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going to worldcon in los angeles!

Published August 21, 2026 by centaur
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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!

The full programming guide is here https://guide.lacon.org/ and my schedule should be linkable here: https://guide.lacon.org/people/05eb0286/anthony-francis :

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)
  • 16:30 PDT — Uh-oh, Eye Contact: Neurodiversity in Science Fiction
    253B (ACC North)

Saturday, August 29, 2026

  • 15:00 PDT — The Laws of Robotics and Other Ways AI Might Learn from SF
    Huntington (Hilton)
  • 16:30 PDT — Killer Robots and Rogue Computers in SF
    Palos Verdes (Hilton)

Sunday, August 30, 2026

  • 14:00 PDT — Academic Poster Session
    257 (ACC North) - 90 mins
  • 16:30 PDT — The Shape of Science Fiction
    253A (ACC North) - 30 mins

Hope to see you all there!

-the Centaur

“Stock up for the Summer” Giveaway

Published July 18, 2026 by centaur
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Hey folks, as part of trying to get my act together on my writing and my blog, I'm working with the fine folks at Inkslinger PR to try to beat my blog, social media, and even my long-defunct newsletter back into some kind of reasonable shape. So I'm participating in a "Stock up for the Summer" giveaway in which you can enter to win a gift card (and possibly paperbacks!) for signing up to the newsletters of me and a bunch of other authors! Sign up here! https://geni.us/SummerStockUp

That's all for now! More soon.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty six day one seven seven]: today i learned …

Published June 27, 2026 by centaur
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... 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.

[twenty twenty six day one seven six]: my gosh, they’ve leveled up

Published June 26, 2026 by centaur
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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.

-the Centaur

Pictured: um, I said it.

[twenty twenty six day one seven five]: greens a bit too deep

Published June 26, 2026 by centaur
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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.

It was a pretty good day.

-Anthony

[twenty twenty six day one seven four]: that’s not a donut

Published June 25, 2026 by centaur
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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?

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty six day one seven three]: sale! sale! sale!

Published June 24, 2026 by centaur
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So a sale just dropped out of the sky at https://bookshop.org/shop/TIP ... bookshop.org is apparently running an Anti-Prime Day Sale with free shipping and discounts across the site, and you can get Thinking Ink Press books at 20% off at the link above. This runs through Friday!

We found out, I quickly met with Betsy via Meet to discuss how to promote it, and the rest of the team weighed in with copy ideas on Signal. A quick sprint to Canva produced these graphics ...

Support indie bookstores indeed!

And indie publishers. https://bookshop.org/shop/TIP

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty six day one seven two]: general relativity is hard

Published June 21, 2026 by centaur
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I'm sure this is obvious to most people who are not dumb that the key discovery of the person known as the world's greatest smarty pants might be a difficult subject, but I apparently have the dumb. I have been studying general relativity ("Einstein gravity") on and off, for twenty years, and while I get some of it, other parts still just keep breaking my head.

Like, why does time slow down when you accelerate? That's, like, almost THE key prediction of GR. The explanation seems so simple, but yet, when I try to work through the links of the chain, I just can't get it. I read the words and then try to recreate it in my little black grid-ruled notebook and end up right where I started, asking the question, "What does baffled mean?"

The current attempt involves having literally about a half-dozen books that have useful-seeming explanations of gravitational time dilation, which I am going through in quasi-parallel, trying to get a grip on the key feature which just doesn't make sense to me (why particles emitted in the roof of a rocket or elevator seem to "run fast" compared to an observer sitting on the floor).

I feel if I could just get this, then I'd have a much deeper understanding. But the understanding I do have gives me two wrong answers: one, it shouldn't work at all, or two, it's always been there in the equations, and Newton should have discovered it, but simply didn't because he didn't think of it.

Hopefully I'll get there. Wish me luck.

-the Centaur

Pictured: pound cake, almond milk, two general relativity textbooks, and buried between them the little black notebook where I'm trying to work all this out. Thanks, Albert.

[twenty twenty six day one seven one]: functionally weeds

Published June 20, 2026 by centaur
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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).

We'll see.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty six day one seven zero]: again with the helping

Published June 19, 2026 by centaur
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And today's edition (well, not today's, as I blog a little ahead) of cats on workspaces includes Lily I think, bringing one of her favorite balls to one of my favorite workstations, a high-topped bar table made by my wife to look like a giant coral. Enjoy! I will work elsewhere.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty six day one six nine]: i checked myself

Published June 18, 2026 by centaur
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Back in 1997, I drove across country for HAL 9000's birthday (yes, THAT Hal), held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where a friend was a graduate student. They called it the Cyberfest, and Arthur C. Clarke joined us for the first transatlantic video call at 1 frame per second.

But on the drive, I recall watching the time zones change around me. I calculated how many degrees across the Earth I had driven ... and the shift in time due to the curve around the Earth matched up.

No, it's not flat, and you cannot fake reality in any way whatsoever.

-the Centaur

Pictured: an Old Fashioned at the One Five, where we had a nice vegan meal after my urgent care visit for my broken toe.

[drawing every day 2026 day zero zero one]: the back

Published June 17, 2026 by centaur
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Unblogged torso study from day 1 of this year. Well, actually, this was drawn in September, since I draw pretty far ahead; but it's the drawing scheduled for January 1st.

Drawing every day, on average, backfilling missed posts, when I can.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty six day one six eight]: anatomy of the toe

Published June 17, 2026 by centaur
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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 ...

-the Centaur

Pictured: Broken right ... there.

[twenty twenty six day one six seven]: adult me, bro

Published June 16, 2026 by centaur
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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.