

So I’m now known as the falling cat physics guy, thanks to writing a popular science book on the history of scientists studying how cats land on their feet (“cat turning”) that you may or may not have heard of! Recently, Michael Marshall at New Scientist reached out to me to talk about a relatively new paper on the falling cat problem that looks at the falling cat problem from an interesting new perspective. Though it’s behind a subscription, here’s the link to the article that he wrote about the research.

The work, that was done by researchers at Yamaguchi University in Japan and published in February of 2026, looked at the flexibility of the spine of cats in order to assess the significance of different possible mechanisms for falling cat motion. Both the research approach and the conclusions were quite insightful to me, so I thought I would talk about it a bit here!

Continue reading →
Posted in Animals, Physics | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Conan the Barbarian: A Nest of Serpents, by Jim Zub

Posted on February 21, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 5 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! As usual, my link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account.

My blogging is at the happy point where I occasionally get copies of books to review, and I am always delighted to get works related to Robert E. Howard’s writing, which my whole blog was originally inspired by! Last year, I reviewed Conan the Barbarian: Twisting Loyalties, written by Jim Zub, and not long ago Titan Comics sent me the next volume in the series, Conan the Barbarian: A Nest of Serpents, also written by Jim Zub! This volume covers issues #21-24 of Conan, following directly after the last volume and continuing some of the plot lines.

One thing that is fun about Zub’s writing is that he fits the stories quite nicely into the original Conan fiction by Robert E. Howard. Twisting Loyalties was set during and after Howard’s famous 1934 story Queen of the Black Coast, and A Nest of Serpents is set following the events of Howard’s The Vale of Lost Women, which was only published in 1967 years after Howard’s death.

Continue reading →
Posted in Fantasy fiction, Robert E. Howard | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Hothouse, by Brian Aldiss

Posted on February 15, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 4 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Could only find this book available on Amazon this time.

Been digging through my collection of unread books looking for something different to read and recently the book Hothouse (1962) by English science fiction author Brian Aldiss caught my eye!

I picked this up some time ago after reading Aldiss’ most famous book Non-Stop, a tale of humans who live on a malfunctioning generation ship that have reverted to a primitive society and think that the ship they are on is their entire world! Non-Stop was an imaginative and unique story and I had high hopes that Hothouse would be similarly innovative.

My hopes were proven true! Hothouse is one of the wildest science fiction rides I’ve been on in quite a while.

Continue reading →
Posted in Science fiction | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

The Berserker Throne, by Fred Saberhagen

Posted on January 29, 2026 by skullsinthestars

Book 3 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Today, I can oddly only link to the audiobook on Bookshop.org, since it is an old book and largely out of print.

I’ve been slowly reading the Berserker series of books by Fred Saberhagen in order (book one, book two, book three), but recently I saw one of the later novels in the series, The Berserker Throne (1985) in my local used bookstore and couldn’t resist jumping ahead! It doesn’t seem to be an issue to jump around a little, as long as one knows the backstory, because each novel appears to tell its own story about the Berserker menace.

For those unfamiliar, the Berserkers of Saberhagen’s tales are an army of super-intelligent robotic war machines that were constructed by an ancient alien race to eliminate their long-time enemy… however, the Berserkers went beyond their intended programming and wiped out both sides of the conflict and moved on to wipe out all life in the universe. They are fast, powerful, intelligent, deadly, and utterly ruthless in their goal. The first book of the series tells the story of humanity’s first devastating encounters with the Berserkers, and how it was only through the genius of a general named Karlsen that the main force of machines was wiped out and its remnants driven into hiding. The Berserkers are clever, however, and even a single weakened and isolated Berserker has the potential to ruin an entire world if left unchecked.

Continue reading →
Posted in Science fiction | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment