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, by clicking through and buying (anything, 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.– SAH
FROM TALEENA SINCLAIR: Everything Beautiful In Its Time
Everything Beautiful In Its Time
A Collection of Poetry
In Everything Beautiful In Its Time, the ancient rhythms of nature interweave with timeless spiritual wisdom to create a contemplative journey through both calendar and conscience. This collection moves from the observable world—spring’s capricious winds, summer’s dappled light, autumn’s memory-harvest, winter’s patient stillness—into deeper territories of the heart where biblical wisdom meets personal experience.
Drawing inspiration from Ecclesiastes’ meditation these poems explore the appointed times of human experience: birth and death, planting and harvest, mourning and dancing, silence and speech. Through intimate narratives of family, marriage, and faith, the collection traces how divine purpose unfolds in particular moments—a child’s escape from garden labor, the forgiveness cycle walked along Pacific Northwest cliffs, the gamble of loving deeply.
Rich with sensory detail and anchored in place, these poems speak to anyone seeking meaning in both the sweetness and sorrow that come to every table life spreads before us.
FROM TOM ROGNEBY: Battle Buddy
An old friend came to visit when Anna least expected him. On a rainy day, a cup of coffee and conversation leads to what she needs most.
Pilgrims are washed ashore on a small island, interrupting their journey to change history.
Space Marines fight a battle to secure a derelict space station.
All this and more, from sword and sorcery to space shootouts to ghost stories.
BY GEORGE WASHINGTON OGDEN, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Trail Rider (Annotated): The classic pulp western
In the heart of Kansas, Texas Hartwell arrives seeking a fresh start, only to be drawn into a web of deceit and danger. Hired as a trail rider, Hartwell’s life takes a dark turn when he is framed for introducing infected cattle onto the range. As accusations fly and tensions rise, Hartwell must fight to clear his name while navigating a landscape rife with betrayal and unexpected alliances.
Amidst the chaos, Hartwell finds solace in his love for Sallie McCoy, the dedicated schoolteacher who sees the truth in his eyes. Yet, his path is complicated by Fannie Goodnight, a woman caught in the crosshairs of the cattle rustlers, who harbors a secret affection for him. Uncle Boley, the loyal bootmaker, stands steadfast by Hartwell’s side, offering unwavering support in the face of adversity.
Hartwell must confront his enemies, unmask the traitors, reclaim his honor and protect those he loves.
Join Texas Hartwell on a journey of redemption and resilience, where the line between friend and foe is blurred, and the true measure of a man is tested.
- This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the novel historic and genre context.
FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Lion and the Darkness (Timelines Book 4)
The Long-Awaited Sequel to The Lion in Paradise
At long last, Ariela Rivers Wolff begins her mission to the Simulated Worlds.
As the Martyr of Sardristra, she finds herself in the position of a Joan of Arc, burned at the stake for preaching a sermon of love to a very violent race of . . . blue, four-legged, four-armed, sort-of-horse analogs. Five hundred years later in their history, she finds a totally-reversed welcome as “Saint Ardreyelya” in the country in which she first appeared. Will she be able to prevent the rest of the world from destroying “her” people before she can convert them, too?
As the Goddess of Mahoukai, she finds herself the deity of a world religion in a world governed by magic. And like all worlds with magic, inevitably there is a Demon Lord. She’ll have to deal with that Demon Lord before the world of Mahoukai can be realized into the True Universe . . . but in the event, the Demon Lord is an infiltrated agent of the very enemies she is sworn to fight in the real world. Can The Lion of God take on a Darkness, single-handed? If not, it may spell doom for the inhabitants of Mahoukai – and for herself.
FROM BLAKE SMITH: The Hartington Inheritance (The Hartington Series Book 1)
Almira Hartington was heir to the largest fortune in the galaxy, amassed by her father during his time as a director of the Andromeda Company. But when Sir Josiah commits suicide, Almira discovers that she and her siblings are penniless. All three of them must learn to work if they wish to eat, and are quickly scattered to the far reaches of the universe. Almira stubbornly remains on-planet, determined to remain respectable despite the sneers of her former friends.
Sir Percy Wallingham pities the new Lady Hartington. But the lady’s family will take care of her, surely? It’s only after he encounters Almira in her new circumstances that he realizes the extent of her troubles and is determined to help her if he can. He doesn’t know that a scandal is brewing around Sir Josiah’s death and Almira’s exile from society. But it could cost him his life, and the lady he has come to love.
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.
FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: The Guardian Cycle, Vol.1: In Dreams and Other Stories
A man whose debts must be paid by vengeance. A woman desperate to save her husband. A grieving father finding a young enemy soldier on his veritable doorstep…
These fantasy and soft sci-fi stories wonder whether or not heroes need families. Are we not told that families slow the hero down? Is it not typically implied that they get in the way of the adventure? Are they a burden, or truly the greatest strength from which the hero and those he loves can draw?
Six tales in this collection center on family, faith, and self-sacrificing love as men and women fight for the ones whom they hold most dear. Whether the enemy is inner turmoil, a nightmare, or a demon really does not matter. If the threat seeks to harm a member of the family, it is going to pay dearly.
FROM M. C. A. HOGARTH: Live, Love, Level
In a world where virtual reality gaming lets players shape their own stories, Nick desperately wants to join the beta test for Omen Galaxica’s revolutionary AI update. There’s just one catch – he needs a partner who’s never played before. Enter his mother Amanda, currently on bedrest during a difficult pregnancy. Together, they must rebuild the destroyed village of Donner’s Beck while defending it from a notorious griefer intent on wreaking havoc. But as virtual and real worlds blur, both Nick and Amanda discover that games aren’t just about escape… they’re about connection, growth, and finding your place in a rapidly changing world.
A heartwarming tale of family, friendship, and finding meaning in unexpected places, perfect for:
- Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z (and boomers who know)
- parents and teens and people in-between
- gamers and people who love but are baffled by people who game
- dragon, AI, and pizza enthusiasts
FROM C. CHANCY: Seeds of Blood
Welcome to Intrepid. Where Halloween brings tourists, turning leaves – and demons.
Over two decades of bloody murder, Steven Savonarola carved a sorcerous Demongate into the heart of his own hometown. With less than two weeks to disarm it before Halloween, Detective Church and the IPD are running out of time.
Lucky for them, they have an edge: Myrrh, a hell-raider with over a thousand years’ experience shattering dark magic, and Aidan, a half-demon fire mage with a very personal grudge against evil.
The plan is simple: Find the tainted sites. Purify them. Try not to die.
They’ll need all the help they can get. Steven may be gone, but shadows in the mountains are determined to see the Demongate open – even if they have to slaughter half the city to do it. And when it comes to killing shadows, even hell-raiders don’t know everything.
If they’re going to make it to All Saint’s Day, they’re going to need hot lead, cold mead, and a weapon that’s out of this world.
And a little praying wouldn’t hurt….
Welcome to Intrepid. It’s a hell of a Halloween.
FROM JAY MAYNARD: Reflections in Crystal (The Crystal Therapy Chronicles Book 1)
Magic fixes people the world cannot touch.
Alex Sullivan isn’t crazy — just angry. Angry enough to get arrested. Angry enough to be given a strange choice: prison, or an experimental magical program at a private facility in rural Missouri.
They claim to fix broken people not with medicine or therapy, but with silence, service, and a skintight suit of latex.
Inside the suit, Alex is cut off from the world — unable to speak, eat, or even cry in the ordinary way. Inside the crystal, time flows differently. There, guided by someone who seems to know him better than he knows himself, Alex must face his deepest wounds… and either heal, or shatter.
