Category: Uncategorized

The left…. well… they are people of wealth and taste. Or at least a lot of them are.

I’m not questioning the wealth, though it seems now most of them got rich by sucking government teat (well, it always seemed like that, looking at how rich congressmen get. Now we just have more evidence of how it was done.)

I’m questioning the taste.

Look, I grew up amid leftists by definition because I grew up in Europe and I have an intellectual bend. While it has gotten like that here too, I’d say in that Europe was a good twenty years “ahead” of us. So it was like going to an ivy league school in the early oughts.

I knew that they had nostalgie de la boue — for those not of French inclination “a taste for mud” — meaning if presented with a group of people who shower every day, look after themselves and others, etc. and a group of people who are somewhere between bohemians and criminals, wash once a month, have sex with cockroaches and don’t even look after themselves, much less others, the leftist will always inevitably find something to praise about the repulsive ones.

This is part the myth of the noble savage being at the very basis of their philosophy — Marx would be as nothing without his theories having mated with Rosseau — and the fact most people ATTRACTED to leftism, particularly at the level of becoming activists being… well… wrong ‘uns.

Yes, there is a continuum between wrong ‘uns and Odds, and most of us are Odds. I’d say wrong ‘uns though are the ones motivated primarily by envy. And envy is the cardinal VIRTUE to leftists, the thing that makes them righteous is that they envy the people who have and do and look as they don’t do.

I am not saying most of us didn’t look at the kids with large friend groups and feel a twinge of jealousy. But jealousy isn’t envy. I wanted to be able to be like them, not to destroy them so no one could be like that. The second is envy. Jealousy resolves itself, as you get older and start understanding trade offs… Like, I could be jealous of Melania Trump who is about my age (?) and looks at most thirty and has the body I never had but wish I did. But I do understand that she’s made keeping herself in shape and beautiful part of her life’s work, while I have been known to bum around in a robe all day if books are being particularly loud, and if my husband had married me for my looks, he’d have been very disappointed I wear makeup like war paint, and only when facing things that scare me. OTOH though I understand she’s a smart lady, she probably would find it onerous to spend a week running down a rabbit hole raised by a casual mention of an historical incident in a fanfic. …. But I do and I have to, and it’s part of the reason I don’t have time for makeup and exercise machines bore me to death.

I.e. I’ve come to terms with people are themselves, I’m me and we wouldn’t like each other’s trade offs. All in all I am okay with who I am, partly because I’ve never been anyone else.

Envy doesn’t let you do that, and the last final idea of envy is always to destroy those you envy, and to gloat over them.

If you look at all leftist movements, envy is their fatal flaw. None of us would object to affirmative action/DEI if it were a series of voluntary, privately founded programs to say teach black people or women what they need to get ahead in business. We might find it (I would) specious that it only applies to ONE skin color or sex, but hey…. Since historically these people did worse, maybe there’s something cultural we can fix. I’m all for that.

(I’m here thinking of a friend I had back in the eighties, who had two phds and couldn’t find a non-retail job, and she was convinced it was racism. Then she came by my house on the way to a job interview and … well, I wouldn’t wear what she had on to do yard work. I freaked, and lent her one of my skirt suits, and fixed her hair. She got the job. And she moaned about “why didn’t anyone tell me that before?”…. look, how she missed the whole “dress for success” movement is a puzzle, but she was my friend, therefore an Odd, and– yeah, cultural holes happen.)

But the left isn’t happy with that. It’s not enough for women who aren’t inclined to marriage and children to be perfectly all right with going into business, and being in fact treated the same as men in business. No. Women who want marriage and children must be shamed/destroyed. The only allowable option must be for women to have “careers.” Women must in fact be forced to be men, to retroactively validate the choice of some wrong ‘un who was shamed for not being normal.

And it’s not enough for business and hiring to be color blind. Not a bit of it. Black people must be advanced over white people. White people must be prevented from advancing and treated worse than any black person ever was, absent slavery. Because the wrong ‘uns — most of them not black — want it retroactively validated that it wasn’t their fault they didn’t get ahead.

The logic of envy causes the left ultimately to hate the good for being good, the happy for being happy, the normal for being normal.

(If you haven’t caught the whiff of put down in “neurotypical” you haven’t been listening. Now I’d give my left arm and a bit of the right to not have a mind that gallops in all ways at once, and to be able to achieve concentration and working on one thing at a time WITHOUT meds. But I don’t look down on the neurotypical. I just wish I could function like that. I don’t want THEM to stop functioning as they do. What would that serve?)

Their logic inexorably leads them to hate humanity itself. I once watched a future evolution series (I THINK Animal Planet, though it might have been another science channel) and could predict every step based on the idea the creators hated humans and would put thumb on the scale for the ultimate “winners” to be as far from humans as possible, including all mammals ending up extinct, then all warm blooded creatures, ending up with intelligent octopi swinging from trees. (I’m actually not joking.)

So I’ve known all this, but all I can say is that they used to be better at hiding it. And they didn’t use to make it so obvious in your face, all within a week.

They didn’t use to ACTIVELY in the same week, cheer on actual demons, or try to spring actual proven gangbangers from jail while ignoring murder victims, or explain, snootily that Mayan child sacrifice wasn’t actually violent, but just a way to communicate with the gods.

They do all of this, mind you, and did my whole life, quietly and behind the scenes, including cheering on genocidal dictators and mollycoddling terrorists.

But few of them did it in public, and if they did they always had a million caveats and excuses.

Oh, yeah, I don’t have links, but we were also treated to Taylor Lorenz simping for a murderer, and when called on it she said that of course she also sympathized with Palestinians.

Now, part of why they seem so out there and brazen, and the rest of us are standing here, eyes agog wondering what the heck has come over them, is that they have lost their cover.

It used to be that when they chose to ignore something in the media — like say the mother of a murder victim at the white house talking about her daughter being killed by illegals — while pushing a story of victimhood about a human pustule like Abrego Garcia, the general public never heard the real story. Definitely we didn’t have places like this blog, three email lists I’m on, or Twitter, where people will point out Abrego Garcia has gang tattoos and that only members of MS-13 have those, partly because if anyone else has them MS-13 kills those people.

So part of it is that their control of the mass-industrial information complex has been removed, and now they’re doing what they always did but in full light of day. I keep visualizing them as a bunch of villains who used to do things behind a curtain and now are doing them with the curtain removed, and don’t understand we can see them.

And part of it is simply that they’ve been going down this philosophical bend so long that they’ve now reached their ultimate conclusion.

And the fact that their covert, “virtuous” attempts at destroying civilization and humanity, by hiding it under the cloak of “saving the Earth” are failing only makes them angrier and the hatred that accompanies envy stronger.

I feel like they’re speeding towards some metaphysical black hole of evil in front of G-d and everybody. And I hope and pray it doesn’t come because if it does the backlash will change us forever as a nation and possibly as a civilization. To be fair, that backlash will also be needed for civilization and humanity to survive.

They’ve come pretty close with trying to excuse/approve of the atrocities of 10/7. And they’ve only gotten away with it to the extent that they have managed to hide somewhat here (And massively abroad) how atrocious those atrocities really were.

But I feel as though they’re building up to something even bigger and more brazen. And I hope something prevents them from that. Because it won’t go well for them.

Or, ultimately, for anyone.

First off, Sarah’s fine, taking a brief break from the blog while editing No Man’s Land while supervised by the kitty crew. So she tossed me the keys and said “Post something.” Something follows.

This morning, we woke up to a thundersnow. Not uncommon in April, up in these parts. I went to check on the chicks, which we moved out of the dining room to outside this last week, and the heat lamp was on and they were physically fine, just unhappy. I found that the young adults had not closed the windows last night, but had closed the blinds, and fixed that, and checked the thermometer, and sighed, and turned the furnace on.

Went downstairs for more milk and found Quicksilver kitty in the ceiling. It’s an old house, and the cats are welcome to walk through the walls and hunt mice. Silver told me about her exploits, I asked if she wanted a hand down, she declined, and I came upstairs to find the percolator had finally started boiling while I was talking to Silver. At least there’s coffee, but the rest of the carrots and the beets are not going in the garden today. Perhaps Saturday will be dry enough again.

Spring is slow up here, with fits of warm weather–yesterday hit seventy–and cold. As I type the snow is horizontal, blowing north to south.

It occurs to me that a lot of us are prone to wanting politics to come on like summer right now. But it’s much more like spring. Spats of snow, setting back the work, days of warm weather when you can’t get things done fast enough ahead of the next cold snap which will come, but you don’t know how soon or how hard it will be.

And it feels like it was summer for the other side for a very long time, yet was it really, or are our feelings deceiving us? My family is a second generation home school family. Forty years of legally home schooling. Was that a win for the statists? How about gun rights? How many wins did we get in gun rights over those decades? And abortion, returned to the states to decide as it should be under our Constitution, even in the depths of one of those nastier cold snaps. What about the end of regulatory rule?

I don’t have a crystal ball, none of us do. We don’t know which way the arrows of future history point: which countries are going to have themselves wars and which will dodge wars this year. We do know the general trend over the millennia is away from involuntary collectivism, from belonging to the tribe, the state, the religion, that you are born under or conquered by. The USA is and has been at the forefront of this trend, and most of our citizens are pretty good at finding groups to belong to, even when we side-eye their choices. But we do know that when the world is unpredictable, as it always has been, steadfastness is our key to success. Today we plant the seeds. Tomorrow we hunker down against the next cold snap. Then we pull the weeds when it warms again. In the end, the harvest of liberty and justice will overflow.

P.S. Saturday happens to be the 250th Anniversary of the start of the Revolutionary War. Do something to celebrate. (Preferably something that keeps you solidly away from the crazies who want another violent Revolution-it’s my birthday, too and I’m sick and tired of their nonsense on that day.) Hang two lights in your window–the Brits came by sea. Have a cake. Have two cakes. Why not party? 250 years of the best thing going for humanity so far is worth a party.

Today’s book is The Last Spaceship by Murray Leinster.

For those wondering why I’m doing this, I have an explanation here. I am following as a kind of guide the one Portuguese science fiction imprint, mostly because it’s likely to be stuff I’ve read before, or at least it is guaranteed some of this is what pulled me into science fiction reading. (And inevitably writing.)

This is the rough list I’m following. And by the way next week’s is an adventure of sorts. The book is by a French author, Jimmy Guieu L’Univers Vivant  which translates roughly as “The Living Universe.” Problem being, as far as I can tell L’Univers Vivant has not been translated into English, and even if I were feeling adventurous enough to translate it, the author died relatively recently, so the rights are still in the hands or … relatives? friends? agents? I don’t think I want to play “find the rights holder.” So, with some trepidation and because I think it will be interesting to look at a foreign title — I’ll be honest, I don’t remember liking much of the foreign sf, except Pierre Barbet, and I don’t know how that will hold up now — I decided to try Jimmy Guieu’s first book in his available series in English. That is The Time Spiral (Polarian-Denebian War Book 1). It’s a bit of an adventure, since the reviews are meh, but hey.

So, that’s next week. Now for this week’s book, let me show you the Portuguese cover, which struck me as very cool.

Murray Leinsters real name was the strangely respectable William Fitzgerald Jenkins. I have absolutely no idea why he used a pen name, except that at the time science fiction (or writing for the pulps in general) was considered not quite respectable. So, it would be like taking a name to be a stripper at night, while being a suburban mommy by day. More or less, though I think the prejudice against the pulps was being considered low brow, not indecent. (This by the way is the reason many female authors used pen names, and not some imaginary prejudice against female writers.)

From wikipedia, on how he came by his pen name: “Murray” is a reference to Leinster’s mother’s maiden name (“Murry”), while “Leinster” alluded to the connection between his middle name (“Fitzgerald”) and the Dukes of Leinster. (By this principle, Dan’s pen name would be Seymour. Though if it comes to that I’ll hold on for the archaic St. Maur.)

Murray Leinster was born in the 1890s and there’s some confusion about where he lived in childhood. Though he and his parents were born in Virginia, the census has them living in Manhattan in 1910. He was a high school dropout and first published in the pulps before WWI.

He wrote for every genre of pulp and broke into science fiction in 1926.

Because his is a grand resume of the sort you expect from a science fiction writer, he was also an inventor, and again, quoting from wikipedia:

Leinster was also an inventor under his real name of William F. Jenkins, best known for the front projection process used in special effects.^[7] He appeared in September 1953 on an episode of the educational series American Inventory, in which he discussed the possibility of space travel.

From what I can understand, The Last Spaceship was first published as a novel in 1949, but it was earlier published as novellas in Galaxy.

First overall impression: I liked it. Really, really liked it.

Second overall impression, and please keep in mind that this is me writing this, okay: there were times in reading this book that I was going “Woah there, Murray. You’re really hitting me over the head with the libertarian philosophy. Don’t make it so on the nose!”

It is a series of problem plots. or if you prefer, an increasing spiral of problems that the hero — Kim — and his girlfriend/wife solve on the side of liberty.

It starts with the idea that future worlds have something called a punisher circuit which can block you from places, block you from commerce, hurt you, paralyze you or even kill you. Kim has been declared persona non grata due to his having found a way to get around the punisher circuit. They took away his means of avoiding it, and have put him under punishment. At the same time his girlfriend is locked in her apartment as a means of softening her up so she’ll fall into the clutches of one of the local oligarchs.

Kim reclaims his ancestor’s spaceship, the last spaceship that ever flew before the culture switched over to matter transmitters. This way he avoids being exiled to a space penal colony.

His first problem is how to go as far as he needs on almost no fuel, which he solves with much can-do and ingenuity.

By the end of the book he’s figured out how to circumvent the game of oligarchs and despots, and he and Donna retire to a new planet. I’ll just say that, without too many spoilers, okay?

Finding out it had been originally published as novellas explained the only complaint I had about the book: that sometimes, in the beginning of a chapter, it starts with an interesting scene, then backtracks way back to explain who these people are and the entire situation. Obviously those chapters are where the novellas started, and they had to explain everything in case a new reader didn’t know the previous novellas. I could do some belly aching about how this could have been smoothed over by editing, but seriously? It was eminently readable anyway.

Oh, as part of all this, I particularly liked this story because Kim is the technical expert, but Donna is sort of a generalist thinker, and suggests solutions to him by saying “if we could do this,” often with analogies. This is very much how Dan and I work, and their interactions reminded me of our interactions.

Leinster also has an unblinkingly realistic view of women, and says things that would probably get a man torched (literally) in the current day. Things like pointing out an aging, not very pretty woman who has no hope of getting a man is obligated by psychology to convince herself she hates males. Or that women tend to dramatize tragedy in their own lives. Or that no woman will willingly take her husband and settle in a world with a surplus of women.

He very much refused to believe that women were purer or kinder beings and doesn’t try to convince me of some mythical “sisterhood” of all females that I never encountered in real life. Perhaps I’m jaundiced, but his observations on women agreed with mine, and he doesn’t portray them as either children or angels but as fully competent human beings shaped by social and evolutionary pressures different from males.

I very much enjoyed The Last Spaceship and its hopeful view of the future and it only took me a day to read because I was sick, and reading it around trying to work (which of course I wasn’t actually up to doing.)

Once I’m done reading next week’s experiment, I’ll probably go poke around for more Murray Leinster science fiction and see if it’s all this decent.

Oh, yes, as a side observation: since I’ve been reading these books kindle has stopped trying to sell me romances — note they’re not quite sane. The only romances I ever read are Jane Austen fanfic. And yet they try to sell me Mafia romances — and is now trying to sell me science fiction.

