Airship Pirates in Science and Fiction Anthony Francis, Erin Tierney, Gail Carriger Friday, 1:00 pm–2:30 pm (1.5 hours) Peninsula 2 (2nd floor) Impractical as they are, airship pirates show up in a lot of steampunk stories and music.
Rogue Makers in Victorian Science Fiction and Steampunk Anthony Francis Saturday, 10:30 am–Noon (1.5 hours) Peninsula 2 (2nd floor) The rogue maker trope is a big part of early science fiction from the Victorian and Edwardian era. Come and learn more from sci-fi fantasy author and engineer Anthony Francis.
Scriptwriting for screen, comics, and audio dramas Madeleine Holly-Rosing, J. Scott Coatsworth, Anthony Francis Sunday, 1:30 pm–3:00 pm (1.5 hours) Peninsula 2 (2nd floor) Scriptwriting takes many forms. In this panel, we will discuss a number of script structures, including the difference between writing a script for screen, a comic book, and an audiodrama.
Clockwork Alchemy is a great festival of all things steampunk, so I hope to see you all there!
-the Centaur Pictured: Me from a few years ago, when I was guest of honor at Clockwork. This year I'm just a regular guest; this year's guests of honor are the estimable D&McT!
Huzzah! As I have posted over all my socials, the very first Worldcon Academic volume, Building Yesterday's Future for Everyone, is now out! Get it at Amazon or Springer! And I'm even happier to say that my good friend Kenneth Moorman and I have the very first article in the volume!
This paper explores the real cognitive science behind professional writing craft. The "scenes" and "sequels" recommended by writing teachers like Dwight Swain have deep roots in how people become attached to characters in stories and are transported into the narrative as the characters struggle with catastrophes and attempt to find new ways to move towards their goals. From the abstract:
The professional writing community and academic theorists of narrative have both developed rich theories of story structure, but there is comparatively little work on the cognitive validity of professional writing concepts or the practical utility of cognitive science theories. In this paper, we bridge this gap by examining the cognitive validity of “scene” and “sequel” theory from professional writing technique. Our contributions include a terminology of narrative unifying cognitive science and professional writing concepts, a cognitive science analysis of the professional writing concepts of “dramatic scene” and “dramatic sequel,” and a software library for extracting “narrative scenes” from narrative texts to facilitate further study in this area.
Welp, this was an uplifting post about accepting help and climbing out of the pit of despair, but instead, you get an irritated post about how WordPress crashed during the uploading of the above image, simultaneously creating the impression that (a) it had failed to upload the image and (b) it had succeeded in saving the text of the post.
The reality was the opposite.
So you get a picture with no context, as I have 12 minutes left and two more things to post today.
Technically speaking, I have 2 more weeks of "convention season" left - the lead-up to Clockwork Alchemy remains, where I'm on 3 or 4 panels, and am also taking my wife and a couple friends to see the Rush 50 Something tour - but the hard part, Dragon Con and Worldcon and the associated Worldcon Academic paper and the fall-from-the-sky Frontiers in Robotics paper edits - are over.
I am so glad I had built up a month and a half of buffer for Drawing Every Day, as I'm still a week ahead.
More in a bit, now that "the Submarine" has surfaced ...
-the Centaur
Pictured: Me mugging at lunch before taking my wife to the airport, just after a wonderful 20th anniversary trip to Asheville, North Carolina.
Hey folks! I somehow survived Worldcon and after a brief visit with my wife am now at Dragon Con for its fortieth anniversary! Since I went to Dragon Con, like, #1 or #2, this makes it my ... um ... let's not get too hasty on counting those years of coming to conventions, now, shall we?
I'm just on three panels, which is a relief after WorldCon's eight:
Muddling Through the Mushy Middle Fri 04:00 pm ~ Hyatt / Embassy EF Anthony Francis(M),D.B. Jackson, Gini Koch, David Boop, Rebecca Moesta, Sherrilyn Kenyon The idea grabs you & you type furiously! You're going along...you know what the end looks like. You're so excited about this story – then BAM!! Everything slows down. Getting words on the page is a slog. How do you get through the mushy middle to the exciting ending? Come to this panel to find out!
