Good Morning kids! The world is on fire, and I do have things to say, but I also have family stuff all day (and probably tomorrow.) I might post some scattered thoughts tonight, if I’m still functional by bed time. On the good side, I managed 9 hours last night, which is better than the three to four I’ve been averaging.

But the thing is my assistant bullied me to post this. (Holly, this is ALL your fault.)

We have a new cover for No Man’s Land. I think this is the final one. And the book is inching to completion through the insanity my life has become. So, have a cover and a chapter.

Actually two chapters. This section could be called “when worlds collide.” When I’m writing I’m always writing towards the next inflection scene, and this one was the first big one in this book. I had it in my head, Skip dropping out the window, and things changing, but I didn’t know how I’d get there. Well, I did.

It’s Just A Step To The Left

Skip:

I knew the mission to Draksah had gone seriously wrong when I saw the slave.

One of those things written in unerasable letters on the walls of IDS buildings was Slave societies cannot join Free Humanity.

Now there was a ton of argument – as about everything else – about what “slave societies” meant, ranging from very subtle shadings on the power of a central state, to people who insisted ours was a slave society since we had a Queen and nobility of birth. It probably will surprise no one that this later didn’t gain much acceptance in Britannia or in the Star Empire itself.

Me? All those shadings were too subtle for me. Surely, I could see how a society with hereditary noblemen and a quiescent and obedient population would become a tyranny. Everyone could see. It had happened several times in the history of mankind. But it was not that clear cut. At our level, where the Queen and the nobility mostly existed to perform unenviable diplomatic and administrative tasks and – sometimes – to lead war, should it be needed, or have the power of ultimate decision in complex cases, I was fairly sure that royalty worked for freedom. On the other hand there was the Quan empire where eventually their sovereign and nobility would decide they no longer needed citizens of any kind.

Edge cases? Ask me. Show me the documentation. I’ll know it when I see it.

What wasn’t an edge case was a society with the existence of actual, for-real chattel slaves. As in people who had no right of self-determination at any level, and could be used and abused at will, and bought and sold as things.

The Star Empire would accept no slave societies.

Not because slavery was uniquely evil, but because slavery corrupted. Once the habit of thinking of some people as things set in, coming out the other side with a free society was difficult.

And yes, I’m aware every human society was a slave society at the onset. It was often a necessity in pre-industrial societies, simply because there are jobs so difficult and so stupidly bad for you that no free human would do them willingly. And I know that almost of all those societies eventually redeemed themselves, and came out as non slave societies. But on the way there lay the terrific wars of the 19^th and 20^th century, and some on the 21^st too, and a couple of utterly destroyed cultures, and socio-psychologists see them as related.

Note that slavery reappeared in space for the same reason it first appeared on Earth: human workers were hard to find, and sometimes had to be forced to tasks that no one wanted to do but which were required. Also, it reappeared as an extreme form of integrating two warring societies, arguably towards the more viable. As in the loser was forced into the culture of the winner.

But that didn’t make it justifiable, nor did it make the infection benign.

The Star Empire – Britannia on High – would not accept societies where some portion of the population was kept as chattel. That was the beginning and the end of it. And though some cases might need to be brought to the attention of the socio-psychologists, the case in Draksah wasn’t one of those.

One entire section of our training – three months of it – was in identifying slaves when we saw them.

So, to recap for those not following along at home: my first assignment after graduation was to Draksah.

I was to be sent out alone. While it was unusual to be sent out alone on your first mission, it wasn’t unheard of. The team there before me – whose names I was never given – had prepared everything to admit Draksah, a level two monarchy – barely industrial, in early stage of individual rights assertion attempting to liberalize with mixed success – into the Star Empire.

The day after my graduation, I was sent a dossier, detailing several years of investigation and visits by envoys, depicting a monarchic society, fairly wealthy, which could be made modern with the use of our technology.

Look, from where I stand now? There were holes in that case history that could have hidden entire herds of elephants. Which at one time I thought is why they sent a newby, fresh off training. Of course, now—

Anyway, from where I stood the mission was a lot like Valhalla, only not as fun. Sure, Draksah didn’t have feigleire, but I went almost entirely vegetarian while there, because all the meat dishes were strange. Look, I didn’t think they were cannibals, but I still didn’t want to eat pork in a society I wasn’t sure of. And it was all pork.

However I didn’t go hungry. I was always dressing up in some very specific costume to go to banquets, or to watch some dance extravaganza.

I was told the culture was so old – ten thousand years or so since the lost ship – that there were no traces of earth customs or culture. Because lost colonies often lose tech and therefore culture. And some deliberately set out to forget Earth.

But the entire thing tasted middle eastern to me, with big men, of the kind that looked like they would as easily pull a knife on you as poison your drink, and women who were covered up all but the eyes or sometimes the face and who scurried out of sight when barely glimpsed: unless they were whores or dancers. I wasn’t sure there was a difference between whores and dancers, either.

Work got done around me, from food being served, to my room being cleaned, to clothing washed, refreshed and put away, but I never saw servants. Even the banquets had all the food laid out by the time we arrived. That should have tipped me off to something being off also, and the only excuse I have for not realizing earlier is that I was green as grass and twice as stupid.

So, I stumbled from banquet to party, and party to another banquet, and eventually stumbled into my bed. I had early on refused the girl in my bed, and then the boy in my bed. This was per protocol, but also because when I say the boy in my bed, I’m not using it in a colloquial sense, and I never had any interest in children. Also even had he been older, I couldn’t tell to what extent being in my bed was compelled, and I never had any interest in rape by any other name. And again, even had they been adults and willing, you don’t get horizontal with the natives. There were rules about getting horizontal with natives. They were complex, detailed and amounted to a big flashing sign saying “don’t.”

And then – when the official signing ceremony was supposed to happen that would bring Draksah into the Star Empire as a probationary member and let me go home – I forgot the documents for signing. It was a special paper, not only non-decaying but impregnated with something or other, likely nanites, same as the translator thingies that worked with my brain to make me understand any language. These were essential because they recorded the DNA of any person who touched the papers. Which was important for the obvious legal reasons.

So I forgot them in my room.

I know, that is a freshman blunder of the type not even I as a freshman should have been able to commit. Except of course I did.

It’s entirely possible that my father was right when he said sometimes we know things we don’t know, and that our subconscious causes accidents or forgetfulness in ways that are needed to save us, while our rational brain refuses to catch the signals.

Maybe it was that, or maybe I was sick and tired of Draksah, and of feeling like I was always watched, and always in peril and that there was stuff going on just beyond my sight, even though, rationally, that made no sense.

So, I forgot the documents, and I went to my room for them.

Honestly, I don’t know why they let me go unescorted, except that I turned around unexpectedly, then I got lost, and wandered off into something that might have been the women’s bathing room, and it’s probable whoever was watching me had some cultural taboo about entering that space.

I swore – in Valhallian, because it seemed appropriate – with “Thor’s rusty hammer” and turned and got out, by another door, though I didn’t realize that, until I noticed the corridor was not the overly ornate space I’d come to know, but a lot simpler: stucco over stone with some patches all but bare, and just worn stone underfoot. But I knew I was on the third floor, and my room was on the fourth, and I headed for the stairs.

And stopped.

Because I saw the slave. He was young, and for a moment, I thought he was a she, given the angelic, beardless face. But the body was all he, at least as much as was visible, between the slave collar and the linen kilt. And the legs below were male too, and the bare feet sure looked it, though both looked larger than I’d expect from a beardless youth.

I looked up from the feet to the face, the averted gaze, the lowered eyelids, the shaven head. I really didn’t need the tattoo on the chest, which my implants helpfully translated as “Property of the royal house of Draksah” to know I was looking at a slave.

And I lost my mind. I mean, I was outraged on so many levels, I could barely think.