I’m not sure if this is reflective of the current market, or of the people who pay to promote the books. I’ve noted for some time that practically the only space opera remaining is mil sf because Baen kept the lights on through the long night when no one else would publish space opera. This is an impoverishment of the field, and I sometimes feel like I’m the lone ranger trying to resurrect the other sub genres of space opera, and I’d appreciate if some of y’all got in the game, because it’s my favorite sub-genre. (I am, mind you, exaggerating for comic effect. Periodically I stumble on very decent non-mil-sf like Arthur Mayor’s Space Station Noir.)

But being pushed mil sf doesn’t annoy me. It’s not my favorite, unless the writers have the skill of Weber and/or Ringo, but it doesn’t actually annoy me.

However, 9 out of ten “science fiction” books pushed at me are “dystopian.” I didn’t like dystopian fiction back in the eighties when it was practically all you could find, and I like it no better now. As I said I grew up under the assumption that we would be getting hit with a nuke and there was nothing I could do about it. And I was determined to survive and make the future back from the past. I have yet to see a reason to doubt my decision.

File that under “old woman yells at cloud.” And do try The Last Spaceship. You won’t regret it.

I must be getting better–

For those who don’t follow my life assiduously — and why not, I ask — we’ve been falling from disaster into contretemps since August last year, when we got the sewage backflow.

Most of it hasn’t been health, but things that end up encouraging me to overwork, and then I manage to get sick.

However this last cold — didn’t seem to be flu, certainly wasn’t covid — was horrible because it dragged on for two weeks, just sick enough I couldn’t work. Also gave me apocalyptic dreams. And it seems to have spun my thyroid out of kilter again. Which was made worse by my having to postpone my appointment with the endocrinologist because I was coughing my lungs off, and frankly didn’t want to share it with anyone, much less a whole waiting room.

Anyway, pardon me for whining. This is part of my decision to start living more healthily, because I hate wasting time. BUT some of it isn’t fixable by clean living. (Like the low thyroid.)

The purpose of this is not to whine — that was just a side benefit! — but to explain how we got to April and how frustrated I am that the book I finished in October — OCTOBER — of last year is still not in ready to be released, not even in e-arc.

And to tell myself and you guys that “Doing the work takes time.”

When things have gone severely wrong, fixing things takes long.

This applies to the world and particularly to our country right now.

Having found out how much destruction and attacks on our country we were paying for via the various skims and cheats off our own government and our own tax money, I’m probably not the only one chomping at the bit and wanting it all fixed YESTERDAY.

But it’s going to take time.

It’s going to take time because fraud and waste and scamming schemes are woven all through our government. It’s going to take time to unwind it without destroying things that we can’t destroy, either because they are legitimate functions of the government or because though illegitimate there are people depending on them who, through no fault of their own have got herded into needing it. Like… yes, social security. You can’t give a seventy year old back the money and opportunities wasted by paying into social security his whole working life. At this point although not getting back the money he/she paid, this person is dependent on social security to survive. And the same with a lot of other help. The government made it impossible for private individuals to help the needy and shut down a lot of private charity as it used to work. So now people are dependent on the government.

And so it goes. Can the government be brought back within constitutional bounds? I certainly think so.

But it’s going to take time. We’d best hope we have another two terms, because we’re going to need them.

If it all goes well, maybe by the end of my life we’ll be something more closely resembling a republic that fits within the bounds of the Constitution.

This will also give us time to change the culture, so that we don’t run up against people whose idea of conservatism or a golden age is FDR’s autocratic rule in the 40s.

In the meantime, I can do what I can to make myself slightly healthier, so I can produce content more regularly. (Particularly the books, impatiently waiting to be written. Hey, given that Dragon doesn’t work for me, and neither does any of the other programs I’ve ever heard of, is there anything new and AI assisted that I can use to dictate? Because that might help.)

At least these last two days, when I’ve been SLIGHTLY better, I’ve got the Musketeer Mysteries and the Dyce Dare ones re-covered and out in print. (Which most of them weren’t.) So that’s something done.

Tomorrow I should be okay to edit, and maybe even — as my editor suggests — make some progress on Rhodes.

And I NEED to update my substack.

But …. it’s going to take time. Doing the work takes time.

Until I figure out magic, that will have to do for me.

And for the country.

No matter how impatient we get.

Okay, enough is enough.

I can’t actually do anything about emergencies that cause me to have to make a serious effort while under the weather.

I can theoretically do something about stuff like fallen tree branches, malfunctioning kitchen appliances, basement floods or other household disasters. But dynamiting the house and building another from scratch is likely to be too expensive and the neighbors would likely object, too. Not to mention the coding board, etc.

Well, I can have the house blessed, I suppose, and we’re working on that.

But it seems like the getting stupidly ill every other month should still be the easiest thing to tackle.

“Easiest” meaning in this case not impossible.

It’s going to take a bit of work. Like, now that I’m so very slightly perking up from whatever this latest schrechlichkeit is I’m not going to try to go full tilt on the writing and the unpacking the living room.

Also, I really need to start walking. Yes, outside, as unpleasant as that is. Probably not a lot. Maybe only a mile or so in the early morning “walking to work.”

No, I don’t particularly like this neighborhood for walking in, but I like being sick even less, and it’s become somewhat obvious that I need to have regular exercise in the (eek!) fresh air.

Also I can do something about not eating randomly because I forgot to eat until I was starving, and then I just grab whatever is sitting around, which is usually crackers or milk or something. (I am not a calf. I can’t live on milk. Yes, it could be worse. Sometimes it is. I also can’t live on bananas.)

