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!
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.
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!
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
Book 2 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! As is now default for me, my link to the book is through my bookshop dot org affiliate account.
One joy of being active on social media — in the midst of a lot of downsides — is becoming friends with authors and getting to read their books. A few years ago, I picked up journalist and internet friend Mark Sumner’s 2016 science fiction novel On Whetsday; I lost track of it among a pile of books for a while, but finally settled in to read it this week and absolutely loved it.
Long ago, a race of beings known as the cithians (seen on the cover) rescued the last remnants of humanity from a disaster that rendered the Earth uninhabitable. Since then, the small number of humans have been cared for by their cithian hosts on the planet Rask, being fed and housed in special districts and only being asked to follow a small number of simple rules.
Here’s another post based on the revisions I’m making for the second edition of my Singular Optics textbook! Caustics are a subject that I’ve sort of casually understood for ages but never well enough to explain it, but book work has finally made it possible.
Most of the history of optics concerns itself with designing lenses and mirrors that focus light to a point in order to make image-forming and correcting devices like cameras, eyeglasses, microscopes and telescopes. But light gets naturally focused all the time when it passes through irregularly shaped pieces of glass, reflects off of dented metal surfaces, or goes through water drops. The bright spots of light one gets look much more intricate than a simple spot of light, as a few examples below show.
The first image was a spot of light I saw on the ground at Gaffney Outlet Mall, created by light passing through some sort of decorative glass feature. The second image shows a coffee cup with three bright images inside, one for each light source illuminating the cup (the arrows show the direction the light is traveling). The third image shows spots on the side of a building in my neighborhood, created by light reflecting off of warped windows of a neighboring building.
These images are all very different, but closer inspection shows that they have similar features. They generally consist of a bright area surrounded by an even brighter line. These lines are the caustics. One can see that these bright lines often possess sharp cusp points.
Once you start recognizing these caustic features, you will see them everywhere. The other day I was getting out of my car and my open door reflected the setting sun onto the car next to mine. I had to stop and take a photo of how the small dings and dents in my car created caustic patterns.
But what are caustics, and how do we interpret images like the coffee cup caustic, i.e. what causes them? That’s what this post will be about.
The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas.
Skulls in the Stars 