E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️

@ebmoon.bsky.social

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Queer SFF author. Grad school dropout. Now independent scholar of eugenics and religion in pop culture. Writing a book on William Blake and Thomas Merton. MILLIONS OF SUNS LEFT shorturl.at/PBLyN https://ko-fi.com/ebmoon

I had nearly made my way past the mushroom fields and food clutches that ring the settlement’s southern void by the time I realized she had not followed—and that I had left my canteen behind. Near the edge of a potato field I found a squat trough of water leaned against a row of stunted grapevines, one of Baltigai’s failed experiments. I paused to drink and stripped to wipe the dust and guilt from my body under the glow of a flickering lifelamp. At the time I could not recognize it for what it was: a simulacrum of the twilit glow that late autumn rainclouds give to Raylian pastures.
We talked for long hours about the war, and the rumors that emeralds had been found to the west, some larger than a newborn aurochs. I was tired by the time the subject turned to you, and I was subjected to that grasping curiosity that those pregnant must endure. The “How far along are you?” and the impertinent questioning of gender. I stretched myself out on the couch while your father threw open the back door to the brisk twilight air. He told us a story then, or rather, several stories, of his last assignment. I have certainly forgotten or distorted many of their details over time, though it was not even a decade ago. Many more, to be sure, were lost and changed in the same way in your father's memory. In the north they have a saying about death, and about remembrance: In time we each become the lies of others.
A medieval-style fortress city/castle at the base of a glacier, forming a dam from which emerge vast torrents of water. It looks a bit like a colder version of a cross between Gondor and Rivendell. PC: "Glacier Castle" by DrawingNightmare on Deviantart
“You didn’t tell me about a human,” Os’kae said. Despite herself, the tone of his voice struck discordantly in her conscience. Maldi excused himself to prepare Os’kae’s sled for the journey home. “It’s nothing for you to worry about,” said Ix’sha. She looked past the old alf’s shoulder at D’ax as he reached the cave’s egress. “It will be no trouble, for the klon or for us.” Os’kae coughed. “I’m glad I came. At least this time they insulted me to my face,” he said. “I hate it when they act like I’m not here.” Ix’sha and Maldi took their time helping Os’kae back into the sled, giving D’ax room to begin his own trek back to Esker’s Flat. She had already decided to break his neck, but that must come later.
A large valley between two huge mountains in the distance. Fields of green and clusters of trees are visible, along with a town and smaller human-built structures farther off.
From far off the house looked profoundly out of place. The brick was of a texture and color foreign to the earth of the region of Esker, yet it looked, I thought, like it might have been moved here, piece by piece, from another plane of reality. A ramp painted to look like wood led up to the front door from the footpath adjoining the valley. From here it would be an easy climb to the klon, if a long one. My nose indexed a myriad of compounds I had never before encountered: paints, glues, perfumes, and soaps. The blue-white glow of fluorescent lamps illuminated the open windows from within, and an artificial pond pooled with condensation, nearly overflowing to the rear of the house.
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Map of Osian.
The current was gentle, as it usually was in winter, and the walls of the channel rose a full meter above the water’s surface. Directly above us, the main conduit of the sombraduct pulsed and thrummed like the artery of a gigantic animal. I sank down into the water, letting my own magyyk leak out into the water around me, forming cephalopoid tentacles in the eddies. Floating prone in the water, I willed the pebbles of the channelbed to abrade my skin, scrubbing away the filth of the preceding hours. I had forgotten the cordyceps oil I’d meant to apply afterward, but I couldn’t let this delay me. Already the hour of Riyana’s meeting with Ix’sha was approaching, and I hoped to head them off before they left home. The doors of human houses held a special fascination for me.
“The TV set shouted, “—duplicates the halcyon days of the pre-Civil War Southern states! Either as body servants or tireless field hands, the custom-tailored humanoid robot—designed specifically for YOUR UNIQUE NEEDS, FOR YOU AND YOU ALONE—given to you on your arrival absolutely free, equipped fully, as specified by you before your departure from Earth; this loyal, trouble-free companion in the greatest, boldest adventure contrived by man in modern history will provide—” It continued on and on.”