Buried History: The Uncensored Stories 'They' Don't Want You to Know Sat 10:00 pm ~ Courtland Grand / Augusta Andrew Hartley(M), D.J. Butler, Jack Campbell, Alex Matsuo, Anthony Francis, David Hankins Sometimes history gets messy. Maybe it's too complicated, or maybe the facts just don't fit the preferred narrative... Whatever the reason, these are our panelists' favorite stories that didn't make it into our history books.
Corsets & Kimono, Trebuchet, & Guillotine: Alt History & Historical Fantasy Sun 04:00 pm ~ Hyatt / Embassy EF Bethanne Kim(M), Leanna Renee Hieber, Clay Griffith, Jack Campbell, Tamsin L. Silver, Anthony Francis When writing Historical Fantasy & Alternate History, you can't make *everything* up. Some parts must be accurate. Finding the balance between realism & the fantastical is important in these genres. We'll be discussing this and other aspects and challenges of writing history into our fiction.
Hopefully this will be a lot of fun for all! Hope to see you at my panels or around the con!
Hey folks! A lot has been going on on this boat ... a lot a lot, and it's been alot ... but I have somehow survived and will be going to Worldcon next week. I'll be at six panels, one talk (on the Shape of Science Fiction) and the Academic Poster Session!
By day, Anthony Francis creates intelligent machines and emotional robots; by night, he writes science fiction and draws comic books. Anthony co-edited the award-winning anthology THE NEURODIVERSIVERSE: ALIEN ENCOUNTERS and wrote the award-winning urban fantasy FROST MOON and its sequels BLOOD ROCK and LIQUID FIRE, all starring magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost. His steampunk includes JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE and stories in TWELVE HOURS LATER, THIRTY DAYS LATER, SOME TIME LATER and NEXT STOP ON THE #13. Anthony lives in South Carolina with his wife and cats but his heart belongs in Atlanta. Follow Anthony at dresan.com.
Thursday, August 27, 2026
15:00 PDT — Humanoid Robots Malibu (Hilton)
16:30 PDT — Robots in Science Fiction: Who’s Writing What in Robotics? Carmel (Hilton)
Friday, August 28, 2026
15:00 PDT — Robots at War: Drones, Big Dogs and Other Robots in Combat 253B (ACC North)
... which is great, because when you stop learning, you're dead.
Even for someone like me, who periodically takes wrong turns on purpose just to see where the roads go, you spend most of your time going over the same routes in the same ways.
And - forgive me for being a navigation researcher - if you primarily walk walk or drive purposely, rather than for recreation or exercise, those routes will make a branching tree coming out of your primary residence, with rings of cross-routes between frequent destinations. The grocery store, the office supply store, and the dump; church, a brunch joint, and again the grocery store.
This habitual spiderweb means we rarely explore intersections in a systematic, exhaustive way, except when walking or riding for recreation, or doing some kind of specific neighborhood patrol. Area rises as the square of distance, but we only have so many hours in the day, and so many trips in each neighborhood we live in in our lives; some intersections will naturally get left out.
My wife took a wrong turn coming back from the dump (we live on a "flagpole lot" with an extremely long driveway, so having garbage service would involve carting the garbage can 1000 feet and back every week, which not only I don't want to do, but also I think would wear out the wheels on the garbage can, which is not a long distance vehicle, but I digress), I SAY, she was coming back from the dump and missed her turn onto our street ... and made an interesting discovery.
She didn't have far to drive to the next cross street, and quickly made it home ... but as she did so, she found a fire station with aluminum can recycling three minutes from our house. She'd already told me about another fire station, ten minutes away on the drive to the airport, that accepted aluminum cans for recycling as a fundraising effort; this one was far closer.