But this is no simple treatment. Alex finds himself on a journey into a hidden world where redemption is earned, the broken are made whole, and some choose never to leave the suit again.
Previously published as Foundational Laminate.
“One of the rare novels I hope becomes reality—a hard look at how to turn the antisocial into good neighbors.”
— Karl K. Gallagher, author of The Fall of the Censor and Torchship
FROM KAREN MYERS: King of the May – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 3)
Book 3 of The Hounds of Annwn.
MORE VALUABLE AS A WEAPON THAN A KINGMAKER, HE MUST MAKE HIS OWN CHOICES TO SECURE THE FUTURE.
George Talbot Traherne, the human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, had hoped to settle into a quiet life with his new family, but it was not to be. Gwyn ap Nudd, Prince of Annwn, has plans to secure his domain in the new world from the overbearing interference of his father Lludd, the King of Britain.
The security of George’s family is bound to that of his overlord, and he vows to help. But when he and his companions stand against Lludd and his allies at court, disaster overturns all their plans and even threatens the Hounds of Annwn themselves.
George and his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, must survive a subtle attack that undermines them both. Other gods and gods-to-be have taken an interest, but the fae are divided in their allegiances and fear the threat of deadly new powers in their unchanging lives.
George and his companions must save themselves if they are to persuade their potential allies to help. But how can they do so, attacked on so many fronts at once? Will he put his family into greater jeopardy by trying to defend them?
FROM SARAH A. HOYT (VOLUME 2 NOW OUT, VOLUME 3 OUT TUESDAY AFTER NEXT): No Man’s Land
No Man’s Land
Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.Volume 2
Skip thought he’d figured out the rules of survival on Elly.
He was wrong.
Now his potential allies from the Star Empire are turning up dead, one by one. Spies and saboteurs have infiltrated every level of Ellyan society, and Skip is running out of people he can trust.
As he races to save the king and archmagician—his only remaining allies—disturbing secrets about Elly’s culture emerge alongside buried truths about his own family’s past. One moment he’s explaining the bewildering concept of binary gender to confused Ellyans, the next he’s making impossible choices that could strand him on this world forever.
His last gambit is reckless. The odds of success are slim. And failure means losing everything—his mission, his allies, his only way home.
But some fights are worth the risk, even when the deck is stacked against you.
Sometimes the most dangerous enemy is the one you never see coming.
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 ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: STUPENDOUS
According To Hoyt 
The trailers had all the usual hype-words: spectacular, stupendous, monumental. You name it, the announcers intoned it as if it actually meant something.
So of course all my friends were antsy with excitement as we waited for the big day. Not that any theater in our area was going to be scheduled for the initial release — those go to the big cities. The little four-plex in Brockton’s tiny mall wouldn’t get anything for at least a week afterward, so we got to see whose folks had the money for the trips and the Ticketmaster fees, and who was going to wait for the hometown theater to get it.
I was unsurprised when the figures from the initial releases were less than wowing. All that initial hype had raised expectations so high that even a masterpiece would have trouble fulfilling them. If anything, the hypesters made it easier for the initial viewers to feel that, as the old saying goes, “the mountains labored and brought forth a mouse.” This wasn’t the sort of movie that people immediately got back into line to see a second time — and we’d be lucky if it even made it to the second-run theaters.
A few years later, when giant-screen flat panel TV’s were first becoming a thing, I watched it in a friend’s home theater, complete with Dolby surround-sound. It would’ve been a decent moneymaker as a stand-alone, but as the much touted return to a beloved fictional world, I could see far too much recycling of the key moments of earlier movies without understanding why they were such high points. To use another old saying, “that which is good is not original, and that which is original is not good.”
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“Alex is Stupendous!”
Alex responded, “Stop this nonsense about me being STUPENDOUS! Yes, I’m the highest ranking Titan of my graduating class of the Academy but there are plenty of other Titans who’d outdo me in skill and power. And some of them might challenge me and some may be idiot enough to endanger the public while doing so!”.
