According To Hoyt

If there is one thing that I’d enjoin you to remove from your mind, for the sake of humanity, please, if this idea that people are widgets who can be molded, twisted, packaged, arranged, engineered!

The proximal cause of this post is Paul Ehrlich’s death, but that’s only part of it. I might or might not, later, write a post about Ehrlich, the man who was always wrong and an actual contender for History’s Greatest Monsters, easily edging out Carter’s considerable credentials and bidding fair to compete (if in a different way) with people like Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Heck, he bids fair, just in lives distorted, maimed and never born to compete with Karl Marx himself. (And as a very minor footnote scared the screaming bejeezus out of me when I was a little kid, reading him.)

However, the cause of this post was a comment on an x post about Ehrlich. This man was well intentioned, I think, and trying to say “whoa, Ehrlich went way too far.”

But this what I mean by “Marxist rats in people’s heads.” This man needs a few glue traps in there to capture the rats.

Of course, I went after it hammer and tongues, in my gentle, persuasive (cough) way. That is, I started jumping up and down and metaphorically speaking throwing shoes at his head.

But on the serious side, look at all the words there. “Sensible population approach” “Nations should determine” “Sustainable population level” “Encourage/discourage”.

This man might disapprove of Ehrlich, but he’s going down the exact same pathway to hell.

The problem with Ehrlich wasn’t Ehrlich. Yes, he was a complete amoral lunatic who only didn’t encourage sterelizing agents in drinking water because that would sterilize other species too, not just human, but humanity has had plenty of immoral lunatics and immoral people, and lunatic people, including a lot of them with ineradicable self-hatred and an overarching messianic complex that have not done the damage Ehrlich managed, and in fact who, in the end did more harm than good. At least I knew one of them, who worked a decent trade, had a wife and family and was a kind father and a fun grandfather. It was only when he got to speaking about how most people in the world were a waste of space and how the world would be so much better if you eliminated 2/3 of them that you saw the madness peek out of his eyes. The difference is he didn’t have the power to sell his toxic ideas, and the credentials and ability to make entire governments either believe them or act on them because they believed it made them seem “smart and progressive.”

Now we can’t eliminate people who write persuasively — take that dagger off my back, thank you, it stings — but what actually allowed Ehrlich to do harm was this idea — which the poor man (I’m convinced he has not idea how toxic he sounds) above echoes so exactly: the idea that governments CAN AND SHOULD determine how the people of the nation should live: how many people should be born, how many die, what’s “sustainable”, what they can eat, what they can’t, how much they should exercise, what type of work they should do, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum and ad vomitus.

Without this bizarre idea that a handful of people at the top should determine all this stuff; that the smart and “enlightened” should decide when the rest of us can wipe our asses, and how many ply the toilet paper should be, Ehrlich would have been just another harmless madman, foaming at the mouth and screaming into the void — or perhaps the college classroom, which comes much to the same — without influencing mass media, the culture, and outright governments like India, China, and a bunch of countries in poor, benighted Africa.

I do understand the temptation — lead us not into — of thinking you’re smart and better read and more enlightened than the rest which fed both Ehrlich and those who fell for his load of week-old, rancid maltusian fish. I get it because I think I and most of those reading this blog fell into that trap when we were teens. We read a lot, and we were smarter than our classmates (Which, unfortunately wasn’t very hard) so we thought we should have more say in how people lived than the run of the mill kid still reading picture books in fifth grade.

Then we grew up. And in growing up we came to realize that though — by and large, and with exceptions — we could run circles and figure eights around most people in the fields we were really good at, even with half a brain tied behind our backs, there were things that were utterly impossible for us that other people did easily. And I’m not talking about the bane of my existence in middle school, aka, “dribble a basketball” but things that are needed for every day life. I’m complete and utter drawers at assembling any structure more complex than ikea furniture. Do not under any circumstances let me lose with any process that is primarily visual (I’m okay if I can handle the pieces of something, but just icons on a screen? ick) like a bunch of programming systems. And I had to invent ways to figure out what pieces of wood I needed to cut that didn’t involve measurements, because 543 and 453 and for that matter 345 become the same thing in my head, once I walk away from my notes. (The way I figured leaned into mom’s trade of making clothes patterns. I use massive sheets of newsprint and cut a shape of the piece I need, then tape that to the wood, and cut. Yes, it’s stupid but it works.) Meanwhile people who found “See Spot run” a challenging read could do all of the stuff that bedeviled me (including dribbling a basketball. Sigh) with trivial ease.

More importantly in the process of growing up I figured a lot of “my people” came up with absolutely bizarre and perverse theories from all that reading, and were wholly unamenable to argument once it was in their head. And I found — and you guys probably found too — that I actually got along with a lot of people who didn’t really enjoy fiction reading, or abstract theory, but whose hobby might be building cool engines, or building interesting furniture, or even things like gardening or cooking. I could relate to them on that plane, and often found more in common with them than with the people who were more like me.

Because, HEAR ME OUT: People are not widgets. They aren’t even easily classifiable into types. Heck, Dan and I are obviously the “same time of person” and can usually figure out the reasoning the other followed to get where he got. Except he can think in math and doesn’t switch digits, and scares the living daylights out of me when he and younger son sit down and start discussing their ideas for a time machine. I’m fairly sure they do it only to annoy me, but seriously I wouldn’t be surprised if I came downstairs some fine morning, and they told me they had built a time machine — in the basement, of COURSE — and had brought Master Shakespeare forward so I can meet him.

That’s the other thing, she grumbles ceiling-ward, younger son! He is the one whose thought processes are more like mine, but what he chooses to think about might as well be alien. And he came from inside me. I know, I was there. It hurt.

But he’s like me, and yet utterly different. Like his father, and yet utterly different. Second verse, same as the first, brothers and sisters, sing from the top of the hymnal: PEOPLE ARE NOT WIDGETS.

Eugenics is inherently evil and counterproductive, whether you’re religious or not, because you can’t weed people out. You just can’t. Genius birth morons (and vice versa) and geniuses have places in which they are utter morons, while morons are genius of its kind. Even if you set out to sterelize everyone who has some supposedly wholly harmful characteristic, like say a high cancer tendency, or depression, you might find out you’d eliminated a most of your creative people. (I have theories, I do.) BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE NO WIDGETS.

Social engineering is just as evil. Start with that post above: Who determines what population is “sustainable”? Sustainable according to whom? And for whom?

Sustainable so people don’t outstrip resources, which was Ehrlich’s insanity? But what are the resources? Do you know? Because Malthus, that horrible man, has been wrong all along the line. More humans means more creativity (law of averages) which means an ability to create ways to feed all of us, which yes, in theory leads to more humans, but in reality doesn’t seem to. So, again, sustainable according to whom?

The government might seem like a good idea — at one point in defending his comment this guy told me we needed honest politicians. But he’s wrong. We’d need demi-gods for this — but even if we had very smart, honest and kind leaders, the platonic ideal of civil servants, say, WHERE WOULD THEY GET THE KNOWLEDGE. How would they know what population was sustainable? Forget knowing when the population will throw a genius that changes the game, how can they tell what the game is or what the pieces are? I swear the illusion that the government has accurate counts of everything is one of the crazies delusions begat by the 20th century. Never has this been true, and never will it be true. Let’s say someone goes out to determine how much edible foodstuff there is in a small village: they’ll come back with a count that doesn’t even vaguely approach reality. Because some people will inflate what they have for social purposes; some people will undercount out of sheer paranoia; some people will lie without meaning to, because they were distracted and just spit out a number. And some people will lie because they made mistakes on what they had (Take the five items for a greatly discounted price that our grocery store runs. We tend to buy things like detergent then, because well… it’s cheaper. The other day, late at night, I was in a panic because I’d run out of dishwashing soap and the store was already closed. I’d looked everywhere… Except husband had moved two large packages into a different area of the basement… But if you’d asked, I’d have said “We’re out” and lied unintentionally.)

This is why (among many other reasons) communist governments fail. Because the people at the top can’t get an accurate count of anything including people in general. And they’re even worse at predicting what will be needed. Which is why the furthest a government interferes in the economy, the more likely immiseration and collapse. This is known as “the knowledge problem.” People at the top can’t KNOW what millions of people need, can do, or even are up to. It’s impossible. (I believe, for instance, lying to government busybodies is one of the beatitudes. Well, it is one of the beatitudes in USAianism. Because I say so. So there.)

The whole idea that governments not only can but SHOULD “social engineer” people is arrant nonsense. It is also evil, because while you can’t engineer people to the desired results, you can accidentally send them down some very weird paths. You can’t create homo sovieticus, who lives for the state and is utterly selfless, but you can create vast classes of people who have no idea how to survive without government handouts, or who would murder their neighbors for a snickers. More to the point, you can’t stop people drinking alcohol, but you can empower the mob because they’re the ones trafficking in the now illegal alcohol.

Because people are not widgets. They have decision power and agency, and if you herd them one way, they might not be able to go against you, but they will find other things to do that is not what you wanted.

