According To Hoyt

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Max Berezin Collection (Chronicles of the Fall Book 26)

Snapshots a character’s life.

One previously published short story, plus nine new stories that give brief glimpses of a budding Mentalist Lord as he survives ambitious relatives, brief romances, interesting assignments, and vacations . . . Balancing family duties and work while doing what’s right . . . even if it might not actually be legal . . .

FROM DAN MELSON: Meeting The Morelli (Embassy Book 1)

Tessa was desperate, and a two year contract with an Imperial Embassy looked like the way out. Helping a newly contacted species develop to a point where they’re ready to deal with the universe is a years-long project, and those whose missions succeed can expect more lucrative contracts in the future as well as the knowledge they’ve helped an entire species survive.

The Empire of Humanity is not being altruistic. It has selfish reason to want the Morelli and others to survive. But the Morelli must be willing to learn, and there’s only so much latitude a species may be given before even the Empire’s own citizens require suppression or worse. Tessa and her superiors must find a way to persuade the Morelli to learn about the dangerous universe beyond their current holdings before the Morelli do anything irreversible.

Because evolution is not done when a species achieves sentience, or even technology. It becomes communal, and the penalty for failure is extinction.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: I Can See Clearly Now (Science Fiction Singles)

What if you could see the life you never lived?

Commander Daniel Forrester has spent forty years among the stars.

At fifty-eight, he is a respected starship commander with a lifetime of exploration behind him. But when news reaches him that Elizabeth—the woman he once intended to marry—has died, Daniel is forced to confront the question that has haunted him for decades:

What if he had stayed?

Then the Resolute discovers something impossible.

Another starship appears in space.

It is the Resolute .

It carries the same identification number, the same crew, and the same commanding officer.

But it comes from somewhere else.

Daniel has encountered an alternate reality.

And in that reality, another version of himself made a different choice.

That Daniel stayed on Earth.

He married Elizabeth.

He helped establish humanity’s first permanent colony on Mars.

And Elizabeth is still alive.

For the first time, Daniel can see the life he has spent forty years imagining.

But the boundaries between the two realities are beginning to collapse.

As alternate histories bleed into one another, Daniel faces an impossible choice: pursue the life he believes he should have lived—or save the people whose lives depend upon the reality he actually chose.

To make that choice, Daniel must finally confront the difference between regretting the past and living in it .

I Can See Clearly Now is a reflective science-fiction novella about alternate realities, impossible choices, lost love, regret, acceptance, and the courage to embrace the future.

FROM KIRILL KHRESTININ: Via Dolorosa: A Novel

Some roads only open at the bottom.

Laura Jones leaves her grandfather’s Arizona ranch for Los Angeles, certain her real life is waiting there. She wants to be an actress. She finds a man who knows how to keep that dream alive—and how to use it against her. Then another man arrives, wearing a police uniform.

Harry Dolan knows what his partner is. He has helped make it possible. At home, his fifteen-year-old daughter needs him, his marriage is disintegrating, and the violence he excuses on the streets is never far from his own front door.

Back in the desert, Laura’s grandfather has a Purple Heart, a shotgun and a past he rarely speaks about. He knows how to fight. What fighting can save is another question.

Their lives collide in a world where pain becomes an excuse, love becomes possession, and people ask God for mercy while denying it to one another.

Via Dolorosa is a brutal literary crime novel about the damage people inherit, the damage they choose to inflict, and the possibility of faith when every comfortable answer has failed. Violent, profane and unflinching, it asks what remains of love when suffering gives you every reason to become cruel.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: PLACE of HONOR: A Science Fiction Novel

Sixteen-year-old Jozan par Julien is First Princess of the Empire of One Hundred Suns and next in line for the throne. Seventeen-year-old Cade-Klin Soline is the most junior member of her bodyguard, someone Jozan is only barely aware of. That changes when an assassination attempt maroons Jozan and Cade-Klin on a dangerous alien planet. Knowing that this is the beginning of an attempt to overthrow her father, Jozan vows to return to the Imperial World, a vow that will throw them headlong into an incredible adventure, an adventure in which they will face a hostile jungle, predatory animals, the mystery of a vast alien space ship and a deadly interstellar conspiracy that will do anything to keep them from reaching their goal. And, at the end of the journey, Jozan will not only have found love with Cade-Klin but will also face the shocking truth about her destiny, a truth she never suspected…

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Everything in 24 Frames

Twenty-four frames equals one second of motion-picture film.

Cather Hargreaves learned that fact for class, but as an abstraction. Now that he’s going on a tour of a movie studio and its back lots, he’s about to get real-life experience in just how movies are made.

What he didn’t expect was being tossed into a real-life horror, as the war against sectarian violence suddenly comes home to the City of Angels. It’s a moment that will change the course of his life forever.

When life is on the line, 24 frames can be an eternity.

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM MICHAEL NICHOLS: Fatal Abstraction: Revolutionizing Strategy and Innovation for the Age of AI

In an era where AI is accelerating disruption and uncertainty, traditional business strategy is dangerously outdated. While innovation professionals adapt rapidly, many established organisations remain stuck in slow, mechanistic planning cycles. Fatal Abstraction argues that to survive, leaders must learn to govern at the level of uncertainty they face―rethinking how strategy is conceived, executed, and evolved.

Drawing on philosophy, mental models, and first hand experience with hundreds of ventures, author Michael Nichols offers a bold framework for mastering disruption. This timely work equips entrepreneurs, executives, and investors with the tools to navigate AI-driven change, build resilient ventures, and revolutionise strategic thinking in the modern age.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Cross-Time Kamaitachi (Timelines Universe Book 5)

I did not land here as a warrior, but a warrior I so soon became . . .

One moment, Dr. Yukiko Yamaguchi was in her high-tech singularity research lab in California, busily adjusting an electronically-leaky fitting playing hell with her instrument readings.

The next moment, she was falling through space, and landing hard in a wilderness area she would quickly discover was her family’s ancient stomping grounds in Japan – but with an apocalyptic twist.

A hundred years later, there would be legends of a great y�kai, a demon, whom some called a kamaitachi – a sort-of whirlwind, weasel-like creature with blades for claws, which catches up unwary humans and slices their skin. But this kamaitachi is no ordinary y�kai – rather, she is

The Cross-Time Kamaitachi

FROM SUMMER GRAYLING: True Colours

Jan Van Der Vaart is a legend. The focus of his magical Talent is pain, and he’s spent years in the military, then as a mercenary, making terrorists, cartels, and governments fear him. Finally, he carved out a safe haven for other Talents, and tried to retire… until one last job, cracking a black lab snatching Talents off the streets, went sideways. He’s left staggering down a rainy coastal highway, thumb out and hoping he’ll catch a lift before the kill team realizes they missed…

Aurelia Brinati is on the run. Having escaped five years of hell as an unwilling lab rat, she has a stolen car and a plan to hide from pursuers by taking passage on a cargo ship headed anywhere else in the world. When she picks up a stray sailor headed the same way, she rapidly discovers she’s out of her depths… and safe in the heart of the storm.