Look, all of this sounds pretty unpalatable, and honestly, I don’t want to do any of it.

I want to keep living like a teenager, or an obsessed writer. I mean, I no longer have kids in the house, so I don’t need to have regular meals, and I don’t need to go to bed on time and I don’t–

But a wise man — okay, older son — has informed me that how I live affects my health. Or in my case my lack of health more often than not. And that while changing everything all at once is impossible, I should pick an habit and stick to it for two weeks and then pick another habit.

… And I’m over sixty, and apparently my body hates me.

So this week I’m going to start the walking thing. I might only walk like half a mile, because I’m still trying to cough up a lung, but I’m going to attempt the outside, fresh air type of thing.

Who’s with me so I don’t feel so alone?

Okay. Good. Now, let’s give this health thing a try.

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 MEL DUNAY: Waking The Dreamlost (The Jaiya Series Book 2)

New, professionally edited edition! Journey to the country of Jaiya, in a world not quite like ours. Here, humans ride trains, drive cars, and use cell phones, but they share their world with insect people and trollfolk, and stranger things lurk in the shadows… In a place like Jaiya, a woman can’t just back out of an arranged marriage to a bigshot, even if her amnesia keeps her from remembering when and how she agreed to it. Her engagement to a politician makes Itana a target for terrorist attacks, but a former soldier named Marish comes to her rescue. She doesn’t remember hiring Marish to find out who is stealing her memories, but he is determined to finish the job…or die trying! Note: Itana and Marish are friends with or related to a few characters from Marrying a Monster, the first book in the Jaiya series, but Dreamlost is meant as a standalone.

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Gulls, Ghosts, and Skeps: Familiar Generations Book Eight

A beekeeper with a secret discovers a hidden orchard, and a little more.
Out-of-tune pianos are the least of a craftsman’s problems when magic combines with frustration.
Ghosts haunt Tallin’s citadel. Or do they?

From quiet stories to wild adventures, these stories expand a Familiar world. Meet new characters and check in with old favorites in this short story collection.

EDITED BY CAROL HIGHTSHOE: Midnight Menagerie. Stories from the edge of reality.

Step right up, dear traveler—your ticket to the extraordinary awaits.

Beneath the striped canopies of the Midnight Menagerie, wonders stir and nightmares awaken. Strongmen flex their might, fortune tellers spin futures, and acrobats defy the stars. But if it is shadows you seek—if you are drawn to the hush of velvet-draped corners where the line between spectacle and sorcery blurs—then step closer.

Here, within these pages, beasts from beyond the veil prowl in cages not quite strong enough. Carnival performers barter in secrets instead of silver. Mystics weave illusions that refuse to fade, and every whispered promise carries a cost. From the neon glow of alien menageries to the flickering lantern light of haunted carnivals, Midnight Menagerie is a collection of the eerie, the wondrous, and the strange.

So take your seat, dear reader. The lights are dimming, the curtains are rising… and the show is about to begin.

Featuring stories by: Fin Patiliu, Annie Percik, Harriet Pheonix, Robert Miller, Chris Clemens, Caitlin Barbera, Petina Strohmer,

FROM DECLAN FINN: Blood Country (Honeymoon from Hell Book 2)

THE HONEYMOON FROM HELL CONTINUES!

Until death do they part.

After surviving their first stop, Marco and Amanda have arrived in wine country.

Everything should go well.

Assuming the dragon constructs made from fire don’t derail their train. Or the local triads don’t hunt them down. Or if the local politician doesn’t turn into some sort of supernatural hell beast.

All in all, it should be a quiet trip.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT (WITH NEW PAPER EDITION*): Sword And Blood
*Yes, I promise I’ll finish the trilogy this year or next, if I can stop getting stupidly sick.

In a shadow-draped France, an ancient horror freed from its tomb has transformed the kingdom into a vampire’s playground.
Paris trembles under the Cardinal’s undead rule, the countryside lies abandoned, and the king offers no resistance.
Until now, three legendary Musketeers have held back the darkness with blessed silver and unwavering courage. But Athos has fallen, turned during a blood mass, while a fiery young man from Gascony arrives seeking vengeance—D’Artagnan, orphaned by the vampires that claimed his family.
With one Musketeer transformed and a vampire-hunter determined to join their ranks, an impossible alliance forms in France’s darkest hour. Some bonds transcend even blood —but will it be enough when the line between hero and monster blurs with each nightfall?
One for all and all for one— in a battle for the soul of France itself.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox

To save the future, sometimes you have to reach to the past to change it. And in the face of extinction, you do what you must, regardless of who stands in the way.
Cataclysm
Unlucky jerk Tom Beadle was on watch at NASA when the collision alert sounded: a new asteroid, bigger than the dino-killer, headed for Earth. Big problem, but that’s why we have NASA, right? Except, after decades of budget cuts, NASA has no way to shove it off course. That job has to be contracted out. Will the private sector company his best friend from college works at succeed where the government option failed? Might be best to have a backup plan, just in case…
Heisenberg’s Point of Observation
Thomas Sutton was not your average fourteen year old, not even in an Ark City. Born in one of the three refuges of the last remnants of life on earth, deep underground, he knows his history. A century after an asteroid shattered and struck the earth, they have been trapped below by volcanic eruptions, toxic gasses, and radioactive dust. But what if he could…change things? What if he could reach the past, to prevent the asteroid’s impact?
Entanglement
Tom Beadle only volunteered for NASA’s neighborhood watch program when his department said it would maybe help him get tenure.None of them counted on the Neighborhood Watch becoming a mortifying political liability when a malfunctioning probe accidently reveals an asteroid hiding behind the larger outer planets, setting off impact alarms– and politicians looking for blame. When their answer is to defund the Watch program and fire all involved, Tom’s only chance to save the earth is to lie through his teeth and try to deflect the asteroid under cover of harvesting rare not-of-this-earth elements. And even that may not work.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Margins of Mundania

A tween boy’s Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don’t bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.