For instance, the lockdowns were designed to steal the election for Biden and to convince us of how great this totally managed society was where the government could ban misinformation and force you to own nothing and be happy. This was the beginning of the reign of a thousand years… Or it would reelect Donald Trump who is now forewarned and forearmed and better able to be burr on the left’s posterior, of course. But they never saw that possibility coming because for them people are widgets, and therefore would just do as the plan said.

They also never foresaw that a vast contingent of people would not want to go back to the office afterwards, because they found they were more productive from home. Or that an even vaster contingent would see what Junior was learning at school and bring the kids home to learn. Oops.

Yes, the left thinks it scored early hits with social engineering. Mostly with racial integration. They forget that the races always wanted to integrate. It’s a basic humanity thing. Humans like strange. It’s why there were segregation laws.

They did score some hits with sending women into the workforce and making men less “aggressive.” Within my lifetime at that. They managed this through unrelenting propaganda, some of which is still messing up even my thinking, and I’m good at seeing the poison. The problem is that telling people that being wives and mothers was a betrayal, or letting down the side, and portraying women who wanted children as stupid was not enough. No. They had to portray family life as hell. They had to propagandize women and men to think they’re on opposite camps. They had to, in fact, destroy basic humanity to get there.

And even then, most women are in the work force due to a combination of high taxes (as is, in my family, I work mostly to pay our taxes, I think — gives a baleful eye to the tax papers… at least at my darkest moments, I’m convinced of that) and poor financial math ability. (Most women working entry level jobs are, if they were brutally honest about work clothes, fuel, second car, etc, costing the family money.) Or, of course, because they’re single because the left has propagandized people away from dating, let alone marrying.

You can call that a success. I call it short sighted. Since yes, it’s brought us to where we’re facing a demographic cliff. Which means in the next generation, even if women stay in the work force, there simply won’t be enough humans to do the necessary work.

No, I don’t know how many people there are. But I do know I see more elderly than kids, and that isles with kid stuff in the stores have shrank and shrank and shrank in my lifetime.

And that’s a problem. Because the fewer people you have, the more likely we won’t have that one rare genius who solves the problems that will need solved. And for that matter the more likely a virus will render us extinct. Not to mention that not reproducing is also a way of going extinct. (Not with a bang — definitely NOT with a bang. Or any bang — but with a whimper.)

It is imperative we take the stupid idea that humans are things that can be “engineered” out of our minds. It is important to eradicate the idea that a precious few have the knowledge to HERD and CULL humanity as though they were sheep.

Because humans aren’t sheep. Though they’re closer to sheep (no, really. Have you ever DEALT with sheep) than to obedient widgets who do as told every time and don’t come up with creative, insane, bizarre ways to obey your orders while utterly subverting them.

There are no special few, honest or dishonest, who know everything needed to deal with humans (or even sheep) except in very small groups (we call those families) that they know very very well. Other than that, mostly, governments should do as little as possible.

And every government office should have a plaque that says: People are not widgets. Don’t forget this. If you do the penalty is death. For someone.

Years ago — so many years ago I think it was the FIRST Bush administration, right after he’d said something about the axis of evil — I had a phone conversation with my brother which shocked me so much that I still remember it vividly.

He was very disapproving of Bush of course. Look, no. He’s not stupid. In fact I’m the dumb bunny of my (I was going to say birth, but it’s both, really, birth and married) family. But you have to understand the “news” they get in Europe make ours sound raving right wing. Yes, even CNN. CNN international is… well, I won’t insult piles of steaming garbage. At least they’re not communist propaganda.

Anyway, he was ranting about Rush and war monging (I THINK. It’s been a while) and then he said “He’s even picking on poor, mad little North Korea.” My jaw dropped. I don’t think I ever managed to pick it up off the floor. It’s still there, metaphorically speaking.

I was a large, ungainly child. Not fat, just built like a tank. And for those who’ve met me and are staring at the page in confusion, yeah, I gained a lot of weight since the six months in bed with pre-eclampsia and repeated dances with hypothyroidism some of which took a while for the doctors to figure out. But I was not a fat child. What I was was huge. And if you’re staring at the page and going “But you are–” Yeah, well, you see, it was Portugal in the sixties. When I stopped growing, at 5’7″ I was taller than probably half the men. (I am now shorter yes. Pre-eclampsia did weird things to my joints, okay?) In all my pictures with my class or friends, from first grade on, not only do I stand a head taller than them, but I’m built on a different scale. Brick sh*thouse comes to mind. (It’s very different in Portugal now. Keep that in mind when we talk about the effects of nutrition. A lot of younger people over six feet.)

Anyway, perhaps because of my size and my being … uh… combative, dad sent me to school with a set of instructions that included “never physically fight someone smaller than you.” Dad truly didn’t understand what evil lives in the heart of little girls. Oh, not mine. Neither subtlety nor conniving were ever part of my character. I’m too ADD to plan underhanded attacks, and as for subtlety, I plain can’t be arsed and besides my face is glass fronted. Most little girls…. uh… Make use of the weapons they have. I’m trying to remember which British author said the most conniving thing in nature is a school boy. He OBVIOUSLY never hung out with school girls.

I was completely unprepared for the character shredding, undermining, “pranks” that destroyed my belongings, etc. And the solution would have made dad very worried, if he’d ever known about them which he didn’t. I couldn’t nor did I want to change my entire personality to retaliate in kind. Frankly, besides the fact that it was against my inclinations, that kind of underhanded attack struck me as something that, for lack of a better term, stains the soul. So once the mess obtruded on my consciousness (you’d really need to know me very well to know how much it takes for me to realize I’m being harassed much less who is doing it) I arranged for a moment where no one saw it, smacked the idiot once or twice and told her next time I’d wipe the floor with her. It’s REMARKABLE how that stopped the shenanigans cold. In fact it stopped them so much I aggregated a circle of friends who were also socially awkward and likely to be the target of such bullying. (Later, in the bigger schools, I also acquired a bunch of LITTLE (or handicapped) friends who were the target of PHYSICAL bullying from larger people. But they weren’t conniving. They were all Odds, bless them. I wish I had pictures. We were the most ridiculously assorted bunch.) I acquired them because being my friend, even if I never did anything (and sometimes I did) to protect them meant they could say “if you mess with me, she’ll be upset.)

However, to dad’s advice, I never picked on those smaller than myself. Actually I never picked on anyone. My basic attitude is that I very much would like to be left alone, preferably with a book and (these days) a cup of coffee. Frankly I think this attitude attracted a lot of the nonsense, but I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHY. Still don’t.

Anyway, countries of course aren’t people. The dynamic in “girl’s schools’ works though, in a weird way, only more so.

The reason my jaw dropped is that my brother seemed utterly unaware that not only was North Korea hell on Earth for its citizens (do they consent? Who knows? No, seriously. When you’re brought up in that kind of regime, you don’t even know there’s alternatives) but also a danger in the larger sphere. Turns out nuclear bombs are not that difficult to build though thank the Lord apparently near impossible to build functionally for most of the schrecklich regimes of this world. Even “little mad North Korea” can build nukes. And while reaching us with one is unlikely, reaching South Korea or much of the Asian sphere is within their means. And this is not just bad because of alliances, but because it disrupts global trade and America lives and dies by global trade. (Among our many virtues. You don’t kill people you hope to sell to. that would be stupid.)

Beyond nuclear danger though, which our own missiles might or might not deter (say, if a regime is nuts and wants to bring about the apocalypse, “we’ll nuke you back” might mean very little. Just off the top of my head.) The world is not the size it was even in World War II. Not only is travel faster, but money and propaganda flow freely.

Which are the way the weak battle the strong. See my brother’s indignation on behalf of poor little mad North Korea. Note I don’t ask him his opinion of Hamass. I’d like us to remain friends.

In that way the world and the relations between countries are a lot closer to an all girl school and anything between men. Though in our feminized age, a lot of men fall into the worst female behavior, so my guess is this is about to become a universal problem even at the interpersonal level, if it hasn’t already.

Which brings me “To what does size have to do with it?” or even relative health or capacity for war.

Sure, the US can and is wiping the floor with Iran. This is justified because Iran has killed a lot of Americans in terrorism, and I don’t put it beyond them and the current axis of evil, including Venezuela and China to have financed most of the invasion of our borders (helped, of course by the enemy within) which was a genuine and disturbing innovative way of war. “Attack by human wave, with the human wave weaponized to disrupt and hate and the host country.” (A lot of the recruiting for ‘immigration’ was via communist group membership and worse, criminal organizations.) And that stroke of genius tactic almost did for us, will probably do Europe in, and our only chance of surviving it is to keep the left out of power long enough. That is evil, diabolic, and weaponizes our compassion and generosity against us, helped by a giant dose of insidious propaganda.

So should we hit “little mad” countries. Yes. At least when they’re attacking us by various insidious means. Because as the actress said to the Bishop “what does size have to do with it?”

Sure, if the US took it upon itself to attack countries because they’re small, that would be wrong and evil. But Lichtenstein is safe from us, and I don’t see Portugal on the hit list.

Look, the more important thing is you can’t really apply the size or “many against one” thing to nations that you’d apply to people. If we did, then the allies ganging up on “poor little Germany” which was certainly mad and by LAND MASS much much smaller than the rest, would be wrong and evil and a terrible injustice.