The entire world fears him… except her. Powers are gathering to recapture Aurelia, but they’d best beware. Jan and his friends will do whatever it takes to keep her safe… whether it’s murder, mayhem, or last-minute shopping runs to find something called cream of tartar for her snickerdoodle cookies.

Protective Hero ✓ Hidden Magic ✓ He Falls First ✓ Found Family ✓ Runaway Heroine ✓ Psychic Powers ✓ Hurt/Comfort ✓ Damaged Heroine ✓ Touch-starved Hero ✓

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

A Duke’s Defiance Could Shatter Two Worlds
In an England where magic pulses through every cobblestone and the English Regency manners and modes never ended, one man’s conscience threatens to topple an empire.
Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, inherited a legacy of forbidden heroism. For generations, his family served as witchfinders, crossing between worlds to rescue those condemned to die for possessing magical gifts. But when the royal princess vanished twenty years ago, the king sealed the borders between realities forever.
Now Seraphim faces an impossible choice: obey the crown and let innocents burn, or defy his king and risk everything he holds dear.
With only his enigmatic half-elf valet Gabriel Penn at his side, Seraphim tears holes in the fabric of existence itself, leaping between alternate Earths where magic means death.
His mother and sister are lost in Fairyland. His enemies circle like vultures. The king’s patience wears thin.
But Seraphim’s stubborn compassion burns brighter than caution. In a world where doing right means risking everything, he’ll discover that the greatest magic might just be the courage to keep fighting when hope seems lost.
Some prices are worth paying. Some lines are worth crossing. Some hearts are worth breaking.
A spellbinding tale of sacrifice, family, and the dangerous allure of doing what’s right in a world determined to punish goodness.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: TEMPT

By Holly the Assistant

A Quiet Summer

No, really. In spite of all the crazy wildfires, I haven’t heard any news of riots. Not like 2020. Even the cities deliberately hit by arson attacks stayed calm.

Maybe the rioters couldn’t afford gas to get to the preferred rioting locations?

Maybe the rioters were working for pay in previous years, and the funding spigot dried up with the crackdown on government spending through NGOs? (Now there’s a misnomer: if your funding comes from government grants you are NOT a non-governmental organization.)

Certainly there were attempts with the anti-ICE activities to gin up a few riots, but those fizzled pretty early on. Turned out that there was no natural rioting support for illegals. I think some of the anti-Flock efforts are also aimed at gathering angry crowds together, from the social media posts, and that doesn’t seem to be gaining any traction, either. People don’t love surveillance cameras, but they do love criminals getting arrested, so it’s a mixed bag, and no one seems to be really interested in having themselves a riot over it.

The hysterias du jour seem to be getting shorter and shorter, and the people flipping out over renaming one of the great lakes seem to have gone on to other topics now.

There’s some interesting stuff over on the White House website about hunting and fishing, and I urge our sportsmen to go read those. I think it might get considerably easier to get access to federal lands for hunting. The fishing one is for saltwater fishing, and I’m a creek fisher by . . . sheer laziness I suppose, it’s my backyard, after all. Everyone in the Chesapeake Bay watershed should look over that EO and see if they need to beat on their local municipalities for charging no longer justifiable fees.

I haven’t heard anything in the media about the tit for tat with Canada over trade, particularly federal procurement. That’s very interesting, especially here in the run-up to Alberta’s secession vote. Has anyone seen that anywhere? How about those of you on the other side of the boarder, is that hitting your news at all?

Gas prices seem to be what’s left for midterm drama, unless they can get some excitement going for other stuff between now and then, and I don’t know about you all, but we haven’t-quite-reached Obama level highs here yet. It’s pretty hard to get a bunch of excitement up about that for anyone who was an adult back then. (That’s before inflation adjustment, by the way, in my mind, but after per the official records. I distinctly remember prices higher than what’s reported, but I didn’t take pictures of the pumps back then.)

I think I’m more concerned about bad candidates depressing the turnout than anything else other than fraud at this point. Some of us have some real stinkers on the ballot. However, a lot of us have rather nasty propositions on the ballot, so maybe that will help get people out. Do encourage your friends to exercise their franchise, as much as is reasonably in your power to do so.

When I was a little girl and an history nut (now I’m an old woman and an history nut) I found out about the (supposed) at least Spartan standard for whether an infant lived or died. The baby was brought from the birthing chamber and put at the feet of his father. If the father took him up, he was a baby, a son of the household (or a daughter, but this being Sparta, sons mattered more.)

The books I read treated this with some approval. The father inspected the baby for defects, and would of course know if the baby was illegitimate, and thus only the fittest survived. The eugenics thing was still strong in Europe. Probably still is. And in Portugal it made perfect sense for the father to be the one deciding because he was, after all, the one expected to pay for the kid’s raising.

I thought it was unspeakably barbaric. And I’d like to ascribe this to my being so enlightened and smart, even at eight or nine, but really, it was probably because my family provided the ribbing about how any sane father would have rejected infant-me, born extremely premature and very hard to keep alive. And how this was why I was still a weakling and caught every disease possible and some impossible. The idea that culling would apply to oneself, like hanging in the morning, sharpens the mind something wonderful.

Anyway, I was very grateful to live in a civilized time when keeping me alive, at least in the measure of the possible, was expected by both society and law. After all, I was a lot, both personality and health, and it was for the best that drowning me in the bathtub or abandoning me in the woods wasn’t acceptable.

Some — dear Lord — 20 years ago, Libertarians who were friends of mine became very alarmed that our standard for who was human and a life worth keeping had changed. Now, it had effectively become “You’re human if mommy says you are.”

No? Look at when a pregnant woman gets killed. Whether the child gets counted as another homicide depends on whether the child was wanted or not. A lot of states have not only abortion till birth but, like Colorado — COLORADO! — you’re allowed to kill the baby for some time after birth with no consequences.

You’re human if mommy wants you.

If mommy doesn’t want you, you stop being human even as labor pains start. She can say “My body, my choice, I want the fetus terminated.” If mommy wants you, on the other hand, she’ll send your sonograms at two months around with “Look at my baby. He has my nose.”