“Agree” said an older Titan who entered the Bar. “There are good reasons for the Agency to discourage challenges about who are the Best”.
Alex replied “Yes Sarge!”
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Nice set of promos as always! Great to see your series is out, and a new one from MCA Hogarth!!!
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Stupendous selection of books today. Just bought three from the list, and another that shares characteristics of the listed book.
I’m looking forward to NML Vol 3; It’ll be ready for the main event in my personal medical adventure series. Might not read much on Wednesday; depends on how loopy I’ll be with post-op painkillers.
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Note: Wednesday, 10/15. This one, Kat goes to the vet for yearly shots.
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The flowers were all small and white, but the scent on the air was stupendous.
They all stopped for a moment, and Sonia said, “Why, this is sweeter than a perfumery!”
“And,” said Giles, “roses are ready to overgrow a house if the daughter is enchanted to a century’s sleep.”
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Thanks for the promo! : )
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NP. I figured it was a good Halloween push. :D
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A bow to the Master.
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Calvin always reminded me very much of myself as a little boy, paticularly when we’d see Calvin in school. Years after fourth grade, my mother told me that my teacher, Mrs. M, thought I was off in my own little world. I replied that I was, since whatever little world I could concoct for myself was much better than any world with Mrs. M in it.
And it was years after that before my mother told me what she really thought of Mrs. M. Apparently we were on the same page.
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The man in the dark red armor stood with his arms folded across his chest and his eyes closed. The sound of his eyes rolling was almost audible.
The death trap his colleagues were caught in was blatantly obvious. Anyone who had bothered to check would have seen signs of the slowfield that the villian had used as a secondary trap behind the explosive attached to the reactor housing. Captain Stupendous, of course, had blundered into it blind and caught the rest of the team as well. Well, almost all of them. Once again, Dr. Arcano was convinced of the wisdom of lagging behind and thinking things through rather than bulling through and figuring it out later. “And here we are again,” he intoned. “Me. Having to pull all our tails of the fire. Could you all, just once, think before you leap?!!! If things weren’t so desperate, I’d leave you there to figure out to save yourselves this time. But…” he paused and fiddled with dial on his vambrace which shot out a tight, corruscating beam of energy and hit the blue wire on the explosive pack, causing the timer to short out and feeding back into the slowfield and dispelling it. “Those who think they know what they’re doing thoroughly annoy those of us who actually do.”
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So much talent!! Stupendous!!
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“That Midnight fellow says he’s composing a song for me on Garage Band,” said Nigel Slim-Howland. “He insists it will be stupendous!”
“Quite flattering, sir,” said Jenkins, his butler.
“But it sounds like a drunk accordionist jumping up and down on bagpipes!”
“Is that not, in a way, stupendous, sir?”
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Cari was depressed. The girl down the hall seemed so hopeful when she asked Cari to look over her creative writing assignment. But after forcing her way through the purplest prose and lackadaisicalest grammar, Cari was forced to conclude her classmate had aimed for stupendous but had landed on stupid.
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Thanks for the promo! I wouldn’t have published without the specific support of this blog and Sarah in particular. Hopefully one day soon, I will publish the novel instead of poetry and you will promo that too. I have gotten so many great books from the promo, I am happy to be among them.
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It was a toad. Nothing stupendous. It felt no worse than the snake, and less than the cup. She put her hands to the stone and began to dissolve the wrongness.
The toad grew a little more vague shape. Then it opened its mouth and let out an ugly croak, and leapt at her face. Flinging up her hands only meant its feet touched her fingers as well as her cheek, and she felt the wrongness flow into them. Pain bit, both icy cold and fiery hot, and terror rose as she flung the creature away.
You healed that before, she told herself. Do not stop.
She turned her powers on herself, healing her face, and feeling the toad hopping toward her, full of malice and venom.