We had a microwave die recently, and our mother-in-law did too; so after I took them to e-waste recycling at the Enoree dump, I then followed the same wrong turn my wife had. On the way, I saw the backsides of many landmarks that I knew from the drive. I soon found the fire station, three minutes from our house as predicted, but when I got there, I found something else: the local cell phone tower, looming over an empty lot with an excellent view of the nearby region. No wonder the cell phone coverage is so good where we are.
And on the drive back, I passed an Anglican church, in walking distance of our house. I'm kind of aggressively Episcopalian, and go to the church where I was married and whose rector buried my mother - but this Anglican church had a prayer labyrinth, also within walking distance of home.
I like where we moved to during the pandemic: we now live on the road my father taught me to drive, forty years ago. But today I took a turn that I rarely did, because I listened to my wife; and so today I learned that the place where we live is filled with amenities - a fire station, recycling, a cell tower, a church, a prayer labyrinth - that make it even better than I thought it was.
-the Centaur
Pictured: The cell tower, the fire station, and the recycling bin.
Truly epic vegan dessert pairing at Maestro's Entre Nous speakeasy in downtown Greenville. Probably our third favorite vegan-friendly restaurant in Greenville after Sunbelly and the 07, but tonight's menu they really leveled up. This was a vegan chocolate torte - much creamier than in the past - and a really great sorbet with fresh fruit, all paired up with great sauces and yin-yang plates for date night with my lovely vegan wife.
We had a wonderful hike in Asheville last Friday, though we had to keep the pace manageable due to my broken toe. After breakfast at The Smokin Onion - and those great croissant muffins - we decided to work off the dessert on a nearby trail attached to the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Our hike began at the Folk Art Center, which unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of, because I was doing quite a bit of limping. Even though I switched to normal shoes to protect my toe, I brought my flat-bottomed shoe just in case the pain got too much and we had to turn around.
There was no need. We had a long hike, with a nice Lovecraftian green tunnel (up top) and despite getting turned around a bit when we turned around, we nevertheless made it back in time to get a cocktail at Battery Park, a fantastic wine bar and bookstore in downtown Asheville, before going to the even more fantastic vegan restaurant Plant for a wonderful dinner and even more dessert.
The above amazing example of a vegan dessert is a close relative of a "cronut" - where a cronut(TM) is a croissant donut, this is something like a croissant muffin, and it's a decadently delicious dessert often found at The Smokin Onion, a vegan restaurant in Asheville that my wife and I like. Once I suggested that we split one of those desserts, and she's like, "get your own!"
Now, I thought THAT was a donut(-like food).
But that's not a donut.
THIS is a donut.
These are apparently from Parlor Donuts in Greenville, SC, "made in small batches every day." They are absolutely not vegan in any way, shape or substantial form. They looked beyond delicious; they looked Cinnabon levels of absolutely unhealthy, and I declined to wreck my blood sugar with them.
What even is that atop the upper two donuts? A fried egg?
Blogging every day, not eating those every day, that's for sure. Would you like a wafer-thin mint?
So in our mushroom farm, some of the logs are producing shiitake mushrooms, some are producing oyster mushrooms (not pictured as something ate the latest buds), some produced nameko (which I was not fond of), there was a fourth variety that didn't come up, and I think we have recently buried some maitake mushrooms logs which won't come up for a few months.
But that doesn't stop other organisms from trying to colonize the logs.
On the right is I believe turkey tail, which some people make into a tea (if it's the right variety) but which we don't eat (and didn't plant, so I don't trust it). On the left is allegedly not a mushroom, but a giant false-puffball slime mold. I did not cut it open to find out.
I believe these are chicken of the woods on the lower center, and possibly another slime mold atop. Again, this isn't what we planted in this log, so we're not going to risk eating them (at least not until we are much, much better at identifying species, which will take a long, long time).
On some of these colonized logs, we can see clear signs that the shiitake mycelium is still colonizing the logs, so we'll give it time. After a year, however, we might pull some of the logs if they are not producing (normally it takes six months to start to fruit, but we're deliberately experimenting with much larger logs, hoping to pay a longer onset to get a longer producing period).