And that decision can change in a minute. Sometimes on a dime.

This is not tenable. It is particularly not tenable for a secular humanist society. (Religious societies have their own answers to abide by. That’s different.)

It’s not tenable because “humanist” rests on “humans” and if what a human is depends on the whim of the woman (and usually a woman who is stressed, hormonally off-ballance and possibly exhausted and ill) the foundations of the society crumble.

My generation — forgive us — were lied to, with a lie we couldn’t personally disprove. We believed that until some time (12 weeks, I think) the growing baby was “a tube with no feelings and no brain” and no human characteristics. This is also untenable in the time of more and more developed sonograms. My older son looked like a peanut in the sonogram at 10 weeks, but now you can see features, little fingers.

So you fall back on ever more specialized definitions of why it’s okay to kill this person whom society says is not a person if mommy says he isn’t. The excuses are amazing. The relationship broke up and mom can’t afford him/her. The mother is mentally wounded somehow, and the birth will hurt her mental health. The baby has this or that defect. And of course, the baby will need complete support to stay alive after birth. (Like all of us did.) And of course, until x or why stage of development they can’t think as we define thinking. Etc. etc. etc.

But all of these definitions are thin when you consider “till birth and sometimes after.” Or for the “too expensive” “too much work” “too weak” “not compos mentis” …. we’ll all hit these at various points in our lives, and sometimes we recover from that, and sometimes we don’t. That standard will allow us to kill most of the disabled, most of the ill, and 100% of the aged. Looks towards Canada. And don’t think it’s not been noticed. Hell, when I was in the hospital, at 33, with pneumonia, I was told I should allow them to do the procedure that was almost guaranteed to kill me because I was a “drain on my family” and would probably always be, and did I want my husband to lose his job because he insisted on staying with me at the hospital? I mean, the old and the sick in general don’t even have mommy to stick up for them. In fact, according to various cases, at that point it’s “you’re human if your spouse/children say you are.”

It sucks. A society built for humans should have the broadest possible definition of human. Not “you’re disposable scrap unless someone else vouches for you.” and “You’re not even human unless your mother says you are.”

Look, I had a friend who had been very abused in childhood and who said that being wanted was a great standard. Otherwise the child would end up abused. She was a little taken back when I told her she was wanted. Her parents needed a child to abuse. Also “wanted” changes. Don’t believe me? Go to craigslist or facebook marketplace and see all the expensive-breed dogs being given away at 2 or 3 years of age, because they’re no longer wanted. Or, more heartbreakingly, all the old dogs and cats being given away because they’re no longer pretty, fluffy, compliant and CHEAP. As the vets bills mount “wanted” changes.

As for “But unwanted children won’t be happy”: poppycock. Beyond the fact that happiness is a terrible way to judge someone’s life and achievements (I am not permanently ecstatically happy. Are you?) by that standard both Dan and I — he was wanted by his mother, but as a GIRL, and I was never wanted by my mother. My father wanted more children, not my mother — are unhappy, suffering souls. And you know, despite illnesses and various issues, I don’t think we are. I really don’t think so. In fact, in the general order of things, and despite a lot of tight squeezes, we’ve been damn lucky and happy. And I don’t think we’re alone, as unwanted children.

In fact, there is absolutely NO justification for the Mommy Standard of Humanity. And the excuses grow thinner as we learn more about biology and human development.

It is a corrosive, crazy way of deciding what is human and what isn’t, what is to be protected and what is to be killed.

Birthrate drop? Ah! That would be lucky. People wonder about the deranged tick tock mommies and “we’re all Lindsey” nonsense. But why should they wonder? You gave mothers the right to decide who is human and who isn’t. Why should that stop once they’re out of the womb? Or in the crazy states out of the womb for a month or so? After all children can become inconvenient, expensive or simply trying and brainless-acting at any point between birth and eighteen. (And after. Hence my lamentations about “I’d smack you upside the head, but I’d need a step stool” which still happen, sometimes, and the boys are well, early middle age at this point. But I can’t say I’m responsible for them.) Why should they not have the right to do away with any inconvenient child they’re responsible for? After all, their sleep patterns are interrupted! They have to look after these small humans! Do you hear them crying? And just keeping them alive as toddlers is a full time job. Shouldn’t the mom have the right to personal fulfillment?

Roman fathers used to have the right to have their kids executed for anything including talking back. (How many of us would survive that?) Then we became more civilized…

In the ancient world, children got exposed in batch lots. Yes, for defects and maybe infidelity, but really for parents’ convenience. There was a Father’s standard. You’re human if he says you are. (Though if you think the women couldn’t give birth in secret and send the kid to be exposed, you’re an optimist or a fool.)

Christians were considered odd because they raised all they bore. If you think that had no impact on the advance and ultimate taking over by Christianity, you’re also a fool.

So, now, in a post-Christian world, we’ve reverted. And yep, birthrates are in the crapper.

But more importantly, the increasingly more obvious Mommy Standard of Humanity makes each and every one of us very aware “I’m only here, because I was allowed to live.” And “Society can change that permission at any time.”

Right to life? Don’t make me laugh.

But Sarah, you can’t be saying that every human is human from conception! Any number of pregnancies end, unnoticed, in spontaneous abortions.

Yeah, I’m aware of that. None better, since early miscarriage is the form my infertility took. So? Many lives end to, at various points before whatever arbitrary age. Does that give us the right to go around killing people, because so many people die of natural causes by their age? The standard is flawed.

I don’t know — and can’t think of any — standard for determining “What’s human” unless we go “is of human DNA, is alive, and if no one kills him/her has a good chance of growing into an independent autonomous human. Maybe not worth spit, (hell he might even grow into a communist) but definitely human.

If society is going to rest on the measure of the human and humanity, then human and humanity needs to be hard rock, something never questioned. The right to life of humans, all humans, must never, ever come into doubt.

Because that’s the price of the right to life for all of us.

The mommy standard sucks. Even the best, sanest of women have moments of idiocy and insanity. Trust me on this. I’m a woman and I try to be sane, but there are times… If her idiocy or insanity can cost the lives of other humans and this is legally and societally approved of? No one is safe.

“But you’d police every pregnancy.” Take a chill pill. I was born in a society where abortion was strictly forbidden by law. And yet it still happened. In fact, many women used it as their main method of contraception. In fact, it’s probably the only way to keep it safe and rare, because everyone involved knew they’d be in trouble if caught.