Her hands burned, and she threw them forward. Dissolving the toad and its malice and its poison, and only then healing her hands.
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What a joy to see Taleena Sinclair’s book led your promo. I have the book on backorder and am awaiting it eagerly.
Of course, I’m her Dad.
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Thanks for Live, Love, Level. It helped a lot, today.
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(Part 1/2)
“I can’t believe it’s so… beautiful.” Miranda Lake leaned up against the polycarbonate-reinforced heavy glass of the lab’s brine-filled, yards-deep viewing window, through which could be seen a fist-sized bluish ‘flame’ on the tip of the thumb-thick iron rod in the vacuum chamber. “Of course it’s madly more poisonous than a coral snake, but still it’s lovely.” Then she just gazed at the now-almost-steady turnip-shape of ionized iron vapor as if it were about the most magnificent flower ever grown. Turned to look through one of the several low-mag spotting scopes. “Colored so much like an iris, of one of the kinds I most fancy.” Night-black hair cascaded forward over her businesslike dove-gray blouse as she bent to the eyepiece.
It wasn’t ‘burning’ chemically, or electrically. Or even, quite strictly speaking, nuclearly, for all the invisible sleet of fast/hot/piping-hot neutrons boiling off its active region at anything from a few MeV up to a few hundred. What was happening in there was Kuzmin oscillations: iron’s neutrons flipping over to anti-neutrons and then annihilating with protons or other neutrons, with the resulting shower of pions (and other things) merrily ripping bits and pieces off the iron nucleus as they clawed their ravening way toward its surface and escape.
Fission reactors made Watt-spectrum ‘fast’ neutrons. Fusion reactors, at least the ones Mars had right now, ‘hot’ ones of 14 MeV or so. This thing made both of those, plus ‘piping hot’ ones of up to 300 MeV or thereabouts. They’d known it would, based on 20th-century antiproton experiments at CERN, if it ever ran. The huge thing now was, making it happen on cue and ‘at a profit’ in energy.
“Matter disintegration. Stupendous! And I mean it in the full sense of the original Latin of that one, astounding! Exactly like something out of the pages of that old 20th-century magazine.” Douglass Keeling’s voice was a deep, rich contrast to Miranda’s pure, precise one. “Even if we were the ones to bring it out of the pages of SF and into 21st-century reality.” It wasn’t nearly the only contrast between them; his scarlet pants and bright more-varicolored-than-Joseph’s-coat vest dazzled, all the more so next to her grayscale habit. But, beneath all the surface differences, they were nearly twins, matched as precisely as purpose-picked parts. Never quite really known to finish each others’ sentences… but they most routinely finished each others’ equations, and even often each others’ thoughts.
And he stood there just as rapt as she, now as still and quiet as a rock.
“I still can’t quite believe we just made most of the fusion reactors on the planet obsolete. I mean, they never did reach energy breakeven all by themselves, you had to throw in subcritical fission breeding blankets to make fissiles to ‘burn’ elsewhere. And now… I doubt anyone’s going to be bothering with fusion much, except in the huge old flash-fusion mega-systems.”
The glass for the window had been made in one of those, in a ten thousand ton batch. Heated by a single explosive-fusion flash right out of the old 1950s ‘Cold War arms race’ only carefully industrialized by practical Martians, way back at the dawn of truly full-scale settlement decades ago.
More than a little awe, there in Jack Long’s voice. Of course, clever, subtle engineering ran in the family; his grandparents had been doing it on the workaday regular together, back in late-20th Hong Kong. A lost paradise.
All of it now regained, and surpassed and improved mightily upon, here.
Which was almost enough to make him forget, most of the time, that the new ‘government’ of most of all of Earth was, if not quite as bad as Red China’s old quasi-Maoist regime, pretty much as evil and Communist.