The dokalf who stood before her was small for a male, no more than two meters in height, androgynous in the soft features of the face. The forehead was tall and flat, the teeth broad and gapped in the way typical of the western Arctic populations. The marks of male gender at his face overlay an older feminine sigil, now scarred over. He gave a boyish smile. No facial hair. Voice high and piping. Ears rose to a point just above the hairline, which formed a crown of two inches at its widest. The pale, paper-white skin was a stark contrast with that of herself and Shrai. She took off the unwieldy gauntlets and set them back into the trunk. She had nearly reacted with violence to an unexpected knock at the door—and with tools unsuitable for combat, which she was barely able to use without hurting herself. She was more on edge than she’d thought.
“You’re not to ask where I got it,” she whispered through a grin. The consumption of an insect, or any other animal, was a strict violation of our vows as sestren. But we were no longer sestren. Anyway I wasn’t, and she soon wouldn’t be. She pushed gently forward on my teeth, a motion that shifted my head upward, gently levered my jaw open, and maneuvered me slowly backward onto my hands as she stretched out her body lengthwise atop me. She moved her fingers to stroke the base of my neck, and with the other hand placed the cricket onto my accepting tongue. I crunched it, savored the sweetness, swallowed. “I’m going to miss you, Sister Kel,” she said before unrolling her body backward from atop me and rising to her feet. I looked into her eyes for a long moment, but I couldn’t speak for fear of crying. She offered me her hand to stand, and we went back to my cell to gather my few belongings. Within the hour, Ag’tzua had walked the librarian and me out of the kalst for the last time. Soon she would be gone from the sisters too.
When T'a'zul and I were confident of her strength to make the journey, I slid the board of shadow under her feet and kissed the back of her hand in obeisance before she skated into the darkness. I listened intently for a long time, but I think within half an hour they had slid far enough that they were only a faint whisper in the earth, and I felt the tether from the platform to my h’jar snap. She was on her own, and I doubted I would ever see her again. Yet the vow I’d made to M’ag’na hung heavy in my mind.
We lived in a small village outside Esker then, in a little house among the woods not far from the edge of town, and two women from your father’s regiment came to visit near the beginning of springrise. They were from Nulruh, and brought with them a selection of their native foods, along with baskets of baby clothes and little toys. We ate fried cicadas with truffles, and drank a foul-smelling mushroom liqueur (mine diluted with water, of course). Your father sang us a song he had learned on his deployment, about bandits on the Red Road and the smell of dinosaur blood. At that time of year the sun hangs for weeks in its low circle over the thawing mountains, so that time passes without a thought. I am still not used to it.
To my great relief, the visual obstruction began to fade. I saw Baltigai half-standing, half-crouching on the apron outside of his root cellar. On his haunches he rose barely to a meter tall. Further up the hill, up a rocky climb of about twenty meters, was his home. Inside, I knew, a staircase connected the root cellar to the farmhouse through the sheer rock. He lit the bowl of a copper pipe and inhaled the smoke of something blue. “You’re welcome to it,” he spoke as he inhaled. He held the smoke for a beat, then breathed out. We began to speak at the same time, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “Thank you again,” I was going to say, and excuse myself. “How goes the dig in the north, Kel?” he asked through the cloud instead. He began to walk toward me between the potato rows, his ornate hammered silver cane leaving a deep impress in the field’s soft soil alongside his hooves. I had long since removed the chestplate again, and I carried it in my right hand. I recalled one of the few Karlish phrases I knew. “H’grwd b’jul.” It meant, roughly, “The birth is done, and I am the afterbirth.” I added, “W’w’wrgd.” “It’s finished,” though what I had meant was “W’w’wrgpas.” “It has stopped.” His eyebrows rose and his long nose curled in surprise. He coughed through another puff, then leaned over the fence downwind of me. “All of it, then? Antimony, phosphorous, even iron?”
Truth Social poll asking "Should Trump pardon Ghislaine Maxwell for giving up 100 names?" Yes: 11.8% No: 88.2%
His beliefs about the origin and nature of the universe were those of the most orthodox karleks: that the great world, called Onni, was neither flat nor a sphere, but the elongated horn of a dead giant, and that when the giant’s body had rotted away, we would plummet endlessly in a black void. Until his arrival, and perhaps to some degree even afterward, he had imagined the darkness of the earth as a malevolent spirit intent on his destruction. The high altitudes and higher latitudes of Raylia are more susceptible to the extremes of winterset and springrise than most countries on the surface. Yet Baltigai, unlike many other upsiders, knew that the deep earth was not cold but hot, and though he sweated uncomfortably here, he had made it a serviceable home.
Patrick Stewart as Professor X wearing his Cerebro headset.