But they’d be in trouble if caught. Society as a whole held that human life was precious and not at the whim of either of its creators, father or mother. Society as a whole, though it wasn’t codified, held that humans had a right to life.

Liberty and the pursuit of happiness are pretty hard on the Mommy Standard.

It’s making everyone more than a bit insane and insecure.

I suggest that we’re not Spartans (thank heavens. They were closer to Cuba than to us) and most of us are not insane. It’s time to face up to the Mommy Standard and rethink the whole thing.

Before civilization is completely gone.

(A Blast from the Past: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2016/09/26/a-vast-wasteland-of-prosperity/ Additional Note from Holly the Assistant: Sarah wants me to let you know that Monday afternoon Dan had a medical false alarm, with the result that their local hospital is going to make a good deal of money off their insurance, and Sarah and Dan are recovering from the effects of spending most of two days and a night in a hospital, a battery of tests, and him being discharged with “Everything looks great, we have no clue, follow up with your PCP,” which all of us who have done that routine knows means they’re dead tired because no one lets you sleep in a hospital.)

Yesterday my husband threatened to drown himself in the shower, if I didn’t stop ranting about the stupid things people believe about history. It’s not that he disagreed, mind you, but that he thought it was too much to endure a graduate-level lecture with side-excursions into various examples he’d never heard about before even getting his pants on in the morning.

I sympathize.  It’s been a long time since I became aware that when that darn, mobile soap box finds me and gets under my feet, I get really really fast-talking and sometimes drop details.

Weirdly, this fit wasn’t prompted by the commenter who came back to an old post yesterday to lecture us about how stupid it is to expect dem poo’ peoplez to be able to retool and find new jobs, once technology dispossesses them of the old ones.  Weirdly, it started because he was telling me about a TV show and something said in the TV show.  (Beginning of digression. I watch second hand TV.  Whenever you guys see a reference or a quote to popular culture, I acquired it by listening to Dan talk about it.  At least most of the time.  No, I don’t know why I don’t watch TV.  What’s worse, I find most of the people who say “Oh, I don’t watch TV” are the sort of prigs who are bragging of their moral superiority.  I’m not morally superior, and my inability to sit still in front of a television, unless I am ill or engaged in some complex project that involves most of my head and hands, is almost as my dad thought a “handicap”.  It isolates me from the culture.  But it is also true.  I think it’s because I never “got used” to watching TV, like some people don’t get used to reading for pleasure.  Most of the time I was growing up, Portugal had two channels, and one only operated on the weekends and evenings. End of digression.) Dan, as he puts it, watches TV so I don’t have to.

Anyway, he was telling me about how terrible conditions were after WWI, and I started pointing out they weren’t.  Not really.  Sure, some people (a lot of domestic servants) were displaced.  Sure, immediately after, a lot of men came back and found their jobs were gone.  Veterans went around the country side, selling booklets and stuff.  You see this in Agatha Christie.

Unspoken is the fact that a lot of these Veterans were actually not quite right in the head, not that you can blame them after the trench war.  BUT even in Britain, which did itself no favors by prolonging the same kind of rationing, etc, it had had during the war, the economy recovered.

Again, if you read Christie, who was unaware of writing history, since she wrote these books contemporary to the events, you see a lot of new houses being built, of factories being started.  Sure, the old families and the old houses never quite recovered.  But that wasn’t because of the economy.  It was because of punitive taxation.  If you had a death in the family, the estate would be lost.

“But Sarah,” you’ll say.  “That’s why the economy recovered and they were able to live better.”

Really?  You’re going to go with that?

I know that was the theory back then, and we really can’t hold it against them, I think, but no, the state doesn’t “invest” in the economy.  Or “ease transition.”

Mostly what the state does is create more and more bureaucracy.  Of course to the extent that that pays a salary to some people it does SOMETHING (I found out, and was shocked at the racism of it, that this is part of the reason democrats support the endless growth of the state.  They think there are a number of people — specifically black people — who cannot adapt to new tech, and therefore must be employed by the state, ad infinitum, in a sort of work fare program.)  I suspect though, having seen the make-work and endless nonsense of bureaucracy in three countries, what it does do is retard the growth of the economy by removing capital from useful purposes.  Oh, and retarding the prosperity of the employees, not to mention their mental health, by keeping them chained to ultimately meaningless work they know it’s meaningless.  A lot of those people are in the position of soviet citizens.  They pretend to work and we pretend to pay them.

Without the galumphing bureaucracy, these people would have shifted and adapted.

How do I know that?  Because they’re human and I’m human.  Yeah, okay, there are differences in IQ range, but you know what they are not that pronounced amid the whole species.  Oh, sure, our dumber friends annoy us, but they’re still smarter than any other thing this planet has ever seen.

And our species thrives on change and strife.  Our species are cunning apes, who keep finding new ways of doing things.  Which drive progress, which shatters the status quo, which in turn causes people who were forced to change to look for more cunning ways of doing things, which…

Yeah, I saw the arguments of our visiting Luddite.  I have also read people who say we were much better before the invention of agriculture.  But what I know is that before the invention of agriculture we lived as individuals maybe 30 years, and as a species occupied certain zones of the globe, and lived in family groups of maybe 15.  There was a total number of us of maybe a million.  Maybe.  Now we cover the face of the earth and as individuals we’re healthier and more longer lived than we’ve ever been.

And while I sympathize with my fellow libertarians who think agriculture brought in a tiered society, I’d like to say poppycock.  With raspberries on top.  It’s not that you don’t get history (archeology is uncertain, and confused at that level.  Agriculture brought greater prosperity, and that made some tombs much less equal than others.  Also, the tombs we tend to find form the nomadic period are all chieftains or their equivalent) what you don’t get is human nature.  You’re engaging in the same form of fallacy the leftists engage in “Humans were perfect, and then an event–”  Bullshit.  I’m human, they were human. I know exactly their degree of perfection.  And as for thinking some kind of egalitarianism prevailed pre agriculture, those of you who think family-bands are egalitarian have never lived in a family with a tyrannical matriarch (or patriarch.)  It can be (not my family, we were never that organized) like a miniature totalitarian regime but even closer and more in your face.

Yeah, yeah, paleolithic diet and people were so much healthier and stuffs.  (Rolls eyes.)  While some of our metabolisms don’t seem to have caught up with agriculture (almost everyone I know who has issues with carbs has a relatively near ancestor from a nomad/hunting culture. Say no more than six generations off.) and while I myself eat very low carb for health reasons, the whole idea that people became LESS healthy with agriculture is a little mad.