But you see, it’s not land mass that makes a country dangerous. Or even population. It’s what they try or succeed to do to countries that just want to be left alone, and often, in fact, to their own people. (No, we’re not the world’s social worker, but there are limits. And their actions against their own people and the world are often linked. See Germany.)

Take the current hotness for terrorist mass shooters. I don’t care if the tactical armored guy with the gun intent on shooting kids in synagogue is a shrimp, and if he’s taken down by ten big footballs players who beat him to death with his own gun. He was a clear and present danger.

Anyone who pushes the “look at big country attacking little country” is selling you something. Russia invading Ukraine isn’t wrong because the Ukraine is smaller. It’s wrong because Russia’s aggression came out of nowhere (trust me on this. False flag doesn’t justify it) and is fueled by Russia’s deranged fantasies of reviving past glory. You can disagree on the causes (and you’d be wrong, but never mind) but from my perspective, size ain’t got nothing to do with it.

In the same way, the US has a lot of land mass, resources and wealth, but it’s not stomping around the world trying to destroy small lands. Anyone who tells you that is also selling you snake shoes. We are mostly, at heart, businessmen. And businessmen can’t sell to the dead.

It’s time people realized the international sphere is NOT in fact a scaled up kindergarten. And even if it were, sometimes the little kid is a stone cold psychopath, and a slap and the promise of more stop a lot of suffering before it happens. Yes, sometimes the big guy ALSO uses that as an excuse.

Which is why sane people judge individually and not generally and blinded by their prejudices.

Unfortunately sane people are rare in this world, and propaganda makes them rarer.

Keep that in mind when propaganda buffets you.

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

EDITED BY DAVE FREER, WITH STORIES BY HOLLY CHISM AND ROSS HATHAWAY: Mad Science: Bits and Pieces (Raconteur Press Anthologies)

In a world where genius teeters on the edge of catastrophe, mad scientists tinker with the impossible—and sometimes succeed.
From a genetically engineered lobster staging a breakout to a grieving inventor building a gravity-defying escape vehicle, from a boy turning catfish into cybernetic heroes to a lone mechanic assembling a story-powered machine to defy both villains and overlords, these ten wildly inventive tales explore the glorious, ridiculous, and terrifying consequences of unchecked curiosity.
Expect sentient toasters, soul-splicing radiators, apocalyptic piano dollies, and one very determined vacuum cleaner. Expect laughter, dread, heart, and the occasional explosion.
Welcome to the laboratory. Mind the sparks.

FROM DWIGHT R. DECKER: The Napoleon of Time

In a near-infinity of parallel Earths identical in every way except for their current moment in time, Doug Arngrim and English-born Gillian Tilbrook, two college instructors from different centuries, find each other in 1912 Poughkeepsie. Meanwhile, a rogue professor roams the past and future in a stolen time machine, changing history on a multitude of worlds according to his whims as the Paratemporal History Institute attempts to track him down and put an end to his historical meddling. Destiny may unfold the same way on every Earth as long as everything is the same, but when the course of human events is interrupted by outsiders, almost anything is free to happen — or is there a still higher Destiny that controls even that? The Napoleon of Time is a quirky science-fiction adventure that takes a slightly different slant on time travel with a dash of trans-temporal romance!

FROM ROSS HATHAWAY: Beautiful Regrets

This anthology is 10 stories from my first year of writing.

In worlds where blades flash, ships vanish into cursed horizons, and dark magic always demands a price, danger is never far and neither is a crooked smile at fate’s expense.

These are stories of mercenaries and misfits, pirates and detectives, warriors and wanderers who live by grit, nerve, and the occasional bad decision. They face haunted seas, alien suns, brutal battlefields, and the long shadows of the supernatural with equal parts courage and gallows humor.

Blending the raw energy of classic pulp with a modern taste for irony and edge, these tales race forward with action, strange wonders, and sharp-tongued wit. Heroes are rarely pure, villains rarely simple, and survival often depends on who can laugh at the darkness the longest.

Fast, fierce, and darkly playful, this is speculative fiction that knows the world is dangerous and finds the adventure in it anyway.

FROM MARY CATELLI: Sylvie’s Escape

Princess Sylvie’s parents sent her off to a mountain castle for her safety. There, she is greeted with a gift of a kitten. Not just any kitten, but one of the legendary Queen Angelique’s kittens.

When the kitten leads her into the forest, she follows, just avoiding capture as soldiers arrive to take the castle. She must flee and find refuge among the mountains and the mountain folk.

If she can.

FROM JAY MAYNARD: Crystal Beauty (The Crystal Therapy Chronicles)

She was supposed to be treated.
Instead, she was abandoned.

Talia entered an experimental therapy hoping to heal a depression that nothing else could touch.

Instead, the sorcerer overseeing her treatment sealed her inside a crystal sphere—and left her there.

Unable to move.
Unable to hear.
Able only to see the wall before her.

While only three years pass in the outside world, Talia lives fifty years alone with her thoughts.

Now the truth has been discovered.

Sky 12, a guide from the Laminatrix Mental Hospital, enters the crystal to attempt the impossible: reach a mind shattered by decades of silence and rebuild it from the inside.

If he succeeds, Talia may reclaim her life.

If he fails, he will never leave the crystal either.

Inspired by Sleeping Beauty, Crystal Beauty is a quiet, haunting, and ultimately hopeful short story set in the world of The Crystal Therapy Chronicles, where even the deepest wounds may yet find healing.

FROM NATHAN BRINDLE: A Dragon in the Foie Gras (Timelines Universe Book 3)

Captain Delaney Wolff Fox is back.

She’s just led her team on a months-long hunt through the penal world al-Saḥra’ (known otherwise by its semi-satirical name “Sanddoom”), looking for an industrial-sized illegal drug “kitchen” that’s been supplying colony worlds with various illegal substances via a network of involuntary migrant “mules”. That hunt ended satisfactorily, and rather explosively, with the destruction of the “kitchen” and hundreds if not thousands of personnel associated with it.

Now the team is heading back to Earth, hoping for some well-deserved shore leave . . .

. . . but it’s not to be. A long-sleeping foreign agent has been found in a stasis chamber in an abandoned Chicago warehouse, and it’s up to Delaney and crew to investigate the mystery, by traveling back to the year 2017 to find out why the agent was placed in stasis then, and why the stasis seems originally to have been planned to end in late 2020.

And when the sleeper wakes, asks for and consumes an entire pound of goose liver pâté, and asks for more, it’s pretty obvious they’ve got

A Dragon In The Foie Gras

FROM MICHAEL MORGAN: The Castaway Files: $50 a Day Plus Expenses

In the shadows of the city, trouble always finds someone willing to take the case.

The Castaway Files: $50 a Day Plus Expenses gathers four gritty detective stories where the stakes are high, the streets are dangerous, and the truth rarely comes cheap.

• A retired cop investigating a mysterious death on his apartment stairs discovers that the missing instrument of a young cellist may be worth killing for.
• A group of kidnappers discovers that abducting a millionaire’s wife can lead to a payday—or a bloodbath.
• A former operative pulled back into the game hunts the people responsible for a brutal kidnapping, only to uncover a conspiracy that reaches far beyond the underworld.
• And in the city’s darkest alleys, a cat with too many toes and a trenchcoat goes looking for a cop killer—and finds a tragedy no one saw coming.

Hard-boiled, fast-moving, and full of dark humor, these stories carry on the tradition of classic pulp crime fiction while adding a few unexpected twists.

Because in the Castaway Files, every case begins the same way:

Someone is desperate.
Someone is dangerous.
And someone is willing to pay.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: Lunar Detectives: 12 Tales of 2040s Moon Bases (The Detective Stories)

In the 2040s, the Moon is no longer a distant dream but a bustling frontier of corporate ambition, where helium-3 mines fuel Earth’s energy hunger and rival bases—LunarCorp’s Alpha, Selene Industries’ Hub, and NovaTech’s Station—vie for dominance. Amid this tense lunar landscape, Lunar Detectives: 12 Tales of 2040s Moon Bases weaves twelve gripping mysteries, each a standalone tale of intrigue, sabotage, and human resilience. Led by Dr. Lena Voss, Raj Patel, and Aisha Khan—brilliant minds from geology, security, and logistics—these unlikely detectives unravel crimes that threaten the fragile lunar order. From a helium-3 heist to a sabotaged gravity array and a sprawling conspiracy named Dione, their investigations reveal a web of corporate greed, hidden networks, and secrets buried in lunar dust. Inspired by classic detective fiction, these stories blend wit, deduction, and heartfelt moments under the stark lunar sky, culminating in a battle to save the Moon from economic warfare. Perfect for fans of science fiction mysteries and intricate puzzles, this collection proves that even in the silent void, truth is worth pursuing.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Godshead (Modern Gods Book 1)

Food and drink for sale; snark for free…

It’s hard to be a god nobody believes in, sometimes. Especially when one spends their days trying to quietly go about his or her life in a world that barely remembers the myths surrounding the old Greek gods, but where some religions still follow the old Norse gods.

And some of the Norse gods are getting more dangerous: Loki, the trickster, has lost the last of what passed for his sanity, and needs to be helped, or stopped. One of the two. And no one seems to be up to it.

