#bokbooks — Public Fediverse posts

●●●◐○ Spotty - Hannah Steenbock (2021 ss)
Sandra is a high-school senior who's developing vitiligo. She's ruthlessly bullied by her classmates, which her mother and teachers don't know. Sandra's divorced mother is still suffering from the car accident that killed her own mother, and left her much younger sister badly burned. That sister, Melody, is now marrying Ben, whom she met during burn rehab. And they're doing it at the Circle of Life Nudist Resort.

Sandra isn't crazy about more people seeing her skin, and her mother isn't thrilled about the nudity, but for Melody's sake they go along with the plan. Sandra finds the resort is clothing-optional, not mandatory-nudity, and she can wear anything she wants, so she asks for and gets a catsuit leotard and a mask to serve as ring girl. But though she's fully covered, she sees how body accepting the residents are, with nobody staring at or commenting on her spots, nor Melody's and Ben's extensive burns.

Sandra gains body confidence at the resort, and shrugs off her classmates' taunts when she comes back after spring break. Come summer, she'll also be visiting Ben and Melody there and trying nudity for herself.

●●●●○ Unholy Alliance - Ben Langhinrichs (2010 ss)
Alice is in her dorm room, preparing to have sex with her girlfriend Tamanna when she hears a noise at her window. Peeping into the ground floor dorms isn't uncommon, so naked Tamanna leans out the window and yells “This what you wanted to see, shithead? Now, go home!” — and a diseased-looking arm pulls her outside.

Alice screams and runs into the hall and pulls the fire alarm¹ and when the linebacker Resident Assistant shows up, tells him what happened. Jeremy grabs a couple of football mates and heads outside, where they manage to find the two creatures taking Tamanna away. Tyler's hand is broken, and he gets a big scratch. As Jeremy says, “I know it sounds crazy, but if I didn't know any better, I'd swear they were zombies. They smelled like death, and had sores and shit all over.”

The police are called, but when they ask why the near-catatonic Tamanna was naked, and learn she and Alice are lesbians, they lose interest and leave, saying they're going to deal with the situation. A few minutes later five cars pull up, holding a preacher, his two bodyguards, and a dozen supporters. He begins to conduct an exorcism to drive evil spirits out of the homosexual students. Fortunately the zombies return then…

●●●◐○ The Glass Eye - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
This is a weird tale about Julia, a spinster who worked as a clerk for an old-fashioned solicitor. In the past she had a boyfriend, who moved away, and even a fiancé, who found someone else. She's thirty-seven and has a knack for saying the wrong thing. “The loneliness and desolation of Julia’s life were appalling.”

Once a year her sister and brother-in-law go to spend a week with his parents in Wales, and their son spends the week with his aunt, who spoils him rotten. On his last day with her this year, Julia took Bernard to the Old Palace Music Hall in Fulham, where they saw various stage acts, culminating with that of Max Collodi, “The Gentleman Ventriloquist with his amazing Dummy ‘George’.”

“His dark hair gleamed, his jaw showed a slight blue shadow. His mustache was exquisitely clipped, his high square shoulders spoke of great strength. His temples were narrow, his eyes deep set, his chin was cleft, his teeth, when he spoke, shone like jewels.” Julia was beyond infatuated. Every night following, Julia went to the show to see him, and when the show moved to other venues, she'd take a tram across town to continue doing so.

Julia eventually wrote to him, and after many, many letters, he agreed to a meeting. It went so very, very wrong…

●●○○○ Brimstone {Stargate Atlantis 15} - David Niall Wilson, Patricia Lee Macomber (2010 nov)
Atlantis's long-range sensors detect something odd: an Earth-like moon of a gas giant in a nearby solar system breaking orbit and heading for its sun. Thinking there might be people there who need help, the Lanteans look up stargate address, only to find it locked out, with a warning that Dr. Rodney McKay accidentally dismisses before they can read it. Fortunately technician Cumby has a near-photographic memory, and is able to draw the glyphs from memory for later translation.

Records say there's an Ancient city there, and it should be avoided. But they can sense both life signs and Zero Point Modules. Atlantis could certainly use the power of the latter, and they feel they have a duty to rescue the former, so the lockout is overridden, and an expedition is sent. At which point it's found that the rogue moon can't be dialed again.

The expedition consists of the usual Sheppard, Teyla, Ronon, McKay, and as a reward for being so helpful, Cumby, whom we definitely expect to get redshirted. They find the city is named Admah, and it's considered the dark to Atlantis's light. As Saul, the Ancient who serves as Security Master says, “Those in cities like Atlantis concerned themselves with spiritual growth and ascension. We chose a different path.”

This turned out to be leading lives of leisure and pleasure. Anyone can come to Admah through the gate, but a dialing permuter means no one can follow them, and no one can leave. Newcomers usually end up fighting to the death in the coliseum for the entertainment of the populace.

So can Rodney figure a way around the stargate lock? Can Lorne and his people mount a rescue? Since everyone we know from the TV show has plot immunity, they'll be okay; it's just getting to ‘okay’ that's the story. Oh, and will Cumby die? It took until the 72% point for something unexpected to happen in this unimaginative book, and then the tale quickly concluded.

●●●●○ The Subletting of the Mansion {Dr. Taverner 08} (1926 ss)
Winnington was staying at the nursing home of Dr. Taverner, his friend. It was not the occultist and psychologist's help he needed, but medical care from his physician colleague Dr. Rhodes, since Winnington was dying of tuberculosis. Then Taverner was called away for some time.

On days he was up to it, Winnington took an after-dinner walk with Dr. Rhodes down the long drive of the grounds to the post box, to send out letters written that day by staff and patients. One time the pair met a woman doing the same. Mrs. Bellamy was renting the house across the street with her husband, and Winnington was smitten. Rhodes protested that she was married, and Winnington returned that it wasn't like anything would happen, since he would soon be dead.

But a few days later Mrs. Bellamy called the nursing home asking for Dr. Rhodes. It seemed her husband was a drug addict, and he'd taken too much again. When Rhodes later told this to Winnington — patient confidentiality meant he shouldn't have, but again, the man was dying, and he badgered Rhodes into it — Winnington smiled schemingly. When next Bellamy overdosed, Winnington — who was an occultist of some skill like Taverner — went spirit-walking and managed to dislodge Bellamy's drug-loosened soul, taking possession of the body…

●●●◐○ Reel Life Films - Sam Merwin Jr (1954 ss)
Cyril Bezdek, production boss of Gigantic Studios, was meeting with Carter Dorwin, powerful plenipotentiary of Consolidated Trust, the bank that financed Gigantic’s multimillion-dollar productions. They had a private suite on a coast-to-coast supertrain.

Dorwin said that his firm was becoming concerned about Gigantic's increasing reliance on science fiction films, which Consolidated felt were undignified. Bezdek explained the problem. The public wanted films with conflict between heroes and villains. But if they made a western, say, and cast Indians or Mexicans as villains, that demographic would protest. Ditto if they did a war picture, where Japanese and German people would object to being seen as the bad guys.

That left science fiction as the only viable genre where you could have conflict with large numbers of villains. Nobody protested if Martians were the ones attacking. Then the train was stopped in the middle of nowhere, and a large spaceship landed nearby…

●●●○○ The 2000 Year War {War Without End 1} - David Collins (2023 nov)
A starship bringing home an ambassador's daughter in medical stasis hits an FTL mine, killing the only person awake, and destroying the room with the servitor drones that might have allowed the ship to repair itself. The med bay is also in vacuum, so Marilee the young Tilley woman can't be awakened.

With the FTL engine offline, it takes fifty years to limp to the nearest star system, where it lands on Luna and awaits rescue. Which doesn't come, since unknown to the ship's AI, a war had broken out between the multi-species Federated Worlds and the Fezzcoll Collective, and left everyone busy for a long time.

The AI waits 2340 years before Earth is advanced enough technologically to produce someone it can hire as a repairman, which it does via the internet. Keith Robinson answered the ad, gets on the shuttle, and builds a drone from the parts the ship had printed out. The drone does the bulk of the repair work, though Keith helps. As is dead common in Collins's novels, Keith becomes captain, and sets forth for the Federated Worlds, along with Marilee from the pod (who ends up having an insignificant role in the tale).

As is often common in DC books, he encounters aliens in trouble. Sometimes in stasis pods in derelict ships, sometimes in outposts that had been cut off for many centuries. Eventually Patti the AI learns that the war has killed ninety percent of the population of both star nations, and made dozens of worlds uninhabitable. So of course magic human Keith manages to end the war with little trouble, and do many other seriously improbable but fun things.²

●●●◐○ The Madison Interview - Ted Bun (2022 nva)
Jennifer Archer won the first Madison Scholarship, financed by the wealthy family. Her major was journalism, and she was now a junior reporter at a state newspaper. In college, she had worked for the school newspaper, and interviewed Alan Madison, scion of the family, who went to the same school as her. The young middle-distance runner had yanked her chain for an hour, before admitting everything he'd said was false and settling down for a real interview. He promised to play nice if they met again.

There had always been rumors that the Madison family fortune was founded in a less than legal way during World War Two. With his father entering politics, young Alan had set out to investigate the true history in the islands north of Australia. He went missing, and only turned up five years later. (Shades of Oliver Queen on Arrow.) Every journalist wanted to interview him, but the only one Alan wanted to talk to was the young woman to whom he owed a do-over.

After signing loads of non-disclosure agreements, Jennifer was taken to an isolated ranch, and was told to strip and put on the provided light robe to go through a metal detector. Then she met Alan again, outside on a very hot day. He was very tanned, very skinny, and very naked. His bodyguard, secretary, chef, nurse, and others wore wraps like Jen, and it was clear they were also usually nude. What exactly had happened to Alan during those missing five years?

●●○○○ Piece of Cake - Patrice Fitzgerald (2015 ss)
Life in Federal United is restrictive, especially if you're Sandra, who tends toward being overweight. She must weigh herself each morning, and the national AI measuring a Citizen's Optimum Weight penalizes her for going outside her approved bounds. Klaxons sound in a public cafeteria when she tries to pick up a slice of cake.

At one point, Sandra even goes to a speakeasy for desserts, where she buys a very expensive slice of contraband cake, only for the place to be raided before she can take a bite. And of course Sandra's home Nutri-Unit won't provide any treats. She ends up beating it into a wreck with her shoe. “She felt dazed. The quest for cake had become the focal point of her existence.”

Still hungry, Sandra visits nice Mrs. Krowitzky on the floor below, to see if she has any food. And she does! Cake and cookies and more. But, alas, things don't work out…

This story is in The AI Chronicles anthology, but AI plays little role in the tale (it tracks people's weight: big whoop), and this tale seems very 1950s-ish, complete with twist ending and countertwist coda.

●●◐○○ The Dope on Mars - Jack Sharkey (1960 ss)
A president who barely got elected decides to rush a NASA project to help his reelection chances. Five men are sent to Mars, spending 260 days in a small spacecraft getting there. Desmond the pilot, Jones the co-pilot, Streeter the navigator, Kroger the biochemist, and Ingersoll the reporter, whose diary entries are the story: “I am one of the first five men in the history of the world to see the opposite side of the Moon [which] isn’t much different from the front.”³

They find Mars has air that's cold and thin, but breathable.⁴ When they do some separate exploring, two of the crew go missing. Their footprints, along with those of larger creatures, are tracked to a crevasse, at the bottom of which is a stream of water. The remaining men find that Desmond and Kruger have been captured by red-scaled reptilian Martians, then they're captured themselves.

The Earthers manage to escape, having discovered a Martian weakness, and make it back to their ship. But the different Martian biology goes against them when the two scales Kroger had brought back as samples hatch into Martians of the ship, almost overloading their life-support system. And things get even worse…

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Eight's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
282+7 ss | 13+0 nvt | 16+1 nva | 85+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Aside: at no time during this story, which lasts at least a half hour, does the fire department show up.

[2] Truly, I can't defend any Collins book as deep or imaginative or thought out. But somehow I still like them, and I suspect I'm going to lean on them to get me to the minimum 100 novels I want to read this year. Ideally 106, since this year has 53 ISO weeks.

[3] Nope. Nearside has maria, while Farside almost entirely lacks those dark lowlands.

[4] Nope.

●●●◐○ Spotty - Hannah Steenbock (2021 ss)
Sandra is a high-school senior who's developing vitiligo. She's ruthlessly bullied by her classmates, which her mother and teachers don't know. Sandra's divorced mother is still suffering from the car accident that killed her own mother, and left her much younger sister badly burned. That sister, Melody, is now marrying Ben, whom she met during burn rehab. And they're doing it at the Circle of Life Nudist Resort.

Sandra isn't crazy about more people seeing her skin, and her mother isn't thrilled about the nudity, but for Melody's sake they go along with the plan. Sandra finds the resort is clothing-optional, not mandatory-nudity, and she can wear anything she wants, so she asks for and gets a catsuit leotard and a mask to serve as ring girl. But though she's fully covered, she sees how body accepting the residents are, with nobody staring at or commenting on her spots, nor Melody's and Ben's extensive burns.

Sandra gains body confidence at the resort, and shrugs off her classmates' taunts when she comes back after spring break. Come summer, she'll also be visiting Ben and Melody there and trying nudity for herself.

●●●●○ Unholy Alliance - Ben Langhinrichs (2010 ss)
Alice is in her dorm room, preparing to have sex with her girlfriend Tamanna when she hears a noise at her window. Peeping into the ground floor dorms isn't uncommon, so naked Tamanna leans out the window and yells “This what you wanted to see, shithead? Now, go home!” — and a diseased-looking arm pulls her outside.

Alice screams and runs into the hall and pulls the fire alarm¹ and when the linebacker Resident Assistant shows up, tells him what happened. Jeremy grabs a couple of football mates and heads outside, where they manage to find the two creatures taking Tamanna away. Tyler's hand is broken, and he gets a big scratch. As Jeremy says, “I know it sounds crazy, but if I didn't know any better, I'd swear they were zombies. They smelled like death, and had sores and shit all over.”

The police are called, but when they ask why the near-catatonic Tamanna was naked, and learn she and Alice are lesbians, they lose interest and leave, saying they're going to deal with the situation. A few minutes later five cars pull up, holding a preacher, his two bodyguards, and a dozen supporters. He begins to conduct an exorcism to drive evil spirits out of the homosexual students. Fortunately the zombies return then…

●●●◐○ The Glass Eye - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
This is a weird tale about Julia, a spinster who worked as a clerk for an old-fashioned solicitor. In the past she had a boyfriend, who moved away, and even a fiancé, who found someone else. She's thirty-seven and has a knack for saying the wrong thing. “The loneliness and desolation of Julia’s life were appalling.”

Once a year her sister and brother-in-law go to spend a week with his parents in Wales, and their son spends the week with his aunt, who spoils him rotten. On his last day with her this year, Julia took Bernard to the Old Palace Music Hall in Fulham, where they saw various stage acts, culminating with that of Max Collodi, “The Gentleman Ventriloquist with his amazing Dummy ‘George’.”

“His dark hair gleamed, his jaw showed a slight blue shadow. His mustache was exquisitely clipped, his high square shoulders spoke of great strength. His temples were narrow, his eyes deep set, his chin was cleft, his teeth, when he spoke, shone like jewels.” Julia was beyond infatuated. Every night following, Julia went to the show to see him, and when the show moved to other venues, she'd take a tram across town to continue doing so.

Julia eventually wrote to him, and after many, many letters, he agreed to a meeting. It went so very, very wrong…

●●○○○ Brimstone {Stargate Atlantis 15} - David Niall Wilson, Patricia Lee Macomber (2010 nov)
Atlantis's long-range sensors detect something odd: an Earth-like moon of a gas giant in a nearby solar system breaking orbit and heading for its sun. Thinking there might be people there who need help, the Lanteans look up stargate address, only to find it locked out, with a warning that Dr. Rodney McKay accidentally dismisses before they can read it. Fortunately technician Cumby has a near-photographic memory, and is able to draw the glyphs from memory for later translation.

Records say there's an Ancient city there, and it should be avoided. But they can sense both life signs and Zero Point Modules. Atlantis could certainly use the power of the latter, and they feel they have a duty to rescue the former, so the lockout is overridden, and an expedition is sent. At which point it's found that the rogue moon can't be dialed again.

The expedition consists of the usual Sheppard, Teyla, Ronon, McKay, and as a reward for being so helpful, Cumby, whom we definitely expect to get redshirted. They find the city is named Admah, and it's considered the dark to Atlantis's light. As Saul, the Ancient who serves as Security Master says, “Those in cities like Atlantis concerned themselves with spiritual growth and ascension. We chose a different path.”

This turned out to be leading lives of leisure and pleasure. Anyone can come to Admah through the gate, but a dialing permuter means no one can follow them, and no one can leave. Newcomers usually end up fighting to the death in the coliseum for the entertainment of the populace.

So can Rodney figure a way around the stargate lock? Can Lorne and his people mount a rescue? Since everyone we know from the TV show has plot immunity, they'll be okay; it's just getting to ‘okay’ that's the story. Oh, and will Cumby die? It took until the 72% point for something unexpected to happen in this unimaginative book, and then the tale quickly concluded.

●●●●○ The Subletting of the Mansion {Dr. Taverner 08} (1926 ss)
Winnington was staying at the nursing home of Dr. Taverner, his friend. It was not the occultist and psychologist's help he needed, but medical care from his physician colleague Dr. Rhodes, since Winnington was dying of tuberculosis. Then Taverner was called away for some time.

On days he was up to it, Winnington took an after-dinner walk with Dr. Rhodes down the long drive of the grounds to the post box, to send out letters written that day by staff and patients. One time the pair met a woman doing the same. Mrs. Bellamy was renting the house across the street with her husband, and Winnington was smitten. Rhodes protested that she was married, and Winnington returned that it wasn't like anything would happen, since he would soon be dead.

But a few days later Mrs. Bellamy called the nursing home asking for Dr. Rhodes. It seemed her husband was a drug addict, and he'd taken too much again. When Rhodes later told this to Winnington — patient confidentiality meant he shouldn't have, but again, the man was dying, and he badgered Rhodes into it — Winnington smiled schemingly. When next Bellamy overdosed, Winnington — who was an occultist of some skill like Taverner — went spirit-walking and managed to dislodge Bellamy's drug-loosened soul, taking possession of the body…

●●●◐○ Reel Life Films - Sam Merwin Jr (1954 ss)
Cyril Bezdek, production boss of Gigantic Studios, was meeting with Carter Dorwin, powerful plenipotentiary of Consolidated Trust, the bank that financed Gigantic’s multimillion-dollar productions. They had a private suite on a coast-to-coast supertrain.

Dorwin said that his firm was becoming concerned about Gigantic's increasing reliance on science fiction films, which Consolidated felt were undignified. Bezdek explained the problem. The public wanted films with conflict between heroes and villains. But if they made a western, say, and cast Indians or Mexicans as villains, that demographic would protest. Ditto if they did a war picture, where Japanese and German people would object to being seen as the bad guys.

That left science fiction as the only viable genre where you could have conflict with large numbers of villains. Nobody protested if Martians were the ones attacking. Then the train was stopped in the middle of nowhere, and a large spaceship landed nearby…

●●●○○ The 2000 Year War {War Without End 1} - David Collins (2023 nov)
A starship bringing home an ambassador's daughter in medical stasis hits an FTL mine, killing the only person awake, and destroying the room with the servitor drones that might have allowed the ship to repair itself. The med bay is also in vacuum, so Marilee the young Tilley woman can't be awakened.

With the FTL engine offline, it takes fifty years to limp to the nearest star system, where it lands on Luna and awaits rescue. Which doesn't come, since unknown to the ship's AI, a war had broken out between the multi-species Federated Worlds and the Fezzcoll Collective, and left everyone busy for a long time.

The AI waits 2340 years before Earth is advanced enough technologically to produce someone it can hire as a repairman, which it does via the internet. Keith Robinson answered the ad, gets on the shuttle, and builds a drone from the parts the ship had printed out. The drone does the bulk of the repair work, though Keith helps. As is dead common in Collins's novels, Keith becomes captain, and sets forth for the Federated Worlds, along with Marilee from the pod (who ends up having an insignificant role in the tale).

As is often common in DC books, he encounters aliens in trouble. Sometimes in stasis pods in derelict ships, sometimes in outposts that had been cut off for many centuries. Eventually Patti the AI learns that the war has killed ninety percent of the population of both star nations, and made dozens of worlds uninhabitable. So of course magic human Keith manages to end the war with little trouble, and do many other seriously improbable but fun things.²

●●●◐○ The Madison Interview - Ted Bun (2022 nva)
Jennifer Archer won the first Madison Scholarship, financed by the wealthy family. Her major was journalism, and she was now a junior reporter at a state newspaper. In college, she had worked for the school newspaper, and interviewed Alan Madison, scion of the family, who went to the same school as her. The young middle-distance runner had yanked her chain for an hour, before admitting everything he'd said was false and settling down for a real interview. He promised to play nice if they met again.

There had always been rumors that the Madison family fortune was founded in a less than legal way during World War Two. With his father entering politics, young Alan had set out to investigate the true history in the islands north of Australia. He went missing, and only turned up five years later. (Shades of Oliver Queen on Arrow.) Every journalist wanted to interview him, but the only one Alan wanted to talk to was the young woman to whom he owed a do-over.

After signing loads of non-disclosure agreements, Jennifer was taken to an isolated ranch, and was told to strip and put on the provided light robe to go through a metal detector. Then she met Alan again, outside on a very hot day. He was very tanned, very skinny, and very naked. His bodyguard, secretary, chef, nurse, and others wore wraps like Jen, and it was clear they were also usually nude. What exactly had happened to Alan during those missing five years?

●●○○○ Piece of Cake - Patrice Fitzgerald (2015 ss)
Life in Federal United is restrictive, especially if you're Sandra, who tends toward being overweight. She must weigh herself each morning, and the national AI measuring a Citizen's Optimum Weight penalizes her for going outside her approved bounds. Klaxons sound in a public cafeteria when she tries to pick up a slice of cake.

At one point, Sandra even goes to a speakeasy for desserts, where she buys a very expensive slice of contraband cake, only for the place to be raided before she can take a bite. And of course Sandra's home Nutri-Unit won't provide any treats. She ends up beating it into a wreck with her shoe. “She felt dazed. The quest for cake had become the focal point of her existence.”

Still hungry, Sandra visits nice Mrs. Krowitzky on the floor below, to see if she has any food. And she does! Cake and cookies and more. But, alas, things don't work out…

This story is in The AI Chronicles anthology, but AI plays little role in the tale (it tracks people's weight: big whoop), and this tale seems very 1950s-ish, complete with twist ending and countertwist coda.

●●◐○○ The Dope on Mars - Jack Sharkey (1960 ss)
A president who barely got elected decides to rush a NASA project to help his reelection chances. Five men are sent to Mars, spending 260 days in a small spacecraft getting there. Desmond the pilot, Jones the co-pilot, Streeter the navigator, Kroger the biochemist, and Ingersoll the reporter, whose diary entries are the story: “I am one of the first five men in the history of the world to see the opposite side of the Moon [which] isn’t much different from the front.”³

They find Mars has air that's cold and thin, but breathable.⁴ When they do some separate exploring, two of the crew go missing. Their footprints, along with those of larger creatures, are tracked to a crevasse, at the bottom of which is a stream of water. The remaining men find that Desmond and Kruger have been captured by red-scaled reptilian Martians, then they're captured themselves.

The Earthers manage to escape, having discovered a Martian weakness, and make it back to their ship. But the different Martian biology goes against them when the two scales Kroger had brought back as samples hatch into Martians of the ship, almost overloading their life-support system. And things get even worse…

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Eight's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
282+7 ss | 13+0 nvt | 16+1 nva | 85+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Aside: at no time during this story, which lasts at least a half hour, does the fire department show up.

[2] Truly, I can't defend any Collins book as deep or imaginative or thought out. But somehow I still like them, and I suspect I'm going to lean on them to get me to the minimum 100 novels I want to read this year. Ideally 106, since this year has 53 ISO weeks.

[3] Nope. Nearside has maria, while Farside almost entirely lacks those dark lowlands.

[4] Nope.

●●●◐○ Spotty - Hannah Steenbock (2021 ss)
Sandra is a high-school senior who's developing vitiligo. She's ruthlessly bullied by her classmates, which her mother and teachers don't know. Sandra's divorced mother is still suffering from the car accident that killed her own mother, and left her much younger sister badly burned. That sister, Melody, is now marrying Ben, whom she met during burn rehab. And they're doing it at the Circle of Life Nudist Resort.

Sandra isn't crazy about more people seeing her skin, and her mother isn't thrilled about the nudity, but for Melody's sake they go along with the plan. Sandra finds the resort is clothing-optional, not mandatory-nudity, and she can wear anything she wants, so she asks for and gets a catsuit leotard and a mask to serve as ring girl. But though she's fully covered, she sees how body accepting the residents are, with nobody staring at or commenting on her spots, nor Melody's and Ben's extensive burns.

Sandra gains body confidence at the resort, and shrugs off her classmates' taunts when she comes back after spring break. Come summer, she'll also be visiting Ben and Melody there and trying nudity for herself.

●●●●○ Unholy Alliance - Ben Langhinrichs (2010 ss)
Alice is in her dorm room, preparing to have sex with her girlfriend Tamanna when she hears a noise at her window. Peeping into the ground floor dorms isn't uncommon, so naked Tamanna leans out the window and yells “This what you wanted to see, shithead? Now, go home!” — and a diseased-looking arm pulls her outside.

Alice screams and runs into the hall and pulls the fire alarm¹ and when the linebacker Resident Assistant shows up, tells him what happened. Jeremy grabs a couple of football mates and heads outside, where they manage to find the two creatures taking Tamanna away. Tyler's hand is broken, and he gets a big scratch. As Jeremy says, “I know it sounds crazy, but if I didn't know any better, I'd swear they were zombies. They smelled like death, and had sores and shit all over.”

The police are called, but when they ask why the near-catatonic Tamanna was naked, and learn she and Alice are lesbians, they lose interest and leave, saying they're going to deal with the situation. A few minutes later five cars pull up, holding a preacher, his two bodyguards, and a dozen supporters. He begins to conduct an exorcism to drive evil spirits out of the homosexual students. Fortunately the zombies return then…

●●●◐○ The Glass Eye - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
This is a weird tale about Julia, a spinster who worked as a clerk for an old-fashioned solicitor. In the past she had a boyfriend, who moved away, and even a fiancé, who found someone else. She's thirty-seven and has a knack for saying the wrong thing. “The loneliness and desolation of Julia’s life were appalling.”

Once a year her sister and brother-in-law go to spend a week with his parents in Wales, and their son spends the week with his aunt, who spoils him rotten. On his last day with her this year, Julia took Bernard to the Old Palace Music Hall in Fulham, where they saw various stage acts, culminating with that of Max Collodi, “The Gentleman Ventriloquist with his amazing Dummy ‘George’.”

“His dark hair gleamed, his jaw showed a slight blue shadow. His mustache was exquisitely clipped, his high square shoulders spoke of great strength. His temples were narrow, his eyes deep set, his chin was cleft, his teeth, when he spoke, shone like jewels.” Julia was beyond infatuated. Every night following, Julia went to the show to see him, and when the show moved to other venues, she'd take a tram across town to continue doing so.

Julia eventually wrote to him, and after many, many letters, he agreed to a meeting. It went so very, very wrong…

●●○○○ Brimstone {Stargate Atlantis 15} - David Niall Wilson, Patricia Lee Macomber (2010 nov)
Atlantis's long-range sensors detect something odd: an Earth-like moon of a gas giant in a nearby solar system breaking orbit and heading for its sun. Thinking there might be people there who need help, the Lanteans look up stargate address, only to find it locked out, with a warning that Dr. Rodney McKay accidentally dismisses before they can read it. Fortunately technician Cumby has a near-photographic memory, and is able to draw the glyphs from memory for later translation.

Records say there's an Ancient city there, and it should be avoided. But they can sense both life signs and Zero Point Modules. Atlantis could certainly use the power of the latter, and they feel they have a duty to rescue the former, so the lockout is overridden, and an expedition is sent. At which point it's found that the rogue moon can't be dialed again.

The expedition consists of the usual Sheppard, Teyla, Ronon, McKay, and as a reward for being so helpful, Cumby, whom we definitely expect to get redshirted. They find the city is named Admah, and it's considered the dark to Atlantis's light. As Saul, the Ancient who serves as Security Master says, “Those in cities like Atlantis concerned themselves with spiritual growth and ascension. We chose a different path.”

This turned out to be leading lives of leisure and pleasure. Anyone can come to Admah through the gate, but a dialing permuter means no one can follow them, and no one can leave. Newcomers usually end up fighting to the death in the coliseum for the entertainment of the populace.

So can Rodney figure a way around the stargate lock? Can Lorne and his people mount a rescue? Since everyone we know from the TV show has plot immunity, they'll be okay; it's just getting to ‘okay’ that's the story. Oh, and will Cumby die? It took until the 72% point for something unexpected to happen in this unimaginative book, and then the tale quickly concluded.

●●●●○ The Subletting of the Mansion {Dr. Taverner 08} (1926 ss)
Winnington was staying at the nursing home of Dr. Taverner, his friend. It was not the occultist and psychologist's help he needed, but medical care from his physician colleague Dr. Rhodes, since Winnington was dying of tuberculosis. Then Taverner was called away for some time.

On days he was up to it, Winnington took an after-dinner walk with Dr. Rhodes down the long drive of the grounds to the post box, to send out letters written that day by staff and patients. One time the pair met a woman doing the same. Mrs. Bellamy was renting the house across the street with her husband, and Winnington was smitten. Rhodes protested that she was married, and Winnington returned that it wasn't like anything would happen, since he would soon be dead.

But a few days later Mrs. Bellamy called the nursing home asking for Dr. Rhodes. It seemed her husband was a drug addict, and he'd taken too much again. When Rhodes later told this to Winnington — patient confidentiality meant he shouldn't have, but again, the man was dying, and he badgered Rhodes into it — Winnington smiled schemingly. When next Bellamy overdosed, Winnington — who was an occultist of some skill like Taverner — went spirit-walking and managed to dislodge Bellamy's drug-loosened soul, taking possession of the body…

●●●◐○ Reel Life Films - Sam Merwin Jr (1954 ss)
Cyril Bezdek, production boss of Gigantic Studios, was meeting with Carter Dorwin, powerful plenipotentiary of Consolidated Trust, the bank that financed Gigantic’s multimillion-dollar productions. They had a private suite on a coast-to-coast supertrain.

Dorwin said that his firm was becoming concerned about Gigantic's increasing reliance on science fiction films, which Consolidated felt were undignified. Bezdek explained the problem. The public wanted films with conflict between heroes and villains. But if they made a western, say, and cast Indians or Mexicans as villains, that demographic would protest. Ditto if they did a war picture, where Japanese and German people would object to being seen as the bad guys.

That left science fiction as the only viable genre where you could have conflict with large numbers of villains. Nobody protested if Martians were the ones attacking. Then the train was stopped in the middle of nowhere, and a large spaceship landed nearby…

●●●○○ The 2000 Year War {War Without End 1} - David Collins (2023 nov)
A starship bringing home an ambassador's daughter in medical stasis hits an FTL mine, killing the only person awake, and destroying the room with the servitor drones that might have allowed the ship to repair itself. The med bay is also in vacuum, so Marilee the young Tilley woman can't be awakened.

With the FTL engine offline, it takes fifty years to limp to the nearest star system, where it lands on Luna and awaits rescue. Which doesn't come, since unknown to the ship's AI, a war had broken out between the multi-species Federated Worlds and the Fezzcoll Collective, and left everyone busy for a long time.

The AI waits 2340 years before Earth is advanced enough technologically to produce someone it can hire as a repairman, which it does via the internet. Keith Robinson answered the ad, gets on the shuttle, and builds a drone from the parts the ship had printed out. The drone does the bulk of the repair work, though Keith helps. As is dead common in Collins's novels, Keith becomes captain, and sets forth for the Federated Worlds, along with Marilee from the pod (who ends up having an insignificant role in the tale).

As is often common in DC books, he encounters aliens in trouble. Sometimes in stasis pods in derelict ships, sometimes in outposts that had been cut off for many centuries. Eventually Patti the AI learns that the war has killed ninety percent of the population of both star nations, and made dozens of worlds uninhabitable. So of course magic human Keith manages to end the war with little trouble, and do many other seriously improbable but fun things.²

●●●◐○ The Madison Interview - Ted Bun (2022 nva)
Jennifer Archer won the first Madison Scholarship, financed by the wealthy family. Her major was journalism, and she was now a junior reporter at a state newspaper. In college, she had worked for the school newspaper, and interviewed Alan Madison, scion of the family, who went to the same school as her. The young middle-distance runner had yanked her chain for an hour, before admitting everything he'd said was false and settling down for a real interview. He promised to play nice if they met again.

There had always been rumors that the Madison family fortune was founded in a less than legal way during World War Two. With his father entering politics, young Alan had set out to investigate the true history in the islands north of Australia. He went missing, and only turned up five years later. (Shades of Oliver Queen on Arrow.) Every journalist wanted to interview him, but the only one Alan wanted to talk to was the young woman to whom he owed a do-over.

After signing loads of non-disclosure agreements, Jennifer was taken to an isolated ranch, and was told to strip and put on the provided light robe to go through a metal detector. Then she met Alan again, outside on a very hot day. He was very tanned, very skinny, and very naked. His bodyguard, secretary, chef, nurse, and others wore wraps like Jen, and it was clear they were also usually nude. What exactly had happened to Alan during those missing five years?

●●○○○ Piece of Cake - Patrice Fitzgerald (2015 ss)
Life in Federal United is restrictive, especially if you're Sandra, who tends toward being overweight. She must weigh herself each morning, and the national AI measuring a Citizen's Optimum Weight penalizes her for going outside her approved bounds. Klaxons sound in a public cafeteria when she tries to pick up a slice of cake.

At one point, Sandra even goes to a speakeasy for desserts, where she buys a very expensive slice of contraband cake, only for the place to be raided before she can take a bite. And of course Sandra's home Nutri-Unit won't provide any treats. She ends up beating it into a wreck with her shoe. “She felt dazed. The quest for cake had become the focal point of her existence.”

Still hungry, Sandra visits nice Mrs. Krowitzky on the floor below, to see if she has any food. And she does! Cake and cookies and more. But, alas, things don't work out…

This story is in The AI Chronicles anthology, but AI plays little role in the tale (it tracks people's weight: big whoop), and this tale seems very 1950s-ish, complete with twist ending and countertwist coda.

●●◐○○ The Dope on Mars - Jack Sharkey (1960 ss)
A president who barely got elected decides to rush a NASA project to help his reelection chances. Five men are sent to Mars, spending 260 days in a small spacecraft getting there. Desmond the pilot, Jones the co-pilot, Streeter the navigator, Kroger the biochemist, and Ingersoll the reporter, whose diary entries are the story: “I am one of the first five men in the history of the world to see the opposite side of the Moon [which] isn’t much different from the front.”³

They find Mars has air that's cold and thin, but breathable.⁴ When they do some separate exploring, two of the crew go missing. Their footprints, along with those of larger creatures, are tracked to a crevasse, at the bottom of which is a stream of water. The remaining men find that Desmond and Kruger have been captured by red-scaled reptilian Martians, then they're captured themselves.

The Earthers manage to escape, having discovered a Martian weakness, and make it back to their ship. But the different Martian biology goes against them when the two scales Kroger had brought back as samples hatch into Martians of the ship, almost overloading their life-support system. And things get even worse…

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Eight's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
282+7 ss | 13+0 nvt | 16+1 nva | 85+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Aside: at no time during this story, which lasts at least a half hour, does the fire department show up.

[2] Truly, I can't defend any Collins book as deep or imaginative or thought out. But somehow I still like them, and I suspect I'm going to lean on them to get me to the minimum 100 novels I want to read this year. Ideally 106, since this year has 53 ISO weeks.

[3] Nope. Nearside has maria, while Farside almost entirely lacks those dark lowlands.

[4] Nope.

●●●◐○ Spotty - Hannah Steenbock (2021 ss)
Sandra is a high-school senior who's developing vitiligo. She's ruthlessly bullied by her classmates, which her mother and teachers don't know. Sandra's divorced mother is still suffering from the car accident that killed her own mother, and left her much younger sister badly burned. That sister, Melody, is now marrying Ben, whom she met during burn rehab. And they're doing it at the Circle of Life Nudist Resort.

Sandra isn't crazy about more people seeing her skin, and her mother isn't thrilled about the nudity, but for Melody's sake they go along with the plan. Sandra finds the resort is clothing-optional, not mandatory-nudity, and she can wear anything she wants, so she asks for and gets a catsuit leotard and a mask to serve as ring girl. But though she's fully covered, she sees how body accepting the residents are, with nobody staring at or commenting on her spots, nor Melody's and Ben's extensive burns.

Sandra gains body confidence at the resort, and shrugs off her classmates' taunts when she comes back after spring break. Come summer, she'll also be visiting Ben and Melody there and trying nudity for herself.

●●●●○ Unholy Alliance - Ben Langhinrichs (2010 ss)
Alice is in her dorm room, preparing to have sex with her girlfriend Tamanna when she hears a noise at her window. Peeping into the ground floor dorms isn't uncommon, so naked Tamanna leans out the window and yells “This what you wanted to see, shithead? Now, go home!” — and a diseased-looking arm pulls her outside.

Alice screams and runs into the hall and pulls the fire alarm¹ and when the linebacker Resident Assistant shows up, tells him what happened. Jeremy grabs a couple of football mates and heads outside, where they manage to find the two creatures taking Tamanna away. Tyler's hand is broken, and he gets a big scratch. As Jeremy says, “I know it sounds crazy, but if I didn't know any better, I'd swear they were zombies. They smelled like death, and had sores and shit all over.”

The police are called, but when they ask why the near-catatonic Tamanna was naked, and learn she and Alice are lesbians, they lose interest and leave, saying they're going to deal with the situation. A few minutes later five cars pull up, holding a preacher, his two bodyguards, and a dozen supporters. He begins to conduct an exorcism to drive evil spirits out of the homosexual students. Fortunately the zombies return then…

●●●◐○ The Glass Eye - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
This is a weird tale about Julia, a spinster who worked as a clerk for an old-fashioned solicitor. In the past she had a boyfriend, who moved away, and even a fiancé, who found someone else. She's thirty-seven and has a knack for saying the wrong thing. “The loneliness and desolation of Julia’s life were appalling.”

Once a year her sister and brother-in-law go to spend a week with his parents in Wales, and their son spends the week with his aunt, who spoils him rotten. On his last day with her this year, Julia took Bernard to the Old Palace Music Hall in Fulham, where they saw various stage acts, culminating with that of Max Collodi, “The Gentleman Ventriloquist with his amazing Dummy ‘George’.”

“His dark hair gleamed, his jaw showed a slight blue shadow. His mustache was exquisitely clipped, his high square shoulders spoke of great strength. His temples were narrow, his eyes deep set, his chin was cleft, his teeth, when he spoke, shone like jewels.” Julia was beyond infatuated. Every night following, Julia went to the show to see him, and when the show moved to other venues, she'd take a tram across town to continue doing so.

Julia eventually wrote to him, and after many, many letters, he agreed to a meeting. It went so very, very wrong…

●●○○○ Brimstone {Stargate Atlantis 15} - David Niall Wilson, Patricia Lee Macomber (2010 nov)
Atlantis's long-range sensors detect something odd: an Earth-like moon of a gas giant in a nearby solar system breaking orbit and heading for its sun. Thinking there might be people there who need help, the Lanteans look up stargate address, only to find it locked out, with a warning that Dr. Rodney McKay accidentally dismisses before they can read it. Fortunately technician Cumby has a near-photographic memory, and is able to draw the glyphs from memory for later translation.

Records say there's an Ancient city there, and it should be avoided. But they can sense both life signs and Zero Point Modules. Atlantis could certainly use the power of the latter, and they feel they have a duty to rescue the former, so the lockout is overridden, and an expedition is sent. At which point it's found that the rogue moon can't be dialed again.

The expedition consists of the usual Sheppard, Teyla, Ronon, McKay, and as a reward for being so helpful, Cumby, whom we definitely expect to get redshirted. They find the city is named Admah, and it's considered the dark to Atlantis's light. As Saul, the Ancient who serves as Security Master says, “Those in cities like Atlantis concerned themselves with spiritual growth and ascension. We chose a different path.”

This turned out to be leading lives of leisure and pleasure. Anyone can come to Admah through the gate, but a dialing permuter means no one can follow them, and no one can leave. Newcomers usually end up fighting to the death in the coliseum for the entertainment of the populace.

So can Rodney figure a way around the stargate lock? Can Lorne and his people mount a rescue? Since everyone we know from the TV show has plot immunity, they'll be okay; it's just getting to ‘okay’ that's the story. Oh, and will Cumby die? It took until the 72% point for something unexpected to happen in this unimaginative book, and then the tale quickly concluded.

●●●●○ The Subletting of the Mansion {Dr. Taverner 08} (1926 ss)
Winnington was staying at the nursing home of Dr. Taverner, his friend. It was not the occultist and psychologist's help he needed, but medical care from his physician colleague Dr. Rhodes, since Winnington was dying of tuberculosis. Then Taverner was called away for some time.

On days he was up to it, Winnington took an after-dinner walk with Dr. Rhodes down the long drive of the grounds to the post box, to send out letters written that day by staff and patients. One time the pair met a woman doing the same. Mrs. Bellamy was renting the house across the street with her husband, and Winnington was smitten. Rhodes protested that she was married, and Winnington returned that it wasn't like anything would happen, since he would soon be dead.

But a few days later Mrs. Bellamy called the nursing home asking for Dr. Rhodes. It seemed her husband was a drug addict, and he'd taken too much again. When Rhodes later told this to Winnington — patient confidentiality meant he shouldn't have, but again, the man was dying, and he badgered Rhodes into it — Winnington smiled schemingly. When next Bellamy overdosed, Winnington — who was an occultist of some skill like Taverner — went spirit-walking and managed to dislodge Bellamy's drug-loosened soul, taking possession of the body…

●●●◐○ Reel Life Films - Sam Merwin Jr (1954 ss)
Cyril Bezdek, production boss of Gigantic Studios, was meeting with Carter Dorwin, powerful plenipotentiary of Consolidated Trust, the bank that financed Gigantic’s multimillion-dollar productions. They had a private suite on a coast-to-coast supertrain.

Dorwin said that his firm was becoming concerned about Gigantic's increasing reliance on science fiction films, which Consolidated felt were undignified. Bezdek explained the problem. The public wanted films with conflict between heroes and villains. But if they made a western, say, and cast Indians or Mexicans as villains, that demographic would protest. Ditto if they did a war picture, where Japanese and German people would object to being seen as the bad guys.

That left science fiction as the only viable genre where you could have conflict with large numbers of villains. Nobody protested if Martians were the ones attacking. Then the train was stopped in the middle of nowhere, and a large spaceship landed nearby…

●●●○○ The 2000 Year War {War Without End 1} - David Collins (2023 nov)
A starship bringing home an ambassador's daughter in medical stasis hits an FTL mine, killing the only person awake, and destroying the room with the servitor drones that might have allowed the ship to repair itself. The med bay is also in vacuum, so Marilee the young Tilley woman can't be awakened.

With the FTL engine offline, it takes fifty years to limp to the nearest star system, where it lands on Luna and awaits rescue. Which doesn't come, since unknown to the ship's AI, a war had broken out between the multi-species Federated Worlds and the Fezzcoll Collective, and left everyone busy for a long time.

The AI waits 2340 years before Earth is advanced enough technologically to produce someone it can hire as a repairman, which it does via the internet. Keith Robinson answered the ad, gets on the shuttle, and builds a drone from the parts the ship had printed out. The drone does the bulk of the repair work, though Keith helps. As is dead common in Collins's novels, Keith becomes captain, and sets forth for the Federated Worlds, along with Marilee from the pod (who ends up having an insignificant role in the tale).

As is often common in DC books, he encounters aliens in trouble. Sometimes in stasis pods in derelict ships, sometimes in outposts that had been cut off for many centuries. Eventually Patti the AI learns that the war has killed ninety percent of the population of both star nations, and made dozens of worlds uninhabitable. So of course magic human Keith manages to end the war with little trouble, and do many other seriously improbable but fun things.²

●●●◐○ The Madison Interview - Ted Bun (2022 nva)
Jennifer Archer won the first Madison Scholarship, financed by the wealthy family. Her major was journalism, and she was now a junior reporter at a state newspaper. In college, she had worked for the school newspaper, and interviewed Alan Madison, scion of the family, who went to the same school as her. The young middle-distance runner had yanked her chain for an hour, before admitting everything he'd said was false and settling down for a real interview. He promised to play nice if they met again.

There had always been rumors that the Madison family fortune was founded in a less than legal way during World War Two. With his father entering politics, young Alan had set out to investigate the true history in the islands north of Australia. He went missing, and only turned up five years later. (Shades of Oliver Queen on Arrow.) Every journalist wanted to interview him, but the only one Alan wanted to talk to was the young woman to whom he owed a do-over.

After signing loads of non-disclosure agreements, Jennifer was taken to an isolated ranch, and was told to strip and put on the provided light robe to go through a metal detector. Then she met Alan again, outside on a very hot day. He was very tanned, very skinny, and very naked. His bodyguard, secretary, chef, nurse, and others wore wraps like Jen, and it was clear they were also usually nude. What exactly had happened to Alan during those missing five years?

●●○○○ Piece of Cake - Patrice Fitzgerald (2015 ss)
Life in Federal United is restrictive, especially if you're Sandra, who tends toward being overweight. She must weigh herself each morning, and the national AI measuring a Citizen's Optimum Weight penalizes her for going outside her approved bounds. Klaxons sound in a public cafeteria when she tries to pick up a slice of cake.

At one point, Sandra even goes to a speakeasy for desserts, where she buys a very expensive slice of contraband cake, only for the place to be raided before she can take a bite. And of course Sandra's home Nutri-Unit won't provide any treats. She ends up beating it into a wreck with her shoe. “She felt dazed. The quest for cake had become the focal point of her existence.”

Still hungry, Sandra visits nice Mrs. Krowitzky on the floor below, to see if she has any food. And she does! Cake and cookies and more. But, alas, things don't work out…

This story is in The AI Chronicles anthology, but AI plays little role in the tale (it tracks people's weight: big whoop), and this tale seems very 1950s-ish, complete with twist ending and countertwist coda.

●●◐○○ The Dope on Mars - Jack Sharkey (1960 ss)
A president who barely got elected decides to rush a NASA project to help his reelection chances. Five men are sent to Mars, spending 260 days in a small spacecraft getting there. Desmond the pilot, Jones the co-pilot, Streeter the navigator, Kroger the biochemist, and Ingersoll the reporter, whose diary entries are the story: “I am one of the first five men in the history of the world to see the opposite side of the Moon [which] isn’t much different from the front.”³

They find Mars has air that's cold and thin, but breathable.⁴ When they do some separate exploring, two of the crew go missing. Their footprints, along with those of larger creatures, are tracked to a crevasse, at the bottom of which is a stream of water. The remaining men find that Desmond and Kruger have been captured by red-scaled reptilian Martians, then they're captured themselves.

The Earthers manage to escape, having discovered a Martian weakness, and make it back to their ship. But the different Martian biology goes against them when the two scales Kroger had brought back as samples hatch into Martians of the ship, almost overloading their life-support system. And things get even worse…

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Eight's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
282+7 ss | 13+0 nvt | 16+1 nva | 85+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Aside: at no time during this story, which lasts at least a half hour, does the fire department show up.

[2] Truly, I can't defend any Collins book as deep or imaginative or thought out. But somehow I still like them, and I suspect I'm going to lean on them to get me to the minimum 100 novels I want to read this year. Ideally 106, since this year has 53 ISO weeks.

[3] Nope. Nearside has maria, while Farside almost entirely lacks those dark lowlands.

[4] Nope.

●●●◐○ Spotty - Hannah Steenbock (2021 ss)
Sandra is a high-school senior who's developing vitiligo. She's ruthlessly bullied by her classmates, which her mother and teachers don't know. Sandra's divorced mother is still suffering from the car accident that killed her own mother, and left her much younger sister badly burned. That sister, Melody, is now marrying Ben, whom she met during burn rehab. And they're doing it at the Circle of Life Nudist Resort.

Sandra isn't crazy about more people seeing her skin, and her mother isn't thrilled about the nudity, but for Melody's sake they go along with the plan. Sandra finds the resort is clothing-optional, not mandatory-nudity, and she can wear anything she wants, so she asks for and gets a catsuit leotard and a mask to serve as ring girl. But though she's fully covered, she sees how body accepting the residents are, with nobody staring at or commenting on her spots, nor Melody's and Ben's extensive burns.

Sandra gains body confidence at the resort, and shrugs off her classmates' taunts when she comes back after spring break. Come summer, she'll also be visiting Ben and Melody there and trying nudity for herself.

●●●●○ Unholy Alliance - Ben Langhinrichs (2010 ss)
Alice is in her dorm room, preparing to have sex with her girlfriend Tamanna when she hears a noise at her window. Peeping into the ground floor dorms isn't uncommon, so naked Tamanna leans out the window and yells “This what you wanted to see, shithead? Now, go home!” — and a diseased-looking arm pulls her outside.

Alice screams and runs into the hall and pulls the fire alarm¹ and when the linebacker Resident Assistant shows up, tells him what happened. Jeremy grabs a couple of football mates and heads outside, where they manage to find the two creatures taking Tamanna away. Tyler's hand is broken, and he gets a big scratch. As Jeremy says, “I know it sounds crazy, but if I didn't know any better, I'd swear they were zombies. They smelled like death, and had sores and shit all over.”

The police are called, but when they ask why the near-catatonic Tamanna was naked, and learn she and Alice are lesbians, they lose interest and leave, saying they're going to deal with the situation. A few minutes later five cars pull up, holding a preacher, his two bodyguards, and a dozen supporters. He begins to conduct an exorcism to drive evil spirits out of the homosexual students. Fortunately the zombies return then…

●●●◐○ The Glass Eye - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
This is a weird tale about Julia, a spinster who worked as a clerk for an old-fashioned solicitor. In the past she had a boyfriend, who moved away, and even a fiancé, who found someone else. She's thirty-seven and has a knack for saying the wrong thing. “The loneliness and desolation of Julia’s life were appalling.”

Once a year her sister and brother-in-law go to spend a week with his parents in Wales, and their son spends the week with his aunt, who spoils him rotten. On his last day with her this year, Julia took Bernard to the Old Palace Music Hall in Fulham, where they saw various stage acts, culminating with that of Max Collodi, “The Gentleman Ventriloquist with his amazing Dummy ‘George’.”

“His dark hair gleamed, his jaw showed a slight blue shadow. His mustache was exquisitely clipped, his high square shoulders spoke of great strength. His temples were narrow, his eyes deep set, his chin was cleft, his teeth, when he spoke, shone like jewels.” Julia was beyond infatuated. Every night following, Julia went to the show to see him, and when the show moved to other venues, she'd take a tram across town to continue doing so.

Julia eventually wrote to him, and after many, many letters, he agreed to a meeting. It went so very, very wrong…

●●○○○ Brimstone {Stargate Atlantis 15} - David Niall Wilson, Patricia Lee Macomber (2010 nov)
Atlantis's long-range sensors detect something odd: an Earth-like moon of a gas giant in a nearby solar system breaking orbit and heading for its sun. Thinking there might be people there who need help, the Lanteans look up stargate address, only to find it locked out, with a warning that Dr. Rodney McKay accidentally dismisses before they can read it. Fortunately technician Cumby has a near-photographic memory, and is able to draw the glyphs from memory for later translation.

Records say there's an Ancient city there, and it should be avoided. But they can sense both life signs and Zero Point Modules. Atlantis could certainly use the power of the latter, and they feel they have a duty to rescue the former, so the lockout is overridden, and an expedition is sent. At which point it's found that the rogue moon can't be dialed again.

The expedition consists of the usual Sheppard, Teyla, Ronon, McKay, and as a reward for being so helpful, Cumby, whom we definitely expect to get redshirted. They find the city is named Admah, and it's considered the dark to Atlantis's light. As Saul, the Ancient who serves as Security Master says, “Those in cities like Atlantis concerned themselves with spiritual growth and ascension. We chose a different path.”

This turned out to be leading lives of leisure and pleasure. Anyone can come to Admah through the gate, but a dialing permuter means no one can follow them, and no one can leave. Newcomers usually end up fighting to the death in the coliseum for the entertainment of the populace.

So can Rodney figure a way around the stargate lock? Can Lorne and his people mount a rescue? Since everyone we know from the TV show has plot immunity, they'll be okay; it's just getting to ‘okay’ that's the story. Oh, and will Cumby die? It took until the 72% point for something unexpected to happen in this unimaginative book, and then the tale quickly concluded.

●●●●○ The Subletting of the Mansion {Dr. Taverner 08} (1926 ss)
Winnington was staying at the nursing home of Dr. Taverner, his friend. It was not the occultist and psychologist's help he needed, but medical care from his physician colleague Dr. Rhodes, since Winnington was dying of tuberculosis. Then Taverner was called away for some time.

On days he was up to it, Winnington took an after-dinner walk with Dr. Rhodes down the long drive of the grounds to the post box, to send out letters written that day by staff and patients. One time the pair met a woman doing the same. Mrs. Bellamy was renting the house across the street with her husband, and Winnington was smitten. Rhodes protested that she was married, and Winnington returned that it wasn't like anything would happen, since he would soon be dead.

But a few days later Mrs. Bellamy called the nursing home asking for Dr. Rhodes. It seemed her husband was a drug addict, and he'd taken too much again. When Rhodes later told this to Winnington — patient confidentiality meant he shouldn't have, but again, the man was dying, and he badgered Rhodes into it — Winnington smiled schemingly. When next Bellamy overdosed, Winnington — who was an occultist of some skill like Taverner — went spirit-walking and managed to dislodge Bellamy's drug-loosened soul, taking possession of the body…

●●●◐○ Reel Life Films - Sam Merwin Jr (1954 ss)
Cyril Bezdek, production boss of Gigantic Studios, was meeting with Carter Dorwin, powerful plenipotentiary of Consolidated Trust, the bank that financed Gigantic’s multimillion-dollar productions. They had a private suite on a coast-to-coast supertrain.

Dorwin said that his firm was becoming concerned about Gigantic's increasing reliance on science fiction films, which Consolidated felt were undignified. Bezdek explained the problem. The public wanted films with conflict between heroes and villains. But if they made a western, say, and cast Indians or Mexicans as villains, that demographic would protest. Ditto if they did a war picture, where Japanese and German people would object to being seen as the bad guys.

That left science fiction as the only viable genre where you could have conflict with large numbers of villains. Nobody protested if Martians were the ones attacking. Then the train was stopped in the middle of nowhere, and a large spaceship landed nearby…

●●●○○ The 2000 Year War {War Without End 1} - David Collins (2023 nov)
A starship bringing home an ambassador's daughter in medical stasis hits an FTL mine, killing the only person awake, and destroying the room with the servitor drones that might have allowed the ship to repair itself. The med bay is also in vacuum, so Marilee the young Tilley woman can't be awakened.

With the FTL engine offline, it takes fifty years to limp to the nearest star system, where it lands on Luna and awaits rescue. Which doesn't come, since unknown to the ship's AI, a war had broken out between the multi-species Federated Worlds and the Fezzcoll Collective, and left everyone busy for a long time.

The AI waits 2340 years before Earth is advanced enough technologically to produce someone it can hire as a repairman, which it does via the internet. Keith Robinson answered the ad, gets on the shuttle, and builds a drone from the parts the ship had printed out. The drone does the bulk of the repair work, though Keith helps. As is dead common in Collins's novels, Keith becomes captain, and sets forth for the Federated Worlds, along with Marilee from the pod (who ends up having an insignificant role in the tale).

As is often common in DC books, he encounters aliens in trouble. Sometimes in stasis pods in derelict ships, sometimes in outposts that had been cut off for many centuries. Eventually Patti the AI learns that the war has killed ninety percent of the population of both star nations, and made dozens of worlds uninhabitable. So of course magic human Keith manages to end the war with little trouble, and do many other seriously improbable but fun things.²

●●●◐○ The Madison Interview - Ted Bun (2022 nva)
Jennifer Archer won the first Madison Scholarship, financed by the wealthy family. Her major was journalism, and she was now a junior reporter at a state newspaper. In college, she had worked for the school newspaper, and interviewed Alan Madison, scion of the family, who went to the same school as her. The young middle-distance runner had yanked her chain for an hour, before admitting everything he'd said was false and settling down for a real interview. He promised to play nice if they met again.

There had always been rumors that the Madison family fortune was founded in a less than legal way during World War Two. With his father entering politics, young Alan had set out to investigate the true history in the islands north of Australia. He went missing, and only turned up five years later. (Shades of Oliver Queen on Arrow.) Every journalist wanted to interview him, but the only one Alan wanted to talk to was the young woman to whom he owed a do-over.

After signing loads of non-disclosure agreements, Jennifer was taken to an isolated ranch, and was told to strip and put on the provided light robe to go through a metal detector. Then she met Alan again, outside on a very hot day. He was very tanned, very skinny, and very naked. His bodyguard, secretary, chef, nurse, and others wore wraps like Jen, and it was clear they were also usually nude. What exactly had happened to Alan during those missing five years?

●●○○○ Piece of Cake - Patrice Fitzgerald (2015 ss)
Life in Federal United is restrictive, especially if you're Sandra, who tends toward being overweight. She must weigh herself each morning, and the national AI measuring a Citizen's Optimum Weight penalizes her for going outside her approved bounds. Klaxons sound in a public cafeteria when she tries to pick up a slice of cake.

At one point, Sandra even goes to a speakeasy for desserts, where she buys a very expensive slice of contraband cake, only for the place to be raided before she can take a bite. And of course Sandra's home Nutri-Unit won't provide any treats. She ends up beating it into a wreck with her shoe. “She felt dazed. The quest for cake had become the focal point of her existence.”

Still hungry, Sandra visits nice Mrs. Krowitzky on the floor below, to see if she has any food. And she does! Cake and cookies and more. But, alas, things don't work out…

This story is in The AI Chronicles anthology, but AI plays little role in the tale (it tracks people's weight: big whoop), and this tale seems very 1950s-ish, complete with twist ending and countertwist coda.

●●◐○○ The Dope on Mars - Jack Sharkey (1960 ss)
A president who barely got elected decides to rush a NASA project to help his reelection chances. Five men are sent to Mars, spending 260 days in a small spacecraft getting there. Desmond the pilot, Jones the co-pilot, Streeter the navigator, Kroger the biochemist, and Ingersoll the reporter, whose diary entries are the story: “I am one of the first five men in the history of the world to see the opposite side of the Moon [which] isn’t much different from the front.”³

They find Mars has air that's cold and thin, but breathable.⁴ When they do some separate exploring, two of the crew go missing. Their footprints, along with those of larger creatures, are tracked to a crevasse, at the bottom of which is a stream of water. The remaining men find that Desmond and Kruger have been captured by red-scaled reptilian Martians, then they're captured themselves.

The Earthers manage to escape, having discovered a Martian weakness, and make it back to their ship. But the different Martian biology goes against them when the two scales Kroger had brought back as samples hatch into Martians of the ship, almost overloading their life-support system. And things get even worse…

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Eight's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
282+7 ss | 13+0 nvt | 16+1 nva | 85+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Aside: at no time during this story, which lasts at least a half hour, does the fire department show up.

[2] Truly, I can't defend any Collins book as deep or imaginative or thought out. But somehow I still like them, and I suspect I'm going to lean on them to get me to the minimum 100 novels I want to read this year. Ideally 106, since this year has 53 ISO weeks.

[3] Nope. Nearside has maria, while Farside almost entirely lacks those dark lowlands.

[4] Nope.

●●●○○ Spring Bank Holiday - Andrew Calow (2021 ss)
Mary and Peter work for the county health office, inspecting kitchens. Two establishments planned on opening new dining facilities the day after the bank holiday, so they flipped a coin to see who went where; Peter got the cricket club and Mary the Collycroft Naturist Club. At least they'd get overtime…

Mary arrives, shows no discomfort at the nude people she sees, and inspects the kitchen — 5 out of 5 — then writes up her report and submits it online. Club manager Jeff invites Mary to stay for lunch — which she pays for, ethics rules and all — then goes for a swim. Jeff notes that Mary already has an all-over tan.

●●●●○ Shared Secrets - Martin Brant (2017 nov)
It's the Sixties or Seventies (wall phones are still a thing), and almost-sixteen Timothy and his 18-year-old sister Tiffany live at the edge of town with their mother Joyce. And also their father, who occasionally works odd jobs for booze money, but mostly spends his waking hours at a bar. The family is on food stamps, which usually run out before the end of the month.

One very hot, late-August day, Tim and Tif go fishing at a nearby stream to catch catfish so the family will have something to eat. Seeking relief from the heat, Tiffany goes skinny-dipping, and after a bit, coaxes Timothy to join her. They swim nude several more times before Tiffany decides they should both go nude at home when no one's there. Their mother gets home from work early one day and sees them, and doesn't object, as long as they're dressed when their father is expected to get home, since he has a temper.

And so it goes, until one day their father comes home unexpectedly and catches them. He gets angry and slaps Tiffany, then storms off when Joyce protests. Driving home from the bar, he gets arrested for drunk driving, not for the first time. Joyce can't afford the $500 bail, and after the incident with Tif, wouldn't pay it anyway. He stays in jail for a week, then gets sentenced to five years as a repeat offender.

Mr. Benson, who owns the land near the stream, finds Tim and Tif swimming nude, and doesn't object. He invites them to his house for some fresh pie, where Mrs. Benson is nude as Mr. Benson undresses. They've long been nudists, as are their grown-up boys, who used to go skinny-dipping with Joyce.

Tif and Tim talk their mother into going nude at home, since the house is so hot and humid with the washing she's had to take in to make up for what little salary her husband used to contribute to the household. Tif decides to invite some other kids to go swimming nude with them, including her not-quite-boyfriend, a female friend, and that friend's sister in Tim's class. The event goes well.

The Bensons hold a nude dinner, with Joyce and her kids, and Tim's new girlfriend. They invite another nudist, a man whose wife recently died. Ted and Joyce can be friends, even if she doesn't choose to divorce her loser husband. Life goes on, just without clothes much of the time.