A book cover: A man and woman, seen from behind, hold hands while facing a squad of armed soldiers wearing gas masks. All is in greytones, except for wispy flames that swirl up from the road in front of them. Title: MANIFEST DESTINY
My eyes found it an instant later. Amid the coagulating grey veins I had extracted from the porous limestone lay the delicate yellow-brown body of a long-cycle cicada. Two of its legs had sunk and fused into the recently molten rock. I skittered haphazardly over to it on all fours, hoping in vain that it might still cling to life. But I saw immediately that a whole third of its body had been practically reduced to ash. Its compound eyes gazed around, lifeless, and in a gruesome corner of my mind it reminded me of Ag’tzua’s cricket morsel.
Moonlight theatrical poster
I looked down into the recessed pit of the barracks as I approached. By now I had caught up enough with the figure walking ahead of me to recognize B’ab’she himself, still wearing his broad steel dig helmet. Seeming to sense my presence, he stopped in the doorway to his cell. Blowing from one end of the long, serpentine central thoroughfare to the other, the wind made a high-pitched whistle that forced us to shout in order to be heard. “Kel’xx,” he said with a smile. “What will you do without a dig to tickle your h’jar?” “I’ll keep myself busy,” I replied, trying to rub the clouds of sleepiness and coal grit from my eyes. “Maldi says it’s diamonds. The deposits Ix’sha mentioned.” Only his two front teeth showed in a devious grin beneath his wispy beard. “If they’re sold, then we’ll all—” “So says S’anthe,” I lied, interrupting his mercantile fantasies. I was not about to tell him I’d spoken to an upsider about such things. Why, indeed, was a subcaptain speaking to an apprentice delver about such things?
Scarlet Witch from House of M #8 whispering "No more Marvel movies"
Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life.
When, at the age of 19, I left the monastery of the Sestren and the klon at Deep Ren’no to be a delver among the mines and narrow, closed-doored dormitories of Esker’s Flat, it was not my teacher but Sister L’ix’ba the librarian who elected to come with me. We told her there would be no books there, and a lot of hard work. But she had apprenticed with Sister B’ex’er as a breaker when she had first come to the kalst. A mining klon would always need demolition work, she said, and she never minded a change in career. She was nearing middle-age then, no older than seventy.
The cover of Bowie's album 1. Outside. White background, with Bowie's face askew, drawn in what looks like rubbed charcoal or watercolor.
Spock dying behind a pane of glass in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Bill Shatner at left.
Henry, wielding a torch, confronts Frankenstein's creature near a cliff.
Black-and-white still of a jar containing a brain, labeled "Disfunctio cerebri / Abnormal brain"
Close-up: Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster.
Frankenstein's creature and a little girl sit by a lake.
Robin Williams side-hugs Annabella Sciadorra against a matte painting of Heaven
He felt, through the shadow, D'ax's terror, then anger. There was another face in the memory—not in reality but in thought. The last image in D'ax's mind had been of Ix'sha, his last feeling one of betrayal. His last thought was that they'd fallen into a trap.
She saw the one she was to meet from a distance: a stout, muscular dokalf wearing an orpiment cloak and the wide conical sounding collar of a breaker. He stood upright against a pillar of bedrock facing the flood of pedestrians. The thought occurred to her as she approached that his eyes must have been fixed on her since long before she could have seen him. It made her uneasy, but she'd have to accept it. Not only culturally but simply morphologically, she was doubtless at a disadvantage here. She stopped a few yards away. He bowed to her, and she returned the gesture as she evaluated him. The rust-yellow garment draped over the breaker in a way that suggested it had not been tailored to his body. Its like had been recorded in no ethnography nor in any study of the guilds she had read. To breaker eyes, deficient in perceiving the redder wavelengths, it must appear nearly black.
Spike, wearing shabby pants and an oversized, puffy jacket: "You think I look like I got money?"
Julia from Cowboy Bebop
The Truman Show theatrical release poster. Jim Carrey climbs a flight of stairs built into a matte painting of the sky.
Cable carrying tiny baby Hope in a pouch on his chest, a la Mandalorian and Grogu. Also by Olivetti.
Cable from behind, drawn in Ariel Olivetti's airbrush style.