I was outraged at the massive deception of myself and presumably the previous ambassadors. I was furious at the very idea they kept slaves. I was livid at the dehumanizing quality of the getup they forced the slaves to wear.

It was quite the most appalling thing I’d ever seen, and yes, I’m aware that I’d been shown films of the Daycean massacres and forced to play through some diplomatic disasters in which I and all my friends were virtually massacred. But this was different. I was not on a simulator. And also, this wasn’t—

They had lied. To the Star Empire. To envoys of the Empress.

I started to march down the hallway, and then it occurred to me I was here alone, and while I had weapons, they weren’t the kind that could take out an entire rogue planet. Not that I would know how to take out a whole planet.

I mean, if it came to that, I would try. I’d been trained by Dad. But…. Diplomatically speaking it was less than advisable. Who can you diplomat at, if they’re all dead?

I stood in that back-staircase, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. I wanted to grab the slave by the arm and drag him back to the banquet room, and denounce the entire travesty of a joke of an insult, of a—

I went so far as to grab the slave’s arm. He looked up, and for a moment there was something in his eyes, something deep and dark, a hint of rebellion, perhaps a warning. But my translator nanos didn’t translate eyes.

I started to pull him towards the dining hall. And then—

Look, there is a reason diplomatic delegations, at their most stripped down are at least two people. At worst, while one of them is discovering the slaves, the other can go and beam a signal to the Star Empire. A mayday. A sign that things have gone seriously sideways.

Because something was going seriously sideways. This was the sort of situation in which things went …. Violent and destructive. The type of situation where I might get sent back to my people in a box. A small box. Filled with ashes. Or maybe with a single ear in it, the rest being unfortunately lost in the fracas.

I backtracked. Still dragging the slave, mostly because, do you know how hard it is to let go of someone’s arm once you’ve grabbed it, and they’re letting you drag them? Okay, I don’t know, maybe the slave had become a sort of security blanket, in that I wasn’t in this thing all alone because there was another human being in here with me.

Though what I expected him to do was beyond me, except serve as a meat shield. Which would make me as complicit in slavery as anyone ever.

I dragged him all the way to my room. Because in my room was the last resort of a diplomat in need: the ripcord.

Okay, it was neither rip nor cord. What it actually was was a panic button. You pushed that button when your mission had gone so horribly wrong that the next step was the ear in a box, or the box of ashes, or whatever.

Yes, I should have had it with me. Same as the contract.

When you pull the ripcord, everything stops. Whatever process was underway, whether to admit the world to the empire or simply to negotiate a truce, it stops the moment the panic button is pressed. At the same time, the ships nearest the world start heading for it to extract the ambassador, or more often the ambassadorial team. Note that when things are that bad, they usually only retrieve the corpses. But all the same, the process must be followed.

So. I marched into my room….

Where there were three other slaves. Same shaved heads, same ridiculous getups, same words on the chest, same beardless, too-pretty faces. One of them looked like a Scandinavian blond, and the other two vaguely Mediterranean.

They were doing something near my bed, and looked up, in shock. I got the impression I’d interrupted them.

It didn’t matter. More slaves was just more evidence.

I let go of the arm of the one slave, who, strangely, got surrounded by the others, wordlessly.

And went for the button in my wardrobe.

I’d grabbed the box that contained it, and used my thumb to open it – it was coded to my genetics – when I caught movement by the corner of my eye and turned…

Three men stood in the doorway. I registered they were Draksalls, wearing Draksall clothing, but they had—

Blasters. They had blasters. They had Imperial armament. And they were pointing them at me. When had they got blasters? And how in hell had this gone so bizarrely wrong?

I did what came naturally. What had been trained into me in the academy, what had been part of me for so many years it might as well have been born with me.

I had forgotten the treaty. I’d forgotten the panic button. I’d forgotten just about everything, but would be more likely to go out stark naked in a place where nudity wasn’t accepted, than go out unarmed. And when I saw the eyes of the men pointing the weapons at me, I knew they meant to kill me. I got my burners from their hidden holsters and fired. I cut the first and the second, the third fired, and there was a cry of alarm, and a fourth fired too.

This is when everything got too confusing.

First, because my brain having decided I was going to die, I put my finger on that panic button and thereby invalidated the mission and called for help.

Second because two of the slaves grabbed me, one per arm. They were stronger than they seemed, or perhaps they simply caught me off balance as they rushed me to the window.

And out.

The window was on the fourth floor of the palace. As they jumped with me out the window – I registered a moment of surprise I hadn’t been simply defenestrated but that they were apparently committed to this as a suicide mission – I caught a glimpse of an ornamental brick patio underneath.

I remember thinking “Third floor so far so good”. And then the stone yard beneath my window, became verdant. Something father used to say probably from some stuffy old document and which he used when things changed drastically and unexpectedly, ran through my mind. “It’s just a jump to the right.”

And then I hit. But not the brick and not as hard as I should for the distance I fell. Oh, no. From the distance I should have fallen. I actually only fell about… six to eight feet.

I hit springy grass, at a moderate velocity. I remember thinking “Son of a bitch, there’s grass after death.”

And then I think I passed out.

The Green Hills Definitely Not of Earth

Skip:

I think I passed out, because I don’t remember losing consciousness, as such. It’s more as though my brain decided things were too silly and turned off momentarily, only to come back on, as I rolled to a sitting position on the green grass.

I became aware of myself while sitting on the grass, with four people surrounding me. They were– They didn’t look– No, one of them looked like one of the slaves, but his hair was long, and he was wearing something that covered his chest, so I couldn’t check for the slave tattoo. He was one of the shorter, darker ones.

He was not behaving like a slave at all, though, as he was arguing, in voluble gestures, and a language composed of gutturals with two other people: a huge blond man – okay, he also had a too-pretty face; I couldn’t tell if he had facial hair, but nothing approaching seven feet tall, with shoulders that gave you the impression half of him could do the work of a draft horse could be anything but male – in some kind of knee-length tunic with what looked like tights under it; and another, shorter, paler blond of more normal proportions, on whose sex I wasn’t going to pronounce, except that the not-endowed-with-breasts chest was muscular and looked masculine – look, I was confused – and who wore some kind of short tunic, pants and a blue cloak.

They were all screaming at each other like … Well, like my father’s family at the only family reunion I’d attended. And what a shock that had been for the little boy raised mostly in his mother’s bloodless domain.

My translator nanos were going berserk, probably because the volume and raspy tone of the language was confusing them. At least – I thought with alarm – if this language came from Earth. I mean, they looked human. But the language sounded like they were alternately growling and clearing their throats with some hard dentals in between for the fun of it.

You’d think, I thought, they were discussing whose cook was better than the other cook and—No. That was what my grandmother and aunt had argued about. I felt weirdly muzzy, like I had missed sleep? Or perhaps falling from a height had scrambled my brain? Or perhaps dying just wasn’t good for you.

The words that came at me were disjointed, and sounds were spit at me randomly. The nanos were catching occasional fragments they translated.

And none of them seemed to make sense. “Bring him back.” “Danger.” “Are you?” “Brotherhood.”

A soft touch on my arm and I turned and—

So, when I was fourteen, Father came and took me from the Academy at Christmas.

Oh, my parents weren’t the most horrible parents in the world. They allowed me holidays. The problem was me. I had decided to stay in the Academy for Christmas. I didn’t allow myself holidays, because I wanted to finish and be commissioned. Mostly because I hated the Academy, but I didn’t dare tell Father that.

And then Father had come and cajoled me out for a couple of days, during which he took me on trip of discovery of cultural institutions in New London, which for the season were putting on magnificent displays of the historical glories of old Earth.

We traipsed through a recreation of the Tuscany of the quattrocento and stopped to admire Leonardo DaVinci’s work, then Father took me to dinner, and after dinner he took me to—

Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’d read Shakespeare and watched him in recording and experienced him in mersi, but I’d never watched it performed by live actors.