It may not look like much, but it smarts where it counts, kid. One of our coffee tables decided to make some special modifications to my middle toe, including a lot of soft-tissue soreness and a tiny chip in the bone which took four X-rays to fully figure out. Flat-bottomed shoes make the world go round ...
Adulting is one of the most important, and pernicious, tasks adults are called upon to undertake. The laundry must get done, after all, but if it's a choice between doing the laundry and maintaining your marriage or caring for your children or loved ones, the hamper can just continue to fill.
In this case, adulting is rather simple. My wife and I use the "80-80" rule: a partnership is not a 50-50 proposition, because we're rarely operating at 100% of our capacity. Even if your partner is awesome and pulls off a 90% success rate, if you rely on your partner to do half the work, inevitably that truly awesome partner will only deliver 45% of the needed work, falling short of your expectations.
If, instead, you ASSUME your partner will sometimes fall short, and take on MORE than 50% of the effort - and they do too - then everything is fine. Your partner's turn to toss the compost on the heap, but you're standing in front of it? Toss it. Your turn to fold the laundry, but your partner sees the laundry in the dryer? She does it. And then everything gets done, and you both feel great.
So my wife mentioned that we're out of litter, and I volunteered to go while I was having lunch at Panera in Greenridge, next to a PetSmart that has our two cat litter brands. Since I knew I was going, I asked her to let me know if we were low on anything else, and she pointed out we were low on 2 of the 9 (!) cat dry food brands we use to distract our very finicky cats.
I was there, I got it done, it all worked out great, while she had folded the laundry I had run last night.
80-80 for the win.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the empty bags/cans of the two cat food brands we were low on.
As good as I try to be about my weight, sometimes I can't seem to help myself. Especially if I find myself super hungry at the start of a three-hour artist date at Barnes and Noble's cafe, and they've got a lone croissant sitting there with my name on it, waiting to be heated up.
I started to write "drawing DETRACTS from writing" but that's not true at all: I just finished a couple of drawings for THE LEGACY OF THE EXTRA CREDIT PROJECT that helped me understand my own characters - and now I've drawn all of the core six characters signed up for the Project. So drawing doesn't detract ... but it certainly can subtract from the time you'd spend on another endeavor.
Our heroes Q'yagon and Darina I most recently used Midjourney reference for, but I had previously drawn them myself; but now, without reference, I have drawn sketches of the stoneskin healer Orieos and his birchbark ranger squeeze Berrybelle, as well as Berrybelle's fire mage brother Sapforte and his ice dragon familiar, Frostthorne. All six are now rendered by my own hand!
But, normally, the Drawing Every Day project has relatively simple drawings - several of which have appeared recently, so you can see what I mean. But at the start and finish of every notebook, I do a more detailed drawing of ... SOMETHING ... related to my writing or comics, and those take longer.
Orieos and Berrybelle finished out a DED notebook (this one from Blick art supply, pictured above) and Sapforte and Frostthorne started a new one (not pictured). O&B took an hour; S&F took three.
In that time, I could have written 500 to 1500 words (more, or less, depending on inspiration and orientation to the text) or made progress on the Logical Robotics Harness, or done work on the FROST MOON re-release or the LCATS project.
But even though I could have spent those four hours writing ... I'm happy with the result.
So even though drawing (and blogging!) subtract from writing time, I'm glad I do them.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Just the notebook, as the drawings are for days 250-251, and we're only at DOY 164.
Normally when my wife's in town and we're not throwing a party, the above space in our living room is reserved for one of her art projects. But right now, she's focusing on painting in her studio, so I have set out my vast pile of piles which I have been trying to beat back with a stick.
The cats are helping. This task has seemed Sisyphean, but, actually, some of the piles have returned to the shelves, and others have dissolved into papers for recycling. The above matrix grabs a large amount of stuff which I think will shrink down with "the treatment". I feel like I'm making progress!
