SOLAR SYSTEM HOA Episode Two: The New Girl a short cosmic comedy It had been three days since the barbecue, which meant it had been three days since anyone had brought up the chicken incident, the comet, or whatever Uranus still wasn't saying — a personal record for the neighborhood. That ended around two in the afternoon, when something new drifted into the cul-de-sac. ✦ ✦ ✦ Arrival Nobody saw her coming, exactly. One minute the street was empty. The next, there was a planet

GALACTIC HOA Episode Two: The Boy Who Cried Supernova a short cosmic comedy There is, in every neighborhood, one resident who has been about to do something dramatic for so long that nobody quite believes it anymore. In the Local Group, that resident was Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse was not, strictly speaking, a member of the Local Group HOA. Betelgeuse was a single red supergiant star sitting in the Milky Way's own shoulder, a relatively short eight hundred or so light-years away

Episode One: The Bar a short cosmic comedy The Sun had been throwing the same neighborhood barbecue for four and a half billion years, and at this point everyone mostly came for the leftovers. ✦ ✦ ✦ The Spread Mercury arrived first, because Mercury arrived first to everything, vibrating slightly even when standing still. He circled the table twice before anyone else had shown up. Mercury: Is the food out? Is it out yet? I could've done this lap eighty-eight times by now. Venu

GALACTIC HOA Episode One: Greg Lets One Go a short cosmic comedy The Local Group is a quiet neighborhood, as these things go. A few dozen galaxies, give or take, drifting in loose formation across a few million light-years of nothing in particular. Nobody's in a hurry. Nobody needs to be. When your neighbors are measured in millions of light-years away and your conversations take place over geological epochs, you learn to let things happen at their own pace. Greg Galaxy had n