At least, not alone. Working together, they can avoid the worst of Loki’s tricks, and maybe even solve their problems.

A tale told from several points of view.

BY HENRY KUTTNER, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: Elak of Atlantis (Annotated): The complete classic sword & sorcery tales

Join Elak on perilous quests across the ancient world! These four classic sword-and-sorcery tales by the masterful Henry Kuttner take us to realms of wonder and terror.

Across the mystical landscapes of lost Atlantis, Elak faces down ferocious monsters, cunning foes, and alien magical arts. With his unmatched skill with a sword and unyielding will to survive, Elak battles to protect the innocent and vanquish evil in this action-packed collection.

With their unique blend of swashbuckling adventure, fantastical world-building, and Lovecraftian horror, Kuttner’s Elak tales have captivated fans of fantasy and science fiction for generations.

• This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the stories genre and historical context.

FROM KAREN MYERS: Monsters, 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

MONSTERS – Xenoarchaeologist Vartan has promised his young daughter Liza one of the many enigmatic lamedh objects that litter the site of a vanished alien civilization.

No one can figure out what they’re good for, but Liza finds a use for one.

ADAPTABILITY – The Webster Marble Deluxe Woodsman, Model 820-E, has been offline for quite some time. Quite some time indeed.

Good thing Webster has a manual to consult, and a great many special functions.

AND FROM SARAH HOYT, WHO REALLY IS GOING TO LEARN TO DO REALLY PUBLICITY THIS WEEK, SHE SWEARS*: No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)

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 1
The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep.
They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner.
The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.
Skip’s already broken that one.
Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.

Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.

*Early, often, and in a bewildering profusion of languages. Sorry.

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: Share

Back in the dawn of time when the world was new, a time when my memories are bathed in a golden light, I had an arrangement of my time and mind down pat and it worked.

Okay, the time was the 90s and since that started with the year of our Lord 1990 I guess it wasn’t the dawn of time. It just feels like that. I’m not joking about the time being suffused with a golden glow.

It actually started out pretty badly as 1991 and 1992 were mostly years from hell. As in, Dan jumped to a work-from-home job while I was pregnant with #1 son, and in the way of work-from-home jobs in the nineties, it was a scam that never paid him. It took us six months to figure that out. Anyway, turned thirty in 1992, just as we finished packing to move to Colorado, and that initiated the happiest almost-decade of my life, cut short by 9/11, not because of 9/11 but because of what it did to my friends’ group.

For a while there, while #1 son and later #2 son were toddlers, I settled into a routine. My favorite years were the six years in Manitou Springs, on top of a hill, in a house that was full of light. I worked in the attic, overlooking the mountain town. Incidentally this was also probably the year that set my thyroid on the road to h*ll, since I managed to pass the invisible upward line that means the altitude is REALLY bad for me. I was okay in downtown Springs (would have been better in downtown Denver) but get me anywhere above that, and the autoimmune starts kicking random stuff. So Manitou and Castle Rock were definitely bad ideas. Particularly since we lived on tall hills and in tall houses both places. Anyway….

My days settled into a very nice pattern where I took a long walk before breakfast (and usually before the kids woke up) then had breakfast, got the kids up, settled them doing something and did a one to two hour “running-clean” of the house. Most moms here will know exactly what I’m talking about. you flush toilets, wipe sinks, make beds, collect discarded stuff and put it in its proper place, then dusted and ran the vacuum, interrupted by the kids doing their thing and coming to show me stuff or asking me how to write something…

BUT what made those hours was that either I called my writing buddy or she called me and we chatted, while she was doing her running clean.

You see, we’d met through our husbands, who’d met at work and were both amused by finding out their wives both were trying to break into SF/F. So we started — haltingly — talking about it. And it became a thing. We talked about markets and submissions, of course, but mostly we talked about what we were writing, the chapters for that day, what we thought was coming out in the current story, etc.

This conversation centered me for the day, made it clear what I was doing, so that I could sit down and work afterwards. This was easier after the kids were both in school (as were hers) because we called each other after dropping the kids off at school, and after cleaning up sat down and wrote till it was time to pick them up.

From it came the writers group that met on Saturdays from 3 pm till whenever. We were usually still kicking people out of the house at 10 pm, and I often made the kind of group dinner you make when you’re young and broke: usually pasta and homemade sauce.

These were my most productive years, until this last year and — it’s shaping up — this one. I always attributed it to the connections, the fact that I had someone outside my head to talk to about my imaginary friends; the fact there was a rhythm and structure to my day.

It fell apart after 9/11. Partly politics. Well, you know. “Did you go crazy, or did you report, on that day they wounded New York?” as Mr. Cohen put it. When world views shatter, they tend to take friendships and writing groups with them.

But there were also economic upheavals and people married, divorced, moved away… and died. By 2003 our group of friends and connections was gone, and I was slogging through writing and increasingly more difficult trad pub landscape all on my own. None of which got easier after I came out of the political closet circa 2010.

So why am I telling you all this?

I realized recently that I haven’t had a group, a connection to humanity in general until my close-in-reader-group that I call the Chinchilla of Hope gang (Yes, there is a story to it. Hold on. Because, first:) This led to some of the most arid times of my life and career. The stories still arrived, on command, but I had no words to write them; no ability to concentrate. It felt like being locked in a stone chamber passing out my stories through tiny cracks on fragments the size of a fortune cookie fortune. I still wrote, but sometimes an entire year went by I couldn’t finish anything.

Yes, there were health issues too, and a lot of it is real, like when the big fires in CO made my asthma go insane which in turn affected everything. But I also wonder how much was the lack of connections.

The Chinchilla of Hope gang are a subset of my fan discord (the closed one. Explaining why it’s closed is… a long story. Yes, there is also an open one, and I promise I’ll visit it more often. Just not yet.) which started out by my threatening them with my Chinelo, which as all of you know is the Portuguese word for Chancla. (There’s chanca too, but no one hits anyone with a chanca, because that’s — in Portuguese — a closed wooden clog. Hitting anyone with that would be felony murder.) One of them who is more dyslexic than should be allowed decided I was hitting her with a Chinchilla, which she thought given the hardness of her head was cruel and unusual to the Chinchilla. Next thing I knew they were throwing virtual Chinchillas at each other and hitting each other with the Chinchilla of Hope. Which was then turned on me when I started writing again, and was very doubtful about the sanity of EVEN WRITING No Man’s Land, the story that I’d been sitting on for (then) 42 years because I was sure no one wanted it. Then started bombarding me with Chinchillas of hope and… well, it turned out all right.

Anyway, the point is, I’m an extreme introvert. How extreme? Well, since 2020 and the lockdowns I have to talk myself down from panic when we’re hosting my kids and their wives for a holiday. Also mostly the “con crud” I get after any con (or let’s face it, dinner with fans) is mostly introvert exhaustion.

While I’m the kind of introvert that needs to see people, usually I’m perfectly content sitting in a corner of a coffee shop, writing, and watching people move around and do things. Seeing them is ENOUGH.

But it turns out even I need a connection. Even if it’s pixels on a screen, via a Discord group.

As I type this, younger son and wife are trying to find a local friend group, and its…. difficult. People were broken, and not just by 9/11 which fractured opinions and made them extremely vehement, but by 2020. In retrospect, the 90s were an anomaly because even though people were very different politically, we were all so relieved we were no longer living under the shadow of “WWIII will break out any minute” that we could talk across political lines. This was mostly tolerance on the right, I think, because we thought without the USSR our local commies weren’t really that much of a threat, and we could afford to let them widget on, and even be friends in the hobbies and stuff we shared.

Yea, we were wrong, but we didn’t know it yet. Now we know it, and things are way more complicated.

But on top of that, 2020 genuinely broke people’s ability to relate, to talk, to get to know strangers and relate to them. We’re more fragmented, more distant.

Yet we’re still social apes. And if even the extreme introvert needs that connection, you probably need it too.

I don’t have an easy way for you to do it. Even with our local friends, we see each other… occasionally. Because meeting in person requires effort, and it feels weird and unnatural after the year of silence and isolation and then the last crazy five years or so.

The problem is that I think something about the human brain equates having no group, no human connection, to “They’re about to put me on the ice floe” or “Hit me on the head and leave me for the jaguars.” and we start going loopy. Well, for some of us loopy-er. Which makes the creative work or even “just” the mind work stop.

What can you do? I don’t know. Start establishing a connection. Somehow. It’s work, but it is worth it.

In the end, humans become and stay humans by being around other humans. And yes, you too need it, even if virtual, even if discord, even if distant. We all need, sometimes, to hear from someone who is not the voice behind our eyes.

Go and try.

This morning I woke up with my husband reading to me. As we know this is always a problem. That’s why I have two novels with the Red Baron, one fantasy and one a science fiction trilogy, sitting at the back of my brain, waiting to bust out…. As soon as I do another 10 ahead of them, including the second of Elly, which is now being a problem.

Fortunately or unfortunately what he was reading didn’t pertain to dead heroes, or fiction or much I could convert into anything beyond a preachy short story, which I don’t write.