I've switched gears now back to the novel, coding, and blogging, but Loki is helping. You can't see him easily right now, so I've provided a reference shot of his helping style above.
Perhaps with that, you can see him helping at my desk.
-the Centaur
Pictured: The piles, exploded; Lily, I think, Loki outside, and Loki behind my monitor.
One of the delights of my life are redeye flights. The actual flight itself isn't usually that grand, but I really enjoy having a long day at a conference or vacation destination with nothing to do, followed by breakfast at the airport in the nearly inevitable layover before the final leg to Greenville.
This time, it was New Jersey, and I have never seen an airport with more food options than the New Jersey airport. Seemingly every 5 to 10 gates, there was a collection of restaurants which included a large, clean, well-organized center aisle counter, one or two large restaurants on the sides, and a quirky restaurant tucked away between them with some ethnic food.
All of these were almost certainly served by the same kitchen, as each cluster (except for the ethnic restaurant) had the same menu, and all had QR codes on each seat to order and deliver food directly. But there were still a large number of staff - one of which served me at a counter directly opposite my gate. It was a well-worked out, efficient, and yet still surprisingly human system.
The food was delicious. And so was the sunrise.
-the Centaur
Pictured: two shots of the sunrise that I saw on my way between gates, a smoked salmon flatbread, and a bowl of fresh fruit.
Back from the Embodied AI Workshop! And TIL (today I learned, though not the today of the blogging every day post) that "home again, home again, jiggity jig" isn't originally just a throw-away line from J.F. Sebastian's autonomous creations in Blade Runner, but actually is a centuries-old nursery rhyme called "To Market, To Market": https://poets.org/poem/market-market
To market, To market, To buy a fat pig. Home again, Home again, Jiggity jig.
I may be a carnivore, but I find the treatment of animals in a lot of older literature ... disturbing. Regardless, I'm home again, and since another year has passed, that means there's a different car from the Clemson autonomous driving team on display in the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport:
On the theme of dubious autonomous creatures, I've said it before, but now I'll say it here: an autonomous vehicle without a physical steering wheel is a bug, just waiting to turn your car into a one-ton paperweight when the software inevitably bricks. Send an engineer out with a gamepad controller all you want: sooner or later you'll need a tow in an awkward situation (say, for example, an underground parking garage in Palo Alto which is too windy for a tow truck to get into ... yes, I do have personal experience with this, why do you ask?) requiring your new paperweight to be serviced in place.
Pull up your pants, turn your ballcap forward, and install a steering wheel.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A fountain in the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport, and the aforementioned self-driving car. I don't think it had a steering wheel, front or back, but perhaps that was just the angle I could see in.
One of the things they tell writers is "always write your ideas down". The truth is, natural language is so impossibly vast that every sentence we think or say, outside of boilerplate hellos, pleasantries, and goodbyes, could be unique. But our memories are NOT structured to retain unique information; instead, they integrate it into familiar patterns so it can be reconstructed - not exactly retrieved.
So if you hit on a bon mot, you're better off writing it down.
OR, put another way, I forgot to write down what I planned to write in this post, and it's GONE.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Vibe Coffee in Denver, where I am writing this ahead of time, as I will soon (as of this writing) be on a redeye flight, and then (as of this posting) be recovering from said redeye.
P.S. If you got a brief flash of this post on the 9th, ignore it. Wait until the 11th. :-D
Denver has impressed me with being clean and beautiful even before getting out of downtown.
The restaurants are great, the streets are clean, and there are many nice walking areas.
Overall it's been a fun place to hang out while attending the CVPR (especially since EAI is over).
And the skies too have been very beautiful ...
... especially the sunsets.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a smoked Old Fashioned at Ocean Prime, Ocean Prime's glowing bar upstairs, Larimer Square, the view from Ocean Prime's patio, the view from nearby Vibe Coffee and Wine, and the sunset I got on the walk from Vibe to Ocean Prime.
