According To Hoyt

Three months ago I came up with resuming a project I started here before the great lockdowns and all the insanity.

I was going to read myself back into my personal history with science fiction.

I see this is going to take my explaining a bit of my own background or how I came to run away with the science fiction and fantasy circus, which is not just a fairly strange pursuit for a woman who was born and raised in a small Portuguese village of no particular importance but outright insane.

You see, where I come from — sonny, (and for that matter, daughtery) — men were men, women were women, and reading was fairly weird. However if you were going to read — and my family was weird enough to — you read things like the newspaper, poetry and if you were of a certain bend of mind and aimed to improve yourself, popular theology, history, and other sciences, more or less in that order. At least that’s what you read if you were a man. If you were a woman you read improving books, edifying tales, and perhaps, hidden and by stealth, true confessions. (Oh, manuals of cooking and handcrafts, too, but that’s another category.) If you came from a family weird enough to read fiction — guilty as charged. Actually my family read everything, including collecting the inserts in medicine bottles. What can I way, the nut didn’t fall far from the tree — normally men read mystery, historic fiction, maybe military fiction, Westerns (for light reading, which they might or might not admit to.) Women read romantic fiction or edifying fiction, such as the lives of saints. (BTW romances in Portugal were more romantic than sexy, but the romantic was more of a 19th century definition. Or as I like to explain it, he died, she mourned him for decades till she died — joining a convent optional — and that was the HEA.)

Of course I read everything. Yes, including the romances that my older cousin read. But part of it is that I continually ran out of reading material. I had entire friendships based on the fact that some kids’ parents signed them up for book clubs and I could borrow the books. In fact, looking back, a lot of my young life was distorted by and devoted to story-seeking-behavior. What the stories were didn’t much matter,and whether they were good was secondary. Honestly? Story is story. Kind of like chocolate is chocolate. Even the worst chocolate (the chocolate of my childhood could be classed as a form of soap) is better, to a kid at least, than no chocolate at all. And frankly, when it comes to story I’m still a kid.

My father tried. I want to point this out right now. My father did his best to teach me good literary taste. He tried to get me to appreciate great books, and have mystery as my guilty pleasure on the side.

It could have worked, maybe. Even if mysteries would have been my primary reading, and the literary stuff just enough to be able to talk about it.

The problem is that my brother went into engineering. When I was eleven, he was an engineering student, and he made friends with a guy who had an actual library. (Something I’d only heard of in movies. In my family we kept books everywhere, including the potato cellar, the workshop and in every other room. Yes, that room too.

Anyway, I listened to the description of the library (yes, it had a ladder) as though he were talking about a fantastical realm, but the most amazing thing is that my brother had discovered science fiction.

For reasons that only the psychiatrist he never had could explain, he decided that he could borrow books — please note, actually bring books into the house I lived in, into the room next to mine — and I wouldn’t read them.

Of course I read them. The first one I remember reading was Out of Their Minds, by Clifford Simak. The first book i remember reading knowing it was science fiction, that is.

It is possible — unless it’s a false memory — that I had read Have Spacesuit Will Travel (Robert A. Heinlein) before, when I was 8. My brother says this was impossible because the first Portuguese edition was when I was 14. And this might be true. Or not. You see, Portugal had the same approach to copyright as many other third world countries. I suspect I stumbled onto it having bought it, in a plain unmarked cover, in some fair, or from some sidewalk bookseller. And that — officially — the edition didn’t exist. The reason I think this happened is that I didn’t have a concept of “science fiction” and didn’t realize the book was anything but contemporary fiction, in 1970. You see, I had seen the moon landing, and I had absolutely no reason to believe that America didn’t have people on the moon permanently. So– I think if I had read HSSWT at 14 I would have realized what it was.

Anyway, i do understand that Out of their minds isn’t precisely science fiction, except perhaps in the that sense where science meets philosophy and ontology. But it was science fiction enough for 11 year old me. At least once my brother had explained that science fiction was dreaming/writing of a future that obviously did not yet exist.

I fell into it with both feet and no parachute. By the time my brother realized I was reading everything he brought home, and told his friend to not lend him any racy stuff, it was already too late. both to stop the addiction and to keep it clean. By then I was taking classes in the city, and had found my way to bookstores that sold more of this particular form of crack.

Oh, heck, who am I kidding? I was back to my old tricks, including carefully cultivating entire relationships because these girls’ fathers or grandfather had stashes of science fiction books around the house. (Some of these men were even nice enough to give me entire boxes of these books as, they say, they’d “outgrown” them. Ah.)

Now what does that have to do with reading myself back through it? Well, you see, most of the books I read — though not all, but the one offs are harder to track and often were never legal — were from the Argonauta collection.

And it’s possible now to find a listing of all the books. See link above.

The problem, when I first tried to do this, is that some books were (as they were by the time I started reading them) unobtanium. But a few months ago, Charlie Martin suggested I might just read the ones I could find.

…. As such, I have read Adrift in the Stratosphere, and will inflict my views of it on you sometime next week. Mostly because I think it’s important to pass on a knowledge of what came before, what worked and what would make us laugh out loud.

Reading what the people of the past thought was the future is fascinating, and also a cautionary tale that what seems absolutely obvious to us is not necessarily so, and the future might prove us wrong.

But more importantly, I’m going to do this, so I might as well share.

I will do these “reviews” — revisits? — once a week on either Tuesdays or Wednesdays.

