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Milkweed Triptych
"A major talent... I can't wait to see more."
—George R. R. Martin
"Mad English warlocks battling twisted Nazi psychics? Yes please, thank you. Tregillis's debut has a white-knuckle plot, beautiful descriptions, and complex characters-- an unstoppable Vickers of a novel."
—Cory Doctorow on Bitter Seeds
"Ian Tregillis triumphantly concludes his astonishing, brilliant, pulse-pounding debut trilogy, The Milkweed Triptych."
—Cory Doctorow on Necessary Evil
"Tregillis' conclusion of the Milkweed Triptych is the pièce de résistance of the series. Necessary Evil is a perfect marriage of science fiction, fantasy and alternate history."
—RT Book Reviews (4.5 stars, Top Pick) on Necessary Evil
"Darkly fascinating…A thoroughly fascinating conclusion to an imaginative tour de force."
—Kirkus on Necessary Evil
"A cross between the devious, character-driven spy fiction of early John le Carré and the mad science fantasy of the X-Men... Despite the jaw-dropping backdrop and oblique plotting, the narrative is driven by character and personal circumstance...
Grim indeed, yet eloquent and utterly compelling."
—Kirkus on The Coldest War
"The characters come alive via [Tregillis's] imaginative dialogue and his storyline will keep readers spellbound and on the edge of their seats with an intense sci-fi/alternate history thriller plot."
—RT Book Reviews (4.5 stars, Top Pick) on The Coldest War
"Well-drawn characters and a feel for time and place make this an excellent journey into an alternate Britain."
—Library Journal on Bitter Seeds
"Engrossing... Tregillis ably mixes cold war paranoia with his mythology."
—Publishers Weekly on The Coldest War
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Antimatter from Thunderstorms
Recent Blog Entries:

The End: NECESSARY EVIL Is Out! - 5/1/2013, 10:29 AM Because I Haven't Posted About tDCS In A While - 4/8/2013, 04:07 PM Announcing the NECESSARY EVIL Signing Tour - 4/5/2013, 05:15 PM Nuclear Deterrence in a Blood Magic World - 2/22/2013, 09:41 AM Guest Post #2 at Charlie Stross's Blog - 2/17/2013, 04:41 PM Guest Post at Charlie Stross's Blog - 2/15/2013, 09:17 PM A Conversation with Charlie Stross - 2/8/2013, 11:06 AM NOW OUT in the UK: THE COLDEST WAR - 2/7/2013, 12:22 AM Clarion Is Accepting Applications for the Class of 2013 - 1/27/2013, 06:38 PM Holy Smokes! Cover Art for Something More Than Night - 1/23/2013, 09:44 PM

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Friday, January 14 2011, 06:17 AM

Now this is cool: an orbiting gamma-ray telescope has detected the creation of antimatter by earthly thunderstorms. 

This is strange and delightful.  I'm a little taken aback that people apparently predicted this quite a long time ago.  (And it's in the literature, so they really did.)

Since I spent my graduate student days thinking about high energy radiation processes, I can't help but speculate about this.

Postulating the creation and annihilation of antimatter as a method for generating all gamma rays within a thunderstorm strikes me as putting the cart before the horse.  It makes much more sense to me that a preexisting gamma above the electron pair-creation threshold would be the source of the positrons, which then create a secondary population of gammas via pair annihilation.  One can imagine Compton scattering scenarios that would boost a lower-energy X-ray photon up to the pair-creation threshold, thus starting the process.  (We already know thunderstorms can produce X-rays.)  But if the antimatter is the original source of the gammas, you have to speculate about a pair-creation process that doesn't already invoke such high energy photons—which is much more difficult at these energies.

But  what do I know.  I write books about Nazis.

I'm tickled that this discovery was made by the Fermi telescope.  When I was in grad school, it was called GLAST (for Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope), and it hadn't been launched yet.  I wrote about the potential impact of GLAST observations in my thesis.  If I had stayed in the field, I would have loved to incorporate GLAST/Fermi data into further iterations of that research. 

Oh, well.

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Interviews
Interview with SFX Magazine
Unwalkers interview [English | French ]
Interview with Speculate! Podcast Interview with Adventures in SciFi Publishing
Ian Tregillis on the Sword and Laser Podcast
Ian Tregillis on John Scalzi's The Big Idea
Interview with Pat's Fantasy Hotlist
Interview with SFRevu
Interview with Mad Hatter Book Review
Interview with Apex Books

Interview at Literary Musings Interview with Pat's Fantasy Hotlist
An interview with the authors of Busted Flush at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist
Interview with Travis Heermann at The Write Line
9-way interview with the contributors to the Wild Cards novel Inside Straight at Pat's Fantasy Hotlist
Interview in the February, 2008 newsletter of the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
An extended interview with Ian Tregillis by Ty Franck, on www.wildcardsbooks.com.

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