Rachel Swirsky, whose Tor.com stories from 2009 wound up as finalists for (variously) the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, is attending Launch Pad, a NASA-funded workshop in which SF writers get a crash course in modern astronomy, via guest lectures from working scientists and also via hands-on use of the University of Wyoming’s telescopes. And she’s live-blogging the experience in a series of fascinatingly detailed guest posts to Jeff VanderMeer’s blog
Tor.com has covered Launch Pad before—David Levine wrote up his experience attending the workshop in 2008.
(But are there really people who think the moon isn’t visible during the day? What, do they never look up? Oy.)
Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a senior editor at Tor Books and, with Liz Gorinsky, one of the two fiction editors of Tor.com. Read more about him on the Tor.com About Us page.