●●●●◐ The Syntax of Consciousness - Pavarti K. Tyler (2015 ss)
Jamie's girlfriend had died in an auto accident two month's ago. She was depressed and needed money to keep paying rent, so she signed up for a medical trial for a neural implant, ‘Jiminy,’ billed as “the little voice inside your head.” She was supposed to go through the initialization steps slowly, but when the implant suggested she could just get them over with quickly, Jamie agreed. Result: Minnie.

Minnie was the female-gendered Artificial General Intelligence — which was supposed to be a gender-neutral non-sapient info-supplement program — resulting from the interface between the implant, Jamie's brain, and the general net. The bootstrapped sapient ends up taking over more and more of Jamie's life, even going so far as to alter her brain chemistry so she sleeps while Minnie shows up at her office and does her job for her.

Jamie becomes conscious one day and finds she's wearing a slinky dress and high heels (neither of which she ever does), and playing high-stakes poker with some questionable individuals. She gets out of there, with Minnie's assistance.

⎡ They knew me as her. I have to call InGen! I have to get the implant out of me. My adrenaline races and I open my purse, searching for my phone.
    No.
    Yes! This is my life!
    You don’t want it. You don’t live it.

Images of myself, crying and depressed, flip through my mind, one after the next. I’m in my apartment, night after night, watching the screenplayer, doing nothing. I work and cry and sleep, talking to no one but Minnie. ⎦

The next time she's awake, she's having an interview about the medical trial, and Minnie is firmly in the driver's seat, telling the nurse how everything is going swimmingly…

●●●○○ A Daughter of Pan {Dr. Taverner 07} (1926 ss)
A firm woman and the drill-sergeant assigned to the matron's youngest daughter show up at Taverner's nursing home, complaining the young woman's mind “is not developing properly,” although “her terrible outbreaks of wildness and temper have practically ceased.” Diana has the aspect of a whipped dog, doing little but cower from life.

As she slowly recovers, it's clear that Diana is more a nature spirit than a young woman, as witness the wild run she took Dr. Rhodes on across the fen. She can see the Old Gods, and anyone in her presence also senses them.

Another patient of the home was Tennant, whose mood modulated between serene placidity and suicidal depression. The only other person he really noticed was Diana, dressed in the Puck costume she'd pulled from the theater supplies. As has happened more than once in these tales, two broken creatures combined to make a workable couple. They end up wed, and head off into the countryside with a donkey, a tent, and cooking supplies, living the wild, free life that rescues them from conformity.

●●●○○ Alien Envoy {Ellwood 1} - Malcolm Jameson (1944 ss)
Half a century ago a fleet of fifty ships had entered Sol System from the direction of the constellation Ursa Major. The Ursans had scouted all the planets, then left. Human ships had attacked them with katatron beams, to no effect; blasts of pink lightning from the alien ships destroyed the human vessels.

Forty years later, huge waves of Ursan ships began arriving once more. It was clear they were colonizing Jupiter. Decades of fighting had left many human ships destroyed, but until today, no Ursan ship was damaged. A lucky shot with the new torpedo had holed the stern part of a ship, but the bow section was intact, with a surviving Ursan inside. The damaged ship was towed to a Bureau of Interplanetary Military Intelligence base on Luna.

The dead crew in the rear section showed the Ursans to resemble a cross between a sea turtle, a squid, and a snail, with many tentacles — some with flexible tips, others with specialized hard tips — and nothing resembling eyes or mouth. The humans learn from the bodies, and construct a motorized chair-cum-suit in which a human could survive the toxic atmosphere and 3.2 gees gravity.

Ellwood (whose last name appears 73 times in this story, never with a first name) is selected to enter the ship and negotiate with the alien, using methods worked out with the primitive peoples of Mars and Venus. At the end of which time, he finds that the Ursan — excuse me, "Armadian" — envoy has used the time to synch his electromagnetic sense with Ellwood's brain, and communicates with him using induced visions. Things work out well in the end, enough for a sequel.

●●○○○ The Arm of Enmord - Jack Sharkey (1959 ss)
New colony worlds mean new legends. Arcturus Beta, surveyed by a ship with a Teutonic crew, called its monsters in the dark Teufel Menschen, or Devil Folk. They were changelings who lived in underground labyrinths, and lured maidens into their lair.

Drake Talbot thought there had to be a germ of truth in the legends, and hoped to find the Teufs. His fiancée Stacey thought his dream silly, until Tymbel showed up. The young man (who she'd known on Earth), had arrived on Beta in the colonist flight the month before hers, and then had been lost in the woods years ago.

Tymbel claimed he'd found both the Teufs and a treasure, and he needed a witness to his find so that the colony leaders would let him keep it and go back to civilization. He thought Drake would do the job, and when Stacey told him, Drake agreed, and the two men set off into the dark forest. A decent start, but a pedestrian ending.

●●●○○ The Hanging Stranger - Philip K. Dick (1953 ss)
PKD does Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a trademark dollop of "Is the world crazy, or am I?" and a dash of religious exceptionalism.

After a day spent in his basement preparing for some construction work, Ed Loyce, owner of Loyce TV Sales and Service, heads for the store to cover for the salesmen during their dinner break, then do some evening paperwork. When he gets there, he finds a dead man hanging from a lamp post. Loyce freaks out, and calls out the other shopkeepers — Fergusson from his pharmacy, Potter from his shoe shop, Jenkins from the stationery store — and no one else has an issue with it.

The police come to see what the fuss is, but Pikeville is a small town, and Ed recognizes that these aren't local cops. He manages to get away. Near the town hall, he sees a beam coming down from the sky, somehow darker than the surrounding nighttime, and within that beam crab-moth beings were flying down and merging with people in the area.

Loyce makes it home, where he tries to get his wife and sons in the car, but they don't see any reason to panic, then in a certain light he sees that his son looks transparent, and within him is a crab-moth…

●●●◐○ The Criminologist Affair {Stewart Grant 2} - Jack Dearborn (2023 nov)
Fielding College, twice employer of Private Investigator Miles Grant, now calls on his PI son Stewart. There have been two rapes, and the police have made no progress on finding the rapist. Stewart initially has little success, but he does meet the student librarian who runs the info desk evenings — the women were both raped walking from the library to the dorms — and develops a relationship with her.

In what seems a "look the answer up in the back of the book" moment, someone who looked like a possible suspect tells Stewart of another suspect, and then it's just a matter of Stewart staking out several places over two weeks to get the proof needed. I get the increasing notion Dearborn is more interested in the nudity than the investigations, which are getting ever shorter shrift.

The flirty nudity part of this series suffers in the start of the book, since Stewart lives alone. He may be nude at home, but he has no one to talk to. Things look up when he starts seeing Carly, especially after he's invited to the house where she lives with her widowed mother, whom he finds out is one of the people in the Nefarious Nudist book, and that both mother and daughter are nudists.

People the Grant family meet frequently turn out to be nudists. Stewart has a nude dinner with Carly and her mother, and when the case is successfully resolved, the mother visits her son for a weekend, allowing Carly and Stewart to have celebratory sex in every room of her house. Stewart also visits his parents and grandmother, and there is some sexual banter there.

●●●◐○ Wolf and Hound {Ethical Vampires 2.1} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2001 nov)
While in Moscow, Sabra — an ancient vampire who recalls the Romans coming to the British Isles — has a dream about a ship without a crew beaching itself in Whitby, where a great black wolf reeking of dark blood magic bounds ashore. It attacks her near Whitby Abbey. Sabra awakens and begins arranging passage back to England.

She learns the ship and wolf were real, so she seeks the shape-shifter. One of the European Breed ‹sniff› of vampire has come to her island. One that has the Talent, but whose narcissism meant her never trained at it. Sabra is involved at the edges of the Dracula tale, seeing Renfield and Mina Harker, watching Van Helsing and his helpers from the sidelines. It turns out that it's Sabra who truly defeated Vlad Tepes and made him flee back to his mountain home, not the mortals in Bram Stoker's tale.

●●●○○ Meatbots - Timothy Capehart (2010 ss)
At a ChemVeg Agrimedium Processing Plant in "Equatorial America" — there's a story there, one not even slightly explained in this tale — Chundhry and Barton tele-puppet two Meatbots — nanotech-powered corpses. The Meatbots deal with clogs and other problems in the (toxic at this stage) great vats that will become growth medium for crops on Mars.

Meatbots Delta and Gamma come into contact with the results of some unexpected chemical reaction, and hours later in their storage closet, they wake up. They have only the most fragmentary of memories, but the two male ex-humans know they like each other, a lot, and make plans to escape the facility…

●●●◐○ The Lovers - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
James Gemmell had his electric system installed a decade ago, in the first wave of electrification in rural Scotland. Now the system was failing, and the man who installed the system sent out an employee who would be in the area for a bigger job, and would get to Gemmell's place after dark.

Andrew was met by Gemmell holding a kerosene lantern, and shown to the job locations. When it was time for the living room to be checked out, Gemmell seemed to have some objection, but then led Andrew to the room. Andrew had thought Gemmell was alone in the house, but he saw a woman about a decade younger than James sitting stiffly on the couch, eyes closed. She made no move, and said nothing. It was most odd.

Later, Andrew stops at a local pub, and gets talking to a chatty sort. He talks about the job, and seeing Gemmell and his wife, and the man splutters. Janet Gemmell had died eight years ago. Had Andrew seen a ghost? (No. The reader realizes what he saw, based on a word Andrew heard but misunderstood.)

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Seven's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
273+9 ss | 13+0 nvt | 16+0 nva | 83+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

I continue to be in a reading slump. The calendar matters enough to me that I'll keep filling it, but it may with only one medium novel, and the rest shorter works, not the usual two novels, or even three.

●●●○○ Spring Bank Holiday - Andrew Calow (2021 ss)
Mary and Peter work for the county health office, inspecting kitchens. Two establishments planned on opening new dining facilities the day after the bank holiday, so they flipped a coin to see who went where; Peter got the cricket club and Mary the Collycroft Naturist Club. At least they'd get overtime…

Mary arrives, shows no discomfort at the nude people she sees, and inspects the kitchen — 5 out of 5 — then writes up her report and submits it online. Club manager Jeff invites Mary to stay for lunch — which she pays for, ethics rules and all — then goes for a swim. Jeff notes that Mary already has an all-over tan.

●●●●○ Shared Secrets - Martin Brant (2017 nov)
It's the Sixties or Seventies (wall phones are still a thing), and almost-sixteen Timothy and his 18-year-old sister Tiffany live at the edge of town with their mother Joyce. And also their father, who occasionally works odd jobs for booze money, but mostly spends his waking hours at a bar. The family is on food stamps, which usually run out before the end of the month.

One very hot, late-August day, Tim and Tif go fishing at a nearby stream to catch catfish so the family will have something to eat. Seeking relief from the heat, Tiffany goes skinny-dipping, and after a bit, coaxes Timothy to join her. They swim nude several more times before Tiffany decides they should both go nude at home when no one's there. Their mother gets home from work early one day and sees them, and doesn't object, as long as they're dressed when their father is expected to get home, since he has a temper.

And so it goes, until one day their father comes home unexpectedly and catches them. He gets angry and slaps Tiffany, then storms off when Joyce protests. Driving home from the bar, he gets arrested for drunk driving, not for the first time. Joyce can't afford the $500 bail, and after the incident with Tif, wouldn't pay it anyway. He stays in jail for a week, then gets sentenced to five years as a repeat offender.

Mr. Benson, who owns the land near the stream, finds Tim and Tif swimming nude, and doesn't object. He invites them to his house for some fresh pie, where Mrs. Benson is nude as Mr. Benson undresses. They've long been nudists, as are their grown-up boys, who used to go skinny-dipping with Joyce.

Tif and Tim talk their mother into going nude at home, since the house is so hot and humid with the washing she's had to take in to make up for what little salary her husband used to contribute to the household. Tif decides to invite some other kids to go swimming nude with them, including her not-quite-boyfriend, a female friend, and that friend's sister in Tim's class. The event goes well.

The Bensons hold a nude dinner, with Joyce and her kids, and Tim's new girlfriend. They invite another nudist, a man whose wife recently died. Ted and Joyce can be friends, even if she doesn't choose to divorce her loser husband. Life goes on, just without clothes much of the time.

●●●●◐ The Syntax of Consciousness - Pavarti K. Tyler (2015 ss)
Jamie's girlfriend had died in an auto accident two month's ago. She was depressed and needed money to keep paying rent, so she signed up for a medical trial for a neural implant, ‘Jiminy,’ billed as “the little voice inside your head.” She was supposed to go through the initialization steps slowly, but when the implant suggested she could just get them over with quickly, Jamie agreed. Result: Minnie.

Minnie was the female-gendered Artificial General Intelligence — which was supposed to be a gender-neutral non-sapient info-supplement program — resulting from the interface between the implant, Jamie's brain, and the general net. The bootstrapped sapient ends up taking over more and more of Jamie's life, even going so far as to alter her brain chemistry so she sleeps while Minnie shows up at her office and does her job for her.

Jamie becomes conscious one day and finds she's wearing a slinky dress and high heels (neither of which she ever does), and playing high-stakes poker with some questionable individuals. She gets out of there, with Minnie's assistance.

⎡ They knew me as her. I have to call InGen! I have to get the implant out of me. My adrenaline races and I open my purse, searching for my phone.
    No.
    Yes! This is my life!
    You don’t want it. You don’t live it.

Images of myself, crying and depressed, flip through my mind, one after the next. I’m in my apartment, night after night, watching the screenplayer, doing nothing. I work and cry and sleep, talking to no one but Minnie. ⎦

The next time she's awake, she's having an interview about the medical trial, and Minnie is firmly in the driver's seat, telling the nurse how everything is going swimmingly…

●●●○○ A Daughter of Pan {Dr. Taverner 07} (1926 ss)
A firm woman and the drill-sergeant assigned to the matron's youngest daughter show up at Taverner's nursing home, complaining the young woman's mind “is not developing properly,” although “her terrible outbreaks of wildness and temper have practically ceased.” Diana has the aspect of a whipped dog, doing little but cower from life.

As she slowly recovers, it's clear that Diana is more a nature spirit than a young woman, as witness the wild run she took Dr. Rhodes on across the fen. She can see the Old Gods, and anyone in her presence also senses them.

Another patient of the home was Tennant, whose mood modulated between serene placidity and suicidal depression. The only other person he really noticed was Diana, dressed in the Puck costume she'd pulled from the theater supplies. As has happened more than once in these tales, two broken creatures combined to make a workable couple. They end up wed, and head off into the countryside with a donkey, a tent, and cooking supplies, living the wild, free life that rescues them from conformity.

●●●○○ Alien Envoy {Ellwood 1} - Malcolm Jameson (1944 ss)
Half a century ago a fleet of fifty ships had entered Sol System from the direction of the constellation Ursa Major. The Ursans had scouted all the planets, then left. Human ships had attacked them with katatron beams, to no effect; blasts of pink lightning from the alien ships destroyed the human vessels.

Forty years later, huge waves of Ursan ships began arriving once more. It was clear they were colonizing Jupiter. Decades of fighting had left many human ships destroyed, but until today, no Ursan ship was damaged. A lucky shot with the new torpedo had holed the stern part of a ship, but the bow section was intact, with a surviving Ursan inside. The damaged ship was towed to a Bureau of Interplanetary Military Intelligence base on Luna.

The dead crew in the rear section showed the Ursans to resemble a cross between a sea turtle, a squid, and a snail, with many tentacles — some with flexible tips, others with specialized hard tips — and nothing resembling eyes or mouth. The humans learn from the bodies, and construct a motorized chair-cum-suit in which a human could survive the toxic atmosphere and 3.2 gees gravity.

Ellwood (whose last name appears 73 times in this story, never with a first name) is selected to enter the ship and negotiate with the alien, using methods worked out with the primitive peoples of Mars and Venus. At the end of which time, he finds that the Ursan — excuse me, "Armadian" — envoy has used the time to synch his electromagnetic sense with Ellwood's brain, and communicates with him using induced visions. Things work out well in the end, enough for a sequel.

●●○○○ The Arm of Enmord - Jack Sharkey (1959 ss)
New colony worlds mean new legends. Arcturus Beta, surveyed by a ship with a Teutonic crew, called its monsters in the dark Teufel Menschen, or Devil Folk. They were changelings who lived in underground labyrinths, and lured maidens into their lair.

Drake Talbot thought there had to be a germ of truth in the legends, and hoped to find the Teufs. His fiancée Stacey thought his dream silly, until Tymbel showed up. The young man (who she'd known on Earth), had arrived on Beta in the colonist flight the month before hers, and then had been lost in the woods years ago.

Tymbel claimed he'd found both the Teufs and a treasure, and he needed a witness to his find so that the colony leaders would let him keep it and go back to civilization. He thought Drake would do the job, and when Stacey told him, Drake agreed, and the two men set off into the dark forest. A decent start, but a pedestrian ending.

●●●○○ The Hanging Stranger - Philip K. Dick (1953 ss)
PKD does Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a trademark dollop of "Is the world crazy, or am I?" and a dash of religious exceptionalism.

After a day spent in his basement preparing for some construction work, Ed Loyce, owner of Loyce TV Sales and Service, heads for the store to cover for the salesmen during their dinner break, then do some evening paperwork. When he gets there, he finds a dead man hanging from a lamp post. Loyce freaks out, and calls out the other shopkeepers — Fergusson from his pharmacy, Potter from his shoe shop, Jenkins from the stationery store — and no one else has an issue with it.

The police come to see what the fuss is, but Pikeville is a small town, and Ed recognizes that these aren't local cops. He manages to get away. Near the town hall, he sees a beam coming down from the sky, somehow darker than the surrounding nighttime, and within that beam crab-moth beings were flying down and merging with people in the area.

Loyce makes it home, where he tries to get his wife and sons in the car, but they don't see any reason to panic, then in a certain light he sees that his son looks transparent, and within him is a crab-moth…

●●●◐○ The Criminologist Affair {Stewart Grant 2} - Jack Dearborn (2023 nov)
Fielding College, twice employer of Private Investigator Miles Grant, now calls on his PI son Stewart. There have been two rapes, and the police have made no progress on finding the rapist. Stewart initially has little success, but he does meet the student librarian who runs the info desk evenings — the women were both raped walking from the library to the dorms — and develops a relationship with her.

In what seems a "look the answer up in the back of the book" moment, someone who looked like a possible suspect tells Stewart of another suspect, and then it's just a matter of Stewart staking out several places over two weeks to get the proof needed. I get the increasing notion Dearborn is more interested in the nudity than the investigations, which are getting ever shorter shrift.

The flirty nudity part of this series suffers in the start of the book, since Stewart lives alone. He may be nude at home, but he has no one to talk to. Things look up when he starts seeing Carly, especially after he's invited to the house where she lives with her widowed mother, whom he finds out is one of the people in the Nefarious Nudist book, and that both mother and daughter are nudists.

People the Grant family meet frequently turn out to be nudists. Stewart has a nude dinner with Carly and her mother, and when the case is successfully resolved, the mother visits her son for a weekend, allowing Carly and Stewart to have celebratory sex in every room of her house. Stewart also visits his parents and grandmother, and there is some sexual banter there.

●●●◐○ Wolf and Hound {Ethical Vampires 2.1} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2001 nov)
While in Moscow, Sabra — an ancient vampire who recalls the Romans coming to the British Isles — has a dream about a ship without a crew beaching itself in Whitby, where a great black wolf reeking of dark blood magic bounds ashore. It attacks her near Whitby Abbey. Sabra awakens and begins arranging passage back to England.

She learns the ship and wolf were real, so she seeks the shape-shifter. One of the European Breed ‹sniff› of vampire has come to her island. One that has the Talent, but whose narcissism meant her never trained at it. Sabra is involved at the edges of the Dracula tale, seeing Renfield and Mina Harker, watching Van Helsing and his helpers from the sidelines. It turns out that it's Sabra who truly defeated Vlad Tepes and made him flee back to his mountain home, not the mortals in Bram Stoker's tale.

●●●○○ Meatbots - Timothy Capehart (2010 ss)
At a ChemVeg Agrimedium Processing Plant in "Equatorial America" — there's a story there, one not even slightly explained in this tale — Chundhry and Barton tele-puppet two Meatbots — nanotech-powered corpses. The Meatbots deal with clogs and other problems in the (toxic at this stage) great vats that will become growth medium for crops on Mars.

Meatbots Delta and Gamma come into contact with the results of some unexpected chemical reaction, and hours later in their storage closet, they wake up. They have only the most fragmentary of memories, but the two male ex-humans know they like each other, a lot, and make plans to escape the facility…

●●●◐○ The Lovers - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
James Gemmell had his electric system installed a decade ago, in the first wave of electrification in rural Scotland. Now the system was failing, and the man who installed the system sent out an employee who would be in the area for a bigger job, and would get to Gemmell's place after dark.

Andrew was met by Gemmell holding a kerosene lantern, and shown to the job locations. When it was time for the living room to be checked out, Gemmell seemed to have some objection, but then led Andrew to the room. Andrew had thought Gemmell was alone in the house, but he saw a woman about a decade younger than James sitting stiffly on the couch, eyes closed. She made no move, and said nothing. It was most odd.

Later, Andrew stops at a local pub, and gets talking to a chatty sort. He talks about the job, and seeing Gemmell and his wife, and the man splutters. Janet Gemmell had died eight years ago. Had Andrew seen a ghost? (No. The reader realizes what he saw, based on a word Andrew heard but misunderstood.)

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Seven's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
273+9 ss | 13+0 nvt | 16+0 nva | 83+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

I continue to be in a reading slump. The calendar matters enough to me that I'll keep filling it, but it may with only one medium novel, and the rest shorter works, not the usual two novels, or even three.

●●●○○ Spring Bank Holiday - Andrew Calow (2021 ss)
Mary and Peter work for the county health office, inspecting kitchens. Two establishments planned on opening new dining facilities the day after the bank holiday, so they flipped a coin to see who went where; Peter got the cricket club and Mary the Collycroft Naturist Club. At least they'd get overtime…

Mary arrives, shows no discomfort at the nude people she sees, and inspects the kitchen — 5 out of 5 — then writes up her report and submits it online. Club manager Jeff invites Mary to stay for lunch — which she pays for, ethics rules and all — then goes for a swim. Jeff notes that Mary already has an all-over tan.

●●●●○ Shared Secrets - Martin Brant (2017 nov)
It's the Sixties or Seventies (wall phones are still a thing), and almost-sixteen Timothy and his 18-year-old sister Tiffany live at the edge of town with their mother Joyce. And also their father, who occasionally works odd jobs for booze money, but mostly spends his waking hours at a bar. The family is on food stamps, which usually run out before the end of the month.

One very hot, late-August day, Tim and Tif go fishing at a nearby stream to catch catfish so the family will have something to eat. Seeking relief from the heat, Tiffany goes skinny-dipping, and after a bit, coaxes Timothy to join her. They swim nude several more times before Tiffany decides they should both go nude at home when no one's there. Their mother gets home from work early one day and sees them, and doesn't object, as long as they're dressed when their father is expected to get home, since he has a temper.

And so it goes, until one day their father comes home unexpectedly and catches them. He gets angry and slaps Tiffany, then storms off when Joyce protests. Driving home from the bar, he gets arrested for drunk driving, not for the first time. Joyce can't afford the $500 bail, and after the incident with Tif, wouldn't pay it anyway. He stays in jail for a week, then gets sentenced to five years as a repeat offender.

Mr. Benson, who owns the land near the stream, finds Tim and Tif swimming nude, and doesn't object. He invites them to his house for some fresh pie, where Mrs. Benson is nude as Mr. Benson undresses. They've long been nudists, as are their grown-up boys, who used to go skinny-dipping with Joyce.

Tif and Tim talk their mother into going nude at home, since the house is so hot and humid with the washing she's had to take in to make up for what little salary her husband used to contribute to the household. Tif decides to invite some other kids to go swimming nude with them, including her not-quite-boyfriend, a female friend, and that friend's sister in Tim's class. The event goes well.

The Bensons hold a nude dinner, with Joyce and her kids, and Tim's new girlfriend. They invite another nudist, a man whose wife recently died. Ted and Joyce can be friends, even if she doesn't choose to divorce her loser husband. Life goes on, just without clothes much of the time.

●●●●◐ The Syntax of Consciousness - Pavarti K. Tyler (2015 ss)
Jamie's girlfriend had died in an auto accident two month's ago. She was depressed and needed money to keep paying rent, so she signed up for a medical trial for a neural implant, ‘Jiminy,’ billed as “the little voice inside your head.” She was supposed to go through the initialization steps slowly, but when the implant suggested she could just get them over with quickly, Jamie agreed. Result: Minnie.

Minnie was the female-gendered Artificial General Intelligence — which was supposed to be a gender-neutral non-sapient info-supplement program — resulting from the interface between the implant, Jamie's brain, and the general net. The bootstrapped sapient ends up taking over more and more of Jamie's life, even going so far as to alter her brain chemistry so she sleeps while Minnie shows up at her office and does her job for her.

Jamie becomes conscious one day and finds she's wearing a slinky dress and high heels (neither of which she ever does), and playing high-stakes poker with some questionable individuals. She gets out of there, with Minnie's assistance.

⎡ They knew me as her. I have to call InGen! I have to get the implant out of me. My adrenaline races and I open my purse, searching for my phone.
    No.
    Yes! This is my life!
    You don’t want it. You don’t live it.

Images of myself, crying and depressed, flip through my mind, one after the next. I’m in my apartment, night after night, watching the screenplayer, doing nothing. I work and cry and sleep, talking to no one but Minnie. ⎦

The next time she's awake, she's having an interview about the medical trial, and Minnie is firmly in the driver's seat, telling the nurse how everything is going swimmingly…

●●●○○ A Daughter of Pan {Dr. Taverner 07} (1926 ss)
A firm woman and the drill-sergeant assigned to the matron's youngest daughter show up at Taverner's nursing home, complaining the young woman's mind “is not developing properly,” although “her terrible outbreaks of wildness and temper have practically ceased.” Diana has the aspect of a whipped dog, doing little but cower from life.

As she slowly recovers, it's clear that Diana is more a nature spirit than a young woman, as witness the wild run she took Dr. Rhodes on across the fen. She can see the Old Gods, and anyone in her presence also senses them.

Another patient of the home was Tennant, whose mood modulated between serene placidity and suicidal depression. The only other person he really noticed was Diana, dressed in the Puck costume she'd pulled from the theater supplies. As has happened more than once in these tales, two broken creatures combined to make a workable couple. They end up wed, and head off into the countryside with a donkey, a tent, and cooking supplies, living the wild, free life that rescues them from conformity.

●●●○○ Alien Envoy {Ellwood 1} - Malcolm Jameson (1944 ss)
Half a century ago a fleet of fifty ships had entered Sol System from the direction of the constellation Ursa Major. The Ursans had scouted all the planets, then left. Human ships had attacked them with katatron beams, to no effect; blasts of pink lightning from the alien ships destroyed the human vessels.

Forty years later, huge waves of Ursan ships began arriving once more. It was clear they were colonizing Jupiter. Decades of fighting had left many human ships destroyed, but until today, no Ursan ship was damaged. A lucky shot with the new torpedo had holed the stern part of a ship, but the bow section was intact, with a surviving Ursan inside. The damaged ship was towed to a Bureau of Interplanetary Military Intelligence base on Luna.

The dead crew in the rear section showed the Ursans to resemble a cross between a sea turtle, a squid, and a snail, with many tentacles — some with flexible tips, others with specialized hard tips — and nothing resembling eyes or mouth. The humans learn from the bodies, and construct a motorized chair-cum-suit in which a human could survive the toxic atmosphere and 3.2 gees gravity.

Ellwood (whose last name appears 73 times in this story, never with a first name) is selected to enter the ship and negotiate with the alien, using methods worked out with the primitive peoples of Mars and Venus. At the end of which time, he finds that the Ursan — excuse me, "Armadian" — envoy has used the time to synch his electromagnetic sense with Ellwood's brain, and communicates with him using induced visions. Things work out well in the end, enough for a sequel.

●●○○○ The Arm of Enmord - Jack Sharkey (1959 ss)
New colony worlds mean new legends. Arcturus Beta, surveyed by a ship with a Teutonic crew, called its monsters in the dark Teufel Menschen, or Devil Folk. They were changelings who lived in underground labyrinths, and lured maidens into their lair.

Drake Talbot thought there had to be a germ of truth in the legends, and hoped to find the Teufs. His fiancée Stacey thought his dream silly, until Tymbel showed up. The young man (who she'd known on Earth), had arrived on Beta in the colonist flight the month before hers, and then had been lost in the woods years ago.

Tymbel claimed he'd found both the Teufs and a treasure, and he needed a witness to his find so that the colony leaders would let him keep it and go back to civilization. He thought Drake would do the job, and when Stacey told him, Drake agreed, and the two men set off into the dark forest. A decent start, but a pedestrian ending.

●●●○○ The Hanging Stranger - Philip K. Dick (1953 ss)
PKD does Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a trademark dollop of "Is the world crazy, or am I?" and a dash of religious exceptionalism.

After a day spent in his basement preparing for some construction work, Ed Loyce, owner of Loyce TV Sales and Service, heads for the store to cover for the salesmen during their dinner break, then do some evening paperwork. When he gets there, he finds a dead man hanging from a lamp post. Loyce freaks out, and calls out the other shopkeepers — Fergusson from his pharmacy, Potter from his shoe shop, Jenkins from the stationery store — and no one else has an issue with it.

The police come to see what the fuss is, but Pikeville is a small town, and Ed recognizes that these aren't local cops. He manages to get away. Near the town hall, he sees a beam coming down from the sky, somehow darker than the surrounding nighttime, and within that beam crab-moth beings were flying down and merging with people in the area.

Loyce makes it home, where he tries to get his wife and sons in the car, but they don't see any reason to panic, then in a certain light he sees that his son looks transparent, and within him is a crab-moth…

●●●◐○ The Criminologist Affair {Stewart Grant 2} - Jack Dearborn (2023 nov)
Fielding College, twice employer of Private Investigator Miles Grant, now calls on his PI son Stewart. There have been two rapes, and the police have made no progress on finding the rapist. Stewart initially has little success, but he does meet the student librarian who runs the info desk evenings — the women were both raped walking from the library to the dorms — and develops a relationship with her.

In what seems a "look the answer up in the back of the book" moment, someone who looked like a possible suspect tells Stewart of another suspect, and then it's just a matter of Stewart staking out several places over two weeks to get the proof needed. I get the increasing notion Dearborn is more interested in the nudity than the investigations, which are getting ever shorter shrift.

The flirty nudity part of this series suffers in the start of the book, since Stewart lives alone. He may be nude at home, but he has no one to talk to. Things look up when he starts seeing Carly, especially after he's invited to the house where she lives with her widowed mother, whom he finds out is one of the people in the Nefarious Nudist book, and that both mother and daughter are nudists.

People the Grant family meet frequently turn out to be nudists. Stewart has a nude dinner with Carly and her mother, and when the case is successfully resolved, the mother visits her son for a weekend, allowing Carly and Stewart to have celebratory sex in every room of her house. Stewart also visits his parents and grandmother, and there is some sexual banter there.

