Health futures, literary futures, & more (3TTN Sept. 9, '21)

Morning to all you Frivolous!

A growing and unexpected, but entirely welcome, interest in the pursuit of diving into the the broader SFF world has been encountering book cover artists and illustrators as a whole. I'm finding beautiful work and I'd like to point out artists that I've come across and hope that their work give you pause and take you on a stroll or journey.  To start:

I came across Sarah Webb's post which are wonderfully warm renditions of the same scene:

Second is Kuri Huang's work which I came across when reading In the Watchful City by S. Qiouyi Lu.  I find these kinetic and epic - stories in themselves:

On to today's list!

Black holes be...not so black

Black holes tend to capture everything including light.  So imagine the surprise when astrophysicists at Stanford found data indicating x-ray light coming from behind a black hole. To be clear, this isn't x-ray light coming back out of the black hole.  Einstein had predicted this, but apparently, we didn't have proof until about a month ago.

Culture of Health

The Robert Woods Johnson Foundation created its first collection of fiction surrounding health and what our future in health would look like.  In this collection, The Plague Doctors by Dr. Karen Lord is an extremely relevant story as Dr. Lord explores what life on a small island would look like during a pandemic; one that initially escaped the global catastrophe, but now has to fight it with very few resources.  Dr. Lord discusses this story further in a blog post as well.  Check out the link for more health-future stories.

The Future Library

This is a great project (one I hope survives, considering climate issues): Norway planted a forest in 2014, the trees of which will turn into books in one hundred years.  Each year, the project is inviting a single author to write a piece, not to be read or published until 2114.  Some great authors have already been invited, starting with none other than Margaret Atwood.