Burial curses, asteroid mining, and another new Star Trek language

Hi, everyone!

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first four issues of The Science of Fiction. I’ve had a blast writing about necromancers in space, Baby Yoda’s biology, decolonizing exoplanets, and building alien languages for Star Trek, and I can’t wait to share more of what I’m working on in the months ahead.

For Thanksgiving week, though, I’ve decided to do something a bit different. As journalists are reporting stories, we often collect tidbits that don’t make it into the piece. You can think of these as a bit like the crusts you cut off your bread while you’re making stuffing: Perfectly delicious, but a bit of a distraction from the final product. Normally, these trimmings languish in a folder on the reporter’s desktop until they’re stale and forgotten, kind of like the leftovers you shoved to the back of your fridge last night. (That was my last food analogy, I swear.) But since I have complete creative control over this newsletter, I thought I’d share a few with y’all.

Here are three fascinating things The Science of Fiction learned over the last month: