I’m delighted to announce that Cosmos has posted my story “For Solo Cello, op. 12″ live and free on their website. This originally appeared in Issue 13 of COSMOS back in March 2007.

His keys dropped, rattling on the parquet floor. Julius stared at them, unwilling to look at the bandaged stump where two weeks ago his left hand had been. He should be used to it by now. He should not still be trying to pass things from his right hand to his left. But it still felt as if his hand were there.

This is beautifully animated, but there’s one detail which makes me go a little buggy. Watch the baby’s eyes. They are so real, compared to the rest of the figure, that it edges into the uncanny valley.

This is a problem that crops up in a lot of different forms of world creation, from set design, to animation to straight puppetry. If you have one element that seems totally real, it makes everything else seem strange. But if everything is stylized in the same manner, then you accept that visual vocabulary. For instance, no one complains that they can’t see all the fur on the Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. But if a real dog wandered through the scene, the entire world would look flat and the dog would look strange. It’s uncanny.