“We’ll probably start with a thorium inner blanket on the first production prototype units. You get lots of multiplication from spallation, and the ‘eta’ fission yield goes way way up when you smack your target with hot or piping-hot neutrons. Maybe there’d be enough improvement to bother with a bit of natural uranium, too…” His voice trailed off, in the old familiar ‘need to think about all that again some, one more time’ sort of way.
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(Part 2/2)
But his ‘piping-hot neutronics’ specialty wouldn’t mean a practical thing without that eerie blue flame, the essential ‘Keeling-Lake device’ itself.
“960 seconds, 16 minutes total stable running time since we got that gizmo out of the start box. This time.” The old rocket-engine jargon in Ingeborg Bach’s quiet, level voice was old-hat to everyone here. And they were, by now at least, almost used to the fact she was a ‘Former and could monitor all of the massive data-flow from all their instruments in real-time, from the comfort of the back of her mind, inside her processor-enhanced skull.
Even as one of this device’s miracles was… it didn’t need much minding.
Her “Terraformers” (or Dualists in their own words) didn’t really have all that much to do with the rest of (“Settler”) Martian society. Except, with the new ‘unified’ theory and a few other things, they were starting to. A policy of ‘live and let live’ on both sides was beginning to… evolve.
Farther back, an older man in comfortably-rumpled clothes ended a chat.
“And that’s just about insane by the old standards, you two. In less than a single day, you’ve gone from the first startups with your new waveguide configuration to stable, reliable running. That’s simply… Muskesque. By the way, Colette’s been monitoring all the way remotely, and she sends her very warmest love and blessings. Meal do naideachd to you both!”
“Tell her congratulations right back, Angus, she deserves ’em no less.” It was Miranda, still peering at that sturdy blue flame, still grinning wide.
Angus Claybourne had had essentially nothing to do with the engineering of today’s breakthrough; and essentially everything to do with making it possible or thinkable in the first place. It was his ‘sort-of-unified field theory’ that had first introduced the idea of ‘guest fields’ in a ‘swampland landscape’ background. If you didn’t like the long-range field structure of natural law itself, well, no problem! Just introduce short-range (as in less-than-infinite-range) fields that did something you wanted, like ‘anti-gravity’ or ‘matter self-annihilation’ — and you could insert ’em not only into your theory, but your experiment and engineering as well. Of course, the devil was in the details, but the archangels were too… and being a generational-class physicist wasn’t exactly hindered by having a generational-class mathematician as your wife and co-worker.
Nor was it any disadvantage, having the ‘Formers coming to you and offering their almost-incomprehensible computational resources, to apply your shiny new theory to 21st-century Mars’ version of the ‘useful arts.’
“1080 seconds, 18 minutes runtime, this start. It’s almost beginning to get a little boring — not!” Inga’s smile, underneath the steampunk-esque goggles on the top of her head (that were also always-on precision imaging devices), was richly 20-something merry and impish… and deeply, wildly impressed.
Douglass Keeling chuckled, rich and resonant and deep. “It’s not just one amazing day for physics and engineering, folks. There are real and longer term implications of this achievement too; and I mean real and long term.”
“We can get more than the piddly half a percent conversion of mass out of our best fusion fuels, for instance,” said Miranda. “That means we could do a lot better than an ultimate exhaust velocity of 10% of lightspeed or so — which opens the door to doing relativistic starflight, if we want to take the trouble to do all the fiddly engineering and astral architecture it’d require to really, properly ever do that.” Still grinning.
“More even than that, I mean long term.” Douglass smiled big back. “Right now we can seriously talk about re-invigorating stars. Even if you burn a star’s original hydrogen all the way to iron, you can still turn it all back to hydrogen if you want, like making an old man ‘nineteen again’ as the old George Burns song has it.” He looked, happily and comfortably, at that fist-sized and almost steady sub-nuclear flame. Much as someone back in old Ireland might’ve looked cozily on a burning pile of peat. “This is genuinely and objectively stupendous, my dear and clever friends. Let’s go open that lonely ice-cold bottle of wonderfully half-sweet champagne, and have a drink all together to changing the world and the future again!”