●●●◐○ Wolf and Hound {Ethical Vampires 2.1} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2001 nov)
While in Moscow, Sabra — an ancient vampire who recalls the Romans coming to the British Isles — has a dream about a ship without a crew beaching itself in Whitby, where a great black wolf reeking of dark blood magic bounds ashore. It attacks her near Whitby Abbey. Sabra awakens and begins arranging passage back to England.

She learns the ship and wolf were real, so she seeks the shape-shifter. One of the European Breed ‹sniff› of vampire has come to her island. One that has the Talent, but whose narcissism meant her never trained at it. Sabra is involved at the edges of the Dracula tale, seeing Renfield and Mina Harker, watching Van Helsing and his helpers from the sidelines. It turns out that it's Sabra who truly defeated Vlad Tepes and made him flee back to his mountain home, not the mortals in Bram Stoker's tale.

●●●○○ Meatbots - Timothy Capehart (2010 ss)
At a ChemVeg Agrimedium Processing Plant in "Equatorial America" — there's a story there, one not even slightly explained in this tale — Chundhry and Barton tele-puppet two Meatbots — nanotech-powered corpses. The Meatbots deal with clogs and other problems in the (toxic at this stage) great vats that will become growth medium for crops on Mars.

Meatbots Delta and Gamma come into contact with the results of some unexpected chemical reaction, and hours later in their storage closet, they wake up. They have only the most fragmentary of memories, but the two male ex-humans know they like each other, a lot, and make plans to escape the facility…

●●●◐○ The Lovers - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
James Gemmell had his electric system installed a decade ago, in the first wave of electrification in rural Scotland. Now the system was failing, and the man who installed the system sent out an employee who would be in the area for a bigger job, and would get to Gemmell's place after dark.

Andrew was met by Gemmell holding a kerosene lantern, and shown to the job locations. When it was time for the living room to be checked out, Gemmell seemed to have some objection, but then led Andrew to the room. Andrew had thought Gemmell was alone in the house, but he saw a woman about a decade younger than James sitting stiffly on the couch, eyes closed. She made no move, and said nothing. It was most odd.

Later, Andrew stops at a local pub, and gets talking to a chatty sort. He talks about the job, and seeing Gemmell and his wife, and the man splutters. Janet Gemmell had died eight years ago. Had Andrew seen a ghost? (No. The reader realizes what he saw, based on a word Andrew heard but misunderstood.)

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Seven's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
273+9 ss | 13+0 nvt | 16+0 nva | 83+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

I continue to be in a reading slump. The calendar matters enough to me that I'll keep filling it, but it may with only one medium novel, and the rest shorter works, not the usual two novels, or even three.

●●●○○ Spring Bank Holiday - Andrew Calow (2021 ss)
Mary and Peter work for the county health office, inspecting kitchens. Two establishments planned on opening new dining facilities the day after the bank holiday, so they flipped a coin to see who went where; Peter got the cricket club and Mary the Collycroft Naturist Club. At least they'd get overtime…

Mary arrives, shows no discomfort at the nude people she sees, and inspects the kitchen — 5 out of 5 — then writes up her report and submits it online. Club manager Jeff invites Mary to stay for lunch — which she pays for, ethics rules and all — then goes for a swim. Jeff notes that Mary already has an all-over tan.

●●●●○ Shared Secrets - Martin Brant (2017 nov)
It's the Sixties or Seventies (wall phones are still a thing), and almost-sixteen Timothy and his 18-year-old sister Tiffany live at the edge of town with their mother Joyce. And also their father, who occasionally works odd jobs for booze money, but mostly spends his waking hours at a bar. The family is on food stamps, which usually run out before the end of the month.

One very hot, late-August day, Tim and Tif go fishing at a nearby stream to catch catfish so the family will have something to eat. Seeking relief from the heat, Tiffany goes skinny-dipping, and after a bit, coaxes Timothy to join her. They swim nude several more times before Tiffany decides they should both go nude at home when no one's there. Their mother gets home from work early one day and sees them, and doesn't object, as long as they're dressed when their father is expected to get home, since he has a temper.

And so it goes, until one day their father comes home unexpectedly and catches them. He gets angry and slaps Tiffany, then storms off when Joyce protests. Driving home from the bar, he gets arrested for drunk driving, not for the first time. Joyce can't afford the $500 bail, and after the incident with Tif, wouldn't pay it anyway. He stays in jail for a week, then gets sentenced to five years as a repeat offender.

Mr. Benson, who owns the land near the stream, finds Tim and Tif swimming nude, and doesn't object. He invites them to his house for some fresh pie, where Mrs. Benson is nude as Mr. Benson undresses. They've long been nudists, as are their grown-up boys, who used to go skinny-dipping with Joyce.

Tif and Tim talk their mother into going nude at home, since the house is so hot and humid with the washing she's had to take in to make up for what little salary her husband used to contribute to the household. Tif decides to invite some other kids to go swimming nude with them, including her not-quite-boyfriend, a female friend, and that friend's sister in Tim's class. The event goes well.

The Bensons hold a nude dinner, with Joyce and her kids, and Tim's new girlfriend. They invite another nudist, a man whose wife recently died. Ted and Joyce can be friends, even if she doesn't choose to divorce her loser husband. Life goes on, just without clothes much of the time.

●●●●◐ The Syntax of Consciousness - Pavarti K. Tyler (2015 ss)
Jamie's girlfriend had died in an auto accident two month's ago. She was depressed and needed money to keep paying rent, so she signed up for a medical trial for a neural implant, ‘Jiminy,’ billed as “the little voice inside your head.” She was supposed to go through the initialization steps slowly, but when the implant suggested she could just get them over with quickly, Jamie agreed. Result: Minnie.

Minnie was the female-gendered Artificial General Intelligence — which was supposed to be a gender-neutral non-sapient info-supplement program — resulting from the interface between the implant, Jamie's brain, and the general net. The bootstrapped sapient ends up taking over more and more of Jamie's life, even going so far as to alter her brain chemistry so she sleeps while Minnie shows up at her office and does her job for her.

Jamie becomes conscious one day and finds she's wearing a slinky dress and high heels (neither of which she ever does), and playing high-stakes poker with some questionable individuals. She gets out of there, with Minnie's assistance.

⎡ They knew me as her. I have to call InGen! I have to get the implant out of me. My adrenaline races and I open my purse, searching for my phone.
    No.
    Yes! This is my life!
    You don’t want it. You don’t live it.

Images of myself, crying and depressed, flip through my mind, one after the next. I’m in my apartment, night after night, watching the screenplayer, doing nothing. I work and cry and sleep, talking to no one but Minnie. ⎦

The next time she's awake, she's having an interview about the medical trial, and Minnie is firmly in the driver's seat, telling the nurse how everything is going swimmingly…

●●●○○ A Daughter of Pan {Dr. Taverner 07} (1926 ss)
A firm woman and the drill-sergeant assigned to the matron's youngest daughter show up at Taverner's nursing home, complaining the young woman's mind “is not developing properly,” although “her terrible outbreaks of wildness and temper have practically ceased.” Diana has the aspect of a whipped dog, doing little but cower from life.

As she slowly recovers, it's clear that Diana is more a nature spirit than a young woman, as witness the wild run she took Dr. Rhodes on across the fen. She can see the Old Gods, and anyone in her presence also senses them.

Another patient of the home was Tennant, whose mood modulated between serene placidity and suicidal depression. The only other person he really noticed was Diana, dressed in the Puck costume she'd pulled from the theater supplies. As has happened more than once in these tales, two broken creatures combined to make a workable couple. They end up wed, and head off into the countryside with a donkey, a tent, and cooking supplies, living the wild, free life that rescues them from conformity.

●●●○○ Alien Envoy {Ellwood 1} - Malcolm Jameson (1944 ss)
Half a century ago a fleet of fifty ships had entered Sol System from the direction of the constellation Ursa Major. The Ursans had scouted all the planets, then left. Human ships had attacked them with katatron beams, to no effect; blasts of pink lightning from the alien ships destroyed the human vessels.

Forty years later, huge waves of Ursan ships began arriving once more. It was clear they were colonizing Jupiter. Decades of fighting had left many human ships destroyed, but until today, no Ursan ship was damaged. A lucky shot with the new torpedo had holed the stern part of a ship, but the bow section was intact, with a surviving Ursan inside. The damaged ship was towed to a Bureau of Interplanetary Military Intelligence base on Luna.

The dead crew in the rear section showed the Ursans to resemble a cross between a sea turtle, a squid, and a snail, with many tentacles — some with flexible tips, others with specialized hard tips — and nothing resembling eyes or mouth. The humans learn from the bodies, and construct a motorized chair-cum-suit in which a human could survive the toxic atmosphere and 3.2 gees gravity.

Ellwood (whose last name appears 73 times in this story, never with a first name) is selected to enter the ship and negotiate with the alien, using methods worked out with the primitive peoples of Mars and Venus. At the end of which time, he finds that the Ursan — excuse me, "Armadian" — envoy has used the time to synch his electromagnetic sense with Ellwood's brain, and communicates with him using induced visions. Things work out well in the end, enough for a sequel.

●●○○○ The Arm of Enmord - Jack Sharkey (1959 ss)
New colony worlds mean new legends. Arcturus Beta, surveyed by a ship with a Teutonic crew, called its monsters in the dark Teufel Menschen, or Devil Folk. They were changelings who lived in underground labyrinths, and lured maidens into their lair.

Drake Talbot thought there had to be a germ of truth in the legends, and hoped to find the Teufs. His fiancée Stacey thought his dream silly, until Tymbel showed up. The young man (who she'd known on Earth), had arrived on Beta in the colonist flight the month before hers, and then had been lost in the woods years ago.

Tymbel claimed he'd found both the Teufs and a treasure, and he needed a witness to his find so that the colony leaders would let him keep it and go back to civilization. He thought Drake would do the job, and when Stacey told him, Drake agreed, and the two men set off into the dark forest. A decent start, but a pedestrian ending.

●●●○○ The Hanging Stranger - Philip K. Dick (1953 ss)
PKD does Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a trademark dollop of "Is the world crazy, or am I?" and a dash of religious exceptionalism.

After a day spent in his basement preparing for some construction work, Ed Loyce, owner of Loyce TV Sales and Service, heads for the store to cover for the salesmen during their dinner break, then do some evening paperwork. When he gets there, he finds a dead man hanging from a lamp post. Loyce freaks out, and calls out the other shopkeepers — Fergusson from his pharmacy, Potter from his shoe shop, Jenkins from the stationery store — and no one else has an issue with it.

The police come to see what the fuss is, but Pikeville is a small town, and Ed recognizes that these aren't local cops. He manages to get away. Near the town hall, he sees a beam coming down from the sky, somehow darker than the surrounding nighttime, and within that beam crab-moth beings were flying down and merging with people in the area.

Loyce makes it home, where he tries to get his wife and sons in the car, but they don't see any reason to panic, then in a certain light he sees that his son looks transparent, and within him is a crab-moth…

●●●◐○ The Criminologist Affair {Stewart Grant 2} - Jack Dearborn (2023 nov)
Fielding College, twice employer of Private Investigator Miles Grant, now calls on his PI son Stewart. There have been two rapes, and the police have made no progress on finding the rapist. Stewart initially has little success, but he does meet the student librarian who runs the info desk evenings — the women were both raped walking from the library to the dorms — and develops a relationship with her.

In what seems a "look the answer up in the back of the book" moment, someone who looked like a possible suspect tells Stewart of another suspect, and then it's just a matter of Stewart staking out several places over two weeks to get the proof needed. I get the increasing notion Dearborn is more interested in the nudity than the investigations, which are getting ever shorter shrift.

The flirty nudity part of this series suffers in the start of the book, since Stewart lives alone. He may be nude at home, but he has no one to talk to. Things look up when he starts seeing Carly, especially after he's invited to the house where she lives with her widowed mother, whom he finds out is one of the people in the Nefarious Nudist book, and that both mother and daughter are nudists.

People the Grant family meet frequently turn out to be nudists. Stewart has a nude dinner with Carly and her mother, and when the case is successfully resolved, the mother visits her son for a weekend, allowing Carly and Stewart to have celebratory sex in every room of her house. Stewart also visits his parents and grandmother, and there is some sexual banter there.

●●●◐○ Wolf and Hound {Ethical Vampires 2.1} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2001 nov)
While in Moscow, Sabra — an ancient vampire who recalls the Romans coming to the British Isles — has a dream about a ship without a crew beaching itself in Whitby, where a great black wolf reeking of dark blood magic bounds ashore. It attacks her near Whitby Abbey. Sabra awakens and begins arranging passage back to England.

She learns the ship and wolf were real, so she seeks the shape-shifter. One of the European Breed ‹sniff› of vampire has come to her island. One that has the Talent, but whose narcissism meant her never trained at it. Sabra is involved at the edges of the Dracula tale, seeing Renfield and Mina Harker, watching Van Helsing and his helpers from the sidelines. It turns out that it's Sabra who truly defeated Vlad Tepes and made him flee back to his mountain home, not the mortals in Bram Stoker's tale.

●●●○○ Meatbots - Timothy Capehart (2010 ss)
At a ChemVeg Agrimedium Processing Plant in "Equatorial America" — there's a story there, one not even slightly explained in this tale — Chundhry and Barton tele-puppet two Meatbots — nanotech-powered corpses. The Meatbots deal with clogs and other problems in the (toxic at this stage) great vats that will become growth medium for crops on Mars.

Meatbots Delta and Gamma come into contact with the results of some unexpected chemical reaction, and hours later in their storage closet, they wake up. They have only the most fragmentary of memories, but the two male ex-humans know they like each other, a lot, and make plans to escape the facility…

●●●◐○ The Lovers - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
James Gemmell had his electric system installed a decade ago, in the first wave of electrification in rural Scotland. Now the system was failing, and the man who installed the system sent out an employee who would be in the area for a bigger job, and would get to Gemmell's place after dark.

Andrew was met by Gemmell holding a kerosene lantern, and shown to the job locations. When it was time for the living room to be checked out, Gemmell seemed to have some objection, but then led Andrew to the room. Andrew had thought Gemmell was alone in the house, but he saw a woman about a decade younger than James sitting stiffly on the couch, eyes closed. She made no move, and said nothing. It was most odd.

Later, Andrew stops at a local pub, and gets talking to a chatty sort. He talks about the job, and seeing Gemmell and his wife, and the man splutters. Janet Gemmell had died eight years ago. Had Andrew seen a ghost? (No. The reader realizes what he saw, based on a word Andrew heard but misunderstood.)

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Seven's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
273+9 ss | 13+0 nvt | 16+0 nva | 83+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

I continue to be in a reading slump. The calendar matters enough to me that I'll keep filling it, but it may with only one medium novel, and the rest shorter works, not the usual two novels, or even three.

●●●○○ Spring Bank Holiday - Andrew Calow (2021 ss)
Mary and Peter work for the county health office, inspecting kitchens. Two establishments planned on opening new dining facilities the day after the bank holiday, so they flipped a coin to see who went where; Peter got the cricket club and Mary the Collycroft Naturist Club. At least they'd get overtime…

Mary arrives, shows no discomfort at the nude people she sees, and inspects the kitchen — 5 out of 5 — then writes up her report and submits it online. Club manager Jeff invites Mary to stay for lunch — which she pays for, ethics rules and all — then goes for a swim. Jeff notes that Mary already has an all-over tan.

●●●●○ Shared Secrets - Martin Brant (2017 nov)
It's the Sixties or Seventies (wall phones are still a thing), and almost-sixteen Timothy and his 18-year-old sister Tiffany live at the edge of town with their mother Joyce. And also their father, who occasionally works odd jobs for booze money, but mostly spends his waking hours at a bar. The family is on food stamps, which usually run out before the end of the month.

One very hot, late-August day, Tim and Tif go fishing at a nearby stream to catch catfish so the family will have something to eat. Seeking relief from the heat, Tiffany goes skinny-dipping, and after a bit, coaxes Timothy to join her. They swim nude several more times before Tiffany decides they should both go nude at home when no one's there. Their mother gets home from work early one day and sees them, and doesn't object, as long as they're dressed when their father is expected to get home, since he has a temper.

And so it goes, until one day their father comes home unexpectedly and catches them. He gets angry and slaps Tiffany, then storms off when Joyce protests. Driving home from the bar, he gets arrested for drunk driving, not for the first time. Joyce can't afford the $500 bail, and after the incident with Tif, wouldn't pay it anyway. He stays in jail for a week, then gets sentenced to five years as a repeat offender.

Mr. Benson, who owns the land near the stream, finds Tim and Tif swimming nude, and doesn't object. He invites them to his house for some fresh pie, where Mrs. Benson is nude as Mr. Benson undresses. They've long been nudists, as are their grown-up boys, who used to go skinny-dipping with Joyce.

Tif and Tim talk their mother into going nude at home, since the house is so hot and humid with the washing she's had to take in to make up for what little salary her husband used to contribute to the household. Tif decides to invite some other kids to go swimming nude with them, including her not-quite-boyfriend, a female friend, and that friend's sister in Tim's class. The event goes well.

The Bensons hold a nude dinner, with Joyce and her kids, and Tim's new girlfriend. They invite another nudist, a man whose wife recently died. Ted and Joyce can be friends, even if she doesn't choose to divorce her loser husband. Life goes on, just without clothes much of the time.

●●●●◐ The Syntax of Consciousness - Pavarti K. Tyler (2015 ss)
Jamie's girlfriend had died in an auto accident two month's ago. She was depressed and needed money to keep paying rent, so she signed up for a medical trial for a neural implant, ‘Jiminy,’ billed as “the little voice inside your head.” She was supposed to go through the initialization steps slowly, but when the implant suggested she could just get them over with quickly, Jamie agreed. Result: Minnie.

Minnie was the female-gendered Artificial General Intelligence — which was supposed to be a gender-neutral non-sapient info-supplement program — resulting from the interface between the implant, Jamie's brain, and the general net. The bootstrapped sapient ends up taking over more and more of Jamie's life, even going so far as to alter her brain chemistry so she sleeps while Minnie shows up at her office and does her job for her.

Jamie becomes conscious one day and finds she's wearing a slinky dress and high heels (neither of which she ever does), and playing high-stakes poker with some questionable individuals. She gets out of there, with Minnie's assistance.

⎡ They knew me as her. I have to call InGen! I have to get the implant out of me. My adrenaline races and I open my purse, searching for my phone.
    No.
    Yes! This is my life!
    You don’t want it. You don’t live it.

Images of myself, crying and depressed, flip through my mind, one after the next. I’m in my apartment, night after night, watching the screenplayer, doing nothing. I work and cry and sleep, talking to no one but Minnie. ⎦

The next time she's awake, she's having an interview about the medical trial, and Minnie is firmly in the driver's seat, telling the nurse how everything is going swimmingly…

●●●○○ A Daughter of Pan {Dr. Taverner 07} (1926 ss)
A firm woman and the drill-sergeant assigned to the matron's youngest daughter show up at Taverner's nursing home, complaining the young woman's mind “is not developing properly,” although “her terrible outbreaks of wildness and temper have practically ceased.” Diana has the aspect of a whipped dog, doing little but cower from life.

As she slowly recovers, it's clear that Diana is more a nature spirit than a young woman, as witness the wild run she took Dr. Rhodes on across the fen. She can see the Old Gods, and anyone in her presence also senses them.

Another patient of the home was Tennant, whose mood modulated between serene placidity and suicidal depression. The only other person he really noticed was Diana, dressed in the Puck costume she'd pulled from the theater supplies. As has happened more than once in these tales, two broken creatures combined to make a workable couple. They end up wed, and head off into the countryside with a donkey, a tent, and cooking supplies, living the wild, free life that rescues them from conformity.

●●●○○ Alien Envoy {Ellwood 1} - Malcolm Jameson (1944 ss)
Half a century ago a fleet of fifty ships had entered Sol System from the direction of the constellation Ursa Major. The Ursans had scouted all the planets, then left. Human ships had attacked them with katatron beams, to no effect; blasts of pink lightning from the alien ships destroyed the human vessels.

Forty years later, huge waves of Ursan ships began arriving once more. It was clear they were colonizing Jupiter. Decades of fighting had left many human ships destroyed, but until today, no Ursan ship was damaged. A lucky shot with the new torpedo had holed the stern part of a ship, but the bow section was intact, with a surviving Ursan inside. The damaged ship was towed to a Bureau of Interplanetary Military Intelligence base on Luna.

The dead crew in the rear section showed the Ursans to resemble a cross between a sea turtle, a squid, and a snail, with many tentacles — some with flexible tips, others with specialized hard tips — and nothing resembling eyes or mouth. The humans learn from the bodies, and construct a motorized chair-cum-suit in which a human could survive the toxic atmosphere and 3.2 gees gravity.

Ellwood (whose last name appears 73 times in this story, never with a first name) is selected to enter the ship and negotiate with the alien, using methods worked out with the primitive peoples of Mars and Venus. At the end of which time, he finds that the Ursan — excuse me, "Armadian" — envoy has used the time to synch his electromagnetic sense with Ellwood's brain, and communicates with him using induced visions. Things work out well in the end, enough for a sequel.

●●○○○ The Arm of Enmord - Jack Sharkey (1959 ss)
New colony worlds mean new legends. Arcturus Beta, surveyed by a ship with a Teutonic crew, called its monsters in the dark Teufel Menschen, or Devil Folk. They were changelings who lived in underground labyrinths, and lured maidens into their lair.

Drake Talbot thought there had to be a germ of truth in the legends, and hoped to find the Teufs. His fiancée Stacey thought his dream silly, until Tymbel showed up. The young man (who she'd known on Earth), had arrived on Beta in the colonist flight the month before hers, and then had been lost in the woods years ago.

Tymbel claimed he'd found both the Teufs and a treasure, and he needed a witness to his find so that the colony leaders would let him keep it and go back to civilization. He thought Drake would do the job, and when Stacey told him, Drake agreed, and the two men set off into the dark forest. A decent start, but a pedestrian ending.

●●●○○ The Hanging Stranger - Philip K. Dick (1953 ss)
PKD does Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a trademark dollop of "Is the world crazy, or am I?" and a dash of religious exceptionalism.

After a day spent in his basement preparing for some construction work, Ed Loyce, owner of Loyce TV Sales and Service, heads for the store to cover for the salesmen during their dinner break, then do some evening paperwork. When he gets there, he finds a dead man hanging from a lamp post. Loyce freaks out, and calls out the other shopkeepers — Fergusson from his pharmacy, Potter from his shoe shop, Jenkins from the stationery store — and no one else has an issue with it.

The police come to see what the fuss is, but Pikeville is a small town, and Ed recognizes that these aren't local cops. He manages to get away. Near the town hall, he sees a beam coming down from the sky, somehow darker than the surrounding nighttime, and within that beam crab-moth beings were flying down and merging with people in the area.

Loyce makes it home, where he tries to get his wife and sons in the car, but they don't see any reason to panic, then in a certain light he sees that his son looks transparent, and within him is a crab-moth…

●●●◐○ The Criminologist Affair {Stewart Grant 2} - Jack Dearborn (2023 nov)
Fielding College, twice employer of Private Investigator Miles Grant, now calls on his PI son Stewart. There have been two rapes, and the police have made no progress on finding the rapist. Stewart initially has little success, but he does meet the student librarian who runs the info desk evenings — the women were both raped walking from the library to the dorms — and develops a relationship with her.

In what seems a "look the answer up in the back of the book" moment, someone who looked like a possible suspect tells Stewart of another suspect, and then it's just a matter of Stewart staking out several places over two weeks to get the proof needed. I get the increasing notion Dearborn is more interested in the nudity than the investigations, which are getting ever shorter shrift.

The flirty nudity part of this series suffers in the start of the book, since Stewart lives alone. He may be nude at home, but he has no one to talk to. Things look up when he starts seeing Carly, especially after he's invited to the house where she lives with her widowed mother, whom he finds out is one of the people in the Nefarious Nudist book, and that both mother and daughter are nudists.

People the Grant family meet frequently turn out to be nudists. Stewart has a nude dinner with Carly and her mother, and when the case is successfully resolved, the mother visits her son for a weekend, allowing Carly and Stewart to have celebratory sex in every room of her house. Stewart also visits his parents and grandmother, and there is some sexual banter there.

●●●◐○ Wolf and Hound {Ethical Vampires 2.1} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2001 nov)
While in Moscow, Sabra — an ancient vampire who recalls the Romans coming to the British Isles — has a dream about a ship without a crew beaching itself in Whitby, where a great black wolf reeking of dark blood magic bounds ashore. It attacks her near Whitby Abbey. Sabra awakens and begins arranging passage back to England.

She learns the ship and wolf were real, so she seeks the shape-shifter. One of the European Breed ‹sniff› of vampire has come to her island. One that has the Talent, but whose narcissism meant her never trained at it. Sabra is involved at the edges of the Dracula tale, seeing Renfield and Mina Harker, watching Van Helsing and his helpers from the sidelines. It turns out that it's Sabra who truly defeated Vlad Tepes and made him flee back to his mountain home, not the mortals in Bram Stoker's tale.

●●●○○ Meatbots - Timothy Capehart (2010 ss)
At a ChemVeg Agrimedium Processing Plant in "Equatorial America" — there's a story there, one not even slightly explained in this tale — Chundhry and Barton tele-puppet two Meatbots — nanotech-powered corpses. The Meatbots deal with clogs and other problems in the (toxic at this stage) great vats that will become growth medium for crops on Mars.

Meatbots Delta and Gamma come into contact with the results of some unexpected chemical reaction, and hours later in their storage closet, they wake up. They have only the most fragmentary of memories, but the two male ex-humans know they like each other, a lot, and make plans to escape the facility…

●●●◐○ The Lovers - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
James Gemmell had his electric system installed a decade ago, in the first wave of electrification in rural Scotland. Now the system was failing, and the man who installed the system sent out an employee who would be in the area for a bigger job, and would get to Gemmell's place after dark.

Andrew was met by Gemmell holding a kerosene lantern, and shown to the job locations. When it was time for the living room to be checked out, Gemmell seemed to have some objection, but then led Andrew to the room. Andrew had thought Gemmell was alone in the house, but he saw a woman about a decade younger than James sitting stiffly on the couch, eyes closed. She made no move, and said nothing. It was most odd.

Later, Andrew stops at a local pub, and gets talking to a chatty sort. He talks about the job, and seeing Gemmell and his wife, and the man splutters. Janet Gemmell had died eight years ago. Had Andrew seen a ghost? (No. The reader realizes what he saw, based on a word Andrew heard but misunderstood.)

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Seven's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
273+9 ss | 13+0 nvt | 16+0 nva | 83+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

I continue to be in a reading slump. The calendar matters enough to me that I'll keep filling it, but it may with only one medium novel, and the rest shorter works, not the usual two novels, or even three.

●●●◐○ Cute - Bob Palmer (2024 nov)
AI was taking loads of jobs. Unemployment was high, as was mental suffering over job insecurity. It was costing the UK government a fortune. They decided something must be done, and opened an ad-agency competition for ideas. Andy was VP at one of the scores of companies who entered, and decided his idea must be truly different to get looked at. Since his college friend Rick owned a robotics firm, Andy had the idea of using AI to fight the negative effects of AI.

Rick and Andy came up with the idea of Colin: a furry, softball-size animatronic robot that "breathed" and blinked and formed expressions with lips and eyebrows. It seemed alive, though the sphere never moved from where it was set down. Colin (you could change the name and voice) was your friend. He could encourage you, comfort you, entertain you, and he was there 24/7; he was "a friend for life."

This probably wouldn't have worked out even if Britain had the plants to manufacture millions of pet robots. But they didn't, so they had to manufacture in China, which allowed the factory there to "upgrade" the chip that was "out of stock". That allowed Chinese authorities to see and hear everything any Colin did.

Even without that, a bot that will always tell you you're right is just the thing to encourage extremism, so violent crimes went up. And later a study proved that delegating so much to your bot actually caused a person's hippocampus to shrink, which is something that happens in dementia.

Oh, many and varied are the things that went wrong. Such a grand experiment.

●●●◐○ Final Exam - Sam Merwin Jr (1955 ss)
Since UFOs began to be sighted in 1947, sightings have grown more frequent, with more ships per sighting. Fifteen years later, the US military is convinced that these signify the start of an invasion. The new president, however, is less certain, and orders that the military doesn't fire unless first unmistakably attacked.

Rather than hide in the prepared bunker, the Great Man and his wife had watched the latest flying saucer flight from the White House balcony, and had seen a huge craft hovering nearby. Afterward, the president goes to visit Harlan, his friend and advisor, to talk about the saucers. When he mentions that he forbid hostile action, Harlan says “Thank you” in a profound way, which makes the president curious, and leads to the explanation that Harlan is not from Earth, and that the flying saucers are doing the opposite of invading…

I liked the House of Many Worlds duology by Merwin, so I grabbed a story of his from Project Gutenberg to check out, and I'll read more. There's also a Megapack of his tales I'll get.

●●◐○○ The Tribulations of Omega Girl - AD Rowen (2020 nov)
A billionaire argued against super-powered individuals, saying it was unwise to let them set themselves above ordinary mortals as sanctioned vigilantes. His supervillain alter ego took steps to back up his view, devising a depowering ray. The plan mostly worked, rendering dozens of the Protectors of New Athens ordinary again. Some heroes were killed, and some had their powers altered in odd ways.

Twenty-three-year-old Omega Girl found out that she could still use her powers, but only when she was completely nude, not wearing so much as shoes or a mask. Legionary, the ultra-powered head of the Protectors, said Omega Girl had to become plain old Meghan Carpenter again. The Protectors had an image to maintain, and it's not like a mother would buy her kid a lunchbox with a nude superhero on it.

Naturally Meghan encountered the classic "bus about to fall off a bridge" and stripped to prevent fatalities. She became an independent, nude hero. This leads to her being repeatedly embarrassed, but this is never gone into. Omega Girl also learns someone official has put out a hit on her, calling on NoClip (Jay, a hero she's always had a crush on) to kill her.

Of course he doesn't, and together with Lyka (whom the Pulse had locked into werewolf form), the trio investigate and find out that the archvillain survived the explosion of his giant depowering ray, and is building another one…

(This book is a bit odd. It's by the same author as, and has a similar subject to, Carla Takes Her Clothes Off, yet I found this work a bit tedious, but the other one sweet. I'm pretty sure the difference is that Carla chose to go nude, and found the experience exciting and sexy. Meghan, on the other hand, was forced to go nude to use her powers, and she found nudity embarrassing. If a character doesn't enjoy their — well, usually her — nudity, neither do I.)

◍◍◍◍◍ September begins.

●●●○○ Siege Perilous {Ethical Vampires 3} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2004 nov)
The final book in the trilogy featuring vampire Richard¹ hearkens back to the first volume, with the reappearance of Charon, then a master assassin and ancient vampire seeking holy relics to tame his Beast, the killing force that eventually takes over old vampires, turning them into wolves. At the end of that book, Richard and She-Who-Walks used the Holy Grail to turn Charon back into a mortal.

Turns out that left Charon with the cancer that was killing him when he was turned, so now he's once more turning to magic to save his life, and if possible, make him a vampire again. Charon is going to holy sites like Stonehenge and El Castillo pyramid in Chichén Itzá, and draining them of their spiritual energy. Sharon Geary, the retrieval specialist from book one who had a relationship with Richard while fighting Charon, senses what the assassin is doing — because she has the Sight, something never mentioned in the first book.