You see, he was reading me a politics editorial. First let me tell you, right now, that if this had been even ten years ago, I’d have performed an exorcism on the spot. Because the Mathematician and I divide the world in two as surely as the treaty of Tordesillas, (spell checker insists this is “tortillas.” This amuses me more than it should.) but in a more insubstantial ways. We specialized within the first three or four years of our marriage. He does the accounting for the household and my business(es) (poor man) because I’m digit dyslexic. I do the housekeeping. He keeps abreast of movies, games, music and informs me if there’s something I might like. I keep abreast of books and blogs and inform him if there’s anything he might be interested in. I refinish pianos, he plays them. He does math, I do politics.

That last one is hard and fast. Mostly because while I’m a nervibore (I live on my nerves) and politics makes me crazy, not keeping abreast of them makes me CRAZIER. I view politics as a dangerous ocean that might at any moment throw out a sneaker wave that drowns me. I have reason for this. If the streets are going to turn into the kind of mess where I turn a corner and run into armed lunatics who will shoot on vague impressions, I want to have some (years of) warning.

He on the other hand hates arguments and sneaking and such things politics are made of, and he would be driven completely raving insane by following all the tendrils of argument and nonsense that is my bread and butter.

It took him years to realize when I started yelling at a movie he was watching and calling it “rank propaganda” I wasn’t being paranoid. He still enjoyed some movies that would make me put a shoe through the expensive screen. (This is why I have noise cancelling headphones and a laptop and am usually blogging, doing instapundit, editing, anything but watching the movie, unless I think it will be “safe for Sarahs.” Those are rare.)

But well… he started paying SOME attention during the Obama administrations, because the sheer rain of sh*t that little psychopath inflicted on this nation got through his consciousness. Then there came 2020. In 2020 for the first two weeks he went raving insane in a mathematical way. No, really. He created a program that extracted actual numbers of hospitalizations and deaths from Covid from every County hospital system (y’all in Utah gave him problems because you use a system different than the rest of the country. I no longer remember why.) Even knowing half of those who died “from Covid” were “with something else like a hole in the head” the numbers were ridiculous. For instance, KC went to “condition red” and hard lock down with four hospitalizations and no deaths.

Anyway, he made this program that updated weekly and told me to share it on instapundit. I did. Every day for a week. The push back was insane. Including “Oh, but they haven’t updated the numbers yet. Next week it will be black plague level.”

He was baffled — guys, he’s a mathematician. His big problem is that he doesn’t understand people being illogical, just like I don’t understand people being rude. Or rather we do, but we just feel it shouldn’t be so. Very strongly — and persevered for a while. The numbers never really increased. The response was all out of proportion. Most people didn’t believe him.

And suddenly he saw what I’d been yelling about for years. And suddenly some of his favorite movies went out of watching rotation because all the good characters were leftists. And suddenly he read politics.

Now keep in mind he’s still not by instinct a political animal, like the rest of us. He’s still, actually, largely apolitical. Those who know us well can attest that I’ll be deep in discussion with a buddy about some ridiculous political snag and Dan will erupt from the office with a baffled expression and say “Did you guys know that–“

He’s outraged, we’re laughing because this is something we were exercised about three months ago, and have since successfully fought back on. He’s my barometer for what the normal “right of center” is like. He’s the person who shows me “Why aren’t we all running around the hills with Klashnakovs yet?” is nonsense, since most of the normal people don’t know a tenth of what the jokers on the left have done. (We’ve learned not to laugh btw, since it offends him. It shouldn’t. He’s the sane one.)

Anyway, so waking up to a mathematician reading politics at me is still confusing at best, alarming at worst.

Picture it: I usually wake up with his alarm clock circa seven thirty, then lay there arguing with the morning.

Morning: is

Me: Oh, no. Oh, no. Not ready. Go away.

Morning: You know you have to get up. You have books to write, a house to clean, food to cook, and you didn’t cue up the blog last night you lazy bum.

Me: mggggggffffffffff.

Morning: Up, up, up….

Meanwhile he showers, and by the time he’s done the morning has usually won and I get my *ss out of bed. (No, you don’t usually see me till close to noon, which you know when I forget to cue the post the night before, or set it wrong. That’s because I’m enrolled in this aerobics program where I run up and down the stairs carrying laundry baskets, or dust and vacuum, or clean the litter boxes, or– Look, it keeps me from being 400 lbs. And provides a sense of accomplishment.)

Anyway, this morning, in the middle of these delicate negotiations between me and the rotation of the Earth, someone walks in phone in hand and says, “The left thinks we’re stupid.”

My eye — on a stalk, yes — emerges from under the covers and I say “mmmmf?”

And then he proceeds to read me this editorial written by some preening MSM slime about how the SAVE act is all a ruse to disenfranchise minorities because:

• the documented cases of “undocumented” (like they forgot their birth certificate at home, and their home is not in another continent.) voting are negligible all over the country.
• This is just to make it harder to vote and prevent black people from voting.
  
  

My husband, who likes to think the best of people is indignant. Since we have motor voter, vote by mail on request, machines where the votes get “adjusted” how do we even prove illegals vote? And do they really think that black people have no ID? Or that black people think they have no ID? Hence “they think we’re stupid.”

He’s right of course, though I wonder how much it is “they think we’re stupid” (They undoubtedly do. Preening disdain for everyone who disagrees with them is a hallmark of the left, because they mistake their political opinions for an IQ test. But they’re probably not the only thing at work) and that their ideology and concentration on theory makes them a peculiar kind of dumb that has nothing to do with natural mental powers. As in, their theory says this, and they need the theory to be right for emotional reasons, so they never think past it. And never examine what is behind the theory.

So, yes, they don’t understand that when you have a school district administrator in Iowa who not only got his position on forged credentials but also — ALSO — is an illegal who has voted for years, or a MAYOR in Kansas who not only is an illegal but has voted for decades, this is what we call a “leading indicator.” Note these are flyover places, not exactly centers of illegal immigration and fraud. If we found the school superintendent in Chicago was a voting illegal, that might be a “Forget it, Jack, it’s Chicago” (Or Detroit. Or California, or, increasingly, Minnesota.) But this is IOWA and KANSAS for sobbing in bed till your pillows are soaking wet. If these two cases exist you bet your sweet and swinging beepy that they’re ALL OVER the country. They’re not documented because as with “undocumented” immigrants, no one has gone looking for documentation. Because what they would find would end up toppling our already worm-eaten trust in our electoral process.

So “documented cases of fraud” are a stalking horse.

More importantly, he’s absolutely right. Look, humans are humans, whether they’re from El Salvador, Barbados or the US. This is something I learned really hard as an exchange student. The Germans had a different culture, but weren’t inherently more sinful or kinder than the people from Guinea.

We have so many means of fraud. SO MANY. From Motor Voter, where, if you’re not a citizen you have to FIGHT not to be signed up to vote, to vote by mail, to vote ahead, to no ID needed to vote, to– And one thing you learn really quick is that if the means of fraud exists SOMEONE will exploit it. And groups who are good at organizing will exploit all those means on an industrial scale.

The Motor Voter thing is peculiarly insidious too, because it can even catch people who aren’t TRYING to be dishonest. Look, Americans themselves don’t understand the difference between illegal immigrant, legal immigrant, resident and citizen. On my civil wedding day a month after I landed in the country for the second time and BEFORE I HAD MY GREEN CARD (which came around December, because bureaucracy) I had an argument with my smart, civically active mother in law, because “You’re an American now. You need to register to vote and make your voice heard.” No, she wasn’t joking. She really thought that’s how it worked. And since then I’ve run into any number of college educated (sometimes with graduate degrees) Americans who think stepping on American soil conveys citizenship. Or an even stupider set who thinks that the rest of the world should vote because “our elections affect the world.” (Let’s not. Most of the world has the kind of culture where if they voted here we’d be as miserable as they are. This is also why “no citizenship without acculturation”. And yes, I have IDEAS.)

So when the newly arrived illegal (or even legal) goes to get a drivers license and the kind lady, having looked at documentation that shows they’re definitely NOT American asks them if they want to register to vote… WHY SHOULD THEY THINK IT’S ILLEGAL? Yes, there’s a line on the paperwork. BUT this is not the paperwork. This is something she does does on the computer, and that’s it. So why would you think something is wrong? And then, because you want to prove you deserve to be an American and Americans vote, of course you VOTE.

So how many illegals vote? Oh, I don’t know. Probably more than 50% of them. Perhaps as many as 80%. (The rest not voting because they’re busy with other stuff and don’t care, not because they think it’s illegal) AND MOST OF THEM HAVE NO IDEA THEY’RE DOING ANYTHING WRONG.

I really can’t emphasize enough the new arrivals complete disorientation in the US. The US is different from most other places in various ways, and when you get here, it’s as though everything you learned as true and solid your entire life suddenly shifts. And not just upside down, but it goes dancing upside down and sideways and tiltawhirl to the point you have no fricking clue what’s legal and not, what is correct and not, or even what would “just” shock your neighbors.

I was college educated and had spent most of my life reading American authors, and I kept being sucker punched by “Wait, what?” I knew stuff like what being a citizen meant because I’d actually taken two civics classes during my exchange student year in the US.