Sure, and if you looked at graves from the village, from the time mom was a kid and my time, you’d find modern medicine, vaccinations and antibiotics had wreaked devastation on a healthy population.  This is because people died younger/less battered in her time.  Also infants tend to sort of vanish into the soil, so you wouldn’t get the great culling that happened before 3 years of age.  Only the strong survived.  In my generation, OTOH almost everyone survived, including the halting, the lame and those with chronic conditions.

Yeah, okay, so no progress comes without a cost.  Sure, some things will get worse, if only for a little while.  Yes, I read Christie (as I said.  One of the amazing things about mysteries, because grounded in the quotidian, is that they are a good record of how life really was, not how historians interpret it) and I read a lot about “pre war” (first) quality.  And it’s true there was a quality never again encountered except now, at high end craftsman created threads and clothes and furniture.

But the industry of the time would never have supplied the masses of humanity that progress allowed to live and thrive.

So, technological progress causes some losses, sometimes for a while.

What it causes, mostly, is disruption.  And the older you get the more you feel all disruption is for the worst, and the world is coming apart.  And if the progress happens too fast (say the first 50 years) people have trouble adjusting their MENTAL PICTURE of the world and some depart reality altogether and when this happens, (the last time I can think of is the industrial revolution, which more or less opened with the blood of the French revolution and closed with WWI.  If it has closed) it ends in blood.

Yeah, it’s scary out there, and things are shaking loose.  But a lot of the things that are shaking loose are undoing the mass-industrial-entertainment-news complex, and the idea that one size fits all.  Some of what is shaking lose is the inability for any of us to reach a mass audience without intermediary “gate keepers” who have long been taken over by the long march of Marxists (speaking of people who have left reality far behind.)

Technological progress — or even change — hurts.  But so does iodine.  It still allows us to live better and longer than our ancestors.

And the one thing you can count on is that we, cunning apes that we are, will continue engaging in it, and adapting to it, and fighting over it.

Those people who are all concerned about you losing your way in this heartless society?  Those who try to cushion you and put you in a safe space?

They’re not your friends.  They’re afraid of what you do if you and your creativity were fully unleashed.  They have achieved a certain domination over their society but are afraid if anything more happens they’ll lose it.

It’s not you, but them, they seek to help.

Ignore them and build.  Build under, build over, build around.  Anticipate technology.  Build technology.  And ignore them.  It’s the only way to deal with them.

Housekeeping Note:

Yes, we realize getting moderated is a pain. Yes, it is automagic thanks to WordPress. Yes, we can blacklist certain words, IP addresses, etc (you might recollect we had to block a whole chunk of a certain foreign country some years back?). NO, we canNOT whitelist you. Not by IP, not by handle. It is NOT a feature WordPress offers. Believe you me, if we could, we would, because for whatever reason there are half a dozen known regulars who get spam trapped regularly. Compared to the actual thousands of spammers and trolls that WordPress traps each day, it’s not bad.

Neither of us, as much as we love you, can spend all day at the computer letting comments through. We try to make sure one of us checks at least twice a day to let your brilliance through. And you really don’t want Sarah sitting here all day, because then you don’t get stories. Me, you don’t pay enough for that job: I’m one of those multiple-small-business-women, and you’d need to replace the rest of my income. But you can submit bids, if you really want to.

By Holly the Assistant.

(You may have noticed that Sarah and I swapped last Friday for this Tuesday. This was intentional, be not alarmed.)

The nature of being a musician is that I know a lot of teachers. My students play in school groups, my performing peers are often school teachers, their friends are teachers . . . a good amount of my local social circle is spread from Kindergarten teacher to tenured professor. And my parents were professors, so the overall multi-generational social circle . . . anyway, teachers everywhere.

And the thing is, they all mean well. They have good intentions. They want what’s best for their students. (I know there are ill-intentioned teachers, because humans, but I don’t know them personally. Well, except for two who . . . but that’s a different story for another time, and I’m absolutely sure those predators thought they were in the right all the way to prison.)

Which is the problem. Wanting what is best and actually knowing what is best are two very different things, and having the right to decide for another person is an entirely separate matter altogether.

Our educational system, by its nature, is central planning oriented. One teacher plans the classes for her many students, one principal plans the policy for her teachers, one dean directs her college. So conformity is a valued trait, by the nature of the system. To get employed and stay employed the teachers jump through hoops. (And tenured professors more than others, because PhDs are a dime a dozen and if you don’t conform you don’t get tenure, and you probably won’t land another position, at least not easily. It quickly becomes habitual, and habits stick.) If the person at the top of the hierarchy has decided that recess is good, teachers conform to that. If she’s decided that peanut butter is bad, teachers conform to that.

People who mean well who are selected for conformity. (And of course have a preference for students who match their own characteristics, and encourage students’ characters in that direction.)

That’s the educational establishment in this country.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: if the thing being conformed to is good, then it’s a very good thing indeed. But if the thing being conformed to is bad, then it quickly becomes very bad. Take Zero Tolerance, for an example. Zero Tolerance of bullying is a very good idea on the surface. No one wants bullies tolerated. They should be disciplined until they reform. In practice, though, it’s the victims who get disciplined when they finally retaliate. Why? The simplest explanation is that no one actually notices until the victim reacts. Often, though, there’s good evidence that the teachers did know, and ignored the bullying because the bully was of a group deemed to need extra help and support. Giving extra help and support to kids who need it is itself a good thing. Tolerating bad behavior because the kids need extra help and support is the opposite of good, but if we allow the common prior that people behave badly because of bad circumstances, it follows that the kids will just be good if helped and supported enough, so the victim who retaliates is actually the bad kid because he is in good circumstances and yet acted badly in retaliation. (Rationalizing FTW? Humans.)

And there we see the slow application of pavement of good intentions leading right to hell.

There’s yet another case of a teacher secretly transitioning a kid in the news. I guarantee you that teacher believes that she is doing this thing in the kid’s best interest. The state agrees. The parents don’t. It’s before a judge.

How do we decide what is best? When do we have the right to decide what is best for someone else?

The traditional answer goes something along the lines of conforming to the general society in ways that lead to successful survival is what is best, and that the head of the family/tribe/clan has the right to decide for the people within the group.

The religious answer is something like obey God, even if it leads to failure of personal survival, is what is best, and the head of the family/tribe/clan decides for the group, but the individual within the group is right to rebel if the order is against God’s law.

The modern American answer is actually pretty unclear about what is best, but pretty solid on as you choose for yourself, provided you are in fact an adult.