Whoever staged that performance had made all the elves – except queen Titania, of course, though I suppose it would be play-period-accurate – boys on the edge of manhood. Well. About my age then.

And whoever did the makeup gave them a sort of unearthly beauty: eyes a little too large, features a little too soft, and hair in whatever color, styled in such a way that you imagined it just grew like that, and yet accented their faces perfectly.

I believe watching that play was when I figured out I had a problem, or at least that I wasn’t standard issue, and wouldn’t fall in love with some insipid Earl’s daughter and breed a passel of brats.

And at that moment, sitting on that post-mortem grass, confused and feeling slightly nauseated, I felt a touch on my arm, turned and—

It was one of those elves. I’d swear to it. Peaseblossom, with the green eyes, and the wavy butt-long red hair, unruly, some strands falling in front of his face, the rest in a sort of bramble-arrangement around his features. And though he looked concerned, he also still looked …. Well… not quite standard human. And breathtakingly beautiful.

He knelt, but in a way that made it look easy, and like it was a perfectly natural way to lower his height to mine. Like– Like you see among people whose culture doesn’t include chairs.

And he was looking at my arm as though there were something profoundly wrong.

I looked at my arm. And I passed out again, that time for real.

It couldn’t have been the sight of blood that covered what was left of it. In case it’s not obvious, I wasn’t in the habit of passing out at the sight of blood. It wasn’t even the realization that I was going to lose everything from slightly below the elbow down: there was nothing else to do when all that was holding half of my arm to the other half was a bit of charred bone.

I came to almost immediately, thinking that honestly that wasn’t even the problem. The problem is that I was in a primitive planet, that probably couldn’t get me home, and if too much time passed before regen, regen wouldn’t work.

“Fuck,” I said, as I woke up. And realized, with perfect timing that it had been said as a guttural two syllable sound which meant the nanos had found the way. And from the gasp from my right, I’d just committed a possibly unforgivable social solecism.

But on my left I felt a touch on my wrist. I looked. My arm and hand looked perfectly intact if perhaps a little pink. Had I dreamed my arm being burned? Peaseblossom’s green eyes looked full of concern, and he spoke, very slowly. He had a low voice, a well modulated bass that sounded out of place with his soft features. I had no idea what he was saying, but he sounded as though he was gentling a scared child.

I could practically feel the nanites running like crazy in my brain trying to make sense of the words. I can’t quite explain, but my brain seemed to be trying on linguistic matrixes for size. Finnish? Bantu? The Neu Deutshe of South Elburg? The weird amalgamation of languages of Hesperius en Haute?

No. No. Something synthetic and– It clicked suddenly. It clicked, with that weird feeling that I should have understood what I’d just heard. I knew from the simulator that this meant it had found the pattern.

“I’m sorry?” I said. “Come again?”

Peaseblossom made a sound somewhere between laugh and delight. “I said,” he said. “That your arm might still get an infection, but the healing should hold. Unless the infection is bad, you should be fine.”

I blinked. “Healing?”

The nano translation glitched. I swore he’d said “Magic.”

But I was sure he was crazy. Or I was crazy. Heck, I probably was crazy. “Ma-gi-c?” I said.

He smiled and nodded. “I am” – garbled – “brother of magicians, my power is third circle bend high power, so I can perform healing.”

I blinked again. “Peaseblossom?” I said. “I mean… elves and fairies? Magic? Where am I?”

He looked decidedly worried. He touched the side of my head with the tip of his fingers, and there was a strange sensation, like a static shock. He frowned.

“I think it’s a linguistic difficulty,” the short, dark one who had been – had been playing? – a slave said. “The star people have,” garbled. “In their heads, and it takes time to catch up with the language they’re hearing.”

“But—” Peaseblossom cut his eyes at me, sideways, like I was the strange one here, then back at his companion. “What can it have to do with blooming peas?”

The other shook his head. “The—” my translator scrambled. Spell? Setting? Program? “In their heads takes time to get the right words.”

I was both shocked and impressed that someone in what looked like a barbarian culture, at least from their attire, and the weapons I glimpsed – I’d caught sight of ankle-daggers on the shorter blond, the giant wore a sword and had a quiver of arrows and a bow slung over his shoulder, and I suspected the others had something along those lines – understood the process well enough.

So, I cleared my throat, and said, “I beg your pardon. Your…. Friend has the right of it. I don’t quite have the right words, and some of the translations seem impossible. Also I might have concussion from the fall.” Peaseblossom shook his head almost imperceptibly as if to deny it. I ignored it. Not getting in arguments with people who have full control of you, while you’re not quite yourself, is a good idea. Or at least diplomatic training said so. “But I have no idea where I am. I don’t think this is Draksah, and you are not speaking a language related to Draksall.”

Peaseblossom shook his head a little, then gave a feral grin. “Oh, there’s a lot of borrow words, including given names. A lot of the names. Though they have different meanings. Because the cultures have been at war so long, but no. We’re not Draksall. This is the world of Elly.” He looked at me, chin tilted up a little defiantly, as though he’d said something shocking and must spy my reaction to see if I would run screaming into the night.

Which I would, if I had any clue what that was supposed to mean. Elly. The word seemed familiar. There was some mention of it in literature about Draksah. Something about its being a mythical world, similar to the lost continent of Atlantis on Earth. A place that couldn’t exist, but which existed, nonetheless in legend and myth, and which kept rearing its fanciful head in the culture. There were references to it, as being a wild land inhabited by creatures not quite human. Wild creatures. I had caught a laughing reference to there being no men on Elly, too, in a conversation during one of the interminable banquets, before it was shut down.

But while my saviors – or captors, I wasn’t sure right then – were barbarians, they didn’t look particularly wild. And they certainly weren’t women.

Of course this was the moment at which my translator decided to take a cue from my thoughts and start glitching on the gender.

“I am—” Peaseblossom hesitated, then shrugged. “Brundar Mahar, third circle of the brotherhood of magicians.” I got the impression his introduction of himself had startled his companions. The giant made a sound like a groan, which combined annoyance and surprise. “And these are my—” parent/father/sire scrambled through my brain. Eerlen Troz, and my,” cousin/stepsister/stepbrother/half sister all scrambled in turn. “Lendir Almar. And this is Selbur Deharn, whom I believe you met in Draksah.”

“The slave!” I said. My brain was having real trouble, okay? And my mouth had mostly taken over. If this were a simulation, someone would have thrown something at me by now. “One of them.”

The slave-like-being’s lips twisted in amusement. “Mahar? I think it’s time we just tell him everything.”

Fun fact: when I was little I thought going over Niagara Falls in a barrel was something people did at least once in a lifetime, for the heck of it. Like, I was convinced there were long lines of people, rolling barrels, waiting their turn to go over the falls.

You see, it was featured in so many of the things I read or watched, like adventure books, or comics, or cartoons, that I thought it must be part of a normal life thing. You went to Disneyland (well, that was featured in the comics), you visited the Grand Canyon, and well, of course you went over the falls in a barrel.

This type of razor-sharp hold on reality is why I spent vast amounts of time in childhood learning to walk really silently, to balance on a narrow ledge or to get out of ropes tying my hands together. Not to mention watching out for quicksand, and having plans if I should fall into it. Because my choice of entertainment had told me those skills were absolutely vital if I hoped to survive.

I remembered this as I tried to find an image for today’s blog. Another fun fact: Midjourney clearly didn’t read the same books I did as a kid, because “barrel tumbling over Niagara Falls” was unobtanium and I’m tired and not in the mood to fight it.

Why did I remember that?

Well, partly because I’m feeling guilty about not having finished reading The Man Who Sold The Moon — but it has been truly odd and stupid out here with occasional episodes of not sleeping — and I was thinking of stories of that period. A lot of it written by Clifford Simak.