BUT the number of even legal immigrants who understand that stuff is vanishingly small. And the number who are willing to doubt native-born “smart” citizens are even smaller.

This is why requiring proof of birth or citizenship to vote is not any kind of onerous requirement. Look, the people already registered will stay registered. They just need to show ID to vote. (Which means, yes, some illegals will stay on, but since we’re disincentivizing their staying here… well… It’s also why Jeffreys (Temu Obama) is so upset about ICE having access to polling places. It might discourage illegals from voting. Which he thinks is bad. SMDH.)

We don’t actually have a ton of people born in the US who lack a birth certificate, and those who do can usually get one. And a lot of states accept “entry in the family Bible” still, or did last time I looked. And naturalized citizens, TRUST ME have a citizenship certificate. And it’s in their go to bag if they ever need to evacuate. They also usually have a passport. (Because we don’t trust the funny people on the left, that’s why. At least if we speak against them.) And that’s not counting funny places like Hawaii where they will write you a birth certificate even if they have no proof you were born there. (They have some weird name for it like preponderance of evidence, or something.)

Women who changed their names? Well, most women are not mentally damaged. I have friends who were divorced more than once and have no trouble obtaining passports and proving their identity. That is, what do you call it? Bullshit.

However even if 80% of illegals vote, that’s the tip of the iceberg. I’m much more concerned about people over 140 years old voting. On principle, vampires shouldn’t vote, and no one else CAN be that age. And that’s not counting imaginary people. When we bought a house that smelled like an ashram in downtown Colorado Springs, we later received voting cards for 90 some people. This was I GRANT YOU a large Victorian, but it only had six rooms. And the family that lived there before us was three people. And I hear enough of those stories to tell you it’s not just Somalian Learing Centers that are housed ten to the abandoned warehouse.

If people have to vote in person and show ID to vote, that — by itself — will force them to at least get fake IDs for all the people registered as Minnie Mouse and Daffy Duck. That will, at the very least slow the fraud enough to make the margin actually controllable. It won’t stop fraud but it will make the fraud actually “a marginal number” that might affect district elections but not state ones.

Which brings us to “But it will make it harder for people to vote” or my “favorite” “But it will disenfranchise black people.”

If you think the first you’re merely an idiot. I actually have to show my ID to vote. And a picture ID, not merely a (Imminently fake-able in batch lots) utility bill, as in Colorado (And while we’re at it, stop the same day registration bullshit. If it didn’t occur to you you want to vote until the day, you failed the “proof of IQ” needed to vote. And you probably don’t exist, actually.) Do you know how much trouble this is? Well, I usually take my purse. When my name is called (my first middle name pronounced as Marquez because why not? Gah) I grab my license, show it to the volunteer, then get assigned a booth. That’s it. It takes maybe ten seconds. And the license is in the wallet with my credit card and other things I take for literally every transaction in life, from buying a gallon of milk to cashing a check.

“But Sarah, what about people who don’t have those documents?”

Well, people who have been in a persistent vegetative state for the last ten years and whose documents have expired shouldn’t vote. Next?

“But black people–“

Well, and now you can take your frigging racist ass out of the conversation. Because while Joe Biden thought that poor kids were “just as smart as white kids” the rest of us don’t march with KKK hoods. It would be as bad for my asthmatic ass as the Covidiocy masks for one. For another sooner or later someone would tweak to my 23 and me profile and… well, you guys have seen Blazing Saddles. ‘nough said.

FOR THE THIRD AND MOST IMPORTANT HAND: I don’t believe people are defined by race. I think 99% of the differences we attribute to race are actually cultural. And even if we had hard biological differences that weren’t stupid shit like a susceptibility to some genetic issues, and/or an inability to process milk or wheat (REALLY? I needed that why? I don’t care if ggggrandmamas preferred Cassava or barley and oats, this is stupid. The majority of my ancestors lived on wheat!) it would be unlikely to hit American blacks who are, frankly, genetically, as much of a mutt as anyone else here, and more so, since most of them have had ancestors here well over a hundred years. Don’t believe me? Go look at the picture of the LA Mayor in Africa. Your first reaction will be “Who is the white chick?”

I don’t understand how the left can pound their chest and say “I am standing up for blacks who are too stupid to get an ID” and not spot the racist. I mean, the men have to shave and the women have to at least occasionally apply makeup. How do they manage not to look in the mirror.

No, most black people aren’t some kind of infant being looked after by someone else. (Always excepting people who have been in a persistent vegetative state for 10 years.) They do have to bank, or at least cash checks, fly and buy groceries. This means most of them have an ID. Like 99.9% of them. The ones who don’t landed here yesterday from Somalia, and the Learing Center hasn’t gotten around to faking them an ID yet.

So would it hinder people from voting? Yes, billions of them as a Democrat in Congress (I don’t even remember which just now) said. (HOW MANY PEOPLE LIVE IN THE US AGAIN?) But they are mostly illegal, imaginary, vampires and such.

And they shouldn’t be voting.

Like you I want the SAVE act to pass, and I do think we should be making sure the GOP leadership hears from us.

But if it doesn’t pass, does it mean all is lost? Not even close. It means we will go through some narrow and unpleasant places, and that our children, probably extending to our grandchildren, will have their work cut out to make this country half as glorious as it will be otherwise. But this has happened before in our history. In fact the last 100 years, with brief, glorious intervals (Salutes Reagan’s shade) was one such period of waste and destruction, which is why recovering is so difficult. We’re trying to repair problems that started before most of us were even born.

I also think Trump is trying very hard not to leave uncompleted work for his followers, even those of his own party. Yesterday he said he had to take Iran because if he didn’t, he couldn’t be sure his successor would have the courage. I think he feels the same way — perhaps rightly — about the SAVE act.

But the fact remains that our majority is thread-thin and that the act might not pass. That is not the end of the country. We might still win the midterms without it. And we might very well win the presidential in 28.

Look, the problem is that you’re underestimating the amount of fraud. No, seriously. And that the amount of fraud should give you a reason to hope.

I saw immense, massive fraud in Colorado in 12, but the win for the democrats — which they then use to install vote-by-fraud — was razor thin. What does that mean? It means that Colorado at least back then was not a purple state at all — that was the fraud — but an almost bizarrely red state.

And I think we are a bizarrely, solidly conservative (for American ways of being conservative) country. Not at all half and half.

Every time I say this, some of you try to come back with “oh, now, the fraud is just on the margins.” Poppycock.

Of course we can’t be absolutely sure. We can’t be sure of anything. One of the results of pervasive fraud everywhere is that you can’t precisely KNOW everything. Which is why we’re all unsure of everything from scientific fact on down. It’s okay. Look, for years we were sure of things we shouldn’t have been. Turns out COVID is not the first time the US left conned the rest of the world into a jump scare. I cant’ find the link anymore, but apparently the study on eggs and cholesterol didn’t show that eating eggs was bad for your cholesterol. But the results were published that way, because FDR wanted to lower the demand for eggs, so as to bring down the price of eggs. (WHAT IS IT WITH DEMOCRATS AND EGGS!) But people believed it the world over and for most of his life my father didn’t have eggs for breakfast — which he loves — because they were unhealthy.

So it’s best that we’ve finally realized we can’t trust the experts, we can’t trust “studies” and we definitely can’t trust polls.

So how do I know that everything isn’t lost? Well, there are ways to tell. If you ever take an art class, they will tell you the way to know the real shape of the object is to examine the “hole” it makes in the background.

Like that.

If everything were truly lost, they wouldn’t need so many means of cheating. If the cheating were only “on the margins” Moter Voter would have done it. They wouldn’t need to keep piling on so much nonsense, from crazy redistricting for decades to finally “Vote by Mail.” And now, trying to agitate to voting by email, because that’s secure or sane. Or the crooked machines would have done it. Or the fact they still control all the media would have done it.

No Republican would ever have won an election, except as a way to make it seem we were still free.

And how do I know it’s not that? Oh, please.

Yes, the first Reagan maybe they would have given it way (but even by then they wouldn’t. They hated him as a Governor.) But the second? And the same with Trump. The first election they might have let him have it — but didn’t. No, seriously. They didn’t. They thought they had it under control — but the third? They would never have allowed it.

And the second? It took SHUTTING DOWN THE WORLD with a bioscare and then — even then — last minute cheating of all kinds to put their chosen corpse in place.

They don’t have this sewn up. If they did they wouldn’t have needed that.

For that matter, yes, they won the midterms in Trump’s first term. Am I the only one who remembers the votes that were counted for days and weeks to achieve that? DESPITE all their other means of cheating.

Look, judging by all the cheating they deploy and how desperately they’re fighting to preserve ALL OF IT? They are at most — and I’m saying at the very most — 25% of the population.

Yes, yes, women, the young, the…. does anyone else notice they have the groups that are prone to preference falsification and not wanting to stand out with an “unpopular” opinion? How many people are undercover, with more or less degrees of success.

I want the SAVE act to pass, because I have this idea that we’ll see a map like Reagan’s wins again.

But if we don’t pass it? We’ll still get it eventually. It will just involve a lot more blood, sweat and tears getting there.

In the meantime, I mean this very seriously STOP HELPING THEM.