If you guys find books of the same time that are interesting, and want to suggest them, feel free.

Anyway, we’re off next week with Adrift in the Stratosphere, by A M. Low. If you want to play along.

You obviously don’t have to read it, and I’ll try to make the write-up fun anyway.

So, see you next week.

So, here we are, somehow part of a big tent.

Okay, correction, the big tent is still forming. We have the oddest people suddenly trying to be with us or on our side, or something. And it’s not so much like we’ve done something to attract everyone and their second cousin, it’s that the other side has been so enthusiastically pushing people away and excommunicating people and demanding that people conform to not just a narrow but ever changing set of specifications that change constantly. And if they don’t conform, they’re terrible, horrible, basically not-people.

So, people have been drifting out way.

Look, it’s not that our beliefs aren’t attractive, mind. They are. We promise people the ability to work to better themselves and the world. But it’s hard too. Being free is hard you have to admit to your own mistakes. you have to fight your own battles. You have to be the adult, and no one is coming to save you.

This means that a lot of people will be afraid of it, scared and horrified by the work needed. But right now they don’t have a choice, and they’re being catapulted, screaming onto our side. Because it’s still better than the psycho alternative that wants to control their every breath, and, if that doesn’t work, is quite willing to destroy them, their culture, and ultimately all humans.

So, they’ve raced here, and they’re on our side now. At least they think they are. They claim to be.

Except it’s not that easy. Is it ever? At heart they still have a lot of of bad habits. They still run to mamma want government to tell them what to do and how to fix everything.

And they have other unsavory habits. One of them being that they try to be what they always thought we were. And what they thought we were is crazy cakes.

So you’ll hear a lot of nonsense, and a lot of people claiming to be on the right and saying the most bizarrely appalling things.

Of course the difference is that there are a lot of soft skulls who just hear it everywhere and start thinking it must be right.

So a lot of the dumber ones are saying all sorts of appalling things, and really thinking they’re getting this “right wing” thing right.

Look, I remember when they told us about the “era of good feelings” And how there were no partisan feelings, no factions, etc.

But you know d*mn well that there were factions, because there were strong disagreements. And there are strong disagreements.

I think the crazier stuff will shake off. Because it usually does. Russia went completely insane once the opinion/discussion control was gone. And then it went extremely Russia. which is where they are right now. Hey, not all cultures are sane, and most countries sort of aren’t.

But we … as a nation are either incredibly sane or completely insane, coming out on the other side. So we have a way to maybe come out all right.

Maybe.

So, despite the fact that humans are social apes and we tend to imitate each other, and fall in with what we think the group is, I’m telling you to hold on to what you believe, what you think and know is right.

Don’t go falling in with the group because “this is a plausible theory.” And “this is what’s behind everything.” Or worse “this is the opposite of what the left told us they believed. (The left lied, anyway.)

Hold on to your beliefs. And if you’re shaky on those, I recommend our founding documents and the writings of the founding fathers.

If you’re still confused? We believe in individual liberty, individual responsibility and individual achievement. We believe in self-determination, freedom of association, and definitely freedom of commerce.

We believe we have the righ right to say whatever we want, particularly the people who are stupid and wrong, because that’s how it can be argued and how the most horrible things can be shown to be horrible.

Turns out when everyone is shoved under one big tent, it’s where the fights are.

There will be some epic fights. Enjoy them.

It’s the sound of freedom.

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

BY ROBERT J. HORTON, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Law Comes To Singing River (Annotated): The classic pulp western.

Lang Rush had to run. He’d killed a man in self-defense, fair and square, but then thought another man was drawing on him and shot him, too. But that man was Drayton, rich and connected, so it didn’t matter what Lang thought.

He ran, all the way to Singing River, population 15, without so much as a post office. And laid low. But there was a girl… and then there was trouble… and before everything was over and the gunsmoke drifted away, the Law would come!

• This iktaPOP Media edition includes an introduction giving the book historical context.

FROM KEVIN IKENBERRY: Bureau 42 (The Phoenix Initiative)

Peacemakers. The Galactic Union’s most capable enforcers and resolute negotiators, their name alone elicits fear and awe among the Union’s citizenry.

It doesn’t happen often, but when a Peacemaker can’t solve a case, it goes to the Peacemaker Archives, as all Peacemaker cold cases reside within “Bureau 42,” as it’s also known. Cases dealing with ghost ships, missing Peacemakers, mysterious killers, and even a few cases that aren’t even really cases can all be found in the files of Bureau 42.

Fourteen authors present thirteen all-new stories from the depths of Bureau 42. Take a look into the forgotten files of the Peacemaker Guild and find never-before-seen secrets, some of which herald the future of the Peacemaker Guild and even the Galactic Union itself.

These stories honor the threat, set the terms, and walk the knife edge between standing or falling. Step inside, Candidate, and see what our files hold…

FROM SCOTT MCCREA: Targets West: A Lucas Wheeler Thriller

Lucas Wheeler is having a bad day when he leaves his beloved Wyoming for the concrete canyons of New York. But he has no idea how rapidly things will turn for the worse. En route to London, where his ranch hands will be performing at the largest international rodeo in the world, Lucas is contacted by the State Department with an unusual request: to report back all observations and significant data on Sheikh Kashif Rashid Al Marltaum. Lucas will be traveling to Dubai to sell several hundred purebred Arabians to the Sheikh, who he learns is deeply involved in terror cells located throughout the U.S.