And today, in the car, on the way to an appointment, when there was absolutely no way to write anything down, I thought of the opening to a Clifford-Simak like story, where the journalist comes in to the newspaper to finish a piece he’s been working on, and the robots are finishing cleaning up, the automated AI coffee machine is yelling because it ran out of grounds, and a spaceship is visible through the plate glass window taking off, in the distance.

Maybe some day I’ll write it, except that as of yet there is no story, just the man (?) going into the office in the early morning and dealing with what’s for him a completely normal bog standard start of the day, but to us is amazing and fantastical. Of course, when a story presents that way, usually starting to write it tells me where it’s going and what the story is. Don’t try this at home. if I’d done this as a beginning writer, I’d have pages and pages in which he fixed the coffee maker, drank the coffee, finished his article, went out for lunch– It’s just at this time in my life, I’ve written so many stories my subconscious only spits out the beginning when it is ready to tell ME the story. — brrr. Just got the cold suspicion that thing is a novel. So I’m going to let it lie until I have at least a week or two to run it from beginning to end.

Anyway, because I was in the car, and didn’t have the means of writing the story, it saved me from the stupid of starting it. (They lie in wait these novels. Worse than the dreaded Portuguese spider-fish under the sand on a sunny beach.) Instead I started thinking about how charming those Simak stories were, in a world that was very much like mid century America, only with sentient, fully automated houses that looked after their people by making them food and flying them around and stuff, or diners run by AI (though he didn’t use that term) who had the personality of motherly, gossipy middle aged women. I thought of his stories in which the newsroom was weirdly automated — not in the way you’d expect — or there were newsfeeds from the stars, or whatever, but they were still banging out the stories on typewriters.

And of course, news were produced, sold, consumed via newspapers.

Of course, the man was a newspaper man. And nothing against him for that, but also he was capable of working out chains of event and consequence. I know that, because I love his novels. But apparently not capable of working out that the kind of tech that gave you seemed-sentient robotic diners would also affect a whole lot of other things. A tech level where the house flew would probably have affected…. well, everything. Semi-sentient houses that fly would have blown up the mid-20th-century society and ethos all to heck and back.

Only of course, people don’t think like that. And even if they did, it would be hard to sell a story like that, because present-day-reader wouldn’t have an in. Meaning they couldn’t mentally move into the story and live there long enough to bond with the people and feel the emotions.

But you know, some things do remain the same. It’s just most classical science fiction assumed a lot more things would stay stable in the change of tech.

And …. we still do.

Recently I read (and linked at instapundit, though of course I can’t find it now) an article where the author was talking about how we’re hitting a massive changeover post in which all our institutions of knowledge are failing.

Our very own Sargent Mom did a post about our educational institutions passing away.

But the thing is…. it’s not just them. It’s everything.

We didn’t get the future of starships and flying houses. (Yet. I’m still holding out for starships and colonizing other planets. I’ll pass on flying houses.)

What we got instead seemed small and innocuous. it was the the ability to process vast amounts of data, so distributed that everyone has a mid-century computer in his pocket, and on his desk, pretty much. And these computers give us the ability to talk to anyone around the world. Oh, and to publish our own news and editorials to be read by thousands or millions. And … upend the world.

We started tumbling in the nineties with ecommerce and the internet, and Amazon and and and and–

And we haven’t stopped. Yes, it is completely making over our knowledge institutions, and the way we learn and communicate and–

A lot of things are passing away, some of which we need and will be surprised as they pass and might or might not have a replacement.

The thing is, when the barrel is going over the Falls, it’s difficult to tell what’s going to tumble, and what will move, and what will get broken. Or what will be functional in a weird way when we stop tumbling.

There is no way to know it.

My younger duct tape brother is telling me the responsible adults around him — well, I didn’t talk to the responsible adults around me, okay? — told him going over the Falls would kill him, even in a barrel.

Fortunately societies aren’t just fragile humans, and the barrel is a metaphor. As are the Falls.

The tumbling isn’t though.

There’s a good chance our society will be alive at the end of it — I’m not putting hands in the fire for Europe and I know other societies will break, badly — and functional. But I suspect we wouldn’t fully make sense of it if we were dropped in the middle of it today.

Fortunately, we’ll get there one day at a time, which makes it easier.

Just…. watch out for unstable floorboards (they make noise) and quick sand, and keep moving, stay flexible. I think it’s okay if you make some noise, but do learn out to get out of binds that you find yourself in.

Or in other words, remember everything is going to tumble and change. Big or small, everything is going to change. Everything.

We’re in the barrel. We’re tumbling.

Brace. Stay positive, stay alert, stay ready to shift and survive.

…. Be ready to take the weight when things come crashing down, because a lot of things will. Oh, not — hopefully — civilization, the monetary system, or technology. No. but the institutions, the certifications, the way things are done. The things human live by.

Remember that any of that could go away, and keep an eye on it.

Be nimble enough to see the next thing, to build the next thing. To create the future.

Stay ready. Keep going. If you fall, pick yourself up. If your buddy falls, pick him up.

And keep moving.

There is a strange theory upheld by a subset of the nuttubers that time stopped in 1999, just before new year’s and everything since then has been a vivid dream.

Look, it’s not even the weirdest theory in that corner of youtube. And in my defense, I only go to youtube when I’m either trying to research something very specific and can’t find it written out, or when I’m trying to not work because I’m too tired/sick and will screw up whatever it is I’m supposed to be working on. In that state of altered…. alteredness, I’ll end up in a loop where I trip from one thing to another.

And that’s why sometimes I end up listening to persuasive talks about how birds are a plot of the CIA, dinosaurs didn’t go existed, they got interstellar travel and have a multi solar system civilization. Or weirder stuff.

And to be fair the weird idea that we have all been vivid dreaming since 1999 is not the weirdest one even outside youtube. I mean, Phillip K. Dick thought that time had stopped in the first century AD, right after the crucifixion, and we were all living in something like a virtual chamber that disguised this fact. (If I understood him correctly, which I might not have.) I mean, there is a population increase, but that theory would sure explain the NPCs we run into, no?

But when the I heard that thing about time having stopped in 1999 I had a moment of complete and absolute longing.

Oh, to go back to that year. To wake up and find out none of these things had happened, all these years that have treated us so very badly. To find the friends who died and are dearly missed still alive; their future unwritten. To find out we still had all the friends that … you know the ones I say “I remember when he/she was sane.” To be able to write things without having everyone (other than the NYC publishing establishment, of course) dissect its sad little entrails to figure out what message I’m sending and what I’m “trying” to say. (In fiction? Usually nothing. I mean, there’s ideas I’m playing with, but they’re likely not what people are liable to think they are. Like the thing for this upcoming (almost done with the revision, I SWEAR) novel is not “fun with sex roles” it’s “clash of cultures with hard and fast framing that can’t be changed.” If I have a message I want to get out? I write a blog post.) And people won’t run around with their heads on fire saying vicious things about me. Or if they do, they’ll have to do it in person, which takes longer.

Oh, I’m not going to lie to you, and I’m not stupid. Crazy at times, but not stupid. I know the attraction of this erasing of a quarter century includes the fact I’d be under forty and have a lot more energy and ability to do things. And if I remembered a few things I’ve found (like, altitude bad) the next twenty years could have been a lot more productive.

But mostly it was this feeling I’d like to go back to when the world was saner.

but it was that thought of “people wouldn’t say vicious things behind my back about offenses I committed only in their heads” that called me back to sanity.

Yes, they did. And on top of that, they played a game of telephone while doing it. And not only could you get yourself hard cancelled for things that you couldn’t control (because you didn’t know you weren’t supposed to step on THAT square) but it wasn’t public, so people assumed that you were no longer being published because you either didn’t sell, or you had done something heinous. And the heinous things were assumed to be terrible and other people would cancel you without even knowing what it was, just knowing you weren’t in favor. And you couldn’t convince anyone at large that it was going on. People would think you were crazy.