When you act blackpilled. When you talk about being afraid of “backlash” against Trump? When you say “if this isn’t perfect by the midterms, the GOP is done?” You’re doing the donkeys work for them.

You see, all of that is battle space preparation that makes their outrageous fraud and election stealing plausible.

Please, I beg you, don’t help them with their battle space preparation. Don’t aid and abet the enemy.

No, you can’t help your feelings, but you can help what you show.

Game face on. Perception is half the battle. Keep exposing them for the ridiculous, insane people they are.

And give them not an inch.

FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT!

By Holly the Assistant

(Sarah’s taking a day off-maybe-for the sort of chores and appointments that must be done on a weekday between 8 and 5. Yesterday, she said “Post on anything for me” and you were going to get kind of a summery of the absolutely insane and flabbergasting level of local government -ish that is the Water District. Today a Hun sent me a DataRepublican “Hello”, and I figured you’d much more enjoy seeing the probable end of the Senate Majority Leader’s political career as it unfolds. Hopefully I get all the links correct: https://cleanr.aho.st/ is a treasure but one I’m not very good at as an X user. You still might get the Water District some other day: it was wild.)

I think the end of Senator Thune’s career starts here, maybe:

Turns out that @LeaderJohnThune was totally projecting when he said the SAVE Act was an influencer campaign.

Senator John Thune is compromised by a company that literally exists to sell access to himself.

Pass it on. https://t.co/Gac8j6lTsW

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) March 10, 2026

https://xcancel.com/DataRepublican/status/2031210131908931837

And continues:

Google/Alphabet, $75,000 to Thune:
Among the largest H-1B sponsors in the United States annually. Lobbied against mandatory E-Verify. Employees donated heavily to FWD . us (the Zuckerberg-founded pro-immigration lobbying coalition). Google supported DACA protections.

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) March 10, 2026

https://xcancel.com/DataRepublican/status/2031378579058208906

And some more:

I'd been looking at PAC contributions when I should have been looking at the people who actually have daily access to the Capitol – the media. The true lobbyists.

Punchbowl News represents a whole lot of powerful industries and they are unflinching admirers of Senate Majority… https://t.co/WPKyXGb7yo pic.twitter.com/YVtLzIloiW

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) March 10, 2026

https://xcancel.com/DataRepublican/status/2031354814005997922

And still going as I’m writing this post, DataRepublican is an American treasure:

. @DOGE_GSA FYI, seems like our taxpayer money pays for Punchbowl News subscriptions? pic.twitter.com/yP4b5T6Iqa

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) March 10, 2026

https://xcancel.com/DataRepublican/status/2031411481758269504

If y’all X users see more to this today, please feel free to add the xcancel links in the comments for our non X user Huns, and many, many, thanks to the Hun who made xcancel and the Hun who sent me the DataRepublican said Hello to Sen. Thune message.

Recently on X someone posted a thing about how the Biden State Department had been very busy trying to make the maps gay.

You can’t say that sentence with a straight face. You also can’t read it with a straight face. It also wasn’t exactly what they were doing but what they were doing was both as ridiculous and more alarming.

You see, what they were doing was “queering the maps.” If you’re at all humanities adjacent, have a humanities degree taken in the last… oh, fifty years, or keep up with the insanity of academia, you know that “queering” encompasses gay, but isn’t exactly gay.

It’s more of a “turn everything upside down” type of thing, part of the absolute belief that if Western Society collapses Utopia ensues. This belief is both bizarre and widespread and is causing a lot — as in a lot — of suffering, death, cultural dissolution and horror the world over. For quite literally no good reason.

Before I get into it, let me explain what they LIKELY meant by “queering the maps.” You see, maps are weird things. Turns out it is really hard to translate a spherical (or really slightly pear shaped) object into a flat surface. This is why we have several methods of projection that give us the maps we’re familiar with. The important thing, when these maps were created being “To facilitate world navigation” in an era with no GPS or satelite guidance.

The thing is that at least according to the left, these maps give undo importance to Western countries. I saw this pass across my desk sometime during Barry the Red’s administrations, various academics agitating for weirdly distorted — compared to our familiar — maps that made places like South America and Africa MASSIVE and Europe and the US tiny.

Are they more accurate? I don’t know. I woke up late and I have a book to finish going over, a song to put to music, videos to make, another chapter of Orphans to write, a post to make on my substack, a few books to re-publish in updated format, Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped. My immune system is also in a life and death battle with con crud. So far keeping it at bay, but younger son and wife are both ill.

Anyway, again, keep in mind that an absolutely “accurate” map is near impossible given the fact the Earth is a (deformed) globe. And that the maps we had were useful and serviceable for people navigating the coasts and the spaces between, which is why we have them. That way.

Now try to imagine the minds that believe — absolutely believe — that the shit show in the third (and much of the would-be-first) world is because their countries aren’t “proportionately represented” in this flat projection which most of us study in schools and is only really important and relevant for life to navigators, pilots and the like. (And less so, in a time of GPS.) They heartily believe that at the heart of the cultural dysfunction and to put it mildly the failure to thrive of millions of people is…. that they felt humiliated when they looked at maps in elementary school.

In the history of projection, this one is a planet-sized IMAX. First word problems whose major trauma was being laughed at in elementary school think problems caused by tribalism, barbarism, dysfunctional culture, dysfunctional beliefs and, yes, Marxism (the worst ever colonial export) can be cured if we just make third worlders feel better about the size of their countries.

Okay, not just by that of course, but by the whole “Attack Western Culture” project, which includes making Muslims feel better about their contributions to science, making people in the west apologize for colonialism and evils that people that looked vaguely like them might or might not have perpetrated, making men more like women unless they tan interestingly, showing only mixed race couples on TV (don’t get me started) etc. etc. etc. including but not limited to a lot of counterproductive stuff like defining stuff that every country adopted once it entered full on into the industrial revolution — no, seriously. The adoption of these traits and how strong they are traces neatly to who went into the industrial revolution earlier. There are reasons for that, but I’ll spare you the essay — like punctuality, preciseness and schedule-keeping as colonialism and evil bad. Thereby cutting the however faint and nascent trends that could elevate the third world to first world living standards. Or at least eliminate a lot of the sh*t from the sh*tholes.

Anyway, if you dig hard enough at the roof of their belief in the evils of Western civilization, it lies “It makes people who aren’t part of it feel bad.”

Hence their absolute crazy cakes attempts — over and over and over again, including with unlimited mass immigration — to take down Western civilization. Because if it isn’t around to make people feel bad, surely other people will pull in the bits and create their own, perfect, equitable, utopian civilization with none of that imperialistic “better than thou” western stuff, right?

This is mind bogglingly insane. In fact, it is the equivalent of bleeding a tuberculosis patient to make them well.

Worse, as I understand in the absence of antibiotics, a shock to the system, if it doesn’t kill you, might just get your immune system in desperate fighting mode that cures the illness. (I understand that’s how the practice started) while trying to cure the ills of the third world while attacking the model of society that lifted the most people out of famine and desperate poverty in the long, sad history of mankind is just wanton and evil for no good reason.

It is obviously and clearly insane if you stand outside the theory which — in pure Marxist fashion — goes something like “People are poor because other people are rich” and look at the absolute sh*tshow of most of the world. Which are indeed poor and wretched (though still way better than they were before the rise of Western civ, whatever fantasies the left feed themselves) but mostly due to local customs (like mordida), corruption, tribalism, ineffectual or uneven laws, lack of freedom (of speech, marriage, residence, heck, living), etc. etc. ad nauseum. It is not because their SELF ESTEEM was hurt.

Which is at the bottom of it what most western leftists think. The third world only acts up and fails to be paradise on Earth because they have insufficient self esteem.

This is like Marxist psychological analysis done by morons, applying a theory that doesn’t even work for misbehaving kindergardners — or anything outside sitcoms, really — to complex, historically complicated, anthropologically complex regions PEOPLED BY REAL HUMANS. Self esteem, ladies and gentlemen. If we give them that, they will suddenly lose all their bad traits and become perfect angels. … In bad fiction, not even good one.

The tragic reliance on theory over real life — which most of the propagators of this nonsense never got to experience in any significant degree — is also responsible for the way Britain hid the rape gangs. And the way Britain lay supinely back, legs widespread to be invaded by all the dregs of the third world, the contents of prisons in places where prisons are filled with true horrors, and various gangsters of various stripes. Because if they just took them in and welcomed them with open arms, and ignored their little faux pas like well, raping minor girls of the host country, they would recover their self esteem, realize they were “as good as anyone” and instantly become perfect citizens. And then the academics could have their ideal society, where everyone marries someone of another race (no, seriously. Watch the latest British Mysteries. Or… Bridgerton) and everyone behaves like affluent liberals.

Most people refuse to examine things to this level. They laugh at “queering the maps” and move on without taking in the full picture, because it’s hard to believe real, adult human being can believe such a load of absolute nonsense.