Before Lucas can even begin his assignment, he is kidnapped by student radicals, chased while handcuffed through Central Park by on-the-take New York cops and nearly shot in London’s poshest restaurant. It is only when Lucas is lured to Sheikh Kashif’s outlandish Summer Palace hidden in the Dubai desert that he learns of a daring and brazen terrorist plot that will have devastating consequences for the entire Western world.

With a shocking conclusion set in London’s crowded O2 arena, Lucas must overcome incredible odds before a multinational cabal of terrorists can hit…targets west.

Hopping through three continents, filled with memorable and very human characters, and energized by pulse-pounding suspense, Targets West is a thriller for people hungry for stories of American heroism and international intrigue.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Light Up the Night.

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

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

FROM DALE COZORT: Jace of the Jungle: A Snapshot Novella (Snapshot Jungle Adventures Book 1

A Snapshot Jungle Adventure?
Strange new people and animals keep appearing in an alternate history or alternate reality Africa otherwise isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years. In that strange version of Africa, oddly familiar events keep happening.

*An out of place passenger liner is torpedoed by German submarines.
*A castaway boy is raised by man-like apes.
*Brutal slave-raiders sweep in to destroy peaceful communities.
*An 18 year old damsel finds herself in a lot of distress.
*Men talk with elephants.
*Men and ape-man fight to the death.

Sounds like that has all been done before a time or two, right?

Jace of the Jungle delivers an homage to the pulp era Jungle Adventure story with a New Pulp novella just as action-packed as the old pulp adventures. Fair warning, though: Jace starts out considerably darker than the old pulps and goes places the pulp era stories couldn’t.

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 PAM UPHOFF: The Black Cube (Chronicles of the Fall Book 14)

Hieronymus was just going to take a ride with a friend and wasn’t expecting his friend’s sisters to be a kidnapped . . . and he certainly wasn’t expecting the opportunity to be a hero.

As information about the abilities of unchipped Portal Clones spread, their usefulness for cross-dimensional crimes of the ordinary sort should have been anticipated . . . although how to stop them is difficult, if not impossible. But as a spunky thirteen-year-old works to escape, Hieronymus has a plan . . .

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Threads of Empire: Merchant and Empire Book Ten

“Return with coin or not at all!”

Dagnija Modrisdatter brought nothing but bad fortune to her family, or so they believed. When a merchant offered to hire her as spinster and weaver, her father sent her off.

Adrians Eckelbert searched for the master weaver who made ornate belts. He found her on a remote land-tongue, and brought her back to Rhonari.

Dagnija discovers a different world, one filled with possibilities she had never dared to even dream of. But she must learn to navigate the shoals of Rhonari, seat of the trade lords of the Northern Empire. Spinning comes easily to her hand. Speaking for herself and balancing trade law and family duty? Far harder.

FROM MARY CATELLI: Magic And Secrets

Tales of Wonder and Magic A woman, sent to a far off duchy, finds a mysterious wolf haunting the forest, and learns there are secrets no one even suspects. Playing with props for amateur theatricals has more consequences than any of those doing it dream. . . act with care. A king’s tyranny sends a woman searching desperately for a legend of lions, there being no other hope.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Moon Mirror

Chelsea Ayles dreamed of going to the Moon since she was a child. Now her dream job at NASA has turned into a nightmare, thanks to those many blood-sucking arachnids. Yeah, politics, as in a Senator accusing her of destroying America’s priceless heritage because she chose the moonrocks that were used to make a proof-of-concept mirror segment for a lunar telescope project. Now the mirror sits in her office like a bitter mockery of what might have been — until the day her reflection turns into a handsome stranger who calls himself the Man in the Moon and offers her visions of a world that might have been. Visions that ignite a longing of an intensity she hasn’t known since she was in grade school and watched videos of the Apollo lunar missions in science class.

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: 202502 2.0

Collection of current events and other thoughts from February 2025. The world has changed all of a sudden, this is the new update.

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: Evanescent.

I almost called this “Sympathy for RFK, Jr.” but that would be both right and not. I mean, the man is far more of a statist than I’d like, and he might have a dead worm in his brain, but he’s obviously not the devil, and is capable of allying with MAGA to get to his end of Making America Healthy Again. Also, he’s so goofy that it’s impossible not to like him at least a little. I mean, what kind of gonzo mad lad has as his secret when running for president that he once moved a dead bear cub?

Still he believes in the power of centralized up-down commands, so I’m not sure I can back him the whole way. OTOH, he hasn’t tried doing any mandates, so he might be okay.

He is absolutely right on the fact that most of our bought-food is ridiculously bad for us.

I went to a con last weekend, meaning we drove to TN all day Thursday and back on Monday. On the way back we brought some oranges and we stopped for lunch. But on the way out we left too soon for me to able to eat after my thyroid meds. This means I was looking for coffee and food at a road stop. Not only was it much harder to find just plain coffee — how many machines are designed to sell us caramel/frosting/various flavorings of corn syrup and soy with vague bits of caffeine, instead of the one coffee machine in the corner — but finding cream to put in it (as opposed to sweet, flavored soy stuff) was almost impossible. As for anything to eat, there wasn’t amid the various baked things even a glimmer of something that was “just breadlike”. No, it was all sweet cupcakes (even the ones called muffins.) And worse, the cupcake thingies were filled with super-sweet cream and crusted with sugar frosting.

WHY?

Well, I can tell you why, because I am OLD. Around the eighties, the authorities, influenced in no small amount by “Diet for a Small Planet” which combined ignorance about agriculture (lands that are good for growing cows in, don’t necessarily work for wheat, corn or even potatoes) decided that meat was evil, and fat was responsible for every health problem.

Because fat is what makes food delicious, they instead started loading things with carbs and more carbs. And because our food regulations are susceptible to lobbyists, the corn lobby insisted that all sweet should be provided by high fructose corn syrup.

Thing about sugar is the more you have the more you get desensitized to it, so to make things more palatable more and more sugar must be added.

Since we don’t eat much sugar at home, road food, even not the spectacularly restricted choices at breakfast meant that I had enough sugar in a day to dwarf the amounts I normally eat in a week and to give me a hangover.

The amazing thing is not that Americans are overweight and have high rates of diabetes. I’m shocked that all of us aren’t dying in our forties.

So, how do I feel about seed oils? I don’t know. That’s the short answer. Mostly the seed oil oils that we used was canola, and there’s reasons to not have it under “overprocessed” and “goes bad after a while.” For a while now we’ve been using coconut oil or even animal fat when we fry which is not very often. But I have a weakness for tiny fried potatoes, so maybe once every couple of weeks? And it’s not that “we don’t fry” is not because it’s unhealthy* but because it tends to make a bigger mess in our small and um…. anti-efficient kitchen.

Look, at this point I don’t know what is “healthy” and I very much doubt anyone knows.

I grew up on margarine, because butter would definitely kill us all with heart attacks. Eggs were to be longed for, but actually eating them would kill us with heart attacks, etc. etc. etc.

I’ve lived long enough to see that reversed and carbs condemned.

Is this now the universal writ?

I refuse to believe it. I have friends who are far skinnier than I am and perfectly healthy who are functionally humming birds. They live on sugar and carbs only. If I did that, I’d be 450 lbs if I hadn’t already died of screaming diabetes.

Dave Freer, who worked as a biologist for a while, and was even a zoo keeper for a time, once told me that even within species nutrition requirements were highly individual. I think the example he gave were twins (but not identical) lions, where if fed the same diet, one would be unhealthily skinny and the other unhealthily fat.

He says that’s something animal biologists know, but human biologists refuse to acknowledge.

Some day we should be able to identify people’s ideal diet from their genetics (there’s some work on this already) but until then, we definitely need to stop government interference in how we eat.

The government needs to stop not just telling people how to eat — that is as it might be — but telling people what they can and can’t sell, and what subsidized food (which shouldn’t exist) must consist of. Because that just means our collective diets (all of us need convenience foods sometime, and frankly I’m coming to the age not cooking all the time would be nice. Since there’s only two of us most of the time.) are schizophrenic and keep careening between extremes, as well as being influenced by the worst possible reasons; which lobbyists have access and money.

I hope RFKA considers that Making America Healthy Again passes through Getting Government Out of Our Food (Yes, GGOOF. It’s catchy.) Let people sell food unhampered by mandates, and let people eat the food that best suit them. And stop teaching people that plant based food is best. It works for some and perhaps some people like it or need it. But humans are a scavenger species and those eat meat when they can get it.

This whole obsession with vegetarianism (absent some rare health issues) is just more Diet For A Small Planet and the fears of a stupid philosophy that has been proven wrong.

Our planet is not small (And we can colonize others) and meat is delicious, and protein is good for you.

Eat what works for you. Ignore the government. Find your own health.

Humans are fickle creatures. A month ago I was delighted and happy at the speed with which the administration was fixing things.

I’m still happy. I’m also very tired, though that might have to do with just having come back from a con and still being on the edge of con crud.

The thing is that little dissatisfaction points have crept in. I don’t like the labor pick. I am ambivalent over the whole thing with Ukraine, but willing to accept Trump is doing the best he can with the situation and that it’s not entirely in his control. (He’s not magic.) I’m frustrated with judges who make rulings that should be beyond their reach, and which the Supreme Court, inexplicably, decided to tolerate.

This post is as much to you — I’m sure some of the rest of you will need to hear it, not just me — as to myself: Possess your soul in patience. It’s less than a month and a half from inauguration. Yes, Trump is governing like someone who knows his life, as well as our country, depends on this. But he’s not magical, and he’s certainly not a king or a dictator.

Looked at one way, we’ve been on this road towards an European style “managed” republic for a hundred years or so. It can’t be undone with a magical wand, or in a minute. it’s going to take work, and there’s going to be wins and losses. Sometimes it will be two steps forward and one step back. Sometimes the wins will be alloyed with loss and irritation. We will be muttering and cursing, and hoping.

And Trump is not magical either. He’s going to do things I disagree with. Look, anyone will. Even if I were president, I’d be forced into things I didn’t like or, considering how often I’ve made mistakes in life, do things that didn’t play the way I wanted.

The thing is just we tend to attribute magical powers of imposing their view on everyone in power. And the opposition has been driving us to such a bad, illiberal, “you’ll eat the bugs and be thankful” place, and we got such a miracle with the election win, against the cheating and the spending and what felt like a scripted loss. So, of course, we feel like Trump should have a magical reset button. But this doesn’t exist in reality.

And we can’t do much of anything, except work the culture side. Now as a year ago, our job is conquering hearts and minds to liberty. And perhaps percolating a few suggestions upward, as seems to happen sometimes.

Take a deep breath. Eat properly. Try to sleep. And…

Possess your soul in patience. This fight we’re in is not easy, and it will never be over. We might win big and have some breathing time and a time of prosperity, but the statists will come back. If not here, then somewhere else. If not on the national, then on the regional or local level.

The fight goes on. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.

In the mean time, take care of yourself. Celebrate the wins. Endure the losses. Shrug and keep going.

Possess your soul in patience.

Remember, patience is a virtue. So is fortitude. And we’ll get a chance to practice both a lot.

Patience. Keep going.

I don’t like behaviorism as an explanation for all human behaviors. I’ve always believed in humans being able — if not always willing — to think and reason and make decisions, instead of just acting on habit and impulse.

(As for who wrote “Every time a dog salivates, a Pavlovian rings a bell”- Robert A. Heinlein on the blackboard before psychology class, I know nothing. It was an impulse. Also, I’m fairly sure the statute of limitations has expired.)

But there’s no point at all saying that a lot of the stuff we do every day isn’t in great measure made easier by our trained in habits.

Like, for instance, do you think every time you walk? Do you carefully balance? Unless you’re a certain age and your knees have started going, or you’re a toddler, still establishing the habit, you probably don’t. And you don’t think how to write, you just write. (Well, I do. I mean form the letters. Shush you, in the peanut gallery.) So–

You can see how doing a lot of things by rote and habit is useful to us as individuals and as a species. It saves brain power and attention and applying yourself to every little thing.

Thing is, the busier you are, and the older you are, the more things you do by rote, even things that should — technically — be impossible.

I was told recently by an artist that, yeah, you can do it while half asleep, if you’ve trained for decades.

And you know…. Enid Blyton, when she started losing her mind to Alzheimers continued writing. Apparently one of the final novels was a slightely reworked version of another novel, but she was writing.

The thing is, the older you get the more and more things you do by rote and habit. You’ve done them so often.

And it tends to ossify your behaviors. It leaves you curiously unable to adapt when circumstances change. (This by the way is why it’s good to not have been massively successful — though I swear it wouldn’t spoil me) but always scraping at the edges to survive. It builds fewer habits of complacency. Though I won’t say it doesn’t build some non-productive habits, like an inability to relax.)

Cultures can get this too, of course. “But it always worked.” I suspect that’s the problem with the truly contra-productive behaviors like, oh, off the top of my head relative marriage or harems.

Anyway, looking at the spectacle of the democrats in congress holding up stupid little signs during Trump’s speech, or in fact all the incredibly stupid things they’ve been doing since last November I kept thinking of ingrained habits and older people, since most of them are geriatric. (And the young…. well, their younger generation seems either dumb or intellectually lazy.)

They keep doing things like those stunts with signs, or talking about how “the people” are angry or talking about how the right is for “millionaires and billionaires” and it’s like they forget all the times that didn’t work, in the last decade. They keep doing this stuff as though they didn’t have to cheat massively in 2020.

They keep crying on TV, going for the celebs, telling us we’re stupid and uneducated….

All their strategies, including the demonizing of Jan 6, say, would have worked perfectly 30 years ago. Heck, they almost succeeded in making Obama a “great president” as they did with FDR, in the press and school books.

But the information ecology has changed completely. And they can’t adapt. They keep falling on habit, because habit worked so well before.

It’s a bizarre spectacle, like watching people doing stupid things, convinced there is a curtain in front of them, hiding what they’re doing. And unable to realize what there is is an entire crowd watching them.

It’s like watching a mouse that was trained to touch a button and get a pellet, and who keeps doing it even though no treat is coming.

And all we can do is watch and learn, and try to stay mentally flexible.

In a time of high change.

Book Promo (the normal weekly patter.)

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 CEDAR SANDERSON: The Luminous Citadel of New Atlantis (The Tanager)

A Hollow World Defies Known Science…
Wilt Frobisher seizes the chance to join an expedition to the Luminous Citadel—an enigmatic moon orbiting a shattered planet—leaving behind everything he’s ever known. What he finds inside the hollow impossible world staggers the imagination: a lush, gravity-defying biosphere teeming with ancient trees, mysterious inhabitants, and ugly secrets hiding in the shadows.

Guided by the fearless Dione—a red-haired native with a knack for flight and a language all her own—Wilt plunges into a realm where survival depends on mastering the strange currents of an alien ecology. Questions arise the more he bonds with Dione and her people. Who built this refuge? Why was it abandoned? And what does his mentor, the eccentric Dr. Sooma, know that he’s not telling?

In a world of treetop villages, floating acorns, and lurking dangers, Wilt must uncover the truth of the Citadel—or risk becoming part of its forgotten history.

FROM DALE COZORT: Wokuo Incursion

Invasion from an alternate timeline?
It’s December 1937 in a world exactly like ours except that it is about to veer wildly into alternate history. It’s less than two years before World War II broke out historically in Europe. War has already come to much of Asia, with Japan invading China. An isolationist US fears it will be drawn into that conflict, especially after the Japanese sink the US gunboat Panay. Just when President Franklin Roosevelt thinks he has that crisis under control, he faces a bigger issue. High tech descendants of the Wokuo, Japanese pirates and smugglers who should have vanished over three hundred years ago, flood into the Pacific coast off California.

The Wokuo are both refugees and invaders, fleeing from war in an alternate reality where they survived and grew strong, while looking for new conquests to replace their lost empire. They set their sights on California. President Roosevelt sends disgraced former Colonel Martin to California to organize resistance to the invaders, but the Colonel has his own issues, buried deep in his brain and waiting to cause disaster.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Took Their Wages (Space Law Science Fiction)

Returned from long years in interstellar space to longer decades missed on Earth, a starship’s crew face their biggest obstacle yet: Human Resources.

Fresh off their victorious defense of a starship captain on mutiny charges, attorneys Calvin Tondini and Sara Seastrom must now pivot to a new challenge: defending the same starship crew’s hard-earned salaries. Bureaucrats citing relativity want to apply a different clock than bargained for in the crew’s original contract.

Whatever may be said about Einstein, time, and space, the crew’s attorneys know that money isn’t relative.

Check out Took Their Wages for a sober analysis of this timely question.

A science fiction short story.

FROM DAN MELSON: The Price of Power: Book Two of Politics of Empire (The Politics of Empire 2)

For everything there is a price.

Grace has married into one of the most important families of the Empire. The Scimtars are wealthy and powerful in every sense of the term. Her five children will be among the Empire’s elite when they are ready, and Grace herself is not without influence or importance despite her relative youth. But Imperial politics are deadly, and the more you have, the more your rivals want what you have.

There is no shelter from The Price of Power.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Lion of God (Timelines Book 1)

John Wolff has been handed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Again.
He’s already saved the love of his life from an early death – thirty years after she died.
Now, a beautiful young woman, who is clearly his daughter, has appeared from the timeline branch where that same love of his life survived and married his counterpart.
She says they need his help fighting off invaders from the far future. Who, by the way, are looking for him. Why? Because they want the starship drive he and a friend invented, the precursor to their time machine. Problem is, in her timeline, it hasn’t been invented yet.
What man can resist a cry for help from his own daughter?
Particularly when the invaders think she’s a saint. Or possibly, a devil wearing saint’s clothing. And they’re looking for her, too.
Thus begins the Timelines Saga, and the story of the Lion of God.

FROM LINDSAY PETERSEN: Caught in the Wizards’ Duel (The Romantic Chrononaut Book 2)

Rumors swirl of the “Elf King” sabotaging Nicola Tesla’s network of aether towers. Dougray Cameron is called out by King Edward’s Secret Service to investigate. Doug’s wife Kate follows in secret, heeding her misgivings about this ‘wee, small task’ Doug took on. As she watched him scale a tower across the turbulent strait the great iron tower slowly collapses, plunging Doug into the fatal surf.  It’s the stranger next to her whose slow-clapping amplifies the horror — what kind of fiend would do that? 

When Kate turns to demand an explanation he’s gone. Surely he knew something, planned something, killed her husband! The card he handed her — he lives in Paris! Kate Cameron, newly widowed, will follow this Errol Koenig to Paris and serve justice on him!

But — he’s aware of her pursuit, and his confederates are determined to stop her, if not kill her. Aided by those she meets, including Winston Churchill, P G Wodehouse, Mata Hari, Arsène Lupin, Nicola Tesla, and Kemal Ataturk, she follows her prey across Europe to Constantinople and beyond, travelling by Orient Express, Tesla’s airship, and automaton Janissary. 

Somehow the moment to end Koenig’s life never arrives. Could his strange allure be the reason why? 

And could it be true that her husband survived? 

In a classic scene, the pursuit ends atop an ancient castle in a thunderstorm. 

FROM GERALD HALL: Yesterdays War

A wealthy Australian industrialist in the year 2040 accidentally opens a portal into the past with one of the scientific experiments that he has financed. A cataclysmic nuclear war that dooms humanity erupts almost at the same time. The industrialist decides to go through the portal and try to change history to prevent the final war. He assumes the identity of a dead prospector after finding himself in the year 1918. The time traveler enlists the aid of local Aborigine tribesmen while planning to use his knowledge of the future to become wealthy once again. Only this time, he will be using his wealth to influence the course of history and those who made it.

FROM J. MANFRED WEICHSEL: Five Maidens on the Pentagram

Nobody believes Jonah, a mild-mannered mental patient with split personalities, that his doctor is working with his evil alter ego, Maldeus, to sacrifice women to a sex-crazed demon in the hospital basement. Determined to expose his doctor’s evil plan, Jonah goes undercover as Maldeus.

Assisted by a cute nudist mental patient named Aurora, Jonah is thrust into a diabolical plot that forces him to confront the very limits of his own identity. Will Jonah defeat his doctor in time to stop the rise of Satan?

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Princess Seeks Her Fortune

In a land where ten thousand fairy tales come true, Alissandra knows she is in one when an encounter with a strange woman gives her magical gifts, and another gives her sisters a curse.

And she knows that despite the prospects of enchantments, cursed dances, marvelous birds, and work as a scullery maid, it is wise of her to set out, and seek her fortune.

FROM KAREN MYERS: King of the May – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 3)

MORE VALUABLE AS A WEAPON THAN A KINGMAKER, HE MUST MAKE HIS OWN CHOICES TO SECURE THE FUTURE.

George Talbot Traherne, the human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, had hoped to settle into a quiet life with his new family, but it was not to be. Gwyn ap Nudd, Prince of Annwn, has plans to secure his domain in the new world from the overbearing interference of his father Lludd, the King of Britain.

The security of George’s family is bound to that of his overlord, and he vows to help. But when he and his companions stand against Lludd and his allies at court, disaster overturns all their plans and even threatens the Hounds of Annwn themselves.