But it went beyond that. You know how I said I miss all the friends I had (so many) of whom I say “I remember when he/she was sane.”

For some it’s true. Some cracked wide particularly these last 5 years. And before that, the seeds of insanity might have been there, but they were more or less functional and sane. (Some for values of sane as pertaining to writers.)

But for the vast majority, we tolerated them. Note it was we tolerated them. We were isolated. There was no blogsphere, no social media. We assumed that we were “extreme” and unacceptable and more importantly alone or in a tiny minority. So we used our inside voices all the time. We kept quiet.

They didn’t. They thought they were not just the majority but the only opinion among the smart people. In fact their opinions were what made them smart. They still think that, but it was more so back then.

So they would announce things apropos nothing, like “Ahah, Reagn sure is stupid.” And you put up with it, because, well, that was normal. That was acceptable behavior.

And provided we stayed quiet, and didn’t call out the Marxist assumptions in their stories, or meekly accept when they (for values of editors) demanded you incorporate Marxism in yours, you were in fact fine, and you could co-exist.

…. And were pushed steadily closer to the point of no return, while they had full coverage from the only press to do what they wanted.

So, even the lockdowns? They could have done them. And got away with them better. The difference is that they’d still be getting away with it, and the rest of us would be wondering just how bad that virus was, not seen through it.

Of course, the likelihood of their doing the lockdowns was low, because they weren’t desperate. It was desperation that forced them to become vicious.

Which means we’d be living in a fool’s paradise. But not really, because we had to “tolerate” them while they controlled everything and we couldn’t fight back because no one believed we were being oppressed and cancelled. We ourselves didn’t believe it. We kept lying to ourselves.

You know what? As badly as the last few years have treated us, as battered and bruised as we feel, and as much as we’d give to go back to our years of innocence, Heinlein was right: Always travel forward.

The past wasn’t as gold as it seems and as scary as the future looks, there’s hope in it.

Always forward. Let’s build a better future.

For the last two years I’ve been living under a rock, or rather under a novel. So it was only recently when Charles III (Seriously. What was Elizabeth thinking when she named him that, anyway?) put on a spectacular show of ignoring history and mouthing platitudes that I became aware of land acknowledgements.

Being me, and therefore naturally altruistic and giving, I thought I’d save all of you the trouble of crafting your won land acknowledgements by giving you a template.

First to explain where I come from on this — and why Charles III was a special kind of brainless pussy when he made that statement — I understand people like the Canadians and the left in America are very fond of “land acknowledgements” for the same reason they’re fond of “Native American” as a designation. Because they think for some bizarre reason that the Amerindian (no, not a perfect designation, but every human on Earth gets called by the name their neighbors/enemies made up) myths are correct, and Amerindians have been here since “the beginning of time.” Bah. No, they haven’t been here forever, and the land is not uniquely theirs. And if it were, there is a better strategy than whining and namy pamby acknowledgements.*

Where I was born and grew up, the land is — at this point — made mostly of people. At least one of the online anthropological sites lists the region in which I was born and raised as the oldest continuously human-occupied area in Western Europe. What that means, in terms of how many people were buried (not to mention pooped) in that area, it means that the dust has human DNA in it.

Which humans? Oh, that’s… I mean, there’s a reason my kids call Portugal the reservoir tip of Europe.

What I was taught in school which completely missed Pre-historic population movements, from Early European Farmers to Yamnaya we: Celts, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Alans, Visigoths, Moors, Franks, Spaniards, not counting imports from Africa and India that mixed with the native stock. And not forgetting British and French during the Napoleonic wars; Irish which traded goods and genetics with the North of Portugal since the 4th century BC.

Whose land was it? No one’s. One culture will supersede the other. From the time of the Yamnaya tearing into the Early European Farmers and yeah, probably killing all the men and marrying all the women, that’s how land conveys.

Your title to the land as a people is your ability to occupy the land and keep it. Note, the keep it is important.

*In all the history of displaced people, the one people who instead of whining did something about it and not only that but having gotten their land back made it more fruitful and better than what the occupiers were doing with it is Israel. They bought, they fought for, they have kept the house against all challenges and they have made the desert flower.

Everyone else? Every loser country in the world throws themselves on the floor and screams they’d have been great if only they had “their” land back. And it’s always bullshit. Possibly in the history of bullshit none is worse than La Raza bullshit, who think they are entitled to most of the US, when in fact if they took it, they’d only have more of Mexico, a failed narco state which only survives because of remitances from people coming here to work and get welfare from us because we are not in fact Mexican and don’t operate like a failed narco state.

As for the Amerindian illusions: dudes, there is a reason your tribal elders don’t want you do do DNA tests. You were not only defeated. You got in bed with the enemy. Sometimes when you kidnapped their daughters for the purpose. You are only Native Americans in the sense you were born here. You were genetically swamped. You are — and I mean this in the best sense, so shush — the same American mutts as the rest of us. And in return, almost anyone who has a branch of their family that has been here for two hundred years (a not inconsiderable percentage of Americans) has a bit of you. We took your greatness and added it to our own. (Yes, including my kids. A considerable bit. They are descended from all the best.)

So the land: Your land is our land. Your blood is our blood. We are you. Stop whining about stolen land, and start making something of what you have, living in the best nation in the world.

You want a land of your own? Join us. When we go to the stars, claim your own planet.

Because I’m a giving kind of person, I decided to give you a template land

Land Acknowledgement:

We’re standing on stolen land. Sitting, sleeping and playing rock and roll on stolen land.

All land on Earth has been owned by humans and/or proto humans at some point. Heck, a good amount of the continental shelves that are under water offshore are also stolen land.

Before our ancestors, someone else lived there. And before those people someone else lived there. And before those people someone else lived there.

Because that’s what humans do. They take land, and hold it, and have children and raise fat babies.

That’s called being human.

You want some land no human ever owned? Get us to the stars. That’s it.

End land acknowledgement.

Further note for the deluded bastards of La Raza: This land is OUR land. And what we have, we keep.

We’ve been ignoring you, as we’ve been ignoring a lot of other commie offshoots because we thought you’d grow up. But if you want to square off…. Think about it. What we have, we keep. Don’t start none. You won’t like the results.

PS- Because all this isn’t as eloquent as this single tweet by someone I don’t know:

(tweet link. And xcancel link.)

Are you surprised?

Well, I am. I’m surprised the bullshit in Los Angeles isn’t all over the country by now.

I’m not surprised at the bullshit itself. It’s a hot combo of the left having entered the last, desperate point of their ghost dance, their having imported a lot of military age men that they think would be a reliable army, and their wanting to recreate the “success” of BLM and the 2020 Summer of love.

Oh, and the fact we are a nation so great we pay people to riot against us.

I am however surprised that it’s pretty much confined in Los Angeles, and even NYC was saner than that.

I suspect I wasn’t the only one surprised. On Saturday night I was in a medium large town, at a public attraction near an immigrant area. Keep in mind we’d been driving and hanging out with friends, so we weren’t really in touch with the news.

We did however notice the helicopter circling and circling over the crowd and wondered. Husband thought it was the news doing a feature. But something looked wrong.

It wasn’t till we got home and I saw the mess in Los Angeles that it clicked in place.

Look, over the next week, they might — or not — manage to get spicy going elsewhere in the country.

The truth is I’m still in shock we don’t have one of these going in every big city as we did in 2020. Why?

Because they have imported a lot of people. A LOT OF THEM. And a lot of these people are obviously not good people. In fact, they are the opposite of good people. Further, they have the cartels, which right about now are pretty pissed at our making their operations more difficult, and the unions which are, by and large, a cauldron of corruption and have been feeding off illegal immigration.

So– We have a minor and puzzling miracle going here.

And several conclusions can be taken.

