Category: Fiction

I launched a Substack newsletter over the summer in order to better share my creative nonfiction. This month, the featured essay is Six Words of Russian, telling the story of camping on Aegna and blackmarket beer.

As this was now my fourth time camping, I figured I was an old hand. A forest commuter. A modern-day mountaineer. A middle-aged, overweight, trailblazing adventurer …or at least well on the way to becoming one. I knew exactly what I needed for my trip to Aegna.

My lumpy crochet bag held a tent, an air mattress, a battery-operated pump, a sleeping bag, a small pillow, a kilo of charcoal, and a large metal tea kettle.

My hot-pink backpack, picked up half price at Sports Direct, held a change of clothes, bathing suit, large towel, a flat water bucket, a lantern, a small portable video camera, 600g sliced pork, two types of cheese, 200 grams of flour, salt and yeast so that I could make bread, ground coffee, cream, the espresso hand pump that my daughter gave me, a liter of Coke Zero, half a head of lettuce, two bananas and an apple.

I had everything I needed for an overnight stay. I also couldn’t move.

You can read the whole thing on my newsletter, Accidents and Incidents. While there, please subscribe (it’s free!) to receive monthly essays and mishaps.

My essay The Train Station Ateljee: Stumbling Across Estonia’s Distant History was featured in Deep Baltic magazine.

This is one of my favourite essays that I’ve written about Estonia and I’m thrilled to have it shared with a new audience.

My photograph taken and submitted while I was camping on Aegna was shortlisted for the photo competition as a part of the Baltic Island Days featuring Aegna. The photograph was displayed on the Pirita promenade for the event. There were over 80 works submitted of which 20 were selected to be exhibited in the pedestrian underpass leading to Freedom Square for the month of October.

I’m thrilled to be a part of the Gender and Age/Aging in Popular Culture taking place this week at the University of Graz. As with many conferences these days, this is a virtual event.

I am speaking on Thursday about Old Age and Aging as Represented in Star Trek as a part of the panel on Representations of Gender and Aging in Speculative Fiction. It looks set to be a fascinating collection of subjects and I’m very much looking forward to it.

The author of this piece, Jack Williams, asked if he could have five minutes of my time to talk about Flying Tiger Line flight 739. We ended up talking for over an hour, because no way could I tell him all about this flight in less. The interview was used in this feature on a new memorial being placed to commemorate those lost in this military flight.

New Memorial In Maine to Commemorate Missing Military Flight, Nebraskan

Realm has re-released The Triangle, a fun action thriller developed by Dan Koboldt and written by Dan Koboldt, Mindy McGinness and me, has been released as a podcast available to everyone. You can listen to all ten episodes narrated by Neil Hellegers for free on Apple, Spotify and other podcast sysytems.

The mysticism and intrigue of the Bermuda Triangle has just turned personal for Admiral David Segarra: his former ship, the USS Wasp, has gone missing in the area without a trace.

I had great fun taking part in this collaboration and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I think this is a great story and I’m really glad it is getting a bigger audience.

My talk on representations of age and ageing in Star Trek has been translated into Estonian for Reaktor magazine!

https://www.ulmeajakiri.ee/?artikkel-vanus-ja-vananemine-ulmes

I’m very proud to have been invited to present at Estcon and even more so that the talk was translated for me.

I was asked to take part in an interview for ABC’s The History Listen, which was used for a mash-up documentary on one of my favourite Australian characters, Diamond Jack.

It’s a fantastic format, which my mother described as natural storytelling, like we are all telling the story over drinks.

You can listen to the full podcast here: Diamond Jack, Smirnov and the Pelikaan

2020 has been a difficult year for events and conventions, which led to Estcon being the biggest event of the summer for me. My write-up and photographs were featured in the November issue of Locus Magazine and you can read all about it at the Locus online magazine: https://locusmag.com/2020/11/estcon-2020-report/

Attending a science fiction convention from a tent was definitely not what I expected to be doing this summer but my presentation went well and I had a great time.

I was excited by the opportunity to take part in the Exoplanet Demographics conference hosted by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at IPAC/Caltech over the 9-13th of November.

The organisers of the virtual conference were surprised by the amount of interest they received from science fiction writers and decided to do a Collaborative STEAM public outreach project, soliciting science fiction stories, poetry and art inspired by the discoveries being presented during the conference.

I was given the abstract of a presentation by Juliette Becker entitled The Origins of Multi-Planet Systems with Misaligned, Nearby Companions. Inspired by the details of the discovery (at least those that I understood), I wrote a short-and-sweet science fiction story called “The Missed Connection”.

This was published in the Wednesday edition of the Heavy Metal Jupiters and Other Stories e-zine edited by Jessie Christiansen and Heather Clitheroe.

I’m doubly excited to discover that the author of the research talk said that she loved my story!

I absolutely love the story Sylvia Spruck Wrigley wrote about my #ExoDem research talk. I won't spoil it, but Rocky the sentient asteroid has a bad time because he makes some assumptions about STIP geometries! Link: https://t.co/c6eZhcYwbr https://t.co/7lguTpCzDC

— Juliette Becker (@jcbastro) November 11, 2020

This was a great initiative and I am proud to have been a part of it.