Trying to stop Charon at Chichén Itzá, Sharon is blasted into Otherside, the occult realm connected to Reality. Kukulcan the feathered serpent god saves her. Charon travels to Toronto to finally rid himself of Sabra and Richard. Competition continues, culminating in a battle in Otherside.

●●●●○ The Dashing Girl - P.A. Choi (2025 ss)
The end-of-week company meeting was as boring as usual, and Aaron was idly staring down the table at a woman from another department. He didn't know her name, but she was worth looking at. As he looked, he began to imagine her walking through the woods, eventually reaching a small pool. There she removed her sweaty clothing and stepped in to relax.

The notion inspired the twenty-something, and after work he drove to a nearby state park and started hiking, taking this or that fork as seemed correct. He ended up standing beside a small pool, where a nude young woman was lounging, eyes closed. It was the woman from work.

She introduced herself as Katelyn, and invited him to get less sweaty himself. Aaron strips and enters the pool, and the pair chat for an hour. When it starts to get dark, they begin walking back nude, only putting their clothes on just before reaching the parking lot.

In the next week's meeting, a different bored woman looks idly at Aaron. She begins to have a daydream of him hiking nude in the woods and reaching an isolated pool…

●●●●○ The Dead Walk in Brooklyn - Molly Rydzel (2010 ss)
Polo didn't want to go out with Jordan, but keeping a boyfriend meant sometimes doing stupid things with him, like going to see some performance art in Brooklyn. The initial artists were as bad as Polo expected, but then Missy Sunflower came on stage.

Missy's raw sexuality was striking. Her performance “consisted of mostly growls, gurgles and variously pitched shrieks. It was the best live show that Polo had ever seen.” Then a drunk man climbed onto the stage. “Missy's teensy teeth tore into his throat, ripping out his trachea and chomping down on the surrounding flesh.” The crowd's cheer rocked the building. Only then did Polo realize the drunk had been Jordan.

Then the infected crowd spilled out of the building, into the mostly deserted warehouse district. Two preppy drunks knocked Polo into a puddle. Behind them Missy Sunflower loomed behind him, biting first one's throat, then the stunned other's…

●●◐○○ Zombie Fiction - David Dunwoody (2010 ss)
Gert finds a rooming house that looks like a good place to hide for awhile. Inside, she finds another woman, Billie, lying in a hallway, her legs badly burned. It's clear that Billie is going to die soon, hospitals not really being a thing in the post-zombie world, so Gert tries to make her comfortable, and both she and Billie talk while getting drunk on the several bottles of vodka they find in the place.

⎡ “I lost my partner,” Gert said. “Last year. Lifetime ago.”
"You mean you're… oh." ⎦

As Billie gets more drunk, Gert learns that Billie had been married to Ian for a decade, but that ended in divorce, and she'd been with June since shortly after that. They'd spent a year in a post-uprising relocation camp, but things had gotten successively worse, and they'd managed to steal a jeep and escape when riots broke out. They'd crashed yesterday, and the extra cans of gasoline had caught fire. June died.

●●●○○ The Old Ones Hear - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
An Allied ship in the Mediterranean is destroyed off the coast of Greece by an Axis ship, and the Captain and half the crew managed to escape in the ship's boat — along with a Greek old man who suddenly turned up. He hung a leather bag on the mast, and the wind seemed to strengthen and drive them toward an island that the Captain didn't recall being on his map.

When they reached the island, they entered a cove, and there found the Axis warship that had destroyed them — utterly deserted. They also found many more abandoned and wrecked ships on the beach, going back to an ancient Greek trireme.

Having an odd feeling, the Captain explores alone, and comes to a villa. Climbing the hill, he's attacked by wolves, who he manages to fend off. Then he meets meets a woman in ancient dress, and learns that there are more powers on the Allied side than he thought…

●●●◐○ The Death Hound {Dr. Taverner 06} (1922 ss)
William Martin approaches occultist and psychologist Dr. Taverner, and his physician partner Dr. Rhodes. Rhodes examines the man, confirming that he has a weak heart. Which wouldn't be too much of a problem, except that the man has a persistent delusion, that of “a black dog of ferocious aspect who pops out of dark corners and chivvies me, or tries to.” Sometimes it startles him, causing his heart to race. He fears that one day when he'd half-awake, he'll see it and be truly afraid, and his heart will give out.

As the man talks, Rhodes and Taverner learn two things. That Billy Martin has been contending with Tony Mortimer for the hand of Miss Hallam. And that the black dog doesn't bother him on Fridays, which Taverner later notes to Rhodes is the day the Black Lodge meets. Martin is checked into Hindhead, Taverner's sanatorium in the countryside.

There Martin experiences a respite from the black dog, the hospital being protected by a psychic shield. A week later, Miss Hallam and her mother visit, and it's revealed that the young woman is now engaged to Mortimer. Hallam reveals to the two doctors that, when she's near Mortimer, she's smitten with him, but when she's distant from him, she can't imagine why.

It's left to Taverner and Rhodes to deal with the miscreant occultist and help true love be restored.

◐○○○○ Labor Day Barbecue - Allen Knudsen (2021 ss)
John met Brian at a naked yoga class. The two Black men hit it off, and a few weeks later John was invited to Brian and Corey's apartment, nude of course. John had enjoyed hanging out nude with his friends, but then it was New Year's, and a couple months later Covid lockdown. Finally that ended, and John was invited to a potluck dinner party at B&C's condo in a naturist resort. The story is just of the dinner party, where John met other members who lived at the resort or visited weekends.

Now the bad part. Lola and Ernest arrived, masked and nude, and then Brian said “No need for masks here, okay?” Then Frank and Scott arrived, and Brian greeted them with “We’re safely beyond social distancing, right? Everybody’s vaccinated?” The two men tentatively removed their masks.

This happened several more times. If you're an author writing a story, you can pretend Covid never happened and just tell your story. This tale would have lost nothing if set a decade before the pandemic started. But if you do mention Covid, do so responsibly. This story didn't, and I find its attitude poor and its views offensive.

●●●◐○ Beggars in Spain - Nancy Kress (1991 nva)
Roger Camden, self-made billionaire, ordered the usual modifications for his planned child: height, hair and eye color, intelligence, musicality. Then he demanded the sleep-free mod, threatening lawsuits and bad publicity if his kid didn't get it. His wife Elizabeth clearly wasn't thrilled, but went along.

Unexpectedly, Elizabeth produced two eggs the month of the withdrawal. One was taken and modified while the one the doctors missed implanted and developed normally. The Sleepless girl was named Leisha, and Roger strongly favored her; the other girl was named Alice, who was her mother's favorite. The stress of the situation turned Elizabeth into a drunk, and she divorced her rich husband when the girls were young.

Both grew up in the libertarian world where Kenzo Yagai's development of cold fusion had made power almost free. Over time, there were more and more Sleepless, and while some "normal" people disliked them — they were all very successful, having a third more of the day to work toward their goals — it was mostly contained, until an autopsy of a Sleepless young man who'd died in an auto accident revealed that it was possible that a side-effect of the Sleepless mod might be immortality, or failing that, certainly a much-extended lifespan.

This led to all kinds of backlash from the Sleepers, and the Sleepless took steps to protect themselves. The adults could retreat to Sanctuary, a large tract of land they'd bought in Pennsylvania, but what of the Sleepless kids still living with their parents? They'd need rescuing when things went wrong.

●●○○○ Efficiency - Malcolm Jameson (1943 ss)
A very short story about the dangers of excessive efficiency.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Six's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
265+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 15+1 nva | 80+3 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] There is a short story left, plus two side novels with different main characters, in which Richard d'Orleans and Sabra du Lac make appearances as minor figures.

━━━━━━━━━━

Epub-split some more books. The anthology A.I. Chronicles edited by Ellen Campbell. The Essential Jack Sharkey collection, who is apparently like Margaret St. Clair in writing shorter shorts; there are twice as many stories in this collection than most produced in its batch. The Sam Merwin Jr Megapack as well as seven more of his stories from Project Gutenberg.

●●●◐○ Cute - Bob Palmer (2024 nov)
AI was taking loads of jobs. Unemployment was high, as was mental suffering over job insecurity. It was costing the UK government a fortune. They decided something must be done, and opened an ad-agency competition for ideas. Andy was VP at one of the scores of companies who entered, and decided his idea must be truly different to get looked at. Since his college friend Rick owned a robotics firm, Andy had the idea of using AI to fight the negative effects of AI.

Rick and Andy came up with the idea of Colin: a furry, softball-size animatronic robot that "breathed" and blinked and formed expressions with lips and eyebrows. It seemed alive, though the sphere never moved from where it was set down. Colin (you could change the name and voice) was your friend. He could encourage you, comfort you, entertain you, and he was there 24/7; he was "a friend for life."

This probably wouldn't have worked out even if Britain had the plants to manufacture millions of pet robots. But they didn't, so they had to manufacture in China, which allowed the factory there to "upgrade" the chip that was "out of stock". That allowed Chinese authorities to see and hear everything any Colin did.

Even without that, a bot that will always tell you you're right is just the thing to encourage extremism, so violent crimes went up. And later a study proved that delegating so much to your bot actually caused a person's hippocampus to shrink, which is something that happens in dementia.

Oh, many and varied are the things that went wrong. Such a grand experiment.

●●●◐○ Final Exam - Sam Merwin Jr (1955 ss)
Since UFOs began to be sighted in 1947, sightings have grown more frequent, with more ships per sighting. Fifteen years later, the US military is convinced that these signify the start of an invasion. The new president, however, is less certain, and orders that the military doesn't fire unless first unmistakably attacked.

Rather than hide in the prepared bunker, the Great Man and his wife had watched the latest flying saucer flight from the White House balcony, and had seen a huge craft hovering nearby. Afterward, the president goes to visit Harlan, his friend and advisor, to talk about the saucers. When he mentions that he forbid hostile action, Harlan says “Thank you” in a profound way, which makes the president curious, and leads to the explanation that Harlan is not from Earth, and that the flying saucers are doing the opposite of invading…

I liked the House of Many Worlds duology by Merwin, so I grabbed a story of his from Project Gutenberg to check out, and I'll read more. There's also a Megapack of his tales I'll get.

●●◐○○ The Tribulations of Omega Girl - AD Rowen (2020 nov)
A billionaire argued against super-powered individuals, saying it was unwise to let them set themselves above ordinary mortals as sanctioned vigilantes. His supervillain alter ego took steps to back up his view, devising a depowering ray. The plan mostly worked, rendering dozens of the Protectors of New Athens ordinary again. Some heroes were killed, and some had their powers altered in odd ways.

Twenty-three-year-old Omega Girl found out that she could still use her powers, but only when she was completely nude, not wearing so much as shoes or a mask. Legionary, the ultra-powered head of the Protectors, said Omega Girl had to become plain old Meghan Carpenter again. The Protectors had an image to maintain, and it's not like a mother would buy her kid a lunchbox with a nude superhero on it.

Naturally Meghan encountered the classic "bus about to fall off a bridge" and stripped to prevent fatalities. She became an independent, nude hero. This leads to her being repeatedly embarrassed, but this is never gone into. Omega Girl also learns someone official has put out a hit on her, calling on NoClip (Jay, a hero she's always had a crush on) to kill her.

Of course he doesn't, and together with Lyka (whom the Pulse had locked into werewolf form), the trio investigate and find out that the archvillain survived the explosion of his giant depowering ray, and is building another one…

(This book is a bit odd. It's by the same author as, and has a similar subject to, Carla Takes Her Clothes Off, yet I found this work a bit tedious, but the other one sweet. I'm pretty sure the difference is that Carla chose to go nude, and found the experience exciting and sexy. Meghan, on the other hand, was forced to go nude to use her powers, and she found nudity embarrassing. If a character doesn't enjoy their — well, usually her — nudity, neither do I.)

◍◍◍◍◍ September begins.

●●●○○ Siege Perilous {Ethical Vampires 3} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2004 nov)
The final book in the trilogy featuring vampire Richard¹ hearkens back to the first volume, with the reappearance of Charon, then a master assassin and ancient vampire seeking holy relics to tame his Beast, the killing force that eventually takes over old vampires, turning them into wolves. At the end of that book, Richard and She-Who-Walks used the Holy Grail to turn Charon back into a mortal.

Turns out that left Charon with the cancer that was killing him when he was turned, so now he's once more turning to magic to save his life, and if possible, make him a vampire again. Charon is going to holy sites like Stonehenge and El Castillo pyramid in Chichén Itzá, and draining them of their spiritual energy. Sharon Geary, the retrieval specialist from book one who had a relationship with Richard while fighting Charon, senses what the assassin is doing — because she has the Sight, something never mentioned in the first book.

Trying to stop Charon at Chichén Itzá, Sharon is blasted into Otherside, the occult realm connected to Reality. Kukulcan the feathered serpent god saves her. Charon travels to Toronto to finally rid himself of Sabra and Richard. Competition continues, culminating in a battle in Otherside.

●●●●○ The Dashing Girl - P.A. Choi (2025 ss)
The end-of-week company meeting was as boring as usual, and Aaron was idly staring down the table at a woman from another department. He didn't know her name, but she was worth looking at. As he looked, he began to imagine her walking through the woods, eventually reaching a small pool. There she removed her sweaty clothing and stepped in to relax.

The notion inspired the twenty-something, and after work he drove to a nearby state park and started hiking, taking this or that fork as seemed correct. He ended up standing beside a small pool, where a nude young woman was lounging, eyes closed. It was the woman from work.

She introduced herself as Katelyn, and invited him to get less sweaty himself. Aaron strips and enters the pool, and the pair chat for an hour. When it starts to get dark, they begin walking back nude, only putting their clothes on just before reaching the parking lot.

In the next week's meeting, a different bored woman looks idly at Aaron. She begins to have a daydream of him hiking nude in the woods and reaching an isolated pool…

●●●●○ The Dead Walk in Brooklyn - Molly Rydzel (2010 ss)
Polo didn't want to go out with Jordan, but keeping a boyfriend meant sometimes doing stupid things with him, like going to see some performance art in Brooklyn. The initial artists were as bad as Polo expected, but then Missy Sunflower came on stage.

Missy's raw sexuality was striking. Her performance “consisted of mostly growls, gurgles and variously pitched shrieks. It was the best live show that Polo had ever seen.” Then a drunk man climbed onto the stage. “Missy's teensy teeth tore into his throat, ripping out his trachea and chomping down on the surrounding flesh.” The crowd's cheer rocked the building. Only then did Polo realize the drunk had been Jordan.

Then the infected crowd spilled out of the building, into the mostly deserted warehouse district. Two preppy drunks knocked Polo into a puddle. Behind them Missy Sunflower loomed behind him, biting first one's throat, then the stunned other's…

●●◐○○ Zombie Fiction - David Dunwoody (2010 ss)
Gert finds a rooming house that looks like a good place to hide for awhile. Inside, she finds another woman, Billie, lying in a hallway, her legs badly burned. It's clear that Billie is going to die soon, hospitals not really being a thing in the post-zombie world, so Gert tries to make her comfortable, and both she and Billie talk while getting drunk on the several bottles of vodka they find in the place.

⎡ “I lost my partner,” Gert said. “Last year. Lifetime ago.”
"You mean you're… oh." ⎦

As Billie gets more drunk, Gert learns that Billie had been married to Ian for a decade, but that ended in divorce, and she'd been with June since shortly after that. They'd spent a year in a post-uprising relocation camp, but things had gotten successively worse, and they'd managed to steal a jeep and escape when riots broke out. They'd crashed yesterday, and the extra cans of gasoline had caught fire. June died.

●●●○○ The Old Ones Hear - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
An Allied ship in the Mediterranean is destroyed off the coast of Greece by an Axis ship, and the Captain and half the crew managed to escape in the ship's boat — along with a Greek old man who suddenly turned up. He hung a leather bag on the mast, and the wind seemed to strengthen and drive them toward an island that the Captain didn't recall being on his map.

When they reached the island, they entered a cove, and there found the Axis warship that had destroyed them — utterly deserted. They also found many more abandoned and wrecked ships on the beach, going back to an ancient Greek trireme.

Having an odd feeling, the Captain explores alone, and comes to a villa. Climbing the hill, he's attacked by wolves, who he manages to fend off. Then he meets meets a woman in ancient dress, and learns that there are more powers on the Allied side than he thought…

●●●◐○ The Death Hound {Dr. Taverner 06} (1922 ss)
William Martin approaches occultist and psychologist Dr. Taverner, and his physician partner Dr. Rhodes. Rhodes examines the man, confirming that he has a weak heart. Which wouldn't be too much of a problem, except that the man has a persistent delusion, that of “a black dog of ferocious aspect who pops out of dark corners and chivvies me, or tries to.” Sometimes it startles him, causing his heart to race. He fears that one day when he'd half-awake, he'll see it and be truly afraid, and his heart will give out.

As the man talks, Rhodes and Taverner learn two things. That Billy Martin has been contending with Tony Mortimer for the hand of Miss Hallam. And that the black dog doesn't bother him on Fridays, which Taverner later notes to Rhodes is the day the Black Lodge meets. Martin is checked into Hindhead, Taverner's sanatorium in the countryside.

There Martin experiences a respite from the black dog, the hospital being protected by a psychic shield. A week later, Miss Hallam and her mother visit, and it's revealed that the young woman is now engaged to Mortimer. Hallam reveals to the two doctors that, when she's near Mortimer, she's smitten with him, but when she's distant from him, she can't imagine why.

It's left to Taverner and Rhodes to deal with the miscreant occultist and help true love be restored.

◐○○○○ Labor Day Barbecue - Allen Knudsen (2021 ss)
John met Brian at a naked yoga class. The two Black men hit it off, and a few weeks later John was invited to Brian and Corey's apartment, nude of course. John had enjoyed hanging out nude with his friends, but then it was New Year's, and a couple months later Covid lockdown. Finally that ended, and John was invited to a potluck dinner party at B&C's condo in a naturist resort. The story is just of the dinner party, where John met other members who lived at the resort or visited weekends.

Now the bad part. Lola and Ernest arrived, masked and nude, and then Brian said “No need for masks here, okay?” Then Frank and Scott arrived, and Brian greeted them with “We’re safely beyond social distancing, right? Everybody’s vaccinated?” The two men tentatively removed their masks.

This happened several more times. If you're an author writing a story, you can pretend Covid never happened and just tell your story. This tale would have lost nothing if set a decade before the pandemic started. But if you do mention Covid, do so responsibly. This story didn't, and I find its attitude poor and its views offensive.

●●●◐○ Beggars in Spain - Nancy Kress (1991 nva)
Roger Camden, self-made billionaire, ordered the usual modifications for his planned child: height, hair and eye color, intelligence, musicality. Then he demanded the sleep-free mod, threatening lawsuits and bad publicity if his kid didn't get it. His wife Elizabeth clearly wasn't thrilled, but went along.

Unexpectedly, Elizabeth produced two eggs the month of the withdrawal. One was taken and modified while the one the doctors missed implanted and developed normally. The Sleepless girl was named Leisha, and Roger strongly favored her; the other girl was named Alice, who was her mother's favorite. The stress of the situation turned Elizabeth into a drunk, and she divorced her rich husband when the girls were young.

Both grew up in the libertarian world where Kenzo Yagai's development of cold fusion had made power almost free. Over time, there were more and more Sleepless, and while some "normal" people disliked them — they were all very successful, having a third more of the day to work toward their goals — it was mostly contained, until an autopsy of a Sleepless young man who'd died in an auto accident revealed that it was possible that a side-effect of the Sleepless mod might be immortality, or failing that, certainly a much-extended lifespan.

This led to all kinds of backlash from the Sleepers, and the Sleepless took steps to protect themselves. The adults could retreat to Sanctuary, a large tract of land they'd bought in Pennsylvania, but what of the Sleepless kids still living with their parents? They'd need rescuing when things went wrong.

●●○○○ Efficiency - Malcolm Jameson (1943 ss)
A very short story about the dangers of excessive efficiency.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Six's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
265+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 15+1 nva | 80+3 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] There is a short story left, plus two side novels with different main characters, in which Richard d'Orleans and Sabra du Lac make appearances as minor figures.

━━━━━━━━━━

Epub-split some more books. The anthology A.I. Chronicles edited by Ellen Campbell. The Essential Jack Sharkey collection, who is apparently like Margaret St. Clair in writing shorter shorts; there are twice as many stories in this collection than most produced in its batch. The Sam Merwin Jr Megapack as well as seven more of his stories from Project Gutenberg.

●●●◐○ Cute - Bob Palmer (2024 nov)
AI was taking loads of jobs. Unemployment was high, as was mental suffering over job insecurity. It was costing the UK government a fortune. They decided something must be done, and opened an ad-agency competition for ideas. Andy was VP at one of the scores of companies who entered, and decided his idea must be truly different to get looked at. Since his college friend Rick owned a robotics firm, Andy had the idea of using AI to fight the negative effects of AI.

Rick and Andy came up with the idea of Colin: a furry, softball-size animatronic robot that "breathed" and blinked and formed expressions with lips and eyebrows. It seemed alive, though the sphere never moved from where it was set down. Colin (you could change the name and voice) was your friend. He could encourage you, comfort you, entertain you, and he was there 24/7; he was "a friend for life."

This probably wouldn't have worked out even if Britain had the plants to manufacture millions of pet robots. But they didn't, so they had to manufacture in China, which allowed the factory there to "upgrade" the chip that was "out of stock". That allowed Chinese authorities to see and hear everything any Colin did.

Even without that, a bot that will always tell you you're right is just the thing to encourage extremism, so violent crimes went up. And later a study proved that delegating so much to your bot actually caused a person's hippocampus to shrink, which is something that happens in dementia.

Oh, many and varied are the things that went wrong. Such a grand experiment.

●●●◐○ Final Exam - Sam Merwin Jr (1955 ss)
Since UFOs began to be sighted in 1947, sightings have grown more frequent, with more ships per sighting. Fifteen years later, the US military is convinced that these signify the start of an invasion. The new president, however, is less certain, and orders that the military doesn't fire unless first unmistakably attacked.

Rather than hide in the prepared bunker, the Great Man and his wife had watched the latest flying saucer flight from the White House balcony, and had seen a huge craft hovering nearby. Afterward, the president goes to visit Harlan, his friend and advisor, to talk about the saucers. When he mentions that he forbid hostile action, Harlan says “Thank you” in a profound way, which makes the president curious, and leads to the explanation that Harlan is not from Earth, and that the flying saucers are doing the opposite of invading…

I liked the House of Many Worlds duology by Merwin, so I grabbed a story of his from Project Gutenberg to check out, and I'll read more. There's also a Megapack of his tales I'll get.

●●◐○○ The Tribulations of Omega Girl - AD Rowen (2020 nov)
A billionaire argued against super-powered individuals, saying it was unwise to let them set themselves above ordinary mortals as sanctioned vigilantes. His supervillain alter ego took steps to back up his view, devising a depowering ray. The plan mostly worked, rendering dozens of the Protectors of New Athens ordinary again. Some heroes were killed, and some had their powers altered in odd ways.

Twenty-three-year-old Omega Girl found out that she could still use her powers, but only when she was completely nude, not wearing so much as shoes or a mask. Legionary, the ultra-powered head of the Protectors, said Omega Girl had to become plain old Meghan Carpenter again. The Protectors had an image to maintain, and it's not like a mother would buy her kid a lunchbox with a nude superhero on it.

Naturally Meghan encountered the classic "bus about to fall off a bridge" and stripped to prevent fatalities. She became an independent, nude hero. This leads to her being repeatedly embarrassed, but this is never gone into. Omega Girl also learns someone official has put out a hit on her, calling on NoClip (Jay, a hero she's always had a crush on) to kill her.

Of course he doesn't, and together with Lyka (whom the Pulse had locked into werewolf form), the trio investigate and find out that the archvillain survived the explosion of his giant depowering ray, and is building another one…

(This book is a bit odd. It's by the same author as, and has a similar subject to, Carla Takes Her Clothes Off, yet I found this work a bit tedious, but the other one sweet. I'm pretty sure the difference is that Carla chose to go nude, and found the experience exciting and sexy. Meghan, on the other hand, was forced to go nude to use her powers, and she found nudity embarrassing. If a character doesn't enjoy their — well, usually her — nudity, neither do I.)

◍◍◍◍◍ September begins.

●●●○○ Siege Perilous {Ethical Vampires 3} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2004 nov)
The final book in the trilogy featuring vampire Richard¹ hearkens back to the first volume, with the reappearance of Charon, then a master assassin and ancient vampire seeking holy relics to tame his Beast, the killing force that eventually takes over old vampires, turning them into wolves. At the end of that book, Richard and She-Who-Walks used the Holy Grail to turn Charon back into a mortal.

Turns out that left Charon with the cancer that was killing him when he was turned, so now he's once more turning to magic to save his life, and if possible, make him a vampire again. Charon is going to holy sites like Stonehenge and El Castillo pyramid in Chichén Itzá, and draining them of their spiritual energy. Sharon Geary, the retrieval specialist from book one who had a relationship with Richard while fighting Charon, senses what the assassin is doing — because she has the Sight, something never mentioned in the first book.

Trying to stop Charon at Chichén Itzá, Sharon is blasted into Otherside, the occult realm connected to Reality. Kukulcan the feathered serpent god saves her. Charon travels to Toronto to finally rid himself of Sabra and Richard. Competition continues, culminating in a battle in Otherside.

●●●●○ The Dashing Girl - P.A. Choi (2025 ss)
The end-of-week company meeting was as boring as usual, and Aaron was idly staring down the table at a woman from another department. He didn't know her name, but she was worth looking at. As he looked, he began to imagine her walking through the woods, eventually reaching a small pool. There she removed her sweaty clothing and stepped in to relax.

The notion inspired the twenty-something, and after work he drove to a nearby state park and started hiking, taking this or that fork as seemed correct. He ended up standing beside a small pool, where a nude young woman was lounging, eyes closed. It was the woman from work.

She introduced herself as Katelyn, and invited him to get less sweaty himself. Aaron strips and enters the pool, and the pair chat for an hour. When it starts to get dark, they begin walking back nude, only putting their clothes on just before reaching the parking lot.

In the next week's meeting, a different bored woman looks idly at Aaron. She begins to have a daydream of him hiking nude in the woods and reaching an isolated pool…

●●●●○ The Dead Walk in Brooklyn - Molly Rydzel (2010 ss)
Polo didn't want to go out with Jordan, but keeping a boyfriend meant sometimes doing stupid things with him, like going to see some performance art in Brooklyn. The initial artists were as bad as Polo expected, but then Missy Sunflower came on stage.

Missy's raw sexuality was striking. Her performance “consisted of mostly growls, gurgles and variously pitched shrieks. It was the best live show that Polo had ever seen.” Then a drunk man climbed onto the stage. “Missy's teensy teeth tore into his throat, ripping out his trachea and chomping down on the surrounding flesh.” The crowd's cheer rocked the building. Only then did Polo realize the drunk had been Jordan.

Then the infected crowd spilled out of the building, into the mostly deserted warehouse district. Two preppy drunks knocked Polo into a puddle. Behind them Missy Sunflower loomed behind him, biting first one's throat, then the stunned other's…

●●◐○○ Zombie Fiction - David Dunwoody (2010 ss)
Gert finds a rooming house that looks like a good place to hide for awhile. Inside, she finds another woman, Billie, lying in a hallway, her legs badly burned. It's clear that Billie is going to die soon, hospitals not really being a thing in the post-zombie world, so Gert tries to make her comfortable, and both she and Billie talk while getting drunk on the several bottles of vodka they find in the place.

⎡ “I lost my partner,” Gert said. “Last year. Lifetime ago.”
"You mean you're… oh." ⎦

As Billie gets more drunk, Gert learns that Billie had been married to Ian for a decade, but that ended in divorce, and she'd been with June since shortly after that. They'd spent a year in a post-uprising relocation camp, but things had gotten successively worse, and they'd managed to steal a jeep and escape when riots broke out. They'd crashed yesterday, and the extra cans of gasoline had caught fire. June died.

●●●○○ The Old Ones Hear - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
An Allied ship in the Mediterranean is destroyed off the coast of Greece by an Axis ship, and the Captain and half the crew managed to escape in the ship's boat — along with a Greek old man who suddenly turned up. He hung a leather bag on the mast, and the wind seemed to strengthen and drive them toward an island that the Captain didn't recall being on his map.

When they reached the island, they entered a cove, and there found the Axis warship that had destroyed them — utterly deserted. They also found many more abandoned and wrecked ships on the beach, going back to an ancient Greek trireme.

Having an odd feeling, the Captain explores alone, and comes to a villa. Climbing the hill, he's attacked by wolves, who he manages to fend off. Then he meets meets a woman in ancient dress, and learns that there are more powers on the Allied side than he thought…

●●●◐○ The Death Hound {Dr. Taverner 06} (1922 ss)
William Martin approaches occultist and psychologist Dr. Taverner, and his physician partner Dr. Rhodes. Rhodes examines the man, confirming that he has a weak heart. Which wouldn't be too much of a problem, except that the man has a persistent delusion, that of “a black dog of ferocious aspect who pops out of dark corners and chivvies me, or tries to.” Sometimes it startles him, causing his heart to race. He fears that one day when he'd half-awake, he'll see it and be truly afraid, and his heart will give out.

As the man talks, Rhodes and Taverner learn two things. That Billy Martin has been contending with Tony Mortimer for the hand of Miss Hallam. And that the black dog doesn't bother him on Fridays, which Taverner later notes to Rhodes is the day the Black Lodge meets. Martin is checked into Hindhead, Taverner's sanatorium in the countryside.

There Martin experiences a respite from the black dog, the hospital being protected by a psychic shield. A week later, Miss Hallam and her mother visit, and it's revealed that the young woman is now engaged to Mortimer. Hallam reveals to the two doctors that, when she's near Mortimer, she's smitten with him, but when she's distant from him, she can't imagine why.

It's left to Taverner and Rhodes to deal with the miscreant occultist and help true love be restored.

◐○○○○ Labor Day Barbecue - Allen Knudsen (2021 ss)
John met Brian at a naked yoga class. The two Black men hit it off, and a few weeks later John was invited to Brian and Corey's apartment, nude of course. John had enjoyed hanging out nude with his friends, but then it was New Year's, and a couple months later Covid lockdown. Finally that ended, and John was invited to a potluck dinner party at B&C's condo in a naturist resort. The story is just of the dinner party, where John met other members who lived at the resort or visited weekends.

Now the bad part. Lola and Ernest arrived, masked and nude, and then Brian said “No need for masks here, okay?” Then Frank and Scott arrived, and Brian greeted them with “We’re safely beyond social distancing, right? Everybody’s vaccinated?” The two men tentatively removed their masks.

This happened several more times. If you're an author writing a story, you can pretend Covid never happened and just tell your story. This tale would have lost nothing if set a decade before the pandemic started. But if you do mention Covid, do so responsibly. This story didn't, and I find its attitude poor and its views offensive.

●●●◐○ Beggars in Spain - Nancy Kress (1991 nva)
Roger Camden, self-made billionaire, ordered the usual modifications for his planned child: height, hair and eye color, intelligence, musicality. Then he demanded the sleep-free mod, threatening lawsuits and bad publicity if his kid didn't get it. His wife Elizabeth clearly wasn't thrilled, but went along.