1- For whatever reason they can’t count on all of the goblins they thought they could count on. Is it fear? Or the pay isn’t enough? Or they’ve been losing more people through self-deportation than they want to admit.

2- I’m not seeing the type of of interest in these riots that I saw in BLM even early on. I mean, the sentiment just isn’t the same, okay. Most people seem to look at these riots and go “Wait, why aren’t these people already on their way to the border, pursued by bears?”

That could be because race relations are complex, but most Americans view black people as their fellow Americans and have a measure of concern/interest in them. While most Americans view illegals as at best sad sacks and at worst invaders. As sad sacks, we don’t necessarily hate them and we kind of feel sorry for them. But not sorry enough to put up with riots and burning on their behalf.

Underlying all this in the national psyche there is a very strong (and sane) feeling of “Buddy, you’ve got problems but you’re not my problem, and there’s no reason I should take it on.”

Part of it I think is the sheer enervation and immiseration of the Brandon years. We know what they did to us, and we’re not particularly interested in helping people who were used to beat us down.

And part is that we’re getting really tired of the left cosplaying and bullshit.

3- People, not just me, are starting to predict what they’ll do and say. Which, I must say, is about time. they’re running the exact same script with the same beats as Kent State about a half century ago, and every other Communist operation since. (And before too.)

4- Things are about to get more dangerous and complicated. Because when things don’t go according to plan, the left always finds the next crazy thing to grab onto. And their crazy is both not very imaginative and dangerously crazy since it started with stuff wholly constructed in unreality like the Communist Manifesto and Gramsci’s tripe theories and was then fed on a never end of movies that share their assumptions and build in “victories” that could never happen in real life.

Now, I’m glad Trump called the National Guard — among other things, I find it hilarious that the left is complaining about this, while they treated DC as occupied land for months — but I’m also worried it’s not decisive or strong enough.

Because without a big stomp some of the rest of that clueless imported army might decide it’s worth a go and jump in.

And then the bacon will be in the fire and no mistake.

I just wish I weren’t going to spend pretty much all the rest of the month traveling. (Not solid, but lots of excursions/family stuff planned.)

But is what is.

You: Be not afraid, neither do you give up.

I’m reminded of what a then 80 year old friend of mine told me during the election in 2004: “You can tell the left is losing. They always get loudest when they’re losing.”

Well, they sure are loud.

Keep your head on a swivel. Don’t take unnecessary risks. And if you’re in Los Angeles stay the heck out of that area, or take a vacation somewhere sane. But don’t let this trouble you unduly.

Be not afraid. In the end we win, they lose. And I don’t think the end is nigh, but they’re sure acting like it is.

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM C. CHANCY: The Words of the Night (Colors of Another Sky Book 1)

It’s 1618. Do you know where your historian is?

Retirement wasn’t supposed to have dragons….

Historian Jason Finn crossed the planet to escape the Black Dog of depression – and almost got there. Over the mountains of Korea, a monster out of nightmares tore his plane from the sky… and into another world.

Hunting down ravenous shapeshifting pirates, Night Magistrate Lee Cheong found survivors from elsewhere. Survivors who say pirates are not the only threat. Over twenty years ago Hanyang burned in dragon flames… and that monster still lives.

Now the young magistrate must lead demon-hunters on a desperate chase, aided by a bandit sharpshooter, a seafolk medic, a Heavenly cultivator on the run for her life… and a time-lost historian.

Jason’s willing to help, but he’s cursed, fighting to survive, and struggling to understand a land of magic and monsters. All the while doing his best to keep a teenage girl alive.

Upside? Jason’s definitely not depressed….

FROM JAY MAYNARD: Foundational Laminate (The Laminate Therapy Chronicles Book 1)

A radical therapy. A difficult past. One last chance to change.

Alex Sullivan isn’t crazy — just angry. Angry enough to get arrested. Angry enough to be offered an unusual choice: face prison, or undergo an innovative therapy at a private facility in rural Missouri.

At the Laminatrix Mental Hospital, patients wear full-body suits that block distraction and isolate sensation. They enter an immersive, time-dilated environment. There, they relive every memory — guided not by a voice, but by telepathic silence. There’s no room to lie, no place to hide.

Alex thinks he can fake it. He’s wrong.

Foundational Laminate begins the Laminate Therapy Chronicles, a speculative series exploring redemption, transformation, and the slow, difficult work of healing.

“One of the rare novels I hope becomes reality—a hard look at how to turn the antisocial into good neighbors.”
— Karl K. Gallagher, author of The Fall of the Censor and Torchship

BY CHARLES ALDEN SELTZER, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: 3 Ways of Lead (Annotated): A Pulp Western Omnibus

Charles Alden Seltzer was one of the first crop of western authors, a contemporary of Zane Grey and William MacLeod Raine. But he *really* hit his stride in 1921, and these three post-1921 novels prove it!

Brass Commandments

“He’s man’s size, goin’ an’ comin’. No show, no fuss; likes to play a lone hand. Cool an’ easy an’ dangerous. Two-gun. Throws ’em so fast that you can’t see ’em. Lightnin’s slow when Lannon moves his gun-hand. Dead shot; cold as an iceberg under fire.”

Such was the opinion in Bozzam City of Flash Lannon. Five years of getting an education back East might have tamed him, some, but when rustlers target his cattle, and the local law doesn’t care, Lannon nails a new law to the wall of the local post office: his brass commandments naming the five men who must leave the country — or die.

Five named men… and “one other.”

Last Hope Ranch

When Ned Templin rode out of the desert to the Last Hope Ranch, Lisbeth Stanton was grateful, because he saved her from having to kill a man. But when Templin told her he was staying, and that he was an outlaw, and that a posse was on his trail looking to hang him for murder, her opinion changed a little.

And it kept changing, for Templin was an enigma, with secrets and motivations she never could have guessed. And, it turned out, so was her father, whom she had been with her whole life but never really known. Between Sheriff Norton and his posse, and the criminal gang Blaisdell’s Raiders, secrets would out, and bullets would fly, at the Last Hope Ranch!

The Way of the Buffalo

When Jim Cameron saved a stranger’s life, he hardly expected that stranger to promise to shoot him dead.

Sunset Ballantine wasn’t bothered that a man had tried to shoot him from a distance — no bullet had ever touched him, despite living his long years in the west and getting into many a gunfight. He *was* bothered that this Easterner was going to run a railroad right past his front door in sixty days. And even more bothered that the man didn’t change his mind once the threat was issued. Ballantine’s word was iron law in Ransome, always had been. Yet this Cameron, understanding full well that Ballantine meant it, and would undoubtedly beat him to the draw in any fair fight, was pushing ahead anyway.

Would Cameron back down? Would Ballantine go back on his word? Could an old western hand face down the forces of Progress, or must he go the way of the buffalo?

• This iktaPOP Media omnibus includes introductions giving the novels historical and genre context.

FROM VICTOR TANGO KILO: Hell Yeah! We’re the Baddies!

Midnight Morrigan was once the Scorpion Horde’s top intelligence operative—master of deception, seduction, assassination, and alcohol appreciation.

Then the invasion of Carpathia faceplanted into a crater of blood, blame, and bureaucratic finger-pointing.

Now the Scorpion Overlords have demoted her to a lowly tactical post on a Horde battle cruiser—stripped of her power, her prestige, and worst of all… her minibar.

Morrigan has only one shot at redemption (and revenge!)—naturally, it involves murder and mayhem.

The Rebel Pact calls itself “the last best hope for freedom in the galaxy,” or at least their PR department does. If she can crush this ragtag band of insurgents, she might just get her rank back. Maybe even her minibar.

On her side: a war-weary Horde captain; a mad scientist named Madd (not a nickname—it’s branding); a sexy operative who gathers intel horizontally; a suspiciously helpful bartender with rebel sympathies; and the galaxy’s hardest-working liver.