The whole debate right now is focused on who decides for non-adults, and exactly what is a non-adult. Is a sixteen year old a non-adult unless she wants an abortion? Is a twenty-five year old a non-adult if he’s on his parents’ health insurance? What constitutes mistreatment of a non-adult that terminates parental authority over the non-adult and moves her under government guardianship? Is the government automatically guardian over all non-adults within it’s jurisdiction? Do the parents have to pay if they have no authority over the non-adult? Is everyone actually under government guardianship and has freedom to act only with governmental permission?

This is on the ballot in a number of states this November, in various forms. When you read the propositions-and look up and read the actual text, not just the ballot summary, don’t just think about that particular issue, think about the broader principals of who decides what is best for another person and in what situations.

Among my personal friends are a family with a child with a rare genetic mutation incompatible with life, long-term. They are part of a foundation of families supporting the researchers working towards cures for this class of mutations. Which is to say, one-off genetic engineering on a living person, which cannot be tested for safety with double blind studies . . . who decides on taking the risk of trying the genetic engineering on the child, if the researchers get to the point they think they may succeed?

And then for adults, we’ve recently seen a couple whistle blowers over organ donations intended to be taken from living, responsive, adult humans, who would have been killed by the donation. Who decides what is best?

When your relative is too old to decide for himself anymore, who decides for him? Who decides he is too old? What’s in his best interests?

The perfect person who perfectly knows what is best for everyone else doesn’t exist, and would be overwhelmed with sorting out the entire world population if she did, anyway. Given that, letting the individual figure out what he thinks is best for himself, and letting the closest kin of those who cannot decide for themselves, however we decide who cannot decide for themselves, determine what is best for them, is the route to the best results for the majority, even though there will always be those individuals who make bad choices for themselves and for those they have control over among us.

Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness, as someone much wiser than I once put it.

People are really odd sometimes.

Okay, so the preliminary to this, and the reason my substacks have been dead, my books are late, etc. is that I spent the last two weeks working on clearing the rest of our former house. Once more, this would have been much easier with Dan’s help, or over a few months. And — for various reasons — we could have taken a few months, but the months we intended to take weren’t possible through a concatenation of adverse circumstances. So … I could choose to take yet more time, now, or to put myself through two weeks of hell and then finally be able to write again.

Is it all done? Aw, no. But if Dan helps next weekend, it should be, and that’s the plan right now, because frankly I can’t just keep pushing pushing pushing. I’m BEAT. How beat? Well, instead of doing anything vaguely productive today (other than finishing setting up the kitchen which is kind of essential and took about 2 hours) I sat on the sofa careening through youtube, hitting on recommends for talks, podcasts, interviews. But good news, it wasn’t watching videos of a guy watching through cemeteries, so I’m not at that level of depression, nor becoming sick again. I’m just exhausted, a malady for which we know the remedy. The plan for the week, is to do maybe an hour or two mornings, then write in the afternoons. Walks, yes, death marches, no.

Anyway, one of the videos I watched, by a commenter I won’t name because I’m still semi-miffed at him for dismissing my opinion on something for which I presented supporting evidence and don’t want to turn this into a war, (I generally respect his intellect and opinions) left me open-mouthed with shock.

Because he’s not stupid. And he’s been looking at politics, particularly politics in the US longer than I have. But his contention was that Barrack Obama started a revolution and that we’re now in a counter revolution.

He’s right we’re now in a counter revolution. But Barrack Obama? Really? He even names Clinton as being part of the previous, decent equilibrium. You know, Clinton. The man who sneaked through Motor Voter and set the stage for our current voting mess where we don’t actually know if people are voting for socialists, or if it’s all fake votes.

He seems to think of Bush and Clinton as the happy, stable times, and I want to scream and bang my head against the desk (except I’m writing this on the sofa (surrounded by cats) because he who has a nine to five job hasn’t set up my desk (yet. He’s working on it. He promises.)

The truth is that the “democrat socialists” are not something new under the sun, and Obama certainly didn’t usher them in.

Obama was, in many ways, the crowning achievement of what started as an infiltration and subversion movement by the USSR. In many ways, he explicitly — like Putin — wanted to bring about a new flowering of the USSR. He explicitly said he wanted to undo everything that Reagan did. (And those of you who don’t think it’s funny he did this while Rome had a pope who was the antithesis of John Paul II is funny fail to admire the sense of humor of the Author.) Obama, like all the red diaper babies, thought that the wrong people had won the cold war and he stompy foot, stompy foot wanted a recast and re-film of the movie. Without really understanding much of what happened or even what’s possible.

Ruinous, yes. Disastrous, yes. A revolutionary leader? Tickle me and make me laugh. He was in fact — and still is — The Little Man Who Wasn’t There. He was in it for the adoration, the perks of celebrity, but he was — and is — no mastermind. His ascendancy was only possible because our voting systems were already corrupted (am I the only person who remembers OFA bragging of making up 2 million votes for him?) His presidency was horrendous because he hates us. But not because he had a super-master-plan. In fact, most of what he tried to bring about either didn’t work or backfired spectacularly. Despite Fast and Furious iodicy, the 2A advocates went from victory to victory, for instance. He could destroy, yes, but not create anything.

And neither can his cohort. The creepy crawly socialists coming out of their holes are products of indoctrination who are in this because they think if they don’t strike now the time will pass. This is a ghost dance, not a victory dance.

Obama never had the following, the strength, the glazing (including after leaving power) that Clinton had. He’s not revered as Clinton is.

Why? Because while we are in a counter-revolution, it goes far deeper than Trump. It started before him. Heck, it was probably existent as feeling and resentment before the internet gave us voice and a place to meet.

The truth is that the attacks on the US and our constitutional republic from a socialist flange have been going on for 100 years give or take. I’d say 113 years, actually.

Heinlein said, during World War II that communists had already penetrated and substantially controlled the Democrats. I’ve seen nothing to show me he was wrong. They certainly had already penetrated academia and the arts.

But now we’re fighting back. Obama isn’t revered like Clinton was for a good 10 years after his presidency, because the media is no longer our soul form of information.

Trump was elected because people already knew how to find information the media won’t give us.

Before the counter-revolution, there was an earthquake. An earthquake that took place in how people live, how people perceive the world. An earthquake in reality itself.

Now, not wanting to discount what Trump has done, particularly in his second term. But his second term wouldn’t have happened if all this were playing out in the 1990s.

None of which is to say we’re not in grave danger. In fact, I’ve been fighting off the heebies all day, though that might be because I’m so tired and this always makes me anxious and depressed.

Yes, the midterms are dangerous. We could do without the Iran war, but I’m sure Trump’s hand on that was forced. Whether it was forced by a real danger of a nuclear Iran of by lying reports of such, none of us can know.

Our only hope is that the defanging of the Democrat money machine will have a considerable effect. That, and if you’re the praying kind, prayer.

Not that a reverse will stop the earthquake, and the counterrevolution it engendered, but because it will set us back and make us fight from a position of greater ruin. And we’re already in such ruinous mess. (The Biden-puppet was surprisingly effective at destruction.)

But it comes to that, then that’s what we’ll do. I’d just rather we were spared.

Meanwhile, win or lose, expect the left to go crazier and crazier and create crazier and crazier situations.

Clears throat: if you’re in a safe position, stay there. If your position looks unstable, find a stable one, away from potential falling debris. Be alert to the fact that a chasm can suddenly open under your feet and that bridges might have fallen.

It’s going to continue shaking.

And yet, it is preferable to the 1984-nightmare we were getting locked into before the shake-up. Far preferable.

Be not afraid. Work, think, speak, pray.

Build under, build over, build around. Prepare to take the weight when structures come crashing down.

In the end, we win, they lose.

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH

FROM BILL SACRAM: Burn It With Fire in Endless Battle Wyrd Warfare (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 80)

The hour is late. The bottle is low. The lightweights have gone home. What’s left is the stuff that burns going down & the stories nobody tells until everybody sober has left the room .

Eleven stories. Eleven wars. One question nobody wants answered.

A survey scout stranded on an ocean world follows something enormous through the water, and finds out whose nightmares he’s been having. Two British privates break through the wall of a trench in 1916 and find what’s been taking the bodies out of no man’s land. A Union major and his Confederate cousin stand back-to-back in New Mexico because the dead Comanche in the valley below don’t care which uniform you wore. A frozen squad at the Chosin Reservoir learns that the thing killing them can be hurt–by noise. A Navy senior chief sits in a courtroom that’s just been cleared of its jury, and finally tells someone what came out of the fog at 25 degrees north.

From the Western Front to Korea, from Katanga to the Bermuda Triangle, from a deployment gate cut into the earth at Oak Ridge to a Warsaw schoolhouse full of things that shouldn’t have a body, these are soldiers doing the job in front of them while the rules quietly stop applying.

Some of them come home.

FROM DALE COZORT: Through the Wild Gate

Robinette Thornburg, the half-human daughter of ultra-rich Robert Thornburg, thought she was fully human, just weird, for the first twenty-one years of her life. She went to expensive private schools, then Harvard. On her twenty-first birthday, she learned that she was half Mangi, the result of an encounter between her father and a primitive near-human woman from the Wild, an alternate reality North America where primitive humans arrived half a million years ago, but no modern humans ever did.

That was the first she had heard of Mangi or the Wild, closely held secrets of the wealthy families who control Gates to it, but she finds out far more than she wants to about the Wild when mysterious enemies kidnap her and leave her to die in the Wild, naked and weaponless.

Robinette nearly starves before finding her way back to our world through an early, uncontrolled Gate. She vows revenge, but on who? She teams up with Eric Carter, a down on his luck private eye and former bodyguard to her father. The two try to figure out who kidnapped Robinette and why, a quest that takes them through the decadent world of the Gate families, the only law in the Wild. It also takes them back to the Wild and then to a final confrontation with, their lives and the fate of the Wild at stake.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Light Up the Night

Dane Crockford is tired. Tired of the green energy crapping out and leaving his wife Rose gasping for breath when their air conditioning dies, tired of trying to hide his use of his own solar panels from the nationalized electrical company, and tired of worrying about his daughter and son-in-law, trapped in an abusive indenture program to pay off their student loans. He’s not the only one, either. Everyone in his home town is in a similar situation, many of them with their children doing dangerous jobs without pay to offset crippling student debt. So when his grandson Toby accidentally discovers an energy generation method that isn’t wholly owned by the federal government, he jumps on the possibility of building something that works, in spite of and around the federal monopoly.

But what the monopoly doesn’t realize is that their grip on Dane, and on his home town, is far less secure than they think. When they disconnect his house from the power grid, they have nothing to hold over him, to force him to work for small rebates on his monthly bill. The utility has unleashed the power of a cranky old man with a rare skill, and they’ve got no idea that they’ve tossed the pebble that starts an avalanche.

“Holly Chism is one of the great, unappreciated authors of our generation. Her work reminds me a lot of Clifford Simak’s.” – Sarah A Hoyt, author of Darkship Thieves

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Emerald Relay: The Jade Dragon Protocol, Book 2 (The Four Banners 3)

The signal was never supposed to be found.

When the survey vessel Tarashima receives a perfectly authenticated fleet order that Fleet Command never sent, retired intelligence officer Major Hiroshi Takamura is pulled from his fourth retirement—eleven days in—and into an investigation that reaches back thirty-one years.

Someone has built the Emerald Relay: a distributed communications network capable of transmitting authenticated commands to every installation in the eastern spiral simultaneously. There is no central point that can be identified or disabled. The theoretical framework was stolen from its creator. The evidence trails point at every nation at once—which means the evidence was manufactured.

The relay hasn’t activated yet. But the window is closing.

With Inspector Mina Park managing the four governments’ back channels, physicist Dr. Aiko Watanabe calculating how much time remains, and former Bureau analyst Madam Xiu Lian emerging from eleven months of solitary investigation with an archive no one knew existed, Takamura must find the relay’s physical archive before someone uses it to start a war—or to own one.

The Emerald Relay is the second novel in the Jade Dragon Protocol series: Golden Age espionage fiction set among the stars, in the tradition of John le Carré and Isaac Asimov.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: JACK CORBETT – SPACE CADET: A Science Fiction Novel

Jack Corbett appears to be a typical junior high student of the 1980’s. Appears to be, on the surface; in school the best the socially awkward Jack can expect is to be called a ‘Space Cadet’, something he can only avoid by Dreaming. The Dream – capital ‘D’ – is a complex fantasy where he is Jax Corbett, the mighty hero of the starlanes. Unlike his unhappy real life, Jack can control the Dream completely; in adventure after fantastic adventure the confident Jax Corbett never fails, never falters. Until now. Now the Dream seems to have taken on a life of its own, a life Jack can no longer control. The Dream eventually becomes so real that Jack believes he is going insane – until he is confronted by a stranger in the actual world, a stranger who somehow knows about Jack’s fantasies! What can it mean? The explanation is so incredible Jack has trouble believing it – until he finds himself plunged headfirst into the Dream, a dangerously real Dream with the stranger in pursuit and Jack’s own life hanging in the balance…

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Lunar Surface Blues

The High Frontier is no place for foolishness, but nature can always make a better idiot.

Four years ago, Molly’s parents brought her up here to the Moon when their work brought them to Shepardsport. In the time since that move, she’s earned her place here and a seat on this field trip. Only one problem — she’s been given the worst possible EVA partner.

A pencil-necked dweeb with an attitude, Benji wants to be one of the guys. But his stunts keep putting them both in danger, and the adults keep blaming Molly.

When Benji gets in over his head, can Molly save him before it costs both their lives?

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM LINDSAY PEET: The Caliuga Setup (The Jaf Daskal Diaries Book 4)

Deserts, disasters, double-crosses… Jaf Daskal returns.

It all began as a simple scam; steal the treasure you’ve been paid to retrieve.
But you have to flee, and your airship is taken by a storm to a new continent.
You’re mistaken for emissaries of the Emperor to this long-lost land, and you live it up as Inspector General.
But some folks aren’t ready for the Empire, as they’re building their own, and don’t appreciate the loose rules of some folks.
Jaf Daskal finds himself in the middle of a struggle to define a land’s future, while coping with a new religion, a new aphrodisiac, and a new love.

The Caliuga Set-Up is Book Four in the Jaf Daskal Adventures, a rollicking tale of humor, farcical mischief, adventure and intrigue.

Click ‘Buy Now’ and tumble headfirst into the chaos of Caliuga and Jaf Daskal’s life!

FROM MEL DUNAY: The Star Master Duology: Shadow Captain and Spider Star: A Complete Science Fiction Series

Jetay is a slave, and so is his brother. They crew a rundown freighter at the ragged edge of Settled Space, and Jetay hides the blade he can form out of psychic energy, because faceless men in red armor are hunting down psychics like him. Then Lady Lanati of the Partisan Alliance buys passage on his ship, finds that her rebellion has no officer available for a secret mission, and puts him in a uniform he has no right to wear. It turns out that he’s pretty good at this. The next thing he knows, he’s a free man with a military commission, standing between a self-crowned Pharaoh and a machine that devours psychics and destroys stars. Both books of the Star Master duology in one volume: 200,000 words of rotating-POV space opera with fleet battles, found family, an enemy captain you come to like, and a courtship that takes two books to reach one kiss. No explicit content. The complete story.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Lion in Paradise (Timelines Book 3)

All Col. Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., USSFM – the Lion of God – wanted was a little piece of paradise to call her own.

Being stuck on a desert world – even if she was the CO of the premiere battalion of the 1st U.S. Space Force Marines that was based there – was not getting her any beach time. Mostly because, without an ocean, there’s really no beach at all.

But she’s got a fix for that problem.

Now, if only the academics studying the problem of terraforming the exile world of al-Saḥra’ would get out of her way . . .

. . . and if only the religious fanatics who want their planet left as a desert, despite all the water from the planet’s former oceans being accessible only a few miles down, will leave the terraforming project alone long enough to see the good it will bring them . . .

. . . then, the Lion would truly be in Paradise.

But even in paradise, black clouds – and black ships – can herald danger for the Lion, herself, and for her daughters as well.

FROM RANDY BROWN: Assignment Day

In 2080 , senior year comes with one huge assignment: rebuild a dead person’s life from every digital trace they left behind, then upload them into VX, the virtual world every living person visits daily.

Corb Thomas wanted an exciting assignment, maybe someone famous, maybe someone who could help him win the ultimate prize: cash, cars, or an unlimited VX wallet.

Instead, he gets Ben Theige, a painfully ordinary rocket scientist who died decades ago. Or at least, that’s what the records say.

The deeper Corb digs, the stranger Ben’s life becomes. Missing data. Corrupted coordinates. A death certificate that doesn’t make sense. A mysterious student following him through VX. And an AI assistant who may know more than it’s telling.

With his girlfriend Kay and best friend Ruben pulled into the mystery, Corb starts to realize Ben wasn’t boring at all—he was hiding something big enough to break the most powerful system in the world.

Now a school project has turned into a race through secrets buried in both the real and virtual worlds.

Because VX doesn’t make mistakes. It doesn’t change the truth. And it definitely doesn’t erase the past.

Unless someone taught it how.

FROM TALEENA SINCLAIR: A Death in the Country: A John Recht Novel (John Recht Novels Book 2)

When John Recht goes to visit an old army friend he hopes to sharpen his estate management, not solve a murder.

Bale Janow is the man everyone hates. Cashiered for cowardice during a pivotal engagement with Waldbach’s long standing enemy the Horde, he has only one advocate, John Recht’s host Charl Wallend. Unhappy memories and dark secrets are brought to light when death rocks the insular community of the country estate.

John and his trusty valet Martin must discover who’s simmering anger is stirred to fresh action and is responsible for A Death in the Country.

FROM JAMES YOUNG: Missives From the Green: An Alternate History Collection

“Halfway down the trail to Hell, in a shady meadow green…”

Fiddler’s Green. A pleasant rest stop halfway to the Styx, the Green was originally accessed by nautical service to the English Crown. Alas, it has currently been infringed upon by those felled while mounted upon noble steeds both living and mechanical. This collection contains six “What ifs…” of military alternate history whose characters would certainly qualify as its eternal denizens:

• Ride with U.S. Army tankers as they rush their new Pershing tanks into the Battle of the Bulge in “Blackjack At Bastogne.”
• Stand on the deck of the U.S.S. North Carolina as she rushes to save an Arctic Convoy from Kriegsmarine raiders in “A Christmas Action.”
• Fly with American pilots as they desperately attempt to stave off the Luftwaffe during a Second Battle of Britain in “Londonfall,” a Usurper’s War short story.
• Join the 72nd Armored Battalion as it desperately stands against the Communist tide outside Pusan in “Mr. Dewey’s Fire Brigade.”
• Two decades later, witness VF-84’s Tomcats battle the North Vietnamese Air Force (NVAF) and its Communist allies over Hanoi in “Mr. Ford’s Cats.”
• Finally, for the first time as part of a larger collection, this volume also includes the Usurper’s War novella Pandora’s Memories.

So go ahead and empty the proverbial canteen and prepare to be regaled once more by a “Master of Alternate History.” There’s plenty of “sabers keen” and “fierce melees” to be found in this collection of clashes that might have been.

NOTE: These short stories can also be found in the Arc of Ares series edited by James Young. They are collated here for ease of accessibility and fiscal economy.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: EXTEND