You Can't Stop Godzilla
Or the slow, inexorable march of time.
Happy New Year!
I hope you all had a joyous holiday season!
I celebrated the holidays the way I usually do: with movies!
First, I treated myself to Godzilla Minus One, which was fantastic! I rarely go out to the movies anymore — I’ve become a homebody in my old age and am perfectly happy to stay home and watch movies on streaming — but I knew I wanted to see this one on the big screen. It was worth it!
I also went with my wife Alexa and our friends David Wellington and Jennifer Dikes to Lincoln Center to see Black Panther with the New York Philharmonic playing the score live.
What an incredible experience! I saw Black Panther back when it came out in 2018, and it was just as good as I remembered it. Maybe even better! Plus, having the score played live by the Philharmonic only made it more powerful.
(Wait, Black Panther came out six years ago already? How is that even possible?)
Anyway, I hope you did some fun things over the holiday season, too!
I also hope 2024 brings you only good things, like health, happiness, and prosperity!
It’s an election year, which means everything will be insane, because election years are always insane, but hopefully we’ll all be able to grab some peace where we can.
Sneak Previews
The Mind Worms, the third volume in the Dr. Laura Powell series, has been delivered to the publisher, Crossroad Press!
I’ve already received the edits, which means the book will most likely be published in March or April. (Crossroad is a POD press, which means their production process is a lot faster than publishing houses that use traditional offset printing.)
I’ll be sure to keep you posted on the publication date.
Also, when there’s cover art to be shared, I’ll share it here with you first, before I share it anywhere else. A perk for being a subscriber!
I can’t tell you much about The Mind Worms yet, but just to whet your appetite, I thought I’d give you a sneak peek at the first line:
Jordan Mintz was already dying when he boarded the southbound Amtrak train at the Albany-Rensselaer station.
That’s not even the worst thing that happens to poor Jordan Mintz in the novel!
Truly, The Mind Worms may be one of the most gruesome things I’ve written. This one might not be for the faint of heart!
In the Flesh
My 2024 convention schedule is starting to shape up!
Here’s a list of where I’ll be throughout the year, although the list is subject to change due to issues like time, money, emergencies, rampaging muppets, Catzilla becoming real and attacking Brooklyn*, etc:
Boskone 61 - February 9-11, 2024
Necon 42 - July 18-21, 2024
NecronomiCon Providence - August 15-18, 2024
The Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival - October TBD
Philcon - November 22-24, 2024
If I’m lucky, I might be able to add a few more to the list as well!
I hope to see you at one or more of these conventions. They’re always a good time, and I really do love any opportunity to meet my readers!
*I’m just kidding, Catzilla is already real. He’s my orange tabby named King Meow, and he attacks the refrigerator magnets every night.
Weird Science Fact for January
In the summer of 2016, an anthrax outbreak on the Yamal Peninsula of Siberia hospitalized dozens of people and killed one child.
Was it a terrorist attack? Did the anthrax escape from a military lab?
Nope, it came from a reindeer.
A reindeer that had been dead for over 75 years.
The Yamal Peninsula is one of the northernmost territories of Russia. It sits high above the Arctic Circle, where it’s so cold the soil is frozen solid.
This is known as permafrost, and the deep freeze can extend down into the earth a thousand feet in some cases. That’s very nearly the size of the Empire State Building!
But permafrost is no match for climate change.
In the summer of 2016, a heatwave—something one would not normally see in the Arctic Circle—struck the Yamal Peninsula and thawed the permafrost.
Unfortunately, it also thawed out the carcass of a dead reindeer than had been frozen in the permafrost.
A reindeer that had been killed by anthrax over seven decades earlier.
As the reindeer carcass warmed up, so did the anthrax inside it.
We already know that bacteria and viruses can survive the deep freeze, and even in places without any known source of food (like the resurrected roundworms I talked about in August’s newsletter).
Amusingly, they’re called zombie bacteria or zombie viruses. Not so amusingly, scientists have recently resurrected over a dozen new pathogens that have been frozen for millennia.
What’s that line from Jurassic Park? “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
In Siberia, it didn’t take long for the unfrozen reindeer’s infectious anthrax spores to spread across the tundra. Reindeer grazing nearby picked up the disease and passed it on to humans, sending dozens of adults to the hospital, killing one child, and resulting in the deaths of over 2,000 reindeer.
Frankly, they—and the rest of the world—were lucky it wasn’t a lot worse.
Microbiologists believe there’s more to come. Climate change is causing the temperature in the Arctic Circle to rise three times faster than anywhere else on the globe, and there are a whole lot of infected reindeer buried in the permafrost.
But it’s not just anthrax we have to worry about.
People and animals have been buried in permafrost for centuries. There could be bodies infected with all kinds of viruses and bacteria, frozen in time—smallpox, the Spanish flu, bubonic plague.
When it comes to climate change, most people are worried about rising sea levels and extreme weather patterns, and rightfully so. But maybe we ought to be worried about something else, too.
Maybe we ought to be worried about what’s going to come out of the ice.
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A special note: Changes are coming to the weird science section of my newsletter!
Stay tuned for an exciting announcement coming soon!
Until next time!
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