Against her: the Rebel Pact, the incompetent Horde military bureaucracy, and the odds.

She couldn’t have asked for a better set of enemies.

Hell Yeah! We’re the Baddies! and its companion novel,The Baddies, explore the light side of the dark side—where one hapless food tech and one disgraced intelligence officer try to outmaneuver an empire built on cruelty, incompetence, and performance reviews. Together, they tell two distinct stories wrapped around the same set of events: a Rashomon-style exploration of different perspectives inside the evil Scorpion Imperium.

FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: The Guardian Cycle, Vol.1: In Dreams and Other Stories

A man whose debts must be paid by vengeance. A woman desperate to save her husband. A grieving father finding a young enemy soldier on his veritable doorstep…

These fantasy and soft sci-fi stories wonder whether or not heroes need families. Are we not told that families slow the hero down? Is it not typically implied that they get in the way of the adventure? Are they a burden, or truly the greatest strength from which the hero and those he loves can draw?

Six tales in this collection center on family, faith, and self-sacrificing love as men and women fight for the ones whom they hold most dear. Whether the enemy is inner turmoil, a nightmare, or a demon really does not matter. If the threat seeks to harm a member of the family, it is going to pay dearly.

FROM HOLLY LEROY: Hostile Earth (Hostile Earth Series Book 1)

Terra Vonn is fighting to survive in a destroyed world, surrounded by unspeakable horror . . . and things are about to get much worse. After witnessing the vicious murder of her mother, Terra has a singular focus—exacting revenge on the killers. But before she can complete her plans, savagery intervenes and she is cast alone into a brutal post-apocalyptic world. As she trails the men south through a land filled with cannibalistic criminals, slave traders, and lunatics, the hunter becomes the hunted. Terra quickly learns that she is neither as tough nor as brave as she thinks she is. Worse, she may be the only one who stands between what little remains of civilization and destruction

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: A Reluctant Sovereign (Family Law Book 7)

When North America attacked the space habitats beyond the Moon they had no plan B if they failed. The Earth Claims Commission was already suffering a credibility crisis and North America’s disastrous failure and defeat left them with no muscle. Far flung worlds and stations were abandoned with no banking, no supply, and no news. The explorers who were owed royalties were cut off too. Lee and her father Gordon weren’t about to sit still for that. If you can repossess a ground car, why not a planet? Lee had standing to be sovereign of Providence but wasn’t all that fond of planets. She didn’t want to be bogged down with the day to day drudgery of sovereignty like her friend Heather on the Moon. Was there any reason she couldn’t have her cake and eat it too? None that she could see.

FROM ANNA FERREIRA: The Root of All Evil

When murder comes to Stockton, it brings long-buried secrets in its wake…

Kate Bereton leads a busy but unexciting life as the clergyman’s only daughter in a small Dorsetshire village. She’s grateful for the break in routine heralded by the arrival of her stepmother’s latest guests, but when Kate discovers a dead body in the parsonage one morning, she finds herself in much more danger than she could have ever anticipated. Terrified and desperate, she turns to the local magistrate for help. Mr. Reddington is eager to aid his dear friend Miss Bereton, but can they discover the murderer before it’s too late, and the secrets of the past are forgotten forever?

With a dash of romance and a generous helping of mystery, The Root of All Evil is a charming whodunit that will delight fans of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie alike.

FROM CELIA HAYES: West Toward the Sunset

It’s the year 1846, and Sally Kettering is just twelve years old. Her parents have decided to sell their farm in rural Ohio and go west … west to California. Sally and her six-year old brother Jon must leave everything they knew – friends, kinfolk and the little town where they had lived all their lives so far. Pa and Ma Kettering packed what they could take into a single covered wagon, and they set out to follow a trail through the wilderness west, along with a party of other families and adventurers. Unknown dangers lay around every bend of the trail … wild animals, wilder Indians … Indians who might be hostile or friendly, and no way to know for certain … treacherous river crossings, trackless deserts, and jagged, dangerous mountain passes.
And still, the Kettering family and their friends boldly set out … following the trail that led west toward the sunset!

FROM KAREN MYERS: Second Sight: A Science Fiction Short Story

A Science Fiction Short Story

BORROWING SOMEONE ELSE’S PERCEPTIONS FOR A POPULAR DEVICE CAN ONLY MEAN COMMERCIAL SUCCESS. RIGHT?

Samar Dix, the inventor of the popular DixOcular replacement eyes with their numerous enhancements, has run out of ideas and needs another hit. Engaging a visionary painter to create the first in a series of Artist models promises to yield an entirely new way of looking at his world.

But looking through another’s eyes isn’t quite as simple as he thinks, and no amount of tweaking will yield entirely predictable, or safe, results.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Baying of the Hounds

In the world we know, Nikola Tesla’s Wardencliffe experiment proved a costly failure and was ultimately torn down for scrap. But what if things had gone differently and he pressed his work to completion? In a world similar to but unlike our own, Tesla completes his transmission tower. But when he turns it on, he discovers his calculations were incomplete. Some unknown factor has created a connection with another world with physical laws unlike our own. The commingling of curved and angular space has led to catastrophe. Now his greatest rival, Thomas Alva Edison, compels him to repair the damage. To do so, Tesla must make his way through a ruined city to the locus of the damage. And through his mind echoes the baying of unseen hounds. A short story originally published in the anthology Steampunk Cthulhu.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Noah’s Boy.

Transform into a shape-shifting dragon? Complicated. Run a successful diner? Even harder. Fall in love? Now that’s really testing Tom Ormson’s self-control.

Between managing a temperamental new fryer and his budding romance with fellow shifter Kyrie Smith, Tom’s plate is already full. But when a vengeful sabre-tooth tiger stalks into town and an ancient dragon starts playing matchmaker, his carefully balanced life threatens to spiral out of control. Add in a string of mysterious murders at the local amusement park, and a lovestruck ex-triad dragon with country music aspirations, and Tom’s having the week from hell—literally.

Now Kyrie’s been kidnapped, and Tom must race against time to save her while keeping his inner dragon in check. Because eating the bad guys? Definitely bad for business.

Welcome to Noah, Colorado, where the supernatural meets the everyday, and young love comes with teeth, claws, and the occasional bout of spontaneous combustion.

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: ROMANTIC.

So, the snake thing? As you know I’ve been whole immersed in fixing this book, to the point nothing much is happening. Though, really, nothing much has happened this week. The meds now discontinued gave me terrible heartburn which, in me, manifests as shoulder pain. Which in turn means I don’t sleep, and I become so massively ADD that someone mentioning a multitool leads to a two hour browsing for the best multitool. Not that I wanted to buy it. But I had to know EVERYTHING about multitools. And it’s liek that with everything. I’ve become the world’s foremost expert on …. well, nothing. But I know a ton about what amounts to chaff. Or dryer lint. Which means not much work gets done. Sigh.

This to say I haven’t read The Man Who Sold The moon, or done much in the way of revision. I will.

But it also means in the sleepless hollows of the night when I can’t even concentrate enough for Jane Austen Fanfic, which is the lowest level of engagement for me, the characters for the second book start babbling in my head. (Oh, other books and series too, but–)

One of those, a constant though not voice character is an eighth circle magician — yes, this space opera has magic. Not real magic, but never mind — which are the people who who do illusions, story telling, memory and apparently mind-healing, though they’ve only found that out recently.

Anyway, this character insists that I’m also an eighth circle. Their derrogatory nickname is Serpent. I was very offended, since…

Because I’ve always been in love with story, I am very afraid of getting caught up in one and losing track of reality. And I try very hard not to lie. Partly because it’s really uncomfortable to confess. I already made my priest laugh helplessly by confessing Twitter hooliganism. (which is actually pride and anger, but, yeah.) But mostly because just like it’s important to know whose voice in your head is yours, it’s also very important to know which reality is actually real. (This from a woman who has long discussions with characters while zonked out of her mind with lack of sleep. Hey!)