Unexpectedly, Elizabeth produced two eggs the month of the withdrawal. One was taken and modified while the one the doctors missed implanted and developed normally. The Sleepless girl was named Leisha, and Roger strongly favored her; the other girl was named Alice, who was her mother's favorite. The stress of the situation turned Elizabeth into a drunk, and she divorced her rich husband when the girls were young.

Both grew up in the libertarian world where Kenzo Yagai's development of cold fusion had made power almost free. Over time, there were more and more Sleepless, and while some "normal" people disliked them — they were all very successful, having a third more of the day to work toward their goals — it was mostly contained, until an autopsy of a Sleepless young man who'd died in an auto accident revealed that it was possible that a side-effect of the Sleepless mod might be immortality, or failing that, certainly a much-extended lifespan.

This led to all kinds of backlash from the Sleepers, and the Sleepless took steps to protect themselves. The adults could retreat to Sanctuary, a large tract of land they'd bought in Pennsylvania, but what of the Sleepless kids still living with their parents? They'd need rescuing when things went wrong.

●●○○○ Efficiency - Malcolm Jameson (1943 ss)
A very short story about the dangers of excessive efficiency.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Six's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
265+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 15+1 nva | 80+3 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] There is a short story left, plus two side novels with different main characters, in which Richard d'Orleans and Sabra du Lac make appearances as minor figures.

━━━━━━━━━━

Epub-split some more books. The anthology A.I. Chronicles edited by Ellen Campbell. The Essential Jack Sharkey collection, who is apparently like Margaret St. Clair in writing shorter shorts; there are twice as many stories in this collection than most produced in its batch. The Sam Merwin Jr Megapack as well as seven more of his stories from Project Gutenberg.

●●●◐○ Cute - Bob Palmer (2024 nov)
AI was taking loads of jobs. Unemployment was high, as was mental suffering over job insecurity. It was costing the UK government a fortune. They decided something must be done, and opened an ad-agency competition for ideas. Andy was VP at one of the scores of companies who entered, and decided his idea must be truly different to get looked at. Since his college friend Rick owned a robotics firm, Andy had the idea of using AI to fight the negative effects of AI.

Rick and Andy came up with the idea of Colin: a furry, softball-size animatronic robot that "breathed" and blinked and formed expressions with lips and eyebrows. It seemed alive, though the sphere never moved from where it was set down. Colin (you could change the name and voice) was your friend. He could encourage you, comfort you, entertain you, and he was there 24/7; he was "a friend for life."

This probably wouldn't have worked out even if Britain had the plants to manufacture millions of pet robots. But they didn't, so they had to manufacture in China, which allowed the factory there to "upgrade" the chip that was "out of stock". That allowed Chinese authorities to see and hear everything any Colin did.

Even without that, a bot that will always tell you you're right is just the thing to encourage extremism, so violent crimes went up. And later a study proved that delegating so much to your bot actually caused a person's hippocampus to shrink, which is something that happens in dementia.

Oh, many and varied are the things that went wrong. Such a grand experiment.

●●●◐○ Final Exam - Sam Merwin Jr (1955 ss)
Since UFOs began to be sighted in 1947, sightings have grown more frequent, with more ships per sighting. Fifteen years later, the US military is convinced that these signify the start of an invasion. The new president, however, is less certain, and orders that the military doesn't fire unless first unmistakably attacked.

Rather than hide in the prepared bunker, the Great Man and his wife had watched the latest flying saucer flight from the White House balcony, and had seen a huge craft hovering nearby. Afterward, the president goes to visit Harlan, his friend and advisor, to talk about the saucers. When he mentions that he forbid hostile action, Harlan says “Thank you” in a profound way, which makes the president curious, and leads to the explanation that Harlan is not from Earth, and that the flying saucers are doing the opposite of invading…

I liked the House of Many Worlds duology by Merwin, so I grabbed a story of his from Project Gutenberg to check out, and I'll read more. There's also a Megapack of his tales I'll get.

●●◐○○ The Tribulations of Omega Girl - AD Rowen (2020 nov)
A billionaire argued against super-powered individuals, saying it was unwise to let them set themselves above ordinary mortals as sanctioned vigilantes. His supervillain alter ego took steps to back up his view, devising a depowering ray. The plan mostly worked, rendering dozens of the Protectors of New Athens ordinary again. Some heroes were killed, and some had their powers altered in odd ways.

Twenty-three-year-old Omega Girl found out that she could still use her powers, but only when she was completely nude, not wearing so much as shoes or a mask. Legionary, the ultra-powered head of the Protectors, said Omega Girl had to become plain old Meghan Carpenter again. The Protectors had an image to maintain, and it's not like a mother would buy her kid a lunchbox with a nude superhero on it.

Naturally Meghan encountered the classic "bus about to fall off a bridge" and stripped to prevent fatalities. She became an independent, nude hero. This leads to her being repeatedly embarrassed, but this is never gone into. Omega Girl also learns someone official has put out a hit on her, calling on NoClip (Jay, a hero she's always had a crush on) to kill her.

Of course he doesn't, and together with Lyka (whom the Pulse had locked into werewolf form), the trio investigate and find out that the archvillain survived the explosion of his giant depowering ray, and is building another one…

(This book is a bit odd. It's by the same author as, and has a similar subject to, Carla Takes Her Clothes Off, yet I found this work a bit tedious, but the other one sweet. I'm pretty sure the difference is that Carla chose to go nude, and found the experience exciting and sexy. Meghan, on the other hand, was forced to go nude to use her powers, and she found nudity embarrassing. If a character doesn't enjoy their — well, usually her — nudity, neither do I.)

◍◍◍◍◍ September begins.

●●●○○ Siege Perilous {Ethical Vampires 3} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2004 nov)
The final book in the trilogy featuring vampire Richard¹ hearkens back to the first volume, with the reappearance of Charon, then a master assassin and ancient vampire seeking holy relics to tame his Beast, the killing force that eventually takes over old vampires, turning them into wolves. At the end of that book, Richard and She-Who-Walks used the Holy Grail to turn Charon back into a mortal.

Turns out that left Charon with the cancer that was killing him when he was turned, so now he's once more turning to magic to save his life, and if possible, make him a vampire again. Charon is going to holy sites like Stonehenge and El Castillo pyramid in Chichén Itzá, and draining them of their spiritual energy. Sharon Geary, the retrieval specialist from book one who had a relationship with Richard while fighting Charon, senses what the assassin is doing — because she has the Sight, something never mentioned in the first book.

Trying to stop Charon at Chichén Itzá, Sharon is blasted into Otherside, the occult realm connected to Reality. Kukulcan the feathered serpent god saves her. Charon travels to Toronto to finally rid himself of Sabra and Richard. Competition continues, culminating in a battle in Otherside.

●●●●○ The Dashing Girl - P.A. Choi (2025 ss)
The end-of-week company meeting was as boring as usual, and Aaron was idly staring down the table at a woman from another department. He didn't know her name, but she was worth looking at. As he looked, he began to imagine her walking through the woods, eventually reaching a small pool. There she removed her sweaty clothing and stepped in to relax.

The notion inspired the twenty-something, and after work he drove to a nearby state park and started hiking, taking this or that fork as seemed correct. He ended up standing beside a small pool, where a nude young woman was lounging, eyes closed. It was the woman from work.

She introduced herself as Katelyn, and invited him to get less sweaty himself. Aaron strips and enters the pool, and the pair chat for an hour. When it starts to get dark, they begin walking back nude, only putting their clothes on just before reaching the parking lot.

In the next week's meeting, a different bored woman looks idly at Aaron. She begins to have a daydream of him hiking nude in the woods and reaching an isolated pool…

●●●●○ The Dead Walk in Brooklyn - Molly Rydzel (2010 ss)
Polo didn't want to go out with Jordan, but keeping a boyfriend meant sometimes doing stupid things with him, like going to see some performance art in Brooklyn. The initial artists were as bad as Polo expected, but then Missy Sunflower came on stage.

Missy's raw sexuality was striking. Her performance “consisted of mostly growls, gurgles and variously pitched shrieks. It was the best live show that Polo had ever seen.” Then a drunk man climbed onto the stage. “Missy's teensy teeth tore into his throat, ripping out his trachea and chomping down on the surrounding flesh.” The crowd's cheer rocked the building. Only then did Polo realize the drunk had been Jordan.

Then the infected crowd spilled out of the building, into the mostly deserted warehouse district. Two preppy drunks knocked Polo into a puddle. Behind them Missy Sunflower loomed behind him, biting first one's throat, then the stunned other's…

●●◐○○ Zombie Fiction - David Dunwoody (2010 ss)
Gert finds a rooming house that looks like a good place to hide for awhile. Inside, she finds another woman, Billie, lying in a hallway, her legs badly burned. It's clear that Billie is going to die soon, hospitals not really being a thing in the post-zombie world, so Gert tries to make her comfortable, and both she and Billie talk while getting drunk on the several bottles of vodka they find in the place.

⎡ “I lost my partner,” Gert said. “Last year. Lifetime ago.”
"You mean you're… oh." ⎦

As Billie gets more drunk, Gert learns that Billie had been married to Ian for a decade, but that ended in divorce, and she'd been with June since shortly after that. They'd spent a year in a post-uprising relocation camp, but things had gotten successively worse, and they'd managed to steal a jeep and escape when riots broke out. They'd crashed yesterday, and the extra cans of gasoline had caught fire. June died.

●●●○○ The Old Ones Hear - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
An Allied ship in the Mediterranean is destroyed off the coast of Greece by an Axis ship, and the Captain and half the crew managed to escape in the ship's boat — along with a Greek old man who suddenly turned up. He hung a leather bag on the mast, and the wind seemed to strengthen and drive them toward an island that the Captain didn't recall being on his map.

When they reached the island, they entered a cove, and there found the Axis warship that had destroyed them — utterly deserted. They also found many more abandoned and wrecked ships on the beach, going back to an ancient Greek trireme.

Having an odd feeling, the Captain explores alone, and comes to a villa. Climbing the hill, he's attacked by wolves, who he manages to fend off. Then he meets meets a woman in ancient dress, and learns that there are more powers on the Allied side than he thought…

●●●◐○ The Death Hound {Dr. Taverner 06} (1922 ss)
William Martin approaches occultist and psychologist Dr. Taverner, and his physician partner Dr. Rhodes. Rhodes examines the man, confirming that he has a weak heart. Which wouldn't be too much of a problem, except that the man has a persistent delusion, that of “a black dog of ferocious aspect who pops out of dark corners and chivvies me, or tries to.” Sometimes it startles him, causing his heart to race. He fears that one day when he'd half-awake, he'll see it and be truly afraid, and his heart will give out.

As the man talks, Rhodes and Taverner learn two things. That Billy Martin has been contending with Tony Mortimer for the hand of Miss Hallam. And that the black dog doesn't bother him on Fridays, which Taverner later notes to Rhodes is the day the Black Lodge meets. Martin is checked into Hindhead, Taverner's sanatorium in the countryside.

There Martin experiences a respite from the black dog, the hospital being protected by a psychic shield. A week later, Miss Hallam and her mother visit, and it's revealed that the young woman is now engaged to Mortimer. Hallam reveals to the two doctors that, when she's near Mortimer, she's smitten with him, but when she's distant from him, she can't imagine why.

It's left to Taverner and Rhodes to deal with the miscreant occultist and help true love be restored.

◐○○○○ Labor Day Barbecue - Allen Knudsen (2021 ss)
John met Brian at a naked yoga class. The two Black men hit it off, and a few weeks later John was invited to Brian and Corey's apartment, nude of course. John had enjoyed hanging out nude with his friends, but then it was New Year's, and a couple months later Covid lockdown. Finally that ended, and John was invited to a potluck dinner party at B&C's condo in a naturist resort. The story is just of the dinner party, where John met other members who lived at the resort or visited weekends.

Now the bad part. Lola and Ernest arrived, masked and nude, and then Brian said “No need for masks here, okay?” Then Frank and Scott arrived, and Brian greeted them with “We’re safely beyond social distancing, right? Everybody’s vaccinated?” The two men tentatively removed their masks.

This happened several more times. If you're an author writing a story, you can pretend Covid never happened and just tell your story. This tale would have lost nothing if set a decade before the pandemic started. But if you do mention Covid, do so responsibly. This story didn't, and I find its attitude poor and its views offensive.

●●●◐○ Beggars in Spain - Nancy Kress (1991 nva)
Roger Camden, self-made billionaire, ordered the usual modifications for his planned child: height, hair and eye color, intelligence, musicality. Then he demanded the sleep-free mod, threatening lawsuits and bad publicity if his kid didn't get it. His wife Elizabeth clearly wasn't thrilled, but went along.

Unexpectedly, Elizabeth produced two eggs the month of the withdrawal. One was taken and modified while the one the doctors missed implanted and developed normally. The Sleepless girl was named Leisha, and Roger strongly favored her; the other girl was named Alice, who was her mother's favorite. The stress of the situation turned Elizabeth into a drunk, and she divorced her rich husband when the girls were young.

Both grew up in the libertarian world where Kenzo Yagai's development of cold fusion had made power almost free. Over time, there were more and more Sleepless, and while some "normal" people disliked them — they were all very successful, having a third more of the day to work toward their goals — it was mostly contained, until an autopsy of a Sleepless young man who'd died in an auto accident revealed that it was possible that a side-effect of the Sleepless mod might be immortality, or failing that, certainly a much-extended lifespan.

This led to all kinds of backlash from the Sleepers, and the Sleepless took steps to protect themselves. The adults could retreat to Sanctuary, a large tract of land they'd bought in Pennsylvania, but what of the Sleepless kids still living with their parents? They'd need rescuing when things went wrong.

●●○○○ Efficiency - Malcolm Jameson (1943 ss)
A very short story about the dangers of excessive efficiency.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Six's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
265+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 15+1 nva | 80+3 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] There is a short story left, plus two side novels with different main characters, in which Richard d'Orleans and Sabra du Lac make appearances as minor figures.

━━━━━━━━━━

Epub-split some more books. The anthology A.I. Chronicles edited by Ellen Campbell. The Essential Jack Sharkey collection, who is apparently like Margaret St. Clair in writing shorter shorts; there are twice as many stories in this collection than most produced in its batch. The Sam Merwin Jr Megapack as well as seven more of his stories from Project Gutenberg.

●●●◐○ Cute - Bob Palmer (2024 nov)
AI was taking loads of jobs. Unemployment was high, as was mental suffering over job insecurity. It was costing the UK government a fortune. They decided something must be done, and opened an ad-agency competition for ideas. Andy was VP at one of the scores of companies who entered, and decided his idea must be truly different to get looked at. Since his college friend Rick owned a robotics firm, Andy had the idea of using AI to fight the negative effects of AI.

Rick and Andy came up with the idea of Colin: a furry, softball-size animatronic robot that "breathed" and blinked and formed expressions with lips and eyebrows. It seemed alive, though the sphere never moved from where it was set down. Colin (you could change the name and voice) was your friend. He could encourage you, comfort you, entertain you, and he was there 24/7; he was "a friend for life."

This probably wouldn't have worked out even if Britain had the plants to manufacture millions of pet robots. But they didn't, so they had to manufacture in China, which allowed the factory there to "upgrade" the chip that was "out of stock". That allowed Chinese authorities to see and hear everything any Colin did.

Even without that, a bot that will always tell you you're right is just the thing to encourage extremism, so violent crimes went up. And later a study proved that delegating so much to your bot actually caused a person's hippocampus to shrink, which is something that happens in dementia.

Oh, many and varied are the things that went wrong. Such a grand experiment.

●●●◐○ Final Exam - Sam Merwin Jr (1955 ss)
Since UFOs began to be sighted in 1947, sightings have grown more frequent, with more ships per sighting. Fifteen years later, the US military is convinced that these signify the start of an invasion. The new president, however, is less certain, and orders that the military doesn't fire unless first unmistakably attacked.

Rather than hide in the prepared bunker, the Great Man and his wife had watched the latest flying saucer flight from the White House balcony, and had seen a huge craft hovering nearby. Afterward, the president goes to visit Harlan, his friend and advisor, to talk about the saucers. When he mentions that he forbid hostile action, Harlan says “Thank you” in a profound way, which makes the president curious, and leads to the explanation that Harlan is not from Earth, and that the flying saucers are doing the opposite of invading…

I liked the House of Many Worlds duology by Merwin, so I grabbed a story of his from Project Gutenberg to check out, and I'll read more. There's also a Megapack of his tales I'll get.

●●◐○○ The Tribulations of Omega Girl - AD Rowen (2020 nov)
A billionaire argued against super-powered individuals, saying it was unwise to let them set themselves above ordinary mortals as sanctioned vigilantes. His supervillain alter ego took steps to back up his view, devising a depowering ray. The plan mostly worked, rendering dozens of the Protectors of New Athens ordinary again. Some heroes were killed, and some had their powers altered in odd ways.

Twenty-three-year-old Omega Girl found out that she could still use her powers, but only when she was completely nude, not wearing so much as shoes or a mask. Legionary, the ultra-powered head of the Protectors, said Omega Girl had to become plain old Meghan Carpenter again. The Protectors had an image to maintain, and it's not like a mother would buy her kid a lunchbox with a nude superhero on it.

Naturally Meghan encountered the classic "bus about to fall off a bridge" and stripped to prevent fatalities. She became an independent, nude hero. This leads to her being repeatedly embarrassed, but this is never gone into. Omega Girl also learns someone official has put out a hit on her, calling on NoClip (Jay, a hero she's always had a crush on) to kill her.

Of course he doesn't, and together with Lyka (whom the Pulse had locked into werewolf form), the trio investigate and find out that the archvillain survived the explosion of his giant depowering ray, and is building another one…

(This book is a bit odd. It's by the same author as, and has a similar subject to, Carla Takes Her Clothes Off, yet I found this work a bit tedious, but the other one sweet. I'm pretty sure the difference is that Carla chose to go nude, and found the experience exciting and sexy. Meghan, on the other hand, was forced to go nude to use her powers, and she found nudity embarrassing. If a character doesn't enjoy their — well, usually her — nudity, neither do I.)

◍◍◍◍◍ September begins.

●●●○○ Siege Perilous {Ethical Vampires 3} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2004 nov)
The final book in the trilogy featuring vampire Richard¹ hearkens back to the first volume, with the reappearance of Charon, then a master assassin and ancient vampire seeking holy relics to tame his Beast, the killing force that eventually takes over old vampires, turning them into wolves. At the end of that book, Richard and She-Who-Walks used the Holy Grail to turn Charon back into a mortal.

Turns out that left Charon with the cancer that was killing him when he was turned, so now he's once more turning to magic to save his life, and if possible, make him a vampire again. Charon is going to holy sites like Stonehenge and El Castillo pyramid in Chichén Itzá, and draining them of their spiritual energy. Sharon Geary, the retrieval specialist from book one who had a relationship with Richard while fighting Charon, senses what the assassin is doing — because she has the Sight, something never mentioned in the first book.

Trying to stop Charon at Chichén Itzá, Sharon is blasted into Otherside, the occult realm connected to Reality. Kukulcan the feathered serpent god saves her. Charon travels to Toronto to finally rid himself of Sabra and Richard. Competition continues, culminating in a battle in Otherside.

●●●●○ The Dashing Girl - P.A. Choi (2025 ss)
The end-of-week company meeting was as boring as usual, and Aaron was idly staring down the table at a woman from another department. He didn't know her name, but she was worth looking at. As he looked, he began to imagine her walking through the woods, eventually reaching a small pool. There she removed her sweaty clothing and stepped in to relax.

The notion inspired the twenty-something, and after work he drove to a nearby state park and started hiking, taking this or that fork as seemed correct. He ended up standing beside a small pool, where a nude young woman was lounging, eyes closed. It was the woman from work.

She introduced herself as Katelyn, and invited him to get less sweaty himself. Aaron strips and enters the pool, and the pair chat for an hour. When it starts to get dark, they begin walking back nude, only putting their clothes on just before reaching the parking lot.

In the next week's meeting, a different bored woman looks idly at Aaron. She begins to have a daydream of him hiking nude in the woods and reaching an isolated pool…

●●●●○ The Dead Walk in Brooklyn - Molly Rydzel (2010 ss)
Polo didn't want to go out with Jordan, but keeping a boyfriend meant sometimes doing stupid things with him, like going to see some performance art in Brooklyn. The initial artists were as bad as Polo expected, but then Missy Sunflower came on stage.

Missy's raw sexuality was striking. Her performance “consisted of mostly growls, gurgles and variously pitched shrieks. It was the best live show that Polo had ever seen.” Then a drunk man climbed onto the stage. “Missy's teensy teeth tore into his throat, ripping out his trachea and chomping down on the surrounding flesh.” The crowd's cheer rocked the building. Only then did Polo realize the drunk had been Jordan.

Then the infected crowd spilled out of the building, into the mostly deserted warehouse district. Two preppy drunks knocked Polo into a puddle. Behind them Missy Sunflower loomed behind him, biting first one's throat, then the stunned other's…

●●◐○○ Zombie Fiction - David Dunwoody (2010 ss)
Gert finds a rooming house that looks like a good place to hide for awhile. Inside, she finds another woman, Billie, lying in a hallway, her legs badly burned. It's clear that Billie is going to die soon, hospitals not really being a thing in the post-zombie world, so Gert tries to make her comfortable, and both she and Billie talk while getting drunk on the several bottles of vodka they find in the place.

⎡ “I lost my partner,” Gert said. “Last year. Lifetime ago.”
"You mean you're… oh." ⎦

As Billie gets more drunk, Gert learns that Billie had been married to Ian for a decade, but that ended in divorce, and she'd been with June since shortly after that. They'd spent a year in a post-uprising relocation camp, but things had gotten successively worse, and they'd managed to steal a jeep and escape when riots broke out. They'd crashed yesterday, and the extra cans of gasoline had caught fire. June died.

●●●○○ The Old Ones Hear - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
An Allied ship in the Mediterranean is destroyed off the coast of Greece by an Axis ship, and the Captain and half the crew managed to escape in the ship's boat — along with a Greek old man who suddenly turned up. He hung a leather bag on the mast, and the wind seemed to strengthen and drive them toward an island that the Captain didn't recall being on his map.

When they reached the island, they entered a cove, and there found the Axis warship that had destroyed them — utterly deserted. They also found many more abandoned and wrecked ships on the beach, going back to an ancient Greek trireme.

Having an odd feeling, the Captain explores alone, and comes to a villa. Climbing the hill, he's attacked by wolves, who he manages to fend off. Then he meets meets a woman in ancient dress, and learns that there are more powers on the Allied side than he thought…

●●●◐○ The Death Hound {Dr. Taverner 06} (1922 ss)
William Martin approaches occultist and psychologist Dr. Taverner, and his physician partner Dr. Rhodes. Rhodes examines the man, confirming that he has a weak heart. Which wouldn't be too much of a problem, except that the man has a persistent delusion, that of “a black dog of ferocious aspect who pops out of dark corners and chivvies me, or tries to.” Sometimes it startles him, causing his heart to race. He fears that one day when he'd half-awake, he'll see it and be truly afraid, and his heart will give out.

As the man talks, Rhodes and Taverner learn two things. That Billy Martin has been contending with Tony Mortimer for the hand of Miss Hallam. And that the black dog doesn't bother him on Fridays, which Taverner later notes to Rhodes is the day the Black Lodge meets. Martin is checked into Hindhead, Taverner's sanatorium in the countryside.

There Martin experiences a respite from the black dog, the hospital being protected by a psychic shield. A week later, Miss Hallam and her mother visit, and it's revealed that the young woman is now engaged to Mortimer. Hallam reveals to the two doctors that, when she's near Mortimer, she's smitten with him, but when she's distant from him, she can't imagine why.

It's left to Taverner and Rhodes to deal with the miscreant occultist and help true love be restored.

◐○○○○ Labor Day Barbecue - Allen Knudsen (2021 ss)
John met Brian at a naked yoga class. The two Black men hit it off, and a few weeks later John was invited to Brian and Corey's apartment, nude of course. John had enjoyed hanging out nude with his friends, but then it was New Year's, and a couple months later Covid lockdown. Finally that ended, and John was invited to a potluck dinner party at B&C's condo in a naturist resort. The story is just of the dinner party, where John met other members who lived at the resort or visited weekends.

Now the bad part. Lola and Ernest arrived, masked and nude, and then Brian said “No need for masks here, okay?” Then Frank and Scott arrived, and Brian greeted them with “We’re safely beyond social distancing, right? Everybody’s vaccinated?” The two men tentatively removed their masks.

This happened several more times. If you're an author writing a story, you can pretend Covid never happened and just tell your story. This tale would have lost nothing if set a decade before the pandemic started. But if you do mention Covid, do so responsibly. This story didn't, and I find its attitude poor and its views offensive.

●●●◐○ Beggars in Spain - Nancy Kress (1991 nva)
Roger Camden, self-made billionaire, ordered the usual modifications for his planned child: height, hair and eye color, intelligence, musicality. Then he demanded the sleep-free mod, threatening lawsuits and bad publicity if his kid didn't get it. His wife Elizabeth clearly wasn't thrilled, but went along.

Unexpectedly, Elizabeth produced two eggs the month of the withdrawal. One was taken and modified while the one the doctors missed implanted and developed normally. The Sleepless girl was named Leisha, and Roger strongly favored her; the other girl was named Alice, who was her mother's favorite. The stress of the situation turned Elizabeth into a drunk, and she divorced her rich husband when the girls were young.

Both grew up in the libertarian world where Kenzo Yagai's development of cold fusion had made power almost free. Over time, there were more and more Sleepless, and while some "normal" people disliked them — they were all very successful, having a third more of the day to work toward their goals — it was mostly contained, until an autopsy of a Sleepless young man who'd died in an auto accident revealed that it was possible that a side-effect of the Sleepless mod might be immortality, or failing that, certainly a much-extended lifespan.

This led to all kinds of backlash from the Sleepers, and the Sleepless took steps to protect themselves. The adults could retreat to Sanctuary, a large tract of land they'd bought in Pennsylvania, but what of the Sleepless kids still living with their parents? They'd need rescuing when things went wrong.

●●○○○ Efficiency - Malcolm Jameson (1943 ss)
A very short story about the dangers of excessive efficiency.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Six's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
265+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 15+1 nva | 80+3 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] There is a short story left, plus two side novels with different main characters, in which Richard d'Orleans and Sabra du Lac make appearances as minor figures.

━━━━━━━━━━

Epub-split some more books. The anthology A.I. Chronicles edited by Ellen Campbell. The Essential Jack Sharkey collection, who is apparently like Margaret St. Clair in writing shorter shorts; there are twice as many stories in this collection than most produced in its batch. The Sam Merwin Jr Megapack as well as seven more of his stories from Project Gutenberg.

●●●◐○ Donuts and Dinosaurs {Scattered Worlds 02} - David Collins (2026 nov)
So this series isn't one that follows a set of characters, but one where different groups of characters face the same situation: being on one of the tens of thousands of chunks of planetary surface that were grabbed in a Lenovian experiment gone wrong, and dropped on a new world together in a Mandelbrot mishmash.

In this tale we get the mid-twenties, cis-het, white, USAn man that Collins seems to begin all his stories with getting scooped up. Also a similar woman, then over time they find a half-dozen more humans. The aliens this time are Proccas (six-legged goat-centaurs), who are Bronze-age fishers; Lanas (elf-bats), who are centuries more advanced than humans; and Gurranas (dwarf Neanderthals), who are a Stone Age people.

We get the usual struggles against dinosaurs, giant wolves, weird sea monsters, and what not, all transposed from various worlds onto this Scattered World — which may or may not be the same planet as the last volume. The usual Collins: fast light adventure, formulaic but fun.

●●●○○ Dogs, Cats, and Naked People. Oh My! - Linda Weber (2021 ss)
Community Service Day is a mandated annual event in this story. Usually Dr. David — senior veterinarian in a practice he shares with Dr. Janet — goes to the residential nudist community of Rolling Oaks to look at the pets of the people who live there, but this year he committed to going to the new Senior Center and checking pets there, so he offers the nudist job to his business partner, who after a couple of days' thought accepts.

On the first day, Janet makes her rounds topless, but wearing a sarong skirt. Walking between cottages, no one makes any untoward remarks. Janet meets a number of clients and their pets, finding only one that merits a more in-depth check at the office later in the week. Andrew the architect (who has a rescue greyhound) tells her about how naturism is a “philosophy of wholesome, non-sexual, family-friendly nudity” and invites her to dinner later.

The next weekend Janet has a dinner with some female friends, and reveals that she'll likely go to Rolling Oaks again to enjoy herself when she's not working.

●●○○○ I'm an Angel, Not an Astrophysicist! - Brian Terence (2025 ss)
Himself had agreed to answer a prayer — by some people with swords fighting some other people with swords — to stop the sun in the sky. The orders had filtered down to two angels, who were left to figure out how to do that without killing everyone on the sword folk's planet.

It took a fair bit of work, which we never really see. The piece is just discussions between catty angels, with no actual plans made or deeds done.

●●◐○○ Deaf, Dumb and Blind - C.M. Eddy, H.P. Lovecraft (1925 ss)
Dr. Morehouse had been visiting the people at the nearest house when Dobbs ran in, panicked. He was the manservant to author Richard Blake, who had rented the old Simeon Tanner place, thinking the dark past of the place exciting, even if the only way the wheelchair-bound writer — deaf, mute, and blind as he was, after what he'd experienced in the Great War — was second-hand, literally, via the touch code he'd worked out with Dobbs.

There had always been rumors about old Simeon, and when a noxious cloud had emanated from the house, the nearby farmers had broken into the house with axes, then into his locked study with the same. They found Simeon dead, with a horrible expression on his face, and his study filled with occult books. They burned the body and the books.

Now, when Blake was typing up his next book, something emerged from the always-locked study. Something which Blake was somehow aware of, and began typing about, in the manuscript that Dr. Morehouse took away before anyone could read it…

●●●●○ Carla Takes Her Clothes Off - A D Rowen (2019 nva)
After the divorce, Brian got his girlfriend pregnant, and Carla got the house, in the backyard of which she was now sunbathing. Topless, as she used to do on the beaches of Spain. Then she realized that the fence and hedge made the backyard private, so why have any tan lines?

This led to Carla going nude all the time at home, and soon enough opening the door to the mail carrier or a food delivery person without bothering to put on her housecoat. (“Exhibiting herself for men made her feel sexy.”) That led to her gardening in the front yard and washing her car nude, with none of her neighbors objecting.

Then Carla invited her friend Mandy to visit, and found that, while initially surprised, Mandy had no problems with Carla's nudity. Soon Carla began driving to her office naked, stopping in a lay-by near work to dress, then again undressing there when returning from her office job in town to her village home.

Soon Mandy, Carla, and two more friends went to Carla's local pub, where they discussed Carla's nudity. Carla explained that she didn't think of herself as a nudist, since she wasn't really interested in being around other nude people.

After some conversation, Jen noted that “Before you said you just liked being naked, now you said you like people seeing you naked. That’s different.” This led to the ladies challenging Carla to strip, her doing so, the largely male clientele having zero problem having a pretty 28-year-old woman nude in the pub, and the tavern owner reluctantly (and his wife later encouragingly) allowing Carla to be nude on the premises.

And so it goes, with Carla being nude more and more places, and her village having no problems with it. She even learns, from a man she gets involved with, that she's not the first.

