Love in the Absence of Mosquitoes

My short story, Love in the Absence of Mosquitoes, is now up at the Journal of Unlikely Entomology.

This story was sparked years back during a graduate class on chemical ecology, where I was supposed to be focusing on corals and naturally went other places instead. I admit that I hesitated before sending it to this particular journal, since, as you may note, the journal is supposed to be dealing with unlikely entomology, and I was dealing with quite likely entomology indeed. But a previous editor had loftily informed me that the science of the story was "too implausible," so I decided to gamble that the editors of this zine had not spent too much time perusing technical articles on chemical ecology and would agree that the science here is too implausible. Events proved me right, but I would like to note, for the record, that the science of this tale is quite, quite real, if still in the development stage. The rest is not.

Vani later decided to walk into a few other stories of mine, something I was not anticipating when I wrote this tale. Some of those stories happen to be in a very loosely linked series of tales, only one of which (And in its absence, hunger) has appeared so far. When I wrote this, I had no immediate plans to feature Vani again – although I knew she had more of a story – and certainly no plans to link her with the nyagon/Isfhan tales – so I'm not certain whether this story can be called part of that series or not. Hmm. Let's call it an accidental addition.

Since it's Saturday, and people often miss Saturday posts, plus the Rapture and all that, I'll probably throw up another link to this story sometime this week.

Smallville series finale

I didn't watch the series finale of Smallville live, partly because setting up the television and trying to find the CW channel would be a major effort (we watch a lot of DVDs, but not broadcast television), and mostly because I hadn't seen the show for several seasons, especially after the departure of the only person consistently worth watching on the show: Michael Rosenbaum's Lex Luthor.

Oh, yes, Lionel Luthor was often worth watching, and I liked Chloe Sullivan, but Lana annoyed me (and many other people) and Lois annoyed me and plotlines annoyed me and so on. To be fair, I've seen Lana Lang's actress in other things, and given a decent script, she can act, and to be fair, I don't think it was Erica Durance as Lois who annoyed me but just the Lois character in general. The only Lois portrayal I've ever liked was Teri Hatcher's in Lois and Clark, and I'm digressing. Anyway I'd drifted off from the show.

But I decided that I'd invested enough time in the show to give the series finale a whirl. And what do you know? It was corny, the dialogue was frequently gag-inducing, it had plot holes too large even for the Man of Steel to fix (and a bit at the end that just does not make any sense), it had incredibly cheap and pathetic narrative tricks to handle previously poorly managed actor contracts that came across as incredibly cheap and pathetic narrative tricks, it had people talking to gravestones and clichéd scene after clichéd scene and by the end I was grinning, a bit teary eyed, and clapping and all happy. It's enough to get me to go back and check out the last couple of seasons. Maybe.

Damn you, show.

( I don't suppose anyone really cares about spoilers or couldn't guess the ending, but just in case, cut for spoilers and some prurient thoughts about White House interns, not the current ones )