(Based on some pre-existing characters and setting.)
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The pain was slowly driving him mad.
It started a few days ago. Lunch in Chinatown with that new client. A quick chat about his PI rates during the hot tea and egg rolls, waiting for the entrees. Moo shoo pork for the client, spicy Kung Pao chicken for him. It was all was good until he bit down on something hard, maybe a bad peanut. He thought, hoped the crunching sound was just the nut. But now the pain in his upper jaw proved otherwise.
He had suspected right away it was the tooth. That tusk had been giving him trouble for years. He had delayed getting a root canal and crown because it was so far back in his mouth. Every dentist he visited had trouble reaching it. To make matters worse, repeated attempts to address it had left him with a severe Novocain allergy.
His natural dread of dentists, born of too many sweets and poor brushing habits as a child, could no longer hold him in check. Over the past few days he had self-medicated with increasing amounts of ibuprofen, augmented with tequila in the evenings. In desperation he had sunk to thievery and swiped a couple of Vicodin from a coworker’s desk drawer. The pain might not kill him, but at this rate the liver damage would.
Now the pain had intensified, climbing from stupendous to tortuous, and was on its way to excruciating. Even a breath of the crisp autumn air sent ice picks of pain through the bone into his eye socket. It didn’t stop there either, ricocheting inside his skull like a bullet. Each breath, each sip of cool water, even a light touch on his cheek sent another spasm of pain across his jangled nerves. Something would have to be done – and soon.
His coworker Jenna appeared before him, the pain drawing a bright nimbus around her. St Jenna of the Vicodin Drawer. She recommended a new dentist in town. “Marty, this doc’s a genius. My husband hates going to the dentist, but he loves Dr. Smith. Swears he didn’t feel a thing!”
He looked the number on the Post-It note that had been pressed into his hand. Might as well bite bullet, he thought ironically. The receptionist who answered told him they always kept space open for emergencies. “Come right away,” she said. Marty drove quickly but carefully. A pothole or speed-bump might blind him with pain and cause an accident.
An assistant was standing by when Marty arrived and escorted him into an exam room. She quickly and gently X-rayed his mouth. “The doctor will be right with you,” the assistant said as she clipped the paper bib around his neck. She withdrew with a wry smile. In the quiet, hushed sounds of dentistry floated from the closed doors of the other exam rooms.
Fear gripped him and his bowels felt loose: for the first time in many years he was in the dreaded Chair. Marty studied the ceiling of the nondescript exam room in effort to calm himself. He glanced over at the instruments laid out on the tray with neat precision, seemingly tools of torture handed down from the Inquisition. Suppressing the urge to run, he told himself at least it would all be over soon. One way or the other.
At that moment a petite woman in a white lab coat entered briskly. She nodded and muttered softly to herself as she studied the X-rays hanging on the light box. With her back to him, the loose lab coat revealed nothing of her form nor he had not seen her face when she entered. But she had very nice legs. Marty was still admiring her finely sculptured calves when she turned to face him. He quickly looked up, hoping that his generally flushed appearance would hide the embarrassment he felt for so obviously ogling her.
“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice, Dr. Smith,” he said.
“Smythe, actually,” came the curt reply with a hint of an English accent.
“I’m sorry?” Overcoming his initial shock of her retort and the haze of the pain, Marty registered her face for the first time. Stunning green eyes framed by shoulder-length strawberry blonde hair. The simple black wrap dress she wore under the lab coat complemented her form without detracting from the radiance of her features. For the first time in days the pain in his mouth was not forefront in his mind.
“Don’t worry,” the dentist said, flashing a perfect smile, “I get that a lot from you Americans. The name is Smythe, not Smith. Hannelore Chatham-Smythe, originally from Oxford. A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Whitaker. Now, open wide, please.”
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