Back in the 1930s, a family name Belgrave lived in town, when eighteen-year-old Hermione decided she didn't want to wear clothes. Despite it being a time when doing such a thing could get a woman put in an asylum, her family supported her, as did the town. A year later, Hermione's two-years-younger sister joined her in nudity. Hermione was nude for six years before marrying and moving away, but Olivia was nude for fifteen years before she moved away. An appendix shows entries from Olivia's journal.

In any case, Carla became close with handyman-and-amateur-historian Steven, and she remained nude around the village henceforth, at least in warmer weather. The fact that the villagers accepted her nudity so readily did lessen Carla's exhibitionist thrill some, but she coped.

●●●○○ The Scented Poppies {Dr. Taverner 05} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
A man comes to occultist and psychologist Dr. Taverner to see if he can do something about the man's cousin, who has just become heir to a childless rich uncle's estate. The problem is that three other cousins were previously the sole heir, and each in turn committed suicide. Gregory Polson would like to see the sequential suicides stopped, both because he likes the current heir, and because there are only three other cousins left, of which he's one.

Gregory suspects Irving, the cousin their uncle is likely to make heir last. Irving gives people small gifts, and Gregory brings in the floral wall hanging that Irving just gave to Tim, the current heir. Taverner discovers within one of the poppies some odd seeds, the scent of which “stirs up the pineal gland,” along with a moonstone, upon which has been impressed a psychic urge to throw oneself from a height.

Apparently some member of the occult community is selling working curses. Taverner and Rhodes must deal with both Irving and the seller to bring the case to a successful conclusion.

●●○○○ The Jameson Satellite - Neil R. Jones (1931 ss)
Inspired by Egyptian mummies, Professor Jameson sought to have his body preserved forever, building himself a small spaceship as a coffin, and leaving instructions for his nephew to launch him into orbit. With his radium repulsion ray fending off meteors, Professor Jameson remained in orbit for a long, long time. Forty million years, during which time the Moon drew much closer to Earth, and the tidally-locked Earth drew much closer to the cool, red Sun.³

After this span, Zoromes from the planet Zor arrive (and eventually say to Jameson “You died and were shot out into space long before any life occurred on Zor,” in another wild miscalculation of time by the author).

They were originally a fully biological race, but in their quest for immortality, ended up making themselves mostly robotic. They have cubical metal bodies with four legs and six manipulatory tentacles, and contain the biological brains of the original inhabitants of Zor. They place Professor Jameson's brain in one of their bodies and revive him.

The now-mechanical Jameson, together with his robotic companions, briefly explore the twilight zone of one-face Earth, have a minor adventure, and then set forth to further explore "the Universe" (NRJ knew not of galaxies?), in this first of many Professor Jameson stories.

●●●◐○ GirlWorld - Lisa Morton (2010 ss)
The apocalypse had gone well for Stace and Brittnay. The former had been a truckstop waitress who'd had to deal with men trying to grope her, the latter a dental assistant who'd had her fill of shrieking brats.

They'd met six months ago in the produce section, and had been together since. The zombie epidemic that had hit three months ago had spared them from their jobs, and when everyone living went to relocation centers, they'd skipped that depressing chaos.

Now they traveled, killing zombies — Stace had a dozen wooden bats, since they shattered eventually, while Brittnay favored a homemade spear — and staying in expensive houses, sometimes having sex all day. Except Stace has bad dreams every night.

So Britt conceives of The Mission, to lay her own old ghosts to rest. They headed to her old house, and they find her father, who beat her mother until she fled, with Britt running away at sixteen. And the couple wreaks sweet revenge on his zombified self.

●○○○○ Meriweather & Bryce, P.I.s - Greg Kauffman-Starkey (2026 nov)
Two Victorian private investigators — and Uranian lovers, despite the laws of Church and State — become involved in a series of kidnappings, all involving men in their early fifties, but of different social stations: laborers, a newspaper editor, an alderman, a wealthy factory owner. The niece of the moneyed man hires the detectives to find him.

Investigating, Jack Meriweather and Lucien Bryce learn that Franklin Royale, notorious criminal mastermind, is involved, but they learn no more. The two of them are also men of a certain age, Jack Meriweather reminds his partner Lucien Bryce. They stroll up and down the street where the kidnappings occur, and are promptly hooded and shoved into a carriage. They learn from the men with whom they're imprisoned that they're now sexual slaves, since “there is a growing fetish” for that sort of thing.²

Bryce and Meriweather then get picked as assassins by Prince Thomas to appear at an official Palace reception — as high-class Uranian prostitutes, mind you — to kill Sultan Adi un-Vactun, who made a disparaging remark about Queen Victoria. And as part of their plan to escape their minders, Lucian and Jack play up their homosexuality and kiss the prince in front of his mother.

Okay, the stupidity of this novel's plot has surprised me multiple times. The ineptitude of the detective heroes, ditto. Why this is so is beyond me, given that I've read other detective novels by this author — three gay leads across four books, one set in Victorian times — and they were much better.

In any case, the detectives here eventually end the sex slavery scheme, get the other men released, and don't end up imprisoned themselves. They even get the Queen to look the other way regarding the detectives' Uranian natures, and the acts the other men were forced to perform under duress, as long as everyone is discreet form now on. And Franklin Royale is arrested, which I didn't expect, he being the James Moriarty of the book.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Five's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
259+6 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+1 nva | 78+2 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] The narrator says the area involved is a roughly 42×51 mile oval. This seems small enough that this book's group would have contacted the people from the first book in the eight years that pass before the final chapter. They don't, which suggests its a different planet (and which makes the experiment even more ludicrous). But the map in the book suggests that we've only experienced a small area of a vast Scatter.

[2] Ri-ii-ight. That a criminal enterprise could identify scores of homosexual clients, who hide their orientations lest they be imprisoned, seems unlikely. Then you need to have clients who want to have sex with unwilling men, pay for the privilege, and trust the panderer with their secrets. Only the fact that Franklin Royale plans to later blackmail these men makes any sense. Oh, and being an equal-opportunity panderer, Royale also maintained a harem of women for wealthy ladies with same-sex tastes.

[3] Yeah, the timeline for all this is wrong, tens of millions of years instead of almost a billion years left for Earth, and more for Sol. Jones seems to be working off Lord Kelvin's idea that the Sun had the heat of its formation, and cooled from there. That nuclear fusion occurs in stars was discovered in the 1920s.

●●●◐○ Donuts and Dinosaurs {Scattered Worlds 02} - David Collins (2026 nov)
So this series isn't one that follows a set of characters, but one where different groups of characters face the same situation: being on one of the tens of thousands of chunks of planetary surface that were grabbed in a Lenovian experiment gone wrong, and dropped on a new world together in a Mandelbrot mishmash.

In this tale we get the mid-twenties, cis-het, white, USAn man that Collins seems to begin all his stories with getting scooped up. Also a similar woman, then over time they find a half-dozen more humans. The aliens this time are Proccas (six-legged goat-centaurs), who are Bronze-age fishers; Lanas (elf-bats), who are centuries more advanced than humans; and Gurranas (dwarf Neanderthals), who are a Stone Age people.

We get the usual struggles against dinosaurs, giant wolves, weird sea monsters, and what not, all transposed from various worlds onto this Scattered World — which may or may not be the same planet as the last volume. The usual Collins: fast light adventure, formulaic but fun.

●●●○○ Dogs, Cats, and Naked People. Oh My! - Linda Weber (2021 ss)
Community Service Day is a mandated annual event in this story. Usually Dr. David — senior veterinarian in a practice he shares with Dr. Janet — goes to the residential nudist community of Rolling Oaks to look at the pets of the people who live there, but this year he committed to going to the new Senior Center and checking pets there, so he offers the nudist job to his business partner, who after a couple of days' thought accepts.

On the first day, Janet makes her rounds topless, but wearing a sarong skirt. Walking between cottages, no one makes any untoward remarks. Janet meets a number of clients and their pets, finding only one that merits a more in-depth check at the office later in the week. Andrew the architect (who has a rescue greyhound) tells her about how naturism is a “philosophy of wholesome, non-sexual, family-friendly nudity” and invites her to dinner later.

The next weekend Janet has a dinner with some female friends, and reveals that she'll likely go to Rolling Oaks again to enjoy herself when she's not working.

●●○○○ I'm an Angel, Not an Astrophysicist! - Brian Terence (2025 ss)
Himself had agreed to answer a prayer — by some people with swords fighting some other people with swords — to stop the sun in the sky. The orders had filtered down to two angels, who were left to figure out how to do that without killing everyone on the sword folk's planet.

It took a fair bit of work, which we never really see. The piece is just discussions between catty angels, with no actual plans made or deeds done.

●●◐○○ Deaf, Dumb and Blind - C.M. Eddy, H.P. Lovecraft (1925 ss)
Dr. Morehouse had been visiting the people at the nearest house when Dobbs ran in, panicked. He was the manservant to author Richard Blake, who had rented the old Simeon Tanner place, thinking the dark past of the place exciting, even if the only way the wheelchair-bound writer — deaf, mute, and blind as he was, after what he'd experienced in the Great War — was second-hand, literally, via the touch code he'd worked out with Dobbs.

There had always been rumors about old Simeon, and when a noxious cloud had emanated from the house, the nearby farmers had broken into the house with axes, then into his locked study with the same. They found Simeon dead, with a horrible expression on his face, and his study filled with occult books. They burned the body and the books.

Now, when Blake was typing up his next book, something emerged from the always-locked study. Something which Blake was somehow aware of, and began typing about, in the manuscript that Dr. Morehouse took away before anyone could read it…

●●●●○ Carla Takes Her Clothes Off - A D Rowen (2019 nva)
After the divorce, Brian got his girlfriend pregnant, and Carla got the house, in the backyard of which she was now sunbathing. Topless, as she used to do on the beaches of Spain. Then she realized that the fence and hedge made the backyard private, so why have any tan lines?

This led to Carla going nude all the time at home, and soon enough opening the door to the mail carrier or a food delivery person without bothering to put on her housecoat. (“Exhibiting herself for men made her feel sexy.”) That led to her gardening in the front yard and washing her car nude, with none of her neighbors objecting.

Then Carla invited her friend Mandy to visit, and found that, while initially surprised, Mandy had no problems with Carla's nudity. Soon Carla began driving to her office naked, stopping in a lay-by near work to dress, then again undressing there when returning from her office job in town to her village home.

Soon Mandy, Carla, and two more friends went to Carla's local pub, where they discussed Carla's nudity. Carla explained that she didn't think of herself as a nudist, since she wasn't really interested in being around other nude people.

After some conversation, Jen noted that “Before you said you just liked being naked, now you said you like people seeing you naked. That’s different.” This led to the ladies challenging Carla to strip, her doing so, the largely male clientele having zero problem having a pretty 28-year-old woman nude in the pub, and the tavern owner reluctantly (and his wife later encouragingly) allowing Carla to be nude on the premises.

And so it goes, with Carla being nude more and more places, and her village having no problems with it. She even learns, from a man she gets involved with, that she's not the first.

Back in the 1930s, a family name Belgrave lived in town, when eighteen-year-old Hermione decided she didn't want to wear clothes. Despite it being a time when doing such a thing could get a woman put in an asylum, her family supported her, as did the town. A year later, Hermione's two-years-younger sister joined her in nudity. Hermione was nude for six years before marrying and moving away, but Olivia was nude for fifteen years before she moved away. An appendix shows entries from Olivia's journal.

In any case, Carla became close with handyman-and-amateur-historian Steven, and she remained nude around the village henceforth, at least in warmer weather. The fact that the villagers accepted her nudity so readily did lessen Carla's exhibitionist thrill some, but she coped.

●●●○○ The Scented Poppies {Dr. Taverner 05} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
A man comes to occultist and psychologist Dr. Taverner to see if he can do something about the man's cousin, who has just become heir to a childless rich uncle's estate. The problem is that three other cousins were previously the sole heir, and each in turn committed suicide. Gregory Polson would like to see the sequential suicides stopped, both because he likes the current heir, and because there are only three other cousins left, of which he's one.

Gregory suspects Irving, the cousin their uncle is likely to make heir last. Irving gives people small gifts, and Gregory brings in the floral wall hanging that Irving just gave to Tim, the current heir. Taverner discovers within one of the poppies some odd seeds, the scent of which “stirs up the pineal gland,” along with a moonstone, upon which has been impressed a psychic urge to throw oneself from a height.

Apparently some member of the occult community is selling working curses. Taverner and Rhodes must deal with both Irving and the seller to bring the case to a successful conclusion.

●●○○○ The Jameson Satellite - Neil R. Jones (1931 ss)
Inspired by Egyptian mummies, Professor Jameson sought to have his body preserved forever, building himself a small spaceship as a coffin, and leaving instructions for his nephew to launch him into orbit. With his radium repulsion ray fending off meteors, Professor Jameson remained in orbit for a long, long time. Forty million years, during which time the Moon drew much closer to Earth, and the tidally-locked Earth drew much closer to the cool, red Sun.³

After this span, Zoromes from the planet Zor arrive (and eventually say to Jameson “You died and were shot out into space long before any life occurred on Zor,” in another wild miscalculation of time by the author).

They were originally a fully biological race, but in their quest for immortality, ended up making themselves mostly robotic. They have cubical metal bodies with four legs and six manipulatory tentacles, and contain the biological brains of the original inhabitants of Zor. They place Professor Jameson's brain in one of their bodies and revive him.

The now-mechanical Jameson, together with his robotic companions, briefly explore the twilight zone of one-face Earth, have a minor adventure, and then set forth to further explore "the Universe" (NRJ knew not of galaxies?), in this first of many Professor Jameson stories.

●●●◐○ GirlWorld - Lisa Morton (2010 ss)
The apocalypse had gone well for Stace and Brittnay. The former had been a truckstop waitress who'd had to deal with men trying to grope her, the latter a dental assistant who'd had her fill of shrieking brats.

They'd met six months ago in the produce section, and had been together since. The zombie epidemic that had hit three months ago had spared them from their jobs, and when everyone living went to relocation centers, they'd skipped that depressing chaos.

Now they traveled, killing zombies — Stace had a dozen wooden bats, since they shattered eventually, while Brittnay favored a homemade spear — and staying in expensive houses, sometimes having sex all day. Except Stace has bad dreams every night.

So Britt conceives of The Mission, to lay her own old ghosts to rest. They headed to her old house, and they find her father, who beat her mother until she fled, with Britt running away at sixteen. And the couple wreaks sweet revenge on his zombified self.

●○○○○ Meriweather & Bryce, P.I.s - Greg Kauffman-Starkey (2026 nov)
Two Victorian private investigators — and Uranian lovers, despite the laws of Church and State — become involved in a series of kidnappings, all involving men in their early fifties, but of different social stations: laborers, a newspaper editor, an alderman, a wealthy factory owner. The niece of the moneyed man hires the detectives to find him.

Investigating, Jack Meriweather and Lucien Bryce learn that Franklin Royale, notorious criminal mastermind, is involved, but they learn no more. The two of them are also men of a certain age, Jack Meriweather reminds his partner Lucien Bryce. They stroll up and down the street where the kidnappings occur, and are promptly hooded and shoved into a carriage. They learn from the men with whom they're imprisoned that they're now sexual slaves, since “there is a growing fetish” for that sort of thing.²

Bryce and Meriweather then get picked as assassins by Prince Thomas to appear at an official Palace reception — as high-class Uranian prostitutes, mind you — to kill Sultan Adi un-Vactun, who made a disparaging remark about Queen Victoria. And as part of their plan to escape their minders, Lucian and Jack play up their homosexuality and kiss the prince in front of his mother.

Okay, the stupidity of this novel's plot has surprised me multiple times. The ineptitude of the detective heroes, ditto. Why this is so is beyond me, given that I've read other detective novels by this author — three gay leads across four books, one set in Victorian times — and they were much better.

In any case, the detectives here eventually end the sex slavery scheme, get the other men released, and don't end up imprisoned themselves. They even get the Queen to look the other way regarding the detectives' Uranian natures, and the acts the other men were forced to perform under duress, as long as everyone is discreet form now on. And Franklin Royale is arrested, which I didn't expect, he being the James Moriarty of the book.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Five's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
259+6 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+1 nva | 78+2 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] The narrator says the area involved is a roughly 42×51 mile oval. This seems small enough that this book's group would have contacted the people from the first book in the eight years that pass before the final chapter. They don't, which suggests its a different planet (and which makes the experiment even more ludicrous). But the map in the book suggests that we've only experienced a small area of a vast Scatter.

[2] Ri-ii-ight. That a criminal enterprise could identify scores of homosexual clients, who hide their orientations lest they be imprisoned, seems unlikely. Then you need to have clients who want to have sex with unwilling men, pay for the privilege, and trust the panderer with their secrets. Only the fact that Franklin Royale plans to later blackmail these men makes any sense. Oh, and being an equal-opportunity panderer, Royale also maintained a harem of women for wealthy ladies with same-sex tastes.

[3] Yeah, the timeline for all this is wrong, tens of millions of years instead of almost a billion years left for Earth, and more for Sol. Jones seems to be working off Lord Kelvin's idea that the Sun had the heat of its formation, and cooled from there. That nuclear fusion occurs in stars was discovered in the 1920s.

●●●◐○ Donuts and Dinosaurs {Scattered Worlds 02} - David Collins (2026 nov)
So this series isn't one that follows a set of characters, but one where different groups of characters face the same situation: being on one of the tens of thousands of chunks of planetary surface that were grabbed in a Lenovian experiment gone wrong, and dropped on a new world together in a Mandelbrot mishmash.

In this tale we get the mid-twenties, cis-het, white, USAn man that Collins seems to begin all his stories with getting scooped up. Also a similar woman, then over time they find a half-dozen more humans. The aliens this time are Proccas (six-legged goat-centaurs), who are Bronze-age fishers; Lanas (elf-bats), who are centuries more advanced than humans; and Gurranas (dwarf Neanderthals), who are a Stone Age people.

We get the usual struggles against dinosaurs, giant wolves, weird sea monsters, and what not, all transposed from various worlds onto this Scattered World — which may or may not be the same planet as the last volume. The usual Collins: fast light adventure, formulaic but fun.

●●●○○ Dogs, Cats, and Naked People. Oh My! - Linda Weber (2021 ss)
Community Service Day is a mandated annual event in this story. Usually Dr. David — senior veterinarian in a practice he shares with Dr. Janet — goes to the residential nudist community of Rolling Oaks to look at the pets of the people who live there, but this year he committed to going to the new Senior Center and checking pets there, so he offers the nudist job to his business partner, who after a couple of days' thought accepts.

On the first day, Janet makes her rounds topless, but wearing a sarong skirt. Walking between cottages, no one makes any untoward remarks. Janet meets a number of clients and their pets, finding only one that merits a more in-depth check at the office later in the week. Andrew the architect (who has a rescue greyhound) tells her about how naturism is a “philosophy of wholesome, non-sexual, family-friendly nudity” and invites her to dinner later.

The next weekend Janet has a dinner with some female friends, and reveals that she'll likely go to Rolling Oaks again to enjoy herself when she's not working.

●●○○○ I'm an Angel, Not an Astrophysicist! - Brian Terence (2025 ss)
Himself had agreed to answer a prayer — by some people with swords fighting some other people with swords — to stop the sun in the sky. The orders had filtered down to two angels, who were left to figure out how to do that without killing everyone on the sword folk's planet.

It took a fair bit of work, which we never really see. The piece is just discussions between catty angels, with no actual plans made or deeds done.

●●◐○○ Deaf, Dumb and Blind - C.M. Eddy, H.P. Lovecraft (1925 ss)
Dr. Morehouse had been visiting the people at the nearest house when Dobbs ran in, panicked. He was the manservant to author Richard Blake, who had rented the old Simeon Tanner place, thinking the dark past of the place exciting, even if the only way the wheelchair-bound writer — deaf, mute, and blind as he was, after what he'd experienced in the Great War — was second-hand, literally, via the touch code he'd worked out with Dobbs.

There had always been rumors about old Simeon, and when a noxious cloud had emanated from the house, the nearby farmers had broken into the house with axes, then into his locked study with the same. They found Simeon dead, with a horrible expression on his face, and his study filled with occult books. They burned the body and the books.

Now, when Blake was typing up his next book, something emerged from the always-locked study. Something which Blake was somehow aware of, and began typing about, in the manuscript that Dr. Morehouse took away before anyone could read it…

●●●●○ Carla Takes Her Clothes Off - A D Rowen (2019 nva)
After the divorce, Brian got his girlfriend pregnant, and Carla got the house, in the backyard of which she was now sunbathing. Topless, as she used to do on the beaches of Spain. Then she realized that the fence and hedge made the backyard private, so why have any tan lines?

This led to Carla going nude all the time at home, and soon enough opening the door to the mail carrier or a food delivery person without bothering to put on her housecoat. (“Exhibiting herself for men made her feel sexy.”) That led to her gardening in the front yard and washing her car nude, with none of her neighbors objecting.

Then Carla invited her friend Mandy to visit, and found that, while initially surprised, Mandy had no problems with Carla's nudity. Soon Carla began driving to her office naked, stopping in a lay-by near work to dress, then again undressing there when returning from her office job in town to her village home.

Soon Mandy, Carla, and two more friends went to Carla's local pub, where they discussed Carla's nudity. Carla explained that she didn't think of herself as a nudist, since she wasn't really interested in being around other nude people.

After some conversation, Jen noted that “Before you said you just liked being naked, now you said you like people seeing you naked. That’s different.” This led to the ladies challenging Carla to strip, her doing so, the largely male clientele having zero problem having a pretty 28-year-old woman nude in the pub, and the tavern owner reluctantly (and his wife later encouragingly) allowing Carla to be nude on the premises.

And so it goes, with Carla being nude more and more places, and her village having no problems with it. She even learns, from a man she gets involved with, that she's not the first.

Back in the 1930s, a family name Belgrave lived in town, when eighteen-year-old Hermione decided she didn't want to wear clothes. Despite it being a time when doing such a thing could get a woman put in an asylum, her family supported her, as did the town. A year later, Hermione's two-years-younger sister joined her in nudity. Hermione was nude for six years before marrying and moving away, but Olivia was nude for fifteen years before she moved away. An appendix shows entries from Olivia's journal.

In any case, Carla became close with handyman-and-amateur-historian Steven, and she remained nude around the village henceforth, at least in warmer weather. The fact that the villagers accepted her nudity so readily did lessen Carla's exhibitionist thrill some, but she coped.

●●●○○ The Scented Poppies {Dr. Taverner 05} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
A man comes to occultist and psychologist Dr. Taverner to see if he can do something about the man's cousin, who has just become heir to a childless rich uncle's estate. The problem is that three other cousins were previously the sole heir, and each in turn committed suicide. Gregory Polson would like to see the sequential suicides stopped, both because he likes the current heir, and because there are only three other cousins left, of which he's one.

Gregory suspects Irving, the cousin their uncle is likely to make heir last. Irving gives people small gifts, and Gregory brings in the floral wall hanging that Irving just gave to Tim, the current heir. Taverner discovers within one of the poppies some odd seeds, the scent of which “stirs up the pineal gland,” along with a moonstone, upon which has been impressed a psychic urge to throw oneself from a height.

Apparently some member of the occult community is selling working curses. Taverner and Rhodes must deal with both Irving and the seller to bring the case to a successful conclusion.

●●○○○ The Jameson Satellite - Neil R. Jones (1931 ss)
Inspired by Egyptian mummies, Professor Jameson sought to have his body preserved forever, building himself a small spaceship as a coffin, and leaving instructions for his nephew to launch him into orbit. With his radium repulsion ray fending off meteors, Professor Jameson remained in orbit for a long, long time. Forty million years, during which time the Moon drew much closer to Earth, and the tidally-locked Earth drew much closer to the cool, red Sun.³

After this span, Zoromes from the planet Zor arrive (and eventually say to Jameson “You died and were shot out into space long before any life occurred on Zor,” in another wild miscalculation of time by the author).

They were originally a fully biological race, but in their quest for immortality, ended up making themselves mostly robotic. They have cubical metal bodies with four legs and six manipulatory tentacles, and contain the biological brains of the original inhabitants of Zor. They place Professor Jameson's brain in one of their bodies and revive him.

The now-mechanical Jameson, together with his robotic companions, briefly explore the twilight zone of one-face Earth, have a minor adventure, and then set forth to further explore "the Universe" (NRJ knew not of galaxies?), in this first of many Professor Jameson stories.

●●●◐○ GirlWorld - Lisa Morton (2010 ss)
The apocalypse had gone well for Stace and Brittnay. The former had been a truckstop waitress who'd had to deal with men trying to grope her, the latter a dental assistant who'd had her fill of shrieking brats.

They'd met six months ago in the produce section, and had been together since. The zombie epidemic that had hit three months ago had spared them from their jobs, and when everyone living went to relocation centers, they'd skipped that depressing chaos.

Now they traveled, killing zombies — Stace had a dozen wooden bats, since they shattered eventually, while Brittnay favored a homemade spear — and staying in expensive houses, sometimes having sex all day. Except Stace has bad dreams every night.

So Britt conceives of The Mission, to lay her own old ghosts to rest. They headed to her old house, and they find her father, who beat her mother until she fled, with Britt running away at sixteen. And the couple wreaks sweet revenge on his zombified self.

●○○○○ Meriweather & Bryce, P.I.s - Greg Kauffman-Starkey (2026 nov)
Two Victorian private investigators — and Uranian lovers, despite the laws of Church and State — become involved in a series of kidnappings, all involving men in their early fifties, but of different social stations: laborers, a newspaper editor, an alderman, a wealthy factory owner. The niece of the moneyed man hires the detectives to find him.

Investigating, Jack Meriweather and Lucien Bryce learn that Franklin Royale, notorious criminal mastermind, is involved, but they learn no more. The two of them are also men of a certain age, Jack Meriweather reminds his partner Lucien Bryce. They stroll up and down the street where the kidnappings occur, and are promptly hooded and shoved into a carriage. They learn from the men with whom they're imprisoned that they're now sexual slaves, since “there is a growing fetish” for that sort of thing.²

Bryce and Meriweather then get picked as assassins by Prince Thomas to appear at an official Palace reception — as high-class Uranian prostitutes, mind you — to kill Sultan Adi un-Vactun, who made a disparaging remark about Queen Victoria. And as part of their plan to escape their minders, Lucian and Jack play up their homosexuality and kiss the prince in front of his mother.

Okay, the stupidity of this novel's plot has surprised me multiple times. The ineptitude of the detective heroes, ditto. Why this is so is beyond me, given that I've read other detective novels by this author — three gay leads across four books, one set in Victorian times — and they were much better.

In any case, the detectives here eventually end the sex slavery scheme, get the other men released, and don't end up imprisoned themselves. They even get the Queen to look the other way regarding the detectives' Uranian natures, and the acts the other men were forced to perform under duress, as long as everyone is discreet form now on. And Franklin Royale is arrested, which I didn't expect, he being the James Moriarty of the book.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Five's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
259+6 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+1 nva | 78+2 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] The narrator says the area involved is a roughly 42×51 mile oval. This seems small enough that this book's group would have contacted the people from the first book in the eight years that pass before the final chapter. They don't, which suggests its a different planet (and which makes the experiment even more ludicrous). But the map in the book suggests that we've only experienced a small area of a vast Scatter.

[2] Ri-ii-ight. That a criminal enterprise could identify scores of homosexual clients, who hide their orientations lest they be imprisoned, seems unlikely. Then you need to have clients who want to have sex with unwilling men, pay for the privilege, and trust the panderer with their secrets. Only the fact that Franklin Royale plans to later blackmail these men makes any sense. Oh, and being an equal-opportunity panderer, Royale also maintained a harem of women for wealthy ladies with same-sex tastes.

[3] Yeah, the timeline for all this is wrong, tens of millions of years instead of almost a billion years left for Earth, and more for Sol. Jones seems to be working off Lord Kelvin's idea that the Sun had the heat of its formation, and cooled from there. That nuclear fusion occurs in stars was discovered in the 1920s.

●●●◐○ Donuts and Dinosaurs {Scattered Worlds 02} - David Collins (2026 nov)
So this series isn't one that follows a set of characters, but one where different groups of characters face the same situation: being on one of the tens of thousands of chunks of planetary surface that were grabbed in a Lenovian experiment gone wrong, and dropped on a new world together in a Mandelbrot mishmash.

In this tale we get the mid-twenties, cis-het, white, USAn man that Collins seems to begin all his stories with getting scooped up. Also a similar woman, then over time they find a half-dozen more humans. The aliens this time are Proccas (six-legged goat-centaurs), who are Bronze-age fishers; Lanas (elf-bats), who are centuries more advanced than humans; and Gurranas (dwarf Neanderthals), who are a Stone Age people.

We get the usual struggles against dinosaurs, giant wolves, weird sea monsters, and what not, all transposed from various worlds onto this Scattered World — which may or may not be the same planet as the last volume. The usual Collins: fast light adventure, formulaic but fun.

●●●○○ Dogs, Cats, and Naked People. Oh My! - Linda Weber (2021 ss)
Community Service Day is a mandated annual event in this story. Usually Dr. David — senior veterinarian in a practice he shares with Dr. Janet — goes to the residential nudist community of Rolling Oaks to look at the pets of the people who live there, but this year he committed to going to the new Senior Center and checking pets there, so he offers the nudist job to his business partner, who after a couple of days' thought accepts.

On the first day, Janet makes her rounds topless, but wearing a sarong skirt. Walking between cottages, no one makes any untoward remarks. Janet meets a number of clients and their pets, finding only one that merits a more in-depth check at the office later in the week. Andrew the architect (who has a rescue greyhound) tells her about how naturism is a “philosophy of wholesome, non-sexual, family-friendly nudity” and invites her to dinner later.

The next weekend Janet has a dinner with some female friends, and reveals that she'll likely go to Rolling Oaks again to enjoy herself when she's not working.

●●○○○ I'm an Angel, Not an Astrophysicist! - Brian Terence (2025 ss)
Himself had agreed to answer a prayer — by some people with swords fighting some other people with swords — to stop the sun in the sky. The orders had filtered down to two angels, who were left to figure out how to do that without killing everyone on the sword folk's planet.

It took a fair bit of work, which we never really see. The piece is just discussions between catty angels, with no actual plans made or deeds done.

●●◐○○ Deaf, Dumb and Blind - C.M. Eddy, H.P. Lovecraft (1925 ss)
Dr. Morehouse had been visiting the people at the nearest house when Dobbs ran in, panicked. He was the manservant to author Richard Blake, who had rented the old Simeon Tanner place, thinking the dark past of the place exciting, even if the only way the wheelchair-bound writer — deaf, mute, and blind as he was, after what he'd experienced in the Great War — was second-hand, literally, via the touch code he'd worked out with Dobbs.

There had always been rumors about old Simeon, and when a noxious cloud had emanated from the house, the nearby farmers had broken into the house with axes, then into his locked study with the same. They found Simeon dead, with a horrible expression on his face, and his study filled with occult books. They burned the body and the books.

Now, when Blake was typing up his next book, something emerged from the always-locked study. Something which Blake was somehow aware of, and began typing about, in the manuscript that Dr. Morehouse took away before anyone could read it…

●●●●○ Carla Takes Her Clothes Off - A D Rowen (2019 nva)
After the divorce, Brian got his girlfriend pregnant, and Carla got the house, in the backyard of which she was now sunbathing. Topless, as she used to do on the beaches of Spain. Then she realized that the fence and hedge made the backyard private, so why have any tan lines?