The monastery is a monolithic structure occupying half a dozen cubic kilometers spread to the west of and above the diminutive klon of Deep Ren’no. The vast majority of the citadel lies within a miles-thick deposit of limestone, so that the walls of my childhood home pictured the tiniest fingerprints of prehistoric life, small bubbles of memory resisting the dead earth around them. To me it was a map of the monastery itself, each resident tucked away inside a tiny cell barely wide and long enough to lay down. I knew these rocks had once been washed by something called seas—they were like wells, Ag’tzua said, only much deeper, and many thousands of times wider. Directly east and south were the farms and fields which provided both the Sestren and the klon’s other residents with their food and textiles. The largest of the fields was worked by Sister Y’ex and her class of novices. It was their task to grow many of the medicinal and ceremonial plants required by the sisterhood’s rites—only this close to the surface the required climates for many of them were hard to maintain, and fires of varying sizes could often be seen from afar among Y’ex’s silos and seedbeds. It was here that the humans settled.
We have appended an Editors' Note to a story about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child in Gaza who was diagnosed with severe malnutrition. After publication, The Times learned that he also had pre-existing health problems. Read more below. Children in Gaza are malnourished and starving, as New York Times reporters and others have documented. We recently ran a story about Gaza’s most vulnerable civilians, including Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, who is about 18 months old and suffers from severe malnutrition. We have since learned new information, including from the hospital that treated him and his medical records, and have updated our story to add context about his pre-existing health problems. This additional detail gives readers a greater understanding of his situation. Our reporters and photographers continue to report from Gaza, bravely, sensitively, and at personal risk, so that readers can see firsthand the consequences of the war.
Roy Cooper's net worth is between $1m and $5m.
GenAI finglers
spam replies
@bonzerbarry on Twitter: "Lockheed Martin said profits in the second quarter plunged almost 80 per cent after the US defense group incurred pre-tax losses of $1.6bn on several of its programs. With the losses mainly stemming from a classified aeronautics program. -FT"
Being mentioned in the records isn’t a sign of wrongdoing.
ed opperman trying to scam people with a link to a predatory loan company
Similar to the last figure, but this one rendered in oranges, yellows, and pale greens. This figure is leaping into the air with his feet tucked slightly under him, as if performing a skateboard trick. The overall mood is abstract, wiggly, and alien.
Rick Tumlinson is the founder of spacefund, a venture capital firm investing in space startups. He also founded the space frontier foundation, earthlight foundation, and new worlds institute and was a founding board member of the x-prize
3. Let SpaceX go to Mars. They’re aiming for a 2030 flight. Yes, that’s after China’s 2029 landing. So what? We’re headed for a farther shore — and meanwhile, three U.S. commercial space stations and a lunar outpost will be under construction (even if it’s being built by robots).
This is a civilizational flex — a broadcast to the planet that they are the ones who build, lead and stay. Their goal isn’t a flag. It’s a footprint followed by a foundation. What some will label a “stunt” will, in hindsight, be seen as the moment China staked its claim in the next chapter of history.
2. End the current Artemis program immediately. Cancel SLS and Gateway. Instead, build on NASA’s successful Commercial Lunar Payload Services model. Back the startups already flying or planning to — Intuitive Machines, Firefly and others like Lone Star and Interlune — and focus on a permanent, U.S.-led lunar industrial village, with an explicit path toward community-building.
Contrast that to what will soon be seen as one of the greatest boondoggles in U.S. history. Rather than support our homegrown pioneers, Congress has clung to Artemis — a Frankenstein’s monster of political pork built around the Space Launch System (SLS), which costs billions per flight and may —just maybe — fly once a year.
Meanwhile, private U.S. citizens inspired by Apollo have been funding and building reusable rockets that can open the entire solar system to the people of Earth — starting now.
How did the country that once epitomized reaching for the stars allow this to happen? Why have we abandoned the High Frontier to bureaucracy, short-term politics and defense contractor kickbacks?
Beyond the scientific and technological returns that space brings taxpayers lies something even more profound: the promise of new resources, new homes and new hope for humanity. While expansion into new frontiers is as American as wagon trains and pioneers, it may surprise you to know it’s never been a part of our official space program. It is, however, central to China’s.
Two panels from a 1987 comic book. Panel one: a black-and-white-suited figure stands atop the descent stage of an Apollo Lunar Module on the East Lawn of the White House. A word balloon emerges from inside: "Good Lord!" Panel two: Close-up of Ronald Reagan, shocked. Reagan: "It's him! It's that superhero I saw on the news this morning!"
A mix of real and artificial flowers and succulents against a backdrop of fog.
Bill Whitfield of the Black Panther chapter in Kansas City serves free breakfast to children before they go to school, April 16, 1969.
The merthey has their arms folded over their chest.