But he pointed out it doesn’t mean lies. Knowing story is an ability in itself. Like with mind healing, they’re good for all sorts of analysis of stories and situations.

The places I search for the truth are weird.

Look, nothing we’re being told is real. Okay, not nothing. But nothing that relates to say, job reports, population figures, how the economy is doing, etc. etc. etc.

That is why I’m looking all the time and in the weirdest places. Stuff like monitoring what’s on the grocery store shelves and how fast it’s selling, or listening to people’s conversations, or seeing what people are talking about buying and what is aspirational, or–

Look, the other day I told Dan I know the economy is getting better because the scam emails that tell me I’ve won a free dinner are now for expensive steakhouses, not places like Applebees. In the depths of Let’s Go Brandon, I got those, and it scared the spit out of me. Because when dinner at applebees is aspirational, people are in serious trouble. And scammers have to know what actually works, so they know when the low-price restaurants are beyond people’s reach and they are willing to answer a scammy email for them.

So, the insanity yesterday is looking (already) more and more like something weird.

Hey, it could be a legitimate spat. Both Elon and Trump are volatile and neither of them are used to being in politics.

But the walk back started by yesterday night, and uh…. something feels wrong about it. My story sense is tingling with “this doesn’t add up.”

And maybe it’s wrong, maybe. But… I don’t think so? And what really bothers me, if it was fireworks, it’s “what was it supposed to blind us to?” Because while fireworks are going on, you don’t see other stuff in the dark.

Or the spat could be real, but we can’t be sure of the reason for it. The real reason. Nor what the fall out will be.

Give it forty eight hours. We can’t know the truth before that anyway (and maybe ever). As with all these public things, give it forty eight hours. Let it chill, and see what is there after.

Even if Elon and Trump really fought with each other, or whatever…. it is not the end of the world.

It’s not even the end of our current ascendance, such as it is. Vance said this week, this is the work of a generation.

There are going to be setbacks. There are going to be more pushes forward, though. And maybe one or two miracles along the way.

Guys, tech is our way, the wind is at our back, and the left hasn’t been able to catch their breath — even during Brandon’s so called presidency — even while they were supposed to have everything their way. They need total media dominance to thrive. And we’re not going to let them do that.

It’s not Trump, as valuable as he’s been. It’s not Elon, as much as he’s tried to do. It’s not any one individual.

This is our battle. It’s all of us. That’s the story. It’s all of us.

And now I’m going to slither off and try to get some rest, so revision can be finished this weekend, and then I can write the other novels, and give them to my newsletter subscribers, and all of that.

So. Chill. Chill. Let the story play itself out before you analyze it and prepare for the fall out or not.

This is a long march.

This is not the end. It’s not even the end of the beginning. Let it be, however, the end of “the world is ending.”

Put your shoulders into changing what can be changed. Look at the rest as a passing show. Decipher it if you can. Don’t let it control you.

But I can’t seem to do it. Not today. Post tomorrow.

We had a cat — Pixie! Best cat ever — who had an habit of pretending everything that happened was part of his master plan.

Lick himself and fall from the chair? He’d look around with that smug expression, like “I meant to do that.

Now combine this with the fact that humans make up stories out of anything.

So, what I am trying to say is that it’s normal for humans to make up stories and to make things make sense. This is why you need to be very careful about conspiracy theories. Because it’s really easy to look at assorted facts and make up a theory where they all “just fit.”

It’s the same part of the brain I use to make up stories.

I’m going to tell you a secret, though: not everything fits. It just seems to, but there’s always stuff that sticks out. Always. Whether it’s your theory, or a novel, or a story the people in power are selling you, it’s hard to make up a story without holes. So, for instance, when you they were selling us the covidiocy, what stuck out for me was “why aren’t the homeless dying in droves?” Look, you can’t know everything. I happened to know that the cruise ships were virus boats, which means that I knew the numbers from Diamond Princess meant there was no real danger. But a lot of people fell for “top of the line care at cruise ships.” However the other great big problem was the homeless. You can’t know everything, but you’ll know some things. And I knew that the homeless were like the collecting pool for every disease possible and also that the homeless have a ton of people who just crossed the border illegally, or came in on a plane to distribute drugs or…. whatever. And yet the homeless weren’t falling down dead.

And that was the hole in the story that allowed me to see it how it was all glued together with spit and wish powder.

You can do this to anything. Yes, stories too, though I try not to. Though of course there is a problem when you first become a proficient story teller because you can’t help seeing the gears of the story, and the holes. it’s why most writers stop reading for a while after they become proficient.

But that’s neither here nor there.

This post is about the tendency of EVERY totalitarian regime to act like Pixie, only infinitely less cute. So, you get everything that happens being “I meant to do that.”

There are videos explaining how everything that happened in the west, all the decline and the bad stuff was a clever plan by the the Soviet Union, and everything is just following their plan.

I think I fell for them when I was young and stupid and they were in late night programs. But you know, guys, even then, I’d been telling stories for a while and things stuck out.

Mostly what sticks out in that type of video is that the story only works if you stay inside the story. If you only look at the facts they show you and not outside them. For instance, the so called decline of the west was mostly something that the media sold us. Under the elites machinations and the barrage of media telling us we sucked, we thought these things were true, but they weren’t. As we know given how hard they’re finding to shove decay down our throat, and how they keep importing third world basket cases to plump up the “failures.” (Mostly because the idea we were in decadence was a stupid Marxist just-so-story and they were mostly lying to themselves. This is the whole idea that living well makes you soft and “decadent” is a soviet idea. It’s also a lie. Living without challenges makes you decadent and soft, but there are challenges in prosperity if you don’t let the government hamper you.)

Look guys, we continually tell ourselves The Arabs, the Chinese, the Russians, whatever the authoritarian group we’re up against are “careful planners. They plan for centuries. They’ll win in the end.”

To be fair, they in general believe that about themselves, too. But that’s because by and large they have all these myths. It’s the only thing they have.

Look, guys, let’s be serious. What is the big problem of totalitarian societies, like the Chinese and the Russians (not just commies, but historically, though communism makes it worse)? Information.

No one could tell the Soviet leaders the society was falling until it was completely beyond salvation, because no one wants to give their supervisor bad news in a totalitarian society. The same reason no one could tell Putin they couldn’t take the Ukraine in a weekend, because they just didn’t have the wherewithal.

In the same way, I bet you Xi thinks his country is much stronger and more capable than it actually is.

So, how can they plan for a thousand years if they don’t actually know what is happening in their own country?

As for the Arabs? Bah. They culturally have serious problems with time and keeping track of why things happen, as well as a bunch of their very own cultural blindspots that means they don’t understand Western culture at all. Yes, they think they do, but they don’t. (Not to mention they too are poisoned with Marxist story telling.)

They can’t. It’s bullshit. They’re selling you a story. And there are holes you can drive a mac truck through.

Yes, they will take the latest spill and tell you that they meant to do that. Every time. Every single time.

But in the end, in the very end, they didn’t mean to do that. They’re not in charge of their own plans. They just keep adjusting them and saying “hey, I meant to do that.”

Be not afraid. And don’t attribute magical powers to the enemy.

Humans don’t plan for centuries. Nope, not even us.

We just stumble from disaster into salvation by the skin of our teeth, to disaster again. And then we say “We meant to do that.”

Even us.

However, over the long time, individual freedom that gives us the ability to react to and recover from disaster in many ways, without holding on to some “grand plan” dreamed up by a single brain or a consortium of single brains have a better chance of surviving and thriving.

No one has a plan. Not even us. All is chaos.

Fortunately chaos is America’s native environment. We thrive on it. We eat chaos for breakfast and then go out and create new challenges.

Be not afraid.

We’re entering a time of high chaos.

We’re coming home.