This led to Carla going nude all the time at home, and soon enough opening the door to the mail carrier or a food delivery person without bothering to put on her housecoat. (“Exhibiting herself for men made her feel sexy.”) That led to her gardening in the front yard and washing her car nude, with none of her neighbors objecting.

Then Carla invited her friend Mandy to visit, and found that, while initially surprised, Mandy had no problems with Carla's nudity. Soon Carla began driving to her office naked, stopping in a lay-by near work to dress, then again undressing there when returning from her office job in town to her village home.

Soon Mandy, Carla, and two more friends went to Carla's local pub, where they discussed Carla's nudity. Carla explained that she didn't think of herself as a nudist, since she wasn't really interested in being around other nude people.

After some conversation, Jen noted that “Before you said you just liked being naked, now you said you like people seeing you naked. That’s different.” This led to the ladies challenging Carla to strip, her doing so, the largely male clientele having zero problem having a pretty 28-year-old woman nude in the pub, and the tavern owner reluctantly (and his wife later encouragingly) allowing Carla to be nude on the premises.

And so it goes, with Carla being nude more and more places, and her village having no problems with it. She even learns, from a man she gets involved with, that she's not the first.

Back in the 1930s, a family name Belgrave lived in town, when eighteen-year-old Hermione decided she didn't want to wear clothes. Despite it being a time when doing such a thing could get a woman put in an asylum, her family supported her, as did the town. A year later, Hermione's two-years-younger sister joined her in nudity. Hermione was nude for six years before marrying and moving away, but Olivia was nude for fifteen years before she moved away. An appendix shows entries from Olivia's journal.

In any case, Carla became close with handyman-and-amateur-historian Steven, and she remained nude around the village henceforth, at least in warmer weather. The fact that the villagers accepted her nudity so readily did lessen Carla's exhibitionist thrill some, but she coped.

●●●○○ The Scented Poppies {Dr. Taverner 05} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
A man comes to occultist and psychologist Dr. Taverner to see if he can do something about the man's cousin, who has just become heir to a childless rich uncle's estate. The problem is that three other cousins were previously the sole heir, and each in turn committed suicide. Gregory Polson would like to see the sequential suicides stopped, both because he likes the current heir, and because there are only three other cousins left, of which he's one.

Gregory suspects Irving, the cousin their uncle is likely to make heir last. Irving gives people small gifts, and Gregory brings in the floral wall hanging that Irving just gave to Tim, the current heir. Taverner discovers within one of the poppies some odd seeds, the scent of which “stirs up the pineal gland,” along with a moonstone, upon which has been impressed a psychic urge to throw oneself from a height.

Apparently some member of the occult community is selling working curses. Taverner and Rhodes must deal with both Irving and the seller to bring the case to a successful conclusion.

●●○○○ The Jameson Satellite - Neil R. Jones (1931 ss)
Inspired by Egyptian mummies, Professor Jameson sought to have his body preserved forever, building himself a small spaceship as a coffin, and leaving instructions for his nephew to launch him into orbit. With his radium repulsion ray fending off meteors, Professor Jameson remained in orbit for a long, long time. Forty million years, during which time the Moon drew much closer to Earth, and the tidally-locked Earth drew much closer to the cool, red Sun.³

After this span, Zoromes from the planet Zor arrive (and eventually say to Jameson “You died and were shot out into space long before any life occurred on Zor,” in another wild miscalculation of time by the author).

They were originally a fully biological race, but in their quest for immortality, ended up making themselves mostly robotic. They have cubical metal bodies with four legs and six manipulatory tentacles, and contain the biological brains of the original inhabitants of Zor. They place Professor Jameson's brain in one of their bodies and revive him.

The now-mechanical Jameson, together with his robotic companions, briefly explore the twilight zone of one-face Earth, have a minor adventure, and then set forth to further explore "the Universe" (NRJ knew not of galaxies?), in this first of many Professor Jameson stories.

●●●◐○ GirlWorld - Lisa Morton (2010 ss)
The apocalypse had gone well for Stace and Brittnay. The former had been a truckstop waitress who'd had to deal with men trying to grope her, the latter a dental assistant who'd had her fill of shrieking brats.

They'd met six months ago in the produce section, and had been together since. The zombie epidemic that had hit three months ago had spared them from their jobs, and when everyone living went to relocation centers, they'd skipped that depressing chaos.

Now they traveled, killing zombies — Stace had a dozen wooden bats, since they shattered eventually, while Brittnay favored a homemade spear — and staying in expensive houses, sometimes having sex all day. Except Stace has bad dreams every night.

So Britt conceives of The Mission, to lay her own old ghosts to rest. They headed to her old house, and they find her father, who beat her mother until she fled, with Britt running away at sixteen. And the couple wreaks sweet revenge on his zombified self.

●○○○○ Meriweather & Bryce, P.I.s - Greg Kauffman-Starkey (2026 nov)
Two Victorian private investigators — and Uranian lovers, despite the laws of Church and State — become involved in a series of kidnappings, all involving men in their early fifties, but of different social stations: laborers, a newspaper editor, an alderman, a wealthy factory owner. The niece of the moneyed man hires the detectives to find him.

Investigating, Jack Meriweather and Lucien Bryce learn that Franklin Royale, notorious criminal mastermind, is involved, but they learn no more. The two of them are also men of a certain age, Jack Meriweather reminds his partner Lucien Bryce. They stroll up and down the street where the kidnappings occur, and are promptly hooded and shoved into a carriage. They learn from the men with whom they're imprisoned that they're now sexual slaves, since “there is a growing fetish” for that sort of thing.²

Bryce and Meriweather then get picked as assassins by Prince Thomas to appear at an official Palace reception — as high-class Uranian prostitutes, mind you — to kill Sultan Adi un-Vactun, who made a disparaging remark about Queen Victoria. And as part of their plan to escape their minders, Lucian and Jack play up their homosexuality and kiss the prince in front of his mother.

Okay, the stupidity of this novel's plot has surprised me multiple times. The ineptitude of the detective heroes, ditto. Why this is so is beyond me, given that I've read other detective novels by this author — three gay leads across four books, one set in Victorian times — and they were much better.

In any case, the detectives here eventually end the sex slavery scheme, get the other men released, and don't end up imprisoned themselves. They even get the Queen to look the other way regarding the detectives' Uranian natures, and the acts the other men were forced to perform under duress, as long as everyone is discreet form now on. And Franklin Royale is arrested, which I didn't expect, he being the James Moriarty of the book.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Five's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
259+6 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+1 nva | 78+2 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] The narrator says the area involved is a roughly 42×51 mile oval. This seems small enough that this book's group would have contacted the people from the first book in the eight years that pass before the final chapter. They don't, which suggests its a different planet (and which makes the experiment even more ludicrous). But the map in the book suggests that we've only experienced a small area of a vast Scatter.

[2] Ri-ii-ight. That a criminal enterprise could identify scores of homosexual clients, who hide their orientations lest they be imprisoned, seems unlikely. Then you need to have clients who want to have sex with unwilling men, pay for the privilege, and trust the panderer with their secrets. Only the fact that Franklin Royale plans to later blackmail these men makes any sense. Oh, and being an equal-opportunity panderer, Royale also maintained a harem of women for wealthy ladies with same-sex tastes.

[3] Yeah, the timeline for all this is wrong, tens of millions of years instead of almost a billion years left for Earth, and more for Sol. Jones seems to be working off Lord Kelvin's idea that the Sun had the heat of its formation, and cooled from there. That nuclear fusion occurs in stars was discovered in the 1920s.

●●●◐○ Donuts and Dinosaurs {Scattered Worlds 02} - David Collins (2026 nov)
So this series isn't one that follows a set of characters, but one where different groups of characters face the same situation: being on one of the tens of thousands of chunks of planetary surface that were grabbed in a Lenovian experiment gone wrong, and dropped on a new world together in a Mandelbrot mishmash.

In this tale we get the mid-twenties, cis-het, white, USAn man that Collins seems to begin all his stories with getting scooped up. Also a similar woman, then over time they find a half-dozen more humans. The aliens this time are Proccas (six-legged goat-centaurs), who are Bronze-age fishers; Lanas (elf-bats), who are centuries more advanced than humans; and Gurranas (dwarf Neanderthals), who are a Stone Age people.

We get the usual struggles against dinosaurs, giant wolves, weird sea monsters, and what not, all transposed from various worlds onto this Scattered World — which may or may not be the same planet as the last volume. The usual Collins: fast light adventure, formulaic but fun.

●●●○○ Dogs, Cats, and Naked People. Oh My! - Linda Weber (2021 ss)
Community Service Day is a mandated annual event in this story. Usually Dr. David — senior veterinarian in a practice he shares with Dr. Janet — goes to the residential nudist community of Rolling Oaks to look at the pets of the people who live there, but this year he committed to going to the new Senior Center and checking pets there, so he offers the nudist job to his business partner, who after a couple of days' thought accepts.

On the first day, Janet makes her rounds topless, but wearing a sarong skirt. Walking between cottages, no one makes any untoward remarks. Janet meets a number of clients and their pets, finding only one that merits a more in-depth check at the office later in the week. Andrew the architect (who has a rescue greyhound) tells her about how naturism is a “philosophy of wholesome, non-sexual, family-friendly nudity” and invites her to dinner later.

The next weekend Janet has a dinner with some female friends, and reveals that she'll likely go to Rolling Oaks again to enjoy herself when she's not working.

●●○○○ I'm an Angel, Not an Astrophysicist! - Brian Terence (2025 ss)
Himself had agreed to answer a prayer — by some people with swords fighting some other people with swords — to stop the sun in the sky. The orders had filtered down to two angels, who were left to figure out how to do that without killing everyone on the sword folk's planet.

It took a fair bit of work, which we never really see. The piece is just discussions between catty angels, with no actual plans made or deeds done.

●●◐○○ Deaf, Dumb and Blind - C.M. Eddy, H.P. Lovecraft (1925 ss)
Dr. Morehouse had been visiting the people at the nearest house when Dobbs ran in, panicked. He was the manservant to author Richard Blake, who had rented the old Simeon Tanner place, thinking the dark past of the place exciting, even if the only way the wheelchair-bound writer — deaf, mute, and blind as he was, after what he'd experienced in the Great War — was second-hand, literally, via the touch code he'd worked out with Dobbs.

There had always been rumors about old Simeon, and when a noxious cloud had emanated from the house, the nearby farmers had broken into the house with axes, then into his locked study with the same. They found Simeon dead, with a horrible expression on his face, and his study filled with occult books. They burned the body and the books.

Now, when Blake was typing up his next book, something emerged from the always-locked study. Something which Blake was somehow aware of, and began typing about, in the manuscript that Dr. Morehouse took away before anyone could read it…

●●●●○ Carla Takes Her Clothes Off - A D Rowen (2019 nva)
After the divorce, Brian got his girlfriend pregnant, and Carla got the house, in the backyard of which she was now sunbathing. Topless, as she used to do on the beaches of Spain. Then she realized that the fence and hedge made the backyard private, so why have any tan lines?

This led to Carla going nude all the time at home, and soon enough opening the door to the mail carrier or a food delivery person without bothering to put on her housecoat. (“Exhibiting herself for men made her feel sexy.”) That led to her gardening in the front yard and washing her car nude, with none of her neighbors objecting.

Then Carla invited her friend Mandy to visit, and found that, while initially surprised, Mandy had no problems with Carla's nudity. Soon Carla began driving to her office naked, stopping in a lay-by near work to dress, then again undressing there when returning from her office job in town to her village home.

Soon Mandy, Carla, and two more friends went to Carla's local pub, where they discussed Carla's nudity. Carla explained that she didn't think of herself as a nudist, since she wasn't really interested in being around other nude people.

After some conversation, Jen noted that “Before you said you just liked being naked, now you said you like people seeing you naked. That’s different.” This led to the ladies challenging Carla to strip, her doing so, the largely male clientele having zero problem having a pretty 28-year-old woman nude in the pub, and the tavern owner reluctantly (and his wife later encouragingly) allowing Carla to be nude on the premises.

And so it goes, with Carla being nude more and more places, and her village having no problems with it. She even learns, from a man she gets involved with, that she's not the first.

Back in the 1930s, a family name Belgrave lived in town, when eighteen-year-old Hermione decided she didn't want to wear clothes. Despite it being a time when doing such a thing could get a woman put in an asylum, her family supported her, as did the town. A year later, Hermione's two-years-younger sister joined her in nudity. Hermione was nude for six years before marrying and moving away, but Olivia was nude for fifteen years before she moved away. An appendix shows entries from Olivia's journal.

In any case, Carla became close with handyman-and-amateur-historian Steven, and she remained nude around the village henceforth, at least in warmer weather. The fact that the villagers accepted her nudity so readily did lessen Carla's exhibitionist thrill some, but she coped.

●●●○○ The Scented Poppies {Dr. Taverner 05} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
A man comes to occultist and psychologist Dr. Taverner to see if he can do something about the man's cousin, who has just become heir to a childless rich uncle's estate. The problem is that three other cousins were previously the sole heir, and each in turn committed suicide. Gregory Polson would like to see the sequential suicides stopped, both because he likes the current heir, and because there are only three other cousins left, of which he's one.

Gregory suspects Irving, the cousin their uncle is likely to make heir last. Irving gives people small gifts, and Gregory brings in the floral wall hanging that Irving just gave to Tim, the current heir. Taverner discovers within one of the poppies some odd seeds, the scent of which “stirs up the pineal gland,” along with a moonstone, upon which has been impressed a psychic urge to throw oneself from a height.

Apparently some member of the occult community is selling working curses. Taverner and Rhodes must deal with both Irving and the seller to bring the case to a successful conclusion.

●●○○○ The Jameson Satellite - Neil R. Jones (1931 ss)
Inspired by Egyptian mummies, Professor Jameson sought to have his body preserved forever, building himself a small spaceship as a coffin, and leaving instructions for his nephew to launch him into orbit. With his radium repulsion ray fending off meteors, Professor Jameson remained in orbit for a long, long time. Forty million years, during which time the Moon drew much closer to Earth, and the tidally-locked Earth drew much closer to the cool, red Sun.³

After this span, Zoromes from the planet Zor arrive (and eventually say to Jameson “You died and were shot out into space long before any life occurred on Zor,” in another wild miscalculation of time by the author).

They were originally a fully biological race, but in their quest for immortality, ended up making themselves mostly robotic. They have cubical metal bodies with four legs and six manipulatory tentacles, and contain the biological brains of the original inhabitants of Zor. They place Professor Jameson's brain in one of their bodies and revive him.

The now-mechanical Jameson, together with his robotic companions, briefly explore the twilight zone of one-face Earth, have a minor adventure, and then set forth to further explore "the Universe" (NRJ knew not of galaxies?), in this first of many Professor Jameson stories.

●●●◐○ GirlWorld - Lisa Morton (2010 ss)
The apocalypse had gone well for Stace and Brittnay. The former had been a truckstop waitress who'd had to deal with men trying to grope her, the latter a dental assistant who'd had her fill of shrieking brats.

They'd met six months ago in the produce section, and had been together since. The zombie epidemic that had hit three months ago had spared them from their jobs, and when everyone living went to relocation centers, they'd skipped that depressing chaos.

Now they traveled, killing zombies — Stace had a dozen wooden bats, since they shattered eventually, while Brittnay favored a homemade spear — and staying in expensive houses, sometimes having sex all day. Except Stace has bad dreams every night.

So Britt conceives of The Mission, to lay her own old ghosts to rest. They headed to her old house, and they find her father, who beat her mother until she fled, with Britt running away at sixteen. And the couple wreaks sweet revenge on his zombified self.

●○○○○ Meriweather & Bryce, P.I.s - Greg Kauffman-Starkey (2026 nov)
Two Victorian private investigators — and Uranian lovers, despite the laws of Church and State — become involved in a series of kidnappings, all involving men in their early fifties, but of different social stations: laborers, a newspaper editor, an alderman, a wealthy factory owner. The niece of the moneyed man hires the detectives to find him.

Investigating, Jack Meriweather and Lucien Bryce learn that Franklin Royale, notorious criminal mastermind, is involved, but they learn no more. The two of them are also men of a certain age, Jack Meriweather reminds his partner Lucien Bryce. They stroll up and down the street where the kidnappings occur, and are promptly hooded and shoved into a carriage. They learn from the men with whom they're imprisoned that they're now sexual slaves, since “there is a growing fetish” for that sort of thing.²

Bryce and Meriweather then get picked as assassins by Prince Thomas to appear at an official Palace reception — as high-class Uranian prostitutes, mind you — to kill Sultan Adi un-Vactun, who made a disparaging remark about Queen Victoria. And as part of their plan to escape their minders, Lucian and Jack play up their homosexuality and kiss the prince in front of his mother.

Okay, the stupidity of this novel's plot has surprised me multiple times. The ineptitude of the detective heroes, ditto. Why this is so is beyond me, given that I've read other detective novels by this author — three gay leads across four books, one set in Victorian times — and they were much better.

In any case, the detectives here eventually end the sex slavery scheme, get the other men released, and don't end up imprisoned themselves. They even get the Queen to look the other way regarding the detectives' Uranian natures, and the acts the other men were forced to perform under duress, as long as everyone is discreet form now on. And Franklin Royale is arrested, which I didn't expect, he being the James Moriarty of the book.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Five's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
259+6 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+1 nva | 78+2 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] The narrator says the area involved is a roughly 42×51 mile oval. This seems small enough that this book's group would have contacted the people from the first book in the eight years that pass before the final chapter. They don't, which suggests its a different planet (and which makes the experiment even more ludicrous). But the map in the book suggests that we've only experienced a small area of a vast Scatter.

[2] Ri-ii-ight. That a criminal enterprise could identify scores of homosexual clients, who hide their orientations lest they be imprisoned, seems unlikely. Then you need to have clients who want to have sex with unwilling men, pay for the privilege, and trust the panderer with their secrets. Only the fact that Franklin Royale plans to later blackmail these men makes any sense. Oh, and being an equal-opportunity panderer, Royale also maintained a harem of women for wealthy ladies with same-sex tastes.

[3] Yeah, the timeline for all this is wrong, tens of millions of years instead of almost a billion years left for Earth, and more for Sol. Jones seems to be working off Lord Kelvin's idea that the Sun had the heat of its formation, and cooled from there. That nuclear fusion occurs in stars was discovered in the 1920s.

●●●○○ A Day in the Rain - P.A. Choi (2020 ss)
Anabeth was a high school senior who'd been sick for a week, left alone for ten hours every day while her divorced mother worked eight hours as a secretary, and endured an hour-long commute twice a day. But today Anabeth was feeling better, and felt a need to get outside. It was hot and raining, and she removed her nightshirt and panties, and stepped out into the rain. Her house was in a dead end, at the edge of a lightly-populated plat, and it wasn't likely anyone would see her.

Anabeth walked through the field, enjoying the warm rain, then came to the woods, which she crosses through, imagining herself an elf. Then she came upon the lake. After resting a bit from the climb down the hill, she prepared to have a swim, only to see a college-age boy across the lake looking at her. When he waved, Anabeth's nervousness left her, and she began to swim. When next she looked up, she saw the skinny young man stripping, and preparing to do the same.

They met in the middle of the lake, had a brief conversation, then swam to shore and talked further, before Cameron said he had to get back, but that Anabeth had inspired him to do so naked. She watched him leave, then walked home herself, dancing in the rain.

●●●○○ The Soul That Would Not Be Born {Dr. Taverner 04} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
A wealthy woman brings her daughter to see Dr. Taverner. Since three hours after birth, Mona Cailey has been entirely withdrawn, not moving or reacting to anything. Taverner says that if it's a problem with her brain, he can do nothing, but if it's her mind that's the cause, there are possibilities.

Dr. Taverner goes into his usual trance, and consults the young woman's Akashic Record. In her last incarnation, she was the daughter of a Duke in fifteenth-century Italy. Her younger sister had a boyfriend of suitable rank, with a good future, and not-then-Mona stole him. Worse, when a better prospect came along, she betrayed the man to his enemies to get rid of him, and he was killed.

Mona destroyed two lives, and karmic justice is due her. Having seen that at her birth, when a newly-incarnated soul gets a preview of its next life, Mona had chosen to withdraw. The man who died centuries ago, did so calling Mona's former name, so in this life he was drawn to her. In this life he was another shell-shocked soldier with a fiancée, and Mona would be a means to his cure, and her sorrow…

●●●○○ The Monkey's Paw - W.W. Jacobs (1902 ss)
The classic story. I've seen versions of the central idea in TV shows and movies, but this is the first time I've read the tale. A family friend who's been traveling for twenty years, most recently in India, visits a couple and their 22-year-old son. After much drinking, the visitor shows them the monkey's paw, which he says can give three people each three wishes.

He says he's used his three wishes, and will not speak of them, only to say that the wishes always come true in the cruelest way possible. The father says he's mostly happy, and about all that he needs is to pay off the mortgage, so he wishes for ₤200 (about ₤27k today). The next day a lawyer shows up at their door with the money, and bad news…

●●●●○ Edge of Twilight {Behold: Humanity! 22} - Ralts Bloodthorne (2026 nov)
The Terran Age is in remission. Terran Descent Humanity is extinct, and Earth is still hiding in the Bag, with the pocket universe expected to open in some seven thousand years. All the little empires at the edges of Confederacy Space think it's time to expand, since the species that composed sixty percent of the Confederacy military is gone.

Ret.lek gets bored having to stomp out invading forces again and again, and just lets his warmek run on autopilot until finally he faces the Noocracy, which has apparently learned a few things, and makes the Confederacy work for its win.

Tank Battalion Commander Ekret retires after over a century of service, and his body is reset to age twenty. He initially has trouble adapting to civilian life, and develops an alcohol problem, but after a couple of years he recovers, gets a degree, and marries.

Nakteti, once of the first characters introduced in the series (when the small ship she captained was targeted by a Precursor War Machine, and one of the Immortals came to her aid), now the honorary leader of twenty Tnvaru worlds, spends a decade laying safe paths through the territory of the Terran Tomb Worlds, knowing those civilizations that come next will forget the humans, and will awaken horrors if they interfere with Terran worlds while humanity is offstage.

The chapters detailing those characters' experiences alternate with ones where future civilizations show interest in the Forerunners (humans) and their tech and weapons, usually to get an advantage over a neighboring empire. Things always go badly for them. You'd think a clue would come from the "Terrans" name being corrupted to "Terrors" over the millennia.

One of the future-set chapters concerns a researcher whose expedition uncovered an outpost where Terrans had some Atrekna brain-gatherer machines in stasis. The newcomers released the Atrekna robots, which promptly wiped out their expedition, except for one individual who managed to awaken a Confederacy AI that used a modified creation engine to produce a set of injections which the individual used to implant a Terran consciousness into himself, giving him the skills needed to survive and destroy the base. We get a dozen interludes where his civilization figures out what he now is, what he can do, and how to deal with him.

From the tone and events, I thought this might be the last book in the series. It certainly seems to be wrapping up loose ends after three millions-of-worlds wars in three decades, and the temporary extinction of most humans. But the book ends with the customary Sneak Peek of the next volume, so at least one more is coming.

●○○○○ To Please Nicholas - Alexander Hayes (2010 ss)
This is a story in a queer zombies anthology that doesn't have zombies in it (it's more of a Frankenstein's monster). It's written in second-person in a particularly annoying way. And it uses language that's pseudo-profound and fake old-fashioned: “We are each bred to our own desires. Consider the moth is not attracted to the flame but to the greater darkness it perceives behind the fire.”

Yeah, I didn't like it. A grandmother picks up hitchhiking runaways and loners, and uses parts of them to freshen her ever-rotting "grandson". The young man encounters a man who ran out of gas, and after walking with him to the station, has sex with him in the trailer where he lives with his grandmother. Grandmother finds out he let replacement parts get away, and punishes him. He runs away, and starts to rot to death…

●●◐○○ Holidays in the Nudist Colony- Ana Jurić (2021 ss)
This is the third Naturist Collective anthology. In each one, this author has written a story that has the same title as the anthology, which somewhat annoys me.

In this one, Lisel (ex-teacher) and Hans (ex-cop) — they met in Murder in the Nudist Colony — have purchased Happy Valley Naturist Resort, because the elderly owner died, and his widow can't run the place alone. They fix up the place and reopen, only to have few guests. When Lisel was exercising one of the resort's horses one day, it got excited and ran from the field, carrying naked Lisel into town.

She ended up meeting the man who ran a print shop, and he printed up another batch of the flyers Lisel had made last week, which she handed out in Lady Godiva fashion before heading back to the camp. Gustav put up posters, and there was an online story. The resort went on to have a successful reopening and a very busy summer.

●◐○○○ Til the Last Beat - Clancy Nacht (2010 ss)
Sam and Zach have been together for seven years, and Sam wants to get married, but they live in Texas before same-sex marriage was legal in all US states. Sam suggests a neopagan binding ceremony, which Zach reluctantly goes along with. While window-shopping for rings, the couple finds in their mixed-use building an odd Victorian shop that wasn't there yesterday.

Sam drags Zach in, and is enchanted by the place, while Zach sees giant spiders and skeletons and an actual green-skinned witch as saleswoman. The witch sells them wedding bands (in the form of a golden man spooning a silver man), and offers to perform the ceremony, which involves blood-letting and an oath that says they'll stay together even past the last beat of their hearts.

The next day Sam dies in a car accident, and when Zach goes to the morgue, Sam rises as a zombie, and quickly makes Zach one, and the couple continues their domestic existence, eating brains while they slowly rot.

●●◐○○ Painted Masks - Will Forest (2021 ss)
Back at the Noonay Noo Naturist Park on the Caribbean Island of St. Ethel, Miranda T. Alcántara, retired entomologist and founder of the park, has organized a Carnaval festival. She's agreed that Denise and Terence can write about the event on their website ‘Naturist Mandinga,’ which features reviews of naturist places from an Afro-centric viewpoint.

There's an initial dispute when Terence begins taking photos for the site, which is not done without explicit permission at a nudist resort, and he notes that the contract Dr. A signed never mentioned that photos couldn't be taken. Denise finally manages to explain to Terence what the problem is, and he suggests painting the participants instead, and making the painted faces blank. The celebration goes on, and all is well in the end.

●●●○○ Orders {Bullard 9} - Malcolm Jameson (1945 ss)
The Treaty of Juno had officially brought peace to the Solar System (albeit while glossing over a few points). Admiral Bullard now commanded Lunar Base, overseeing the mothballed fleet, all of whose ships would eventually have their weapons removed.

Then Lionel Wallowby, Undersecretary of State for Asteroidal Affairs — and major author of the clause in the treaty that forbid forever the use of force or the threat of force in any situation whatever, regardless of provocation — showed up.

Federal marshals have not been able able to bring in a major criminal hiding out in the Trojans, two small polities that Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn variously claim, which issue the Treaty of Juno fudged by allowing the asteroid groups independence. They say the blanket amnesty clause in the treaty — intended for belligerents — means no one is subject to Solar Federation power.

Wallowby wants Bullard to send out a ship — which won't be able to use or even threaten force — to do the job. Bullard sends Benton to do so, using a plan that has no realistic chance of succeeding, but of course does. This is the final Bullard tale, posthumously published.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Four's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
251+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 77+1 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

My father's issue cut down reading time this week. I also seem to be in a reading lapse, and am watching more videos. Hell, I've even watched some movies, which is rare.

●●●○○ A Day in the Rain - P.A. Choi (2020 ss)
Anabeth was a high school senior who'd been sick for a week, left alone for ten hours every day while her divorced mother worked eight hours as a secretary, and endured an hour-long commute twice a day. But today Anabeth was feeling better, and felt a need to get outside. It was hot and raining, and she removed her nightshirt and panties, and stepped out into the rain. Her house was in a dead end, at the edge of a lightly-populated plat, and it wasn't likely anyone would see her.

Anabeth walked through the field, enjoying the warm rain, then came to the woods, which she crosses through, imagining herself an elf. Then she came upon the lake. After resting a bit from the climb down the hill, she prepared to have a swim, only to see a college-age boy across the lake looking at her. When he waved, Anabeth's nervousness left her, and she began to swim. When next she looked up, she saw the skinny young man stripping, and preparing to do the same.

They met in the middle of the lake, had a brief conversation, then swam to shore and talked further, before Cameron said he had to get back, but that Anabeth had inspired him to do so naked. She watched him leave, then walked home herself, dancing in the rain.

●●●○○ The Soul That Would Not Be Born {Dr. Taverner 04} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
A wealthy woman brings her daughter to see Dr. Taverner. Since three hours after birth, Mona Cailey has been entirely withdrawn, not moving or reacting to anything. Taverner says that if it's a problem with her brain, he can do nothing, but if it's her mind that's the cause, there are possibilities.

Dr. Taverner goes into his usual trance, and consults the young woman's Akashic Record. In her last incarnation, she was the daughter of a Duke in fifteenth-century Italy. Her younger sister had a boyfriend of suitable rank, with a good future, and not-then-Mona stole him. Worse, when a better prospect came along, she betrayed the man to his enemies to get rid of him, and he was killed.

Mona destroyed two lives, and karmic justice is due her. Having seen that at her birth, when a newly-incarnated soul gets a preview of its next life, Mona had chosen to withdraw. The man who died centuries ago, did so calling Mona's former name, so in this life he was drawn to her. In this life he was another shell-shocked soldier with a fiancée, and Mona would be a means to his cure, and her sorrow…

●●●○○ The Monkey's Paw - W.W. Jacobs (1902 ss)
The classic story. I've seen versions of the central idea in TV shows and movies, but this is the first time I've read the tale. A family friend who's been traveling for twenty years, most recently in India, visits a couple and their 22-year-old son. After much drinking, the visitor shows them the monkey's paw, which he says can give three people each three wishes.

He says he's used his three wishes, and will not speak of them, only to say that the wishes always come true in the cruelest way possible. The father says he's mostly happy, and about all that he needs is to pay off the mortgage, so he wishes for ₤200 (about ₤27k today). The next day a lawyer shows up at their door with the money, and bad news…

●●●●○ Edge of Twilight {Behold: Humanity! 22} - Ralts Bloodthorne (2026 nov)
The Terran Age is in remission. Terran Descent Humanity is extinct, and Earth is still hiding in the Bag, with the pocket universe expected to open in some seven thousand years. All the little empires at the edges of Confederacy Space think it's time to expand, since the species that composed sixty percent of the Confederacy military is gone.

Ret.lek gets bored having to stomp out invading forces again and again, and just lets his warmek run on autopilot until finally he faces the Noocracy, which has apparently learned a few things, and makes the Confederacy work for its win.

Tank Battalion Commander Ekret retires after over a century of service, and his body is reset to age twenty. He initially has trouble adapting to civilian life, and develops an alcohol problem, but after a couple of years he recovers, gets a degree, and marries.

Nakteti, once of the first characters introduced in the series (when the small ship she captained was targeted by a Precursor War Machine, and one of the Immortals came to her aid), now the honorary leader of twenty Tnvaru worlds, spends a decade laying safe paths through the territory of the Terran Tomb Worlds, knowing those civilizations