George and his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, must survive a subtle attack that undermines them both. Other gods and gods-to-be have taken an interest, but the fae are divided in their allegiances and fear the threat of deadly new powers in their unchanging lives.

George and his companions must save themselves if they are to persuade their potential allies to help. But how can they do so, attacked on so many fronts at once? Will he put his family into greater jeopardy by trying to defend them?

https://amzn.to/41mdVoVFROM LEIGH KIMMEL: All the Little Hedgehogs

In Soviet Union, genetic engineering does you.

Yona wondered why everyone kept steering him toward a military career, until one of his teachers noticed his aptitude for genetics. Now he’s the personal student of Academician Voronsky, working in a secret genetic engineering facility in a closed town.

However, Yona keeps having to spend as much time babysitting the Academician’s adopted son Kolya as actually doing genetics. When this extra assignment becomes a frustration, Yona learns just how quickly privileges can be retracted.

And then he starts learning just how deep the secrets of the Soviet human genetics program really goes.

A story from the Grissom timeline (Gus on the Moon universe).

Caution: Contains intense material that may be disturbing to some readers. Reader caution advised.

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: Glamorous.

True tragedy has always fascinated me. It makes for lousy novels, unless you like eating grey fog with a spoon, but can be an effective background for a novel, within which pre-doomed background the character can carve out difficult wins.

What I mean by true tragedy is the type of pre=determined plot in which two people/nations/forces run at each other, each with vital and urgent needs from their own point of view and they can’t see the other pov at all, no matter how they try.

Most of the most fascinating tragedies of this type happen when two cultures collide, because cultures — and those embedded in them — truly are at a very essential level blind to each other.

When I was researching the simultaneous Boer and Zulu invasion of South Africa (no, the Zulus were not even vaguely “native” and assuming they were simply because it was the same continent and they’re black is not just racist but arrant ignorance. They were no more native to South Africa than Frenchmen to Portugal during the Napoleonic wars. The fact outsiders can’t tell you apart from the natives does NOT make you native.) I realized I was reading about that type of tragedy. And that the same type of tragedy (rather than overpowered, oh, so strong colonizers against helpless “natives” who worship nature) is what happened in America with the Amerindians. To an extent it’s what is unrolling before our very eyes in the Israel/Palestine conflict, which has only NOT resulted in complete elimination of “Palestinians” because the Israelis have the patience of Job and perhaps an insufficiently developed sense of self-preservation. (I recommend on read The Washing of the Spears by Donald R. Morris, for a glimpse at the big picture.)

What happened in all of those cases (and is happening in Palestine, in slow mo, with one important difference) is that a civilized culture came into the sphere of a barbaric one.

I’m not going to apologize for these terms, btw. Words mean things. A civilized culture, in general, in western terms, means one with adequate means of communication, a sense of belonging and human worth beyond the most basic and pathetic tribal affiliation, and some kind of shared moral/philosophical ethos. (For most of the west, that is Judaic/Christianity. Other cultural disagreements happen, of course, but it’s on the framework of that background.) Barbarians, OTOH are the default background from of humanity. There is no link, no belief in overarching humanity beyond the most basic blood ties. Tribes can be long lasting and widespread, but at the bottom there’s an assumption of shared blood and more importantly — since the shared blood is (no matter how provably wrong) often at the very heart of modern nationalities too — the denial of humanity or value to anyone else. The basic philosophy of the barbarian is “survival for me and mine/at the expense/despite/never mind anyone else.” (All humans can get pushed to this place in moments of dire need. But for the barbarian it is the only mode. And this is also present in our current issue.)

The problem of barbarism/paleolithic mode of interaction with other cultures is that it developed a very simple, very effective way of dealing with invasion/incursions of other tribes into their area. Remember, they don’t give a hang about the people coming in, not even women and children. Their way of retaining their land and getting rid of the invaders is simple, basic and …. showy. Showy and ruthless are needed.

So, if you notice a settlement from another tribe on your lands, you go over and commit the most ruthless, shocking atrocities you can think of. You kill men, women and children (unless you take those as slaves) in the most horrifying way. Slice, dice and often eat. And leave the corpses as a warning.

For two barbaric tribes, this works. If the outpost was a part of a tribe, the first tiptoe over the line, you just showed them they don’t want to come here. You’ll do worse than just killing to them. From what I understand in most neolithic clashes, this would either make the other tribe retreat and find an easier place to colonize/raid/attack, or at least pause hostilities while you prepare for bigger fights.

When the enemy you’ve spotted is a civilization, though, you’ve just bought yourself hell. Civilized people tend to view neolithic barbarism as putting yourself beyond the pale of humanity. You become a feral beast who must be eliminated.

There were serious debates in the clashes between civilizations on whether the Zulus had souls, whether Amerindians had souls. Dismissing these as racist misses the point. A lot of us who are visually indistinguishable from the Palestinians (basically Mediterranean sub-race) have had more than a few moments of feeling that way about Palestinians after 10/7. There is a type of behavior so barbaric that civilized human beings immediately, instinctively class it as “not human.” This is intentional as a war tactic of barbarians, of course. It’s the whole “Don’t mess with those guys, they’re not even human” but it misfires badly with a civilized enemy, who then decides to exterminate the “non-human.” The other part of this is that barbarians always underestimate the size of the group they’re dealing with. Because they don’t understand group allegiance beyond the tribe.

