The Big Idea: Living Forever

I talk about death on John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever

cover of Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas by Emily C. Skaftun

In today’s Big Idea, author Emily C. Skaftun is thinking about death… for starters. With a book title like Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas, perhaps this is not entirely surprising.

EMILY C. SKAFTUN:

Death! There is no bigger idea. 

The theme that emerged as I was putting together my favorite stories to create my first collection—and no one is more surprised than I that a theme emerged at all!—is something like:

Death. Maybe it’s not the worst thing that could happen?

Or: Be sure to read the fine print about your life after death.


To keep reading, head over to Whatever, where this piece was originally published.

My Favorite Bit: Living Forever

I talk about shrugging on Mary Robinette Kowal’s My Favorite Bit

cover of Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas by Emily C. Skaftun

Everybody shrugs.

They also poop, but that’s a different story. (I did once pitch the idea of a picture book called “Every Monster Poops” to an artist friend as a collaboration, but we never got past cracking ourselves up brainstorming what zombie poop would look like… but I digress).

My favorite thing about writing nonhuman characters is the challenge and opportunity of imagining how they inhabit their alien bodies.


To keep reading, head over to My Favorite Bit, where this piece was originally published.

Experience is the new luxury

Tired of cruises? Try an expedition aboard the MS Roald Amundsen

Photo courtesy of Hurtigruten
Hurtigruten’s newest vessel, MS Roald Amundsen, is an “expedition ship” built for the extreme environments of the Arctic and Antarctic seas.

If your image of a cruise ship is a floating monstrosity the size of a city block, full of casinos, colorful iced drinks with bendy straws, and overblown attractions like waterslides or ziplines, housing thousands of drunk travelers on their way someplace tropical—in other words, if you’re the kind of savvy traveler who scoffs at the idea of cruises—it’s time to take another look at Hurtigruten.

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Catching the Arctic Illness in Svalbard

Are people nuts to love the high north? I go to (almost) the end of the earth to find out

Arctic Illness Svalbard
Photo: Elizabeth Bourne
A mural in Barentsburg with a portion of the poem “Arctic Illness” by Russian poet Robert Rozhdestvensky.

Emily C. Skaftun
The Norwegian American

“Why are you going to Svalbard?” was the most frequent question I got when talking about my summer travel plans. In the way of many adventurers, I had no very compelling answer to the question. Because it’s there!

I have a friend in Longyearbyen now (Elizabeth Bourne, whose name you may recognize from this paper), who was willing to let me crash in her spare room and eager to show me around the place that she loves to a suspicious degree. Mutual friends tasked me with determining whether Elizabeth was entirely insane.

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Voting, here & there

Elections and voting in Norway and the United States

voting in Norway
Photo: Emily C. Skaftun
This is an actual ballot from Oslo’s municipal election. It’s incredibly different from the ones I’m used to because this entire ballot is the vote—in this case, if a voter chose this ballot to put into the box, that would constitute a vote for the Sosialistisk Venstreparti (SV). The polling place has forms like this for each of the parties, and all a voter really has to do is choose one of these. In that voter’s home municipality, they can also check one or more of the names on listed (or write in others), to give “extra” votes for individual candidates*.

Emily C. Skaftun
The Norwegian American

While in Norway this August, I had the pleasure of accompanying my friend Chloe to the voting shack. It was three weeks before the official election date, and Chloe’s flatmate Erland was haranguing her about not doing her civic duty yet. So of course, we all got to chatting about the differences in voting systems.

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