In a while it is a measure of how successful Western Civ has been, that we raised and kept ADULTS, sometimes elderly people so innocent they can live in this sort of fairy tale and think that it makes perfect sense. We are so rich, so amazingly wealthy that we generated an entire class of people who have never had to DO anything real. They’ve never planted a garden, they’ve never looked after a dying parent, by and large they’ve never really cooked their own food, or raised their own kids. They have traveled, but never unchaperoned, without maps, and without gravitating to their counterparts in the countries/areas they visited. That’s how they can remain ignorant and deny such things as the third world’s usually hostile attitude towards women or gays. (And confuse things like forced transitioning in Iran with being good about transgender issues. Or confuse the boys raised as girls from an early age in the third world with tolerance of gay lifestyles.) And how they fail to understand that issues are way deeper than “self esteem.”

At personal, tribal or country level, really, self esteem tends to be highest where aggressive, destructive traits and behaviors are also highest.

Western civilization collapsing (no, I don’t think we are. Even Europe is showing signs of life. I just think the next century is going to be lit) wouldn’t raise anyone. Just collapse human civilization to maybe eighteenth century level for a long while.

Which is why I beg you not to look away. Yes. They really are this crazy. They really are this destructive.

They need to be laughed at, sure, but also confronted everywhere and have their pet theories ripped apart whenever they so much as dare to hint at them. We need to make them face the full glaring absurdity. Need to. For our own sake.

If you can homeschool your own kids. The indoctrination starts in kindergarten. Yes, even in good private schools. If they also receive government money, they have to conform to various governmental directives AND to the official curricula. You might be paying a lot for a better dressed version of your local public school. Bring the kids home. Homeschool them. Or read everything they learn and homeschool after school. It will make them a little cynical but that’s all to the good.

The only way this nonsense survives is that it’s pounded in so early it becomes revealed, unquestioned truth. Destroy indoctrination at all levels and do not give your kids to it. As well have them pass through the fire.

I’m not going to propose we raze universities and salt the ruins, but I am going to ask that before anyone donates to these organs you visit incognito, talk to their humanities students and find out what’s really going on. And also that anyone who has any power at official capacity in our government look into this nonsense. Yes, I think government is MOSTLY a force for destruction, but some things need to be destroyed, to be fair. Like, disconnected, head in the clouds theories.

That’s fair. Anti-Western theories want to destroy us and our way of life. I suggest we do onto them first.

And hurry.

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 MARTIN L. SHOEMAKER: Funeral for a Friend (The Route Books of Bobo Buttons, Private Eye Book 3)

Fall of a Sky Dancer

When Bobo Buttons, Private Eye takes a side trip to visit Jock Robin’s grave, he sees a family conducting their own funeral. To his surprise, he recognizes one of the mourners: an acrobat from a rival show, a man whom Bobo recently saved from prison. The deceased is the acrobat’s wife, and his family and others think he killed her. The fall of this Sky Dancer is tearing the circus apart.

So the show’s Governor hires Bobo to find the truth. Bobo goes undercover in hostile territory to dig up the real story, secrets that someone has already killed to conceal…

FROM DALE COZORT: Raphaela, Princess of the Jungle: A Snapshot Novel (Snapshot Jungle Adventures Book 2)

Nearly a hundred years ago, in an alternate reality Africa dotted with lost cities, Raphaela of Zan was eleven years old and dying of a rapid aging disease. A mysterious gray-eyed man gave her a drink he claimed would cure her. Instead, it stopped her from aging at all, trapping her in an eleven-year-old body, on the verge of life, but never able to truly live. Now, the rapid aging disease is back, threatening to turn her into a withered crone before she has a chance to live. Can she survive man-apes, Romans and Mad Puritans to find the gray-eyed man and convince him to save her?

FROM NATHAN BRINDLE: The Clerics in the Kitchen (Timelines Universe Book 10)

When your meth lab is built on a factory scale…

The planet Sanddoom. Desert exile world for most of Earth’s Radical Islamic Fundamentalists. Run by Mad Mullahs, who repay the favor of American leniency by creating a world of slavery, insurgency, and export of dangerous drugs via their own outmigrating people, headed for other colony planets.

The first two are covered by a hands-off agreement with the Americans.

The last, not so much. And Captain Delaney Wolff Fox’s special assignments fire team, FTSA1, aren’t going to stand for it. Their job is to hunt down and eliminate

The Clerics in the Kitchen

FROM MATTHEW C. LUCAS: Space Station Halcyon: “Now Under New Management!”

Welcome to Space Station Halcyon!
(Management is not responsible for anything that happens to you)

Joey Mumbai’s down on his luck and over his head. To pay off his gambling debts, he’s forced to run an old space station at the end of the galaxy as a “legitimate business” for the mob. All Joey has to do is make money—and not attract any attention. But Space Station Halcyon is like a floating death trap, with a rage-filled manatee, a psychotically cheerful computer, and a sports bar that may or may not be possessed.

When a government code inspector and her enforcerbot drop by the station, Joey must bluff, bribe, and connive his way through interstellar bureaucracy, laser gun fights, and the worst beer in the galaxy. Can Joey turn his derelict station and degenerate crew into something resembling legality? Or is the whole place going to explode in a cloud of code violations? Or maybe both?

Space Station Halcyon is a wild and raucous sci-fi comedy about bad luck, worse decisions, and the cosmic horror of being put in charge. A Hitchhiker’s Guide-esque romp that answers the eternal question: “Who’s in charge around here?”

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Triton Enigma (The Outer Worlds Saga Book 4)

On Neptune’s frozen moon, humanity finds a warning written in stone.

When the exploratory vessel Argo reaches Neptune, its crew expects silence, ice, and scientific routine. Instead, they uncover impossible signals coming from Triton—a moon that should not exist in its present orbit, and may not belong to our solar system at all.

Beneath Triton’s frozen surface lie ruins older than Earth’s history, carved with Egyptian hieroglyphs no human hand could have made. As military commander Colonel Marcus Hale struggles to keep his crew alive against failing suits and relentless cold, idealistic scientists push to decode the message left behind by a vanished civilization.

What they learn is both astonishing and unsettling: Triton was once a waystation for a wandering world—Pluto—cast adrift across the galaxy after its creators destroyed their own sun through reckless science.

As time, oxygen, and power run out, the crew must decide what to tell Earth—and whether humanity is ready to hear a warning written millions of years ago:

Some knowledge comes at too great a cost.

Written in the spirit of classic 1950s science fiction, The Triton Enigma is a tale of exploration, moral responsibility, and the thin line between discovery and disaster.

FROM DAVE FREER: If I Wake Before I Die

The Hotel Miroir, with it’s mirrored halls and endless repeated patterns – not all quite the same. A place of fractal patterns where universes — might have been and could be collide. A place where Lark had once danced with the man she would always wait for.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Dumas (Machine World Book 1)

Dumas house Zeller. A Servants bastard who was caught using Mentalist Powers and chipped. Still brilliant, but without Power, with speech issues, sold . . . But he’s got a Grand Plan . . .

A small part of the Baranov Family has been kicked out of Baranov House after their son is accused of improprieties with the Family Head’s daughter. Retreating to their old hunting lodge on a low population World, with their old servants and a couple of new ones, they’re going to find themselves right on the spot when the Machines arrive.

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 SARAH A. HOYT: Done With Mirrors: A Collection of Short Stories (Sarah A. Hoyt’s Short Story Collections)

DONE WITH MIRRORS

From Prometheus Award winner Sarah A. Hoyt comes a dazzling collection that showcases why her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales—and why readers can’t get enough.

Magic-soaked noir in 1920s Denver. Mirror-hopping time lords fleeing across infinite universes. Survival in John Ringo’s zombie apocalypse. Murder and mystery in the world of Darkships and Rhodes. Each story in this collection pulls you into a different world—and refuses to let go.

Previously published in acclaimed anthologies from Baen and Chris Kennedy Publishing, these nine tales span Hoyt’s most beloved universes alongside standalone adventures. Whether she’s writing in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, exploring her own Darkships and Rhodes worlds, or crafting speculative noir that defies categorization, Hoyt delivers the vivid storytelling and emotional resonance that has earned her a devoted following.

From rain-slicked streets where magic and murder collide to the far reaches of space-time itself, Done With Mirrors demonstrates the genre-hopping brilliance of one of speculative fiction’s most versatile voices.

Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.

Contains the short stories: Honey Fall; Scrubbing Clean; Last Chance; Great Reckoning in a Small Room; Horse’s Heart; Do No Harm; Dead End Rhodes; Knights of Time; Done with Mirrors.

With an introduction by Holly Chism.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly) – STILL THE PASSION PROJECT!

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 1
The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep.
They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner.
The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.
Skip’s already broken that one.
Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.

Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.

And yes, I do know that finding your own work funny is like eating your own nail pairings, and yet… this amuses me unduly:

AND MANFRED WEICHSEL IS HAVING A KICKSTARTER FOR HIS ACTION GIRLS PROJECT: Action Girls: Triple Threat – Illustrated Omnibus

Hollywood pulp, grotesque spectacle, and the high cost of chasing fame

Note I’m making this small, as some of you apparently read this post at work or near small children. It’s not pornographic, just spicy, but still I don’t want to get anyone in trouble!

Vignette Writing Challenge!

This is one of those fun days when I failed to get a prompt for vignettes thanks, probably, to the inscrutable hamsters of the internet. So as usual, I’m giving you an image to write a challenge about. Have at it.