The end of these clashes is ALWAYS that the barbarians are exterminated with prejudice. Sure, sometimes the barbarians survive physically. But the culture is obliterated root and branch and civilization imposed on them. (It can take a very long time.)

A note on the Palestinian7e and the general culture have been part of the “civilized” world since Rome, but their culture itself has progressively become more barbarian-like and yeah we can say a lot about supremacist religions, and illusions of relevance fed by a corrupt media and world powers, but the fact remains that 10/7 was pure Neolithic war tactic, and that they were convinced this would somehow, oddly, win the war. That is PURE barbarian thinking, and shouldn’t be possible for someone in the 21st century. But here we are.

Anyway this type of clash is a true tragedy because there’s no finding middle ground.

To an extent, though what we watched with Zelenski and Trump in the oval office is even more tragic. There is cultural misunderstanding but there was no need for it. Both cultures are civilized and there are bridging advisors. It’s not always obvious, but there was no reason for the conflagration, either.

SURE there are cultural assumptions on either side, but when it comes to tragedy, this is not the pure tragedy above, but in my opinion, more of an Othelo type tragedy in which a third party sets it up, for its own purposes.

Francis Turner wrote his view of it here, and he sees it more like a tragic culture clash, but I beg to differ.

My view is more of an Othello. For how I watched the meeting (without sound) look at this: Full Body Language analysis.

It is my opinion that Zelinsky — having agreed to sign the treaty and demanded to do it in the oval office — then walked into the room already determined not to sign. More importantly, he walked in determined to humiliate Trump and make him plead with him.

Now there is some tragic misunderstanding there, mostly of who Trump is and of the cultural moment in the US. Europeans tend to view all of the US as the same, and they really believe in a “uniparty” and they’ve doubtless been listening to the press talk about how old and impotent Trump is. This is tragic indeed.

But more importantly we know now for absolute fact that before Zelinsky went into the oval office, he talked to the same broad group of democrats that had been “supporting” him and they advised him to “resist” Trump, to demand more, to refuse cease fire, etc. etc. etc. They wound him up and convinced him he could get whatever he wanted and adulation besides.

To them this was win-win. They were going to put Trump on the spot in the oval office, and if he rolled over paint him as weak, if he didn’t go back to painting him as Putin’s stooge, which they still think is a winning play, judging by their media.

And so it played out. Major loss for Zelinsky. An upset for Trump, but come on, not even the right squishes were siding with Zelinsky. Not even those who all out support Ukraine.

Where the cultural blindness and inability to understand what is happening comes in it’s at Zelinsky’s level and more broadly European level.

They really, really, really don’t understand our current Democrats. They have their own despicable elites in Western Europe at least, but most of them haven’t seen through them. They are as we were say in 2016. The masks haven’t even half fallen. So to their minds, and certainly to Zelensky’s minds it is unbelievable that they’d instigate further war and deaths and risk Ukraine being obliterated and the other states in Europe threatened TO MAKE TRUMP LOOK BAD; to score points in their captive press. (They keep missing that no one is watching/believing that, not in the US. The election should have been a clue, but apparently not.)

And so even anyone that Zelinsky might have consulted would have been unable to advise him better. They and him probably would assume that the democrats had the best interests of Ukraine at heart, if not Trump’s. And in Zelinsky’s case, it is even less likely he realized they were willing to underbuss him to score points, since these are the same people who were helping him till a month and change ago.

So he did what they advised. he had no clue. They’re probably still telling him to “Stand strong” or some derivative thereof. They’ll do this until they realize this isn’t causing most Americans to turn against Trump — a poll in a day or three — and then they’ll ignore Zelinsky* and discard him, like they discarded everyone they used in the past from what’s her face Sheehan to Greta Thunberg. Everyone is a rock star to the left when being used against their true enemy: their domestic opposition. And everyone stops mattering when the attack fails.

But in this case their puppet has substantially wounded his nation’s chance of survival and perhaps the safety of Eastern Europe.

Look, in that position, at that time, Trump did what he had to do. The only thing he COULD do.

How does this end? I don’t know. Right now Trump might be more than willing to throw Ukraine under the bus, but I can tell you he will not willingly endanger Poland.

Can he pull a rabbit from the hat, and make it so that we can still get a ceasefire and use the minerals deal as a trip wire to protect Ukraine? I don’t know. If anyone can, it is this administration (Not because Trump is a super-genius. He might be, but that’s not the point. But because he’s not a politician and his out-of-the-box thinking can allow him to come up with unconventional solutions.) Will he?

I don’t know. Having had my own arguments with Europeans recently, I can tell you the temptation to bitch slap them is almost irresistible. And yet saving them is probably ultimately in our interest. Even if I — and I’m sure Trump — am not willing to sacrifice American lives to that cause. (Not anymore.)

At this point all we can hope for is that Trump pulls a hat out of a rabbit.

And remember that no matter how much we hate the left we can’t hate them enough.

*I realize I spelled Zelinsky many different ways in this. The truth is, I tried to look it up, but nothing clear came up, and I’m typing this while tied to the roof rack in the back of a speeding car. I don’t feel up to go back and change it all to be only one, much less figuring out which is correct.
So, instead, those of you who come up with a count of the number of ways I spelled Zelinski’s name, send me the number and your snail mail to my bookpimping email, and I’ll send you a signed book by return mail. :) Make my issues with spelling work for you. Go.

At ConFinement. Just never came back upstairs after breakfast. Spent a while with friends, just talking. Promo might NOT be till Tuesday?

SORRY.