#6___ — Public Fediverse posts

◍◍◍◍◍ 1632 & Beyond #6 (July 2024 ⁓ 4 ss)

●●◐○○ Passing Fair ⁓ Virginia DeMarce
A decade after the Ring of Fire, Grantville is more cosmopolitan, and the time-displaced West Virginia town has a dozen theaters. Which someone disapproves of, writing them letters about how pretending to be people one isn't — rejecting one's God-given identity — is inherently sinful. There's another plot about identity, where some Black Grantville citizens wonder how their identity will endure, when they're so few.

●●●◐○ From Cramps to Matrimony ⁓ Terry Howard
A lord stayed at a luxury hotel just outside the Ring of Fire, and couldn't get the A-Plus steak sauce he'd had when he'd stayed at the Higgins Hotel in town. The Holiday Lodge later shipped him a bottle of steak sauce as an apology, and he'd ordered more items from the McAdams catalog included. In bulk, since it was cheaper. Which led to his cook selling the excess for a profit, then her niece getting a booth at the market and ordering wholesale to sell retail.

●●●○○ Cassini Runs Home ⁓ Robert E. Waters
Giovanni Cassini, future astronomer and mathematician, was currently a boy on a Little League team in Grantville. In the previous story, his uncle's plans were shattered, when the thought-lost-in-war husband of the woman he loved returned. Antonio had planned to stay in Grantville with Gio, and written the boy's parents, who came to town to retrieve their son. Gio also hopes to hit his first home run before the season ends.

●●●◐○ A Guest at the New Year ⁓ Tim Sayeau
Sir William Davenport in England receives a letter, delivered by armed men on horseback — a worrying thing, considering how paranoid King Charles has become after learning of his fate from uptime history books. But it turns out that the letter is from a young woman in Grantville. When she vacationed in England uptime, she went on a Ghost Tour, and Bramall Hall was on the itinerary. She warns Davenport that he's due to be killed in four years. His wife will die shortly thereafter and become a ghost haunting the Hall. Perhaps that can be avoided.

◍◍◍◍◍ {magazine stories end}

●●◐○○ Havenwood - Mel Cowan (2025 ss)
Alexander Reed inherits a property from a grandaunt whom he barely remembers. It is, of course, a nudist camp. The very uptight businessman initially thinks of selling the place — his property lawyer works out a provisional deal for over ten million pounds — but after walking around the place, Alex finds it soothing, and slowly gets into nudism himself. It's a story Cowan has told a score of times, and it's the last Cowan story I have.

●●◐○○ The Oldest Story in the World - Murray Leinster (1925 ss)
A European man in 19th-Century India just ordered a drink at an outdoor cafe when a disheveled white man sits down beside him and says he mustn't order a red drink. Green or yellow or purple, yes, but never red. The man changes his drink order, and the disheveled soul tells him a tale of another European man in India.

He had learned some local languages, and had observed the people. When he heard of a raja in a poor princedom who exhibited his wealth — several large rubies — in a weekly procession, he resolved to steal them. The man disguised himself as a religious figure, and got himself noticed in the princedom, to the extent that the raja's wife called for him. The rani had yet to get pregnant, and the raja was talking about setting her aside. She wished for the holy man's blessing.

As payment, the holy one asked to touch the tilak mark on his forehead to the raja's rubies, that he might pass on some of the raja's luck to the poor. The rani smuggles the man into the into the treasure room —where the pair were promptly caught. They were brought to the raja, who spent some time deciding on their punishment…

●●◐○○ Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Die - Rob Rosen (2010 ss)
The Second Iraq War. General Billings shows Sergeant Sloan some video. For the third time, a group of Iraqi soldiers has been found ripped limb from limb. No sign of animals or weapon use. Always on the same stretch of road. Sloan's group is sent out to investigate.

They find yet more Iraqi soldiers torn apart. They also find the covered entrance of a bunker: possibly the reason the Iraqis keep mining this section of road. Sloan calls in a demolition group, but before they arrive, he sees a man in US Army uniform on a ridge, watching.

When the bunker is opened, they find drums of some chemical: the WMDs the war was fought over. And several drums are leaking into the soil. Sloan realizes who the man he saw is, and how he came to be changed into a zombie, still carrying out orders: Seek and destroy the enemy. Protect your comrades. It's his boyfriend, who went missing weeks ago: he was apparently killed and buried in contaminated ground, only to arise as a zombie.

●●●○○ The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich - Fritz Leiber (1936 nva)
Three friends go their own way after college. George Kramer becomes a newspaperman, then an author; John Ellis marries another student, Mary Andrews, then they return to her hometown to start his medical practice; and Daniel Kesserich, who could do his odd research anywhere, followed the couple, since he had great trouble making friends, and was loath to lose them.

Ten years later, George gets a letter from John saying that Mary had died in a freak accident, so he travels to California to see if he can help the widower. After George talks to John he goes to visit Kesserich, only to see Daniel's house explode before he reaches the lot. Kesserich goes missing. Then things in the town begin to get odd.

George sees rocks appear out of thin air, forming a trail he follows to Mary's grave. Townsfolk become convinced that Mary was buried alive, or that grave robbers are after her corpse. George sees John drive out of town, with a woman who looks like Mary sitting beside him. More. The explanation, if one believes it, has to do with Daniel's theories about the fourth dimension, and even the fifth.

●●●◐○ Out in the Field - P.A. Choi (2020 ss)
Maddie and Lyra pulled up at the edge of an endless cornfield. Lyra planned to create a visual novel, and Maddie has agreed to take photos for the mood board, and perhaps the cover. The pair of college girls walk into the stalks, a a realm of endless sameness stretching beyond view in all directions.

