Author Archives: Michael

A Cougar in DuPage County?

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News is just coming in that a helicopter using thermal vision has spotted a potential cougar in the Meacham Grove Forest Preserve (Bloomingdale, DuPage County, Illinois). The original reason for the fly over was a missing person.

Watching the video, it’s hard not to think this actually is a cougar. It sure as hell isn’t a dog, or a person. Nor would it be a raccoon.

My hope is that the potential cougar is never seen again, and disappears to southern Illinois, or northern Wisconsin, both of which have national forest land and small wilderness areas. Illinois has a habit of blowing anything away it doesn’t understand. See the gunning down of a Chicago cougar in 2008.

There are 923,000 people in DuPage County, and now, apparently, one cougar. Let’s hope the gun jockeys can keep it in their pants.

More here.

A California Wolverine and Science Fiction

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On February 28, 2008, a researcher from Oregon State University discovered a thing that many thought had vanished: a wolverine in California. The wolverine was filmed via remote camera at an image acquisition station designed for a smaller member of the weasel family, the marten.

This was the first known wolverine in California since 1920. The wolverine is an incredibly rare animal, with only perhaps 100 left in the lower 48. They dislike roads and development, clinging only to the wildest realms in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Washington (all states with considerable roadless acreage and the space a wolverine requires) It is, without equivocation, an animal that is in deep peril.

As a writer of science fiction and fantasy, I love the idea of exploration. Of looking up at the Milky Way and wondering what is possible, and how all of that is possible. The idea of crafting an interstellar spacecraft, or sending out a Mars Rover is exhilarating, and something we must do. There’s high drama in the future, in possible habitable planets, and the unknown universe. This is what powers the thrumming heart of science fiction.

But sometimes, what we’ve known aligning with what should be, here, on our planet, is just as rewarding. And sometimes, these confluences emerge like ghosts from between dark rows of pines, eyes aglow. As is the case with the last California wolverine.

That we know of…..

Fletcher’s Mountains – Perihelion Science Fiction

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I’m thrilled to announce that my story “Fletcher’s Mountains” has been accepted for an upcoming issue of Perihelion Science Fiction.

“Fletcher’s Mountains” is probably my favorite short story. I couldn’t be happier to find a good home for it.

After WW III, a man makes a solitary journey back to an isolated mountain range to find a long lost friend.

Home

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She came to him in the dark, between the windblown pine and aspen. For all he knew she was sent down from the mountains in a gesture of trickery. For nothing could be so beautiful, or move with such grace. As she approached in the forest gloom, he thought of scenes from long ago, scenes before he was born.

The wind splayed her hair across her face as she watched her soft steps amongst the pine needles. Beyond the woman, in the dark, Gallatin Creek murmured.

For a moment he could not tell creek from wind or bowing tree.

He wanted to call out, to ask her who she was and where she’d come from. He moved his lips but no sound emerged.

Then she spoke, her voice coalescing with the leaves. “We’re home,” she said.

Grand-Teton-storm

“Home” is an excerpt from my latest work.