As with my colleagues at FANGORIA, I get a little jazzed up in October. I love Halloween. It gives me the excuse to bring a giant bag of mini 100 Grand bars back from the CVS and to play selections from Phish’s adaptation of Disney’s Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House. (Check out “Your Pet Cat” from 1/2/16 at MSG for a groove with 9 lives.)

Just last night my wife and I decided to take the long way home with an eye toward cheering our neighbors and their spooky season decorations. One family goes all-in on fake headstones with topical jokes, another breaks the bank buying every inflatable ghoul at Home Depot. We’ve also got someone not far away who makes seasonal magic with eerie lighting and not much more. Hats off to them.

“Hey, let’s go down the cul-de-sac,” I suggested as we were driving around. (Note: Cul-de-sac translates as DEAD END! Cue the strings!) As our only-slightly-dented Toyota turned, we found ourselves in a dark corner of central New Jersey.

Oftentimes we’ll spot wildlife — deer, foxes, an occasional woodchuck — and we thought there was something snuffling around near the sidewalk. But it wasn’t a critter. It was a robot.

They make robot lawnmowers now. And they come out at night.

Apparently they’ve been around for years, but cursory research tells me less than five percent of households use them in North America. So I don’t feel so bad that I’ve never noticed one before. (To be fair: I’ve lived most of the last 30 years in New York City, where these wouldn’t be very useful.)

Anyway, this little guy is the size of a microwave on wheels and, from my observations, it doesn’t really work too well. It moves forward an inch, spins around, goes in another haphazard direction, spins again, and doesn’t seem to reduce the amount of grass behind it. It could be, however, that I was causing it to spin out due to shining my brights and shouting AHHHH ROBOT LAWNMOWER!

The funny thing is that I did get a chill up my spine. Maybe it’s from watching Chopping Mall one too many times, but I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if this thing got angry, jumped the curb, and landed belly-side down on my carotid artery. I knew this was an unlikely scenario, but just to be safe we hit the gas and got out of there.

Horror and sci-fi together at home!

Jordan Hoffman, Communications Officer

As I dish to Dave on this week’s episode of The STARLOG Podcast, an earlier interview with writer Jerry Sohl went behind the scenes on the TOS episode “This Side of Paradise.” Sohl explained why he used a nom de plume credit on that episode; he was unhappy with the rewrite. But his version of events did not sit well with Fontana, who was compelled to write in to STARLOG soon thereafter.

What could have been a simple he said-she said transcends into pure poetry, as Fontana makes her case as if arguing before the Supreme Court. Citing dates and spewing facts, Fontana destroys Sohl with a presentation of receipts worthy of a Joan Collins meme. I suspect your reaction will be the same as Dave’s. “No notes.”

You can hear all about this great moment in SF beefing by clicking the “listen” button below.

A Wall is Also a Road is Annalee Newitz’s fifth science fiction book and surely the most bananas of the bunch. (This is a high compliment.)

It is set in two worlds — one, an academic institute run by sentient slime molds, and the other, Ancient Rome, specifically the city of Pompeii before its run-in with Mount Vesuvius. It is bursting with enormous ideas rooted in real (slimy) science and classical scholarship, and populated with characters that feel human and contemporary even though they are quite specifically neither human nor contemporary.

Readers of Newitz’s nonfiction book Four Lost Cities may experience a little déjù vu, as some characteristics in Road are yanked directly from the previously published historical exploration. During our conversation on The STARLOG Podcast, Annalee talks about drawing characters out from their research — in one case, a self-aggrandizing mark of graffiti found in a highly unusual place.

Annalee is, of course, the Editor-in-Chief of the reborn STARLOG print magazine (coming soon coming soon coming soon — stay tuned to this channel for more info) and our chat about the book, I think, elucidates some of what you can expect when you finally get your mitts on the thing. You are also going to learn about slime excretion and how that can be … beautiful.

The new episode of The STARLOG Podcast, like the ones before it, is on whatever podcasting platform you prefer. Or you can just click the little “listen” button below.

SCI-FI

Blade Runner is back, and this time it’s streaming. Amazon debuted the trailer for the newest chapter, Blade Runner 2099, at New York Comic Con, and it naturally looks like a million Chinyen. Will it feature a compelling story as well as striking imagery? We’ll know in about a month.

SCIENCE

Woodsy Owl’s message clearly isn't getting through. People are still throwing their trash everywhere like disgusting zhlubs. An innovation deployed in Amsterdam called a Bubble Barrier is having some success preventing junk in waterways from polluting the wider ocean — and it is being imported to the USA. More at Smithsonian magazine.

CULTURE

French nature photographer Florian Riou captured the phenomenon of “red sprites” — mesospheric electrical charges — and the viral images blow most Hollywood productions out of the water. Click here for the story behind the snaps, and check out more at Riou’s website.

ETHICS

Giant mirrors in orbit could end the concept of night as we know it. There are pros, like aiding rescue workers and powering solar farms, and cons, like saying goodbye to astronomy and also the rhythms of human life as we’ve always known it. Read more about this fascinating conundrum at Science News.