Lyra worried about a harvester coming along, but Maddie said they won't harvest when the crop's still wet from yesterday's rain. Lyra slips in the wet earth, splitting her shorts and getting her shirt covered in mud. She proceeded to strip. “She may have been a prissy girl, but she was not a prudish one.” Maddie strips in solidarity.

Bill didn't like to harvest while the corn was still wet, but it had rained for over a week, and it was expected to start again tomorrow, so this was his only opportunity. He'd given the fields the morning to dry out some, and now it was time to begin.

Hence Bill having a moment of panic when he ran over their clothing, two girls running out of the field naked, and then saying goodbye when Lyra and Maddie drove off nude.

●●●◐○ Disruptors - Jake Berry Ellison, Jr. (2018 ss)
This is the best story of the five in this collection. Alas, like other of this author's stories, it's more of a setup for a longer piece than a complete story.

The surface of Earth is a mess. Heat waves, record storms, floods and droughts, disease and famine, even oxygen-dead oceans where sulfur-eating bacteria belched hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere. The rich were dying in their bunkers. Most of humanity had moved into The Simulation, a virtual-reality version of Earth (with increasing deviations from boring-reality) that ran on servers in deep bunkers in Reality, there powered by geothermal energy and tended by armies of robots.

Marsel and Perran were intelligence agents who tried to protect the Servers from being hacked by uploaded people who wanted to control the foundations of their virtual world. Perran had been kidnapped by The Twins, a pair of women who had worked out a way to increase their power by entrancing men (and rarely, women), using their subjects' mind power for their own as they hacked at the roots of Virtuality.

Marsel contacts Robert, who'd been a reporter in Reality, and had maintained the profession in the new world. They work together to find Perran, and in the doing uncover a greater danger to The Simulation. At which point the tale stops. ‹sigh›

◍◍◍◍◍ August begins.

●●◐○○ Miles Grant – Naturist P.I. {Miles Grant 24} - Jack Dearborn (2023 nov)
The final Miles Grant novel (before his son Stewart takes over the PI series) barely contains a mystery, and Miles botches it. Miles and his wife Shirley are part owner of the Erskine Valley Sun Club, a naturist camp. Dave Erskine notes that his camp has few young members, and other camps are the same. [A real problem with nudist resorts, where the median age is almost sixty.]

The owner of a Texas resort holds a conference to consider changing the American Association for Nude Recreation rules. Some 400 members from resorts in the Western US states meet there. Erskine volunteers Miles, who attends with Shirley and her mother MJ. The bulk of the novel is about this issue, with Miles canvasing people for their opinions, and then giving a couple of presentations.

Miles suggests, and the conference accepts, the idea of using a tiered system. Tier One camps will continue using the rules that have been in effect since the 1930s, where no public shows of affection beyond hand-holding are permitted. Tier Two camps will have a building or section where public sex is permitted, with the rest of the camp being family friendly. And Tier Three Camps will be adult-only, with sex allowed everywhere.

(This doesn't really help in reality, since while young people like to have sex, they're not really crazy about having it with or in front of people who look like their parents or grandparents.)

The mystery occurs when one of the attendees says his wife went missing. She was a smoker, and the other couple in their cabin objected, so she went outside to smoke — in a heavy storm. She was also a secret drinker, said the husband. Miles found the body, with signs of "death by misadventure," and things weren't as he originally thought. The mystery takes up maybe five percent of the novel.

Flirty nudity bits include the chartered buses that took attendees on the two-hour ride from airport to resort being nudist, and leading many couples to have public sex with each other. MJ goes off with a woman, her husband, and the woman's twin sister, who share everything, including MJ. Miles and Shirley and the couple they share their cabin with also play Kiss Poker a few times, where each round the winner chooses a place on their body, and the losers kiss it. ፨ And that's the end of this phase of the series.

●●○○○ The Old Villa - P.A. Choi (2020 ss)
A young woman takes a break from working in her father's orchard, and walks down the road to a seaside villa, abandoned for years, with an overgrown yard, and emptied of furniture. She investigates the place, and because it's empty and it's hot, does so nude. She comes to view the place as her secret hideout, and returns several times, always enjoying her nudity.

One time a young man shows up, coming from his family's shop in the other direction. Amaro is initially embarrassed by Iria's nudity, but comes to be comfortable with her in subsequent meetings, though he never disrobes himself. Time passes, and Iria is eventually sent away to live with relatives while she attends university. Years later she returns to the old villa, but now she was thirty, a mature woman in charge of funding real estate projects. She didn't get naked again.

●●●◐○ Forgiveness Day - Ursula K. Le Guin (1994 nvt)
The Ekumen is in the process of contacting lost human colonies, settled millennia ago by sub-lightspeed generation ships. Werel is the world in question, a planet settled entirely by dark-skinned humans. The planetary culture is patriarchal and slave-holding, to different degrees in the various countries comprising the world.

Solly — female, headstrong, and white — is assigned as ambassador to the mountain kingdom of Gatay, a particularly fundamentalist country. Accompanying her is her guard, Teyeo, a Major from the most powerful country on Werel, where the main Ekumen outpost is. He's from a very militaristic culture, and Sully's whole existence offends him: she acts like a man, isn't shut away like a proper woman, flaunts her emotions and sexuality, doesn't listen to his security advice, more.

Naturally Solly ends up kidnapped, and trying to prevent that, Teyeo is knocked unconscious and taken along. The amateur young kidnappers only had one cell ready, so the pair share it. Then the vassal government of Gatay decides it's better to claim the pair died in the diversion explosion…

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Week Thirty-One's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
237+10 ss | 13+1 nvt | 14+1 nva | 68+1 nov |
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