These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Visitor, And More: A Science Fiction Short Story Bundle from There’s a Sword for That

A Science Fiction Story Bundle from the collection There’s a Sword for That

THE VISITOR – Felockati is anchored to his permanent location underwater and misses the days of roaming his ocean world freely.

But something new drops out of the sky and widens his horizons — all the way to the stars.

YOUR EVERY WISH – Stealing the alien ambassador’s dagger is a sure thing for Pete — just what he needs to pay off his debts.

Until he starts talking to it. There has to be a way to get something for himself out of the deal. Has to be.

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: DEFECTIVE

The Masquerade is Over by Charlie Martin

 

I’ve wanted to revive the term “yellow journalism” for a while. It originally came from the “newspaper wars” between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, and was named for the comic strip The Yellow Kid, which eventually ran in both papers. Both papers were known for outrageous and inflammatory headlines and a certain respect for facts, although the story of Hearst’s promise to Frederic Remington — “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war” — is itself apparently a myth and a bit of yellow journalism.

But the distinction between “respectable journalism” and “yellow journalism” has always been less than its reputation would suggest — going back to Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize for his heavily propagandized coverage of the Soviet Union and the Holodomor famine that killed 10 million Ukrainians. The Pulitzer, considered the non plus ultra of journalistic honors, is actually named for one of the originators of yellow journalism.

Still, legacy media like the New York Times and the “respectable” major news networks tried to maintain the the fiction that they strove for fair and objective reporting, and that anyone who claimed otherwise was trying to “work the refs” and revealing their own bias.

Then along came Fox News. Fox did two unheard of things: first, it drew a careful distinction between its daytime news coverage, and its nighttime opinion; second, taking a markedly more politically conservative tack in that opinion coverage.

Arguably, there was a third distinction, because by trying to actually cover the news fairly in the daytime hours, they looked politically conservative compared to the news coverage on the other networks.

And then along came Trump.

Trump was a massive shock to the system. he had billions of dollars of his own. There had been other unconventional candidates, like John Anderson, and more notably H. Ross Perot. Perot also had plenty of his own money, but he tried running as a third party candidate. Trump correctly recognized that the US election system was heavily oriented to the two major parties, and had been since before the Civil War. Rather than swim upstream like Perot, he decided to run for a major party’s nomination.

Besides the third-party handicap, Perot had a gratingly whiny nasal voice and the stage presence of a tobacco auctioneer or carnival huckster.

Trump, by contrast, had more than a decade as a reality-show fixture in The Apprentice, and numerous cameos in film and making fun of himself in appearances in places like Saturday Night Live. He was engagingly willing to be the butt of their jokes and even make fun of himself. Unlike Perot, his presence in the media was not immediately painful.

Then he ran for president, and what’s worse, ran for the Republican nomination, even though his policies were more like a Truman Democrat or an early FDR.

At first, the legacy media saw him as a bit of a buffoon, a sideshow but interesting. And besides, what chance did he have against the Obama machine and against Hillary Clinton, when it was clearly her turn?

So Trump got an immense amount of “earned media” — publicity gained through something other than paid advertising. It’s publicity you don’t have to pay for.

Then.

He won.

The nomination.

… and the legacy media turned on a dime. He wasn’t an amusing buffoon any longer, he was a dangerous demagogue. At the same time (we now know) the full power of the Obama Administration and much of the Intelligence Community turned to undermining his campaign and preventing his election.

And the son of a bitch won anyway.

This was simply and obviously unacceptable. Something must be done.

At this point, the traditional categories started to break down. No matter their political inclinations, the embedded bureaucracy and a good part of the political commentariat turned out to be utterly conservative in the old-fashioned sense of a desire to preserve and maintain the status quo ante — change as change was bad, and particularly change from outside the hallowed Ivy League idea of acceptable thought. And never mind that Trump, as a graduate of Penn, was an Ivy Leaguer himself — Penn was only a sort of junior varsity of the Ivy League. Besides, Trump was brash, had a Queens accent, and while okay, he was rich, he had made that money by building things, instead of something respectable like financing corporate takeovers or international currency manipulation.

He was a threat to the world view of the embedded and conservative — in the old sense — power structure. He was, simply, “not our kind.”

At that point, the masks must come off, and they did. The New York Times was calling for resistance in the first weeks of Trump’s first term. In the meantime, we now know, highly-placed FBI agents were reassuring one another that they would stop Trump somehow, while the Obama Administration and the Clinton Campaign were doing everything, legally or otherwise, to attack Trump.

Some examples — Jorge Ramos said in 2015 that “neutrality is not an option.” Christian Amanpour argued that journalists couldn’t remain objective in November 2016, just days after the election. The Washington Post changed their slogan to “Democracy Dies In Darkness” in February of 2017, and columnists like Charles Blow in the New York Times was urging a fight, not just reporting.

To those of us of a conservative bent — although I maintain I’m not a conservative, just an 18th century liberal — this wasn’t a surprise, going back to the coverage of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The difference was that Trump, with his combination of in-your-face advocacy and refusal to follow the Acela Corridor line, finally forced the legacy media to remove its masks. It is, and has always been, advocacy media and not objective at all.

You guys really must tell me if my trips back into the memory lane of science fiction bore you to death. I’ll continue making them, and probably keep notes — because I’m old and have hit my head a bunch of times — but not inflict them on you.

For those who are not aware of what I’m doing, this is the initial post.

The short version is that I was introduced to science fiction via a friend of my much older brother’s. His friend had a real library and all the books of the only dedicated Portuguese science fiction imprint, the storied Argonauta. This imprint was so formative for me that when I established my own press I looked to see if I could name it Argonaut. Unfortunately at least at the time there was a gun/war oriented imprint by that name in Colorado, and I couldn’t use the name.

However I didn’t read the books in order, and might never have read all of them (again, having been hit on the head once too many times my memory is no longer eidetic so I don’t actually remember.) In Portugal the print runs were always too small and there were no reprints. This meant that finding the books after the initial distro depended on luck: someone else’s library, used bookstores or the spinner rack in some tiny tobacconist in a forgotten village. (Where I found a treasure trove of Heinlein’s in the 70s.)

Having found the listing online back in 2016, I decided I would read it from the beginning and blog it, and then…. Well, by the time I got around to it it was 2018, we were in severe financial distress, our older kid was getting married, I got ill and and and–

Now here we are. And now I don’t have any more kids to marry off, so the time has come to do this, unless you guys say I’m putting you to sleep, in which case I’ll still do it but not inflict it on you.

Today’s victim is Edmond Hamilton’s The City At World’s End. Next Week’s is Murray Leinster’s The Last Spaceship. (If you buy through these links I get a tiny commission. Just so you know.)

So, the City At The World’s End: first, what a lovely evocative name, isn’t it? It just gives you shivers, like science fiction was supposed to.

Second, I loved the writing style in this book. That probably sounds strange. But I absolutely loved it. It’s spare and tight and stark and beautiful. Reminded me a lot of Clifford Simak when he was on his game. In fact it reminded me so much that when I looked up Edmond Hamilton I was shocked that he was not a journalist. But no, he seems to be one of those rare science fiction writers — then or now — who was just a writer and didn’t have an arm’s long resume of weirdness to lean back on.

The book itself is weird. I enjoyed it a lot, but it could be argued and other reviewers have argued that it’s fractured, and seems not to cohalesce front to end.

I kind of understand them, because it’s a deeply philosophical book (also reminding me of Simak) but the question it explores is not the same it begins with. And yet… And yet, the book is almost a collection of the fears, the mind set of the mid-twentieth-century. It might at that have resonated more with me because I’m a cold war baby. Born too late for anyone to believe in duck and cover, I was told someday the hammer would fall out of a clear blue sky and then our choices were die or die. (Rest assured privately I’d decided I was not going to die, just to spite them. Which is, basically, the story of my life.) Honestly, it’s a wonder any of us, the kids from that time, grew up to be sane. Those of us who did, it’s like we blocked out the doom and gloom and just decided we’d do well and that was that.

Anyway, the book opens with our nightmare back then. John Kenniston, (Ken) works in a laboratory in a small town on the prairie (Middletown) where he does war-related research of some sort. The locals think it’s just an industrial laboratory. These locals include his girlfriend/fiance, Carol.

On a fine morning, Ken is on his way to work when a Super-Atomic-Bomb blows up above the town. This is told in an absolutely passionless way.

In the aftermath, people are shocked to find that they are alive, there is no radiation. But their entire town has been moved millions of years into the future to a time when the sun has become a red dwarf and the Earth is barren and frozen.

They find a domed city on the plains, an abandoned city of their future which allows them to survive. But they’re obsessed with the idea they’re the last of the humans of Earth. So, they blast out a call “Middletown calling”.

Eventually they are answered from the stars, where humans have gone and found other sentients too.

From that point on we are exposed to the overweening might of a Star Federation which decrees the stranded humans must leave the Earth, since it’s dying. They have autocratically moved other populations before. It is not well received by the people of Middletown, who’d rather die on their own terms than be ordered around by distant, faceless authority.

Enter a genius, who has some process–

I will be honest, I’d much prefer if this were a process someone from Middletown — preferably our hero — comes up with. Yes, it would be more implausible, but also would make for tighter and more satisfying plot. But this might be just me making a critique as another word slinger. It’s probably not valid, really, because “I would do it this way” doesn’t mean it’s how it should be done.

But there’s a trip to Vega, there’s a blond from the stars, Varn Allan, there’s weasely bureaucratic scheming, and the romance isn’t even forced, really, even if it’s truly embryonic as it ends, and the “Because you were warmongers” isn’t overloaded and no one really acts like we humans of the 20th (well, I was made then) are inferior. Not really.

I really liked the way the Americans of the plains of the US tell the Star Federation and their incontrovertible laws and commands to put it in their pipes and smoke it. I liked that the rebellion isn’t looked down on.

Because to me, ultimately, this was a collection of the knotty problems of the 20th century. I think the novel escaped the author, as his subconscious decided to work through some stuff. This is so much how my own best work happens, that I’m not going to throw stones.

The fear of the bomb collides with the then popular idea of world-government, only this time on a larger scale, with the peacenick idea that war is primitive, with a lot of ideas that festered then and that we now are fairly sure were always bokum.

Oh, yeah, and in the end, improbably, the individualists of the small town USA win which is just perfect.

I will add this was probably more bittersweet to me, because I have been in love with small town USA in the mid twentieth century long before I came to the US, having fallen hard for it through the stories of Clifford Simak.

And though the cities we lived in were larger than that, Colorado Springs when we moved in still retained the small town feel and the small town occasions.

This was particularly bittersweet as for most of my time in the US these cities have been dying. Now? I don’t know. It’s entirely possible the seismic (“world revolutionary”) changes of the last few years and the next few will change that.

I hope so. There is a dignity, a strength, a community that doesn’t crush the individualism characteristic of America, in these small towns. I’d love to see them flourish.

Anyway — Despite its possible flaws, or maybe because of them, I greatly enjoyed The City At World’s end, and will be looking for more for Edmond Hamilton. I’m sure I read him before, but weirdly, I didn’t remember his name at all.

Next week, onward to The Last Spaceship.

Yes, I’m still doing the reading myself back through old science fiction, but post probably tomorrow. I’m JUST starting to function so things will be a little off schedule.

And speaking of old science fiction, I keep remembering an old-science fiction where the unit the dollar was based on was the “man-hour”, ie. how much work a man could do in an hour.

This tied in in my brain — forgive me, I’ve been feverish for the last few days — with the fact that every year I seem to get busier. And I have a never ending list of things that I MUST do this year.

I’m not alone, either. Most people are… hustling. They have the thing that do that brings them their main money, the secondary thing they do for money, the third thing they’re trying to learn to upgrade thing one and thing two.

I’m not talking about having multiple jobs because one job doesn’t pay enough. That is a problem caused by illegal labor and forbidding teens from working and a bunch of other things, including stupid MBA tricks.

No, what I’m talking about is the people in my circles — who are, almost to the last person, smart, self-actuated, hard working — and who get busier and busier every year, even those of us reaching retirement age.

It finally clicked. It’s not a bad thing. It’s that our man-hours are increasing in value.

Let me explain, take me … 20 years ago. There was one thing I could do. I could write books and submit them. The books would then sell or not sell. I could optimize my value per hour by writing to the house. I.e. since I was in Baen, there was a certain type of book they’d accept. Same for the mystery publisher, for that matter.

I’m not even talking about matter or content, though there was some of that. There is a touch-feel to the books that will sell and where. But more importantly, if I had an idea that could be sufficiently told in 20k words, I couldn’t sell that. Heck, I couldn’t sell 40k words or 60k words. It had to be 80k words or nothing. And the same thing for the current monster which will weigh in at 250k words. I can already imagine the “no. It’s too long.”

So– So I wrote what I could, and put up with it.

Nowadays not only can I write and market whatever crosses my mind, but there’s a million things I can do to make them sell better. From learning publicity, to improving covers, to better typesetting.

You’ll say I outsourced that to others and you’d be right, but that also reduced how much I was worth to me. I now can make things sell better, goose them with a little extra time/effort.

The same with other side things. I’d like to start a podcast (eventually he’ll remove the boxes from my audio booth. After taxes, likely. Right now I don’t have a voice anyway) that is a reading, a talk, sometimes interviews with my friends, etc. I’d like to do short animated movies (I have been playing with animation programs) which I think can exponentially work to promote the books. Or at least some of the books.

And needless to say I want to write. I want to write all the things that I couldn’t write for trad pub.

The point is that every hour can be filled with activities that will certainly pay at least some, and probably/possibly a lot. The potential man-hour is near endless. And not just for me. I’m using my own situation, because it’s easier, but I think each of you could give the examples.

Two conclusions from this:

The first is What a time to be alive!

If they’re right and you live longer when you’re involved and interested? I’m gonna live forever. (Now, can we work on that forever not being taken up with hacking a lung?)

The second is… If you’re one of mine, one of the people who feel pathologically obligated to maximize your value and effort in the world (born owing money) you have to learn to take breaks. You have to learn to pace yourself. And you have to carve out time when you’re not “on”.

I say this as someone who sucks at this. I am aware the fact I forget to take time off leads to my getting sick, which leads to my falling behind, which leads to my forgetting to take time off as I’m catching up, which leads….

I told Dan the other day my happiest time in recent years was a mini vacation we took in September. We spent two hours walking around a car museum, and in my head this keeps shining like a golden moment. Oh, what fun we had!

This is stupid. I mean the fact we don’t have more of these times. Hence the serious talk on how we need to do a weekend every two months or so, so that we decompress.

Because yes, our man-hours are more valuable in potentia than ever, but the body is still mortal and made of flesh, and the d*mn thing just gives out unexpectedly. Particularly if you’re over sixty.

So, rejoice in your potential, but make time when you say “yes taking time off costs me money, but I’m worth it” and take a break now and then.

I will tell you this is not how I thought it would be in my sixth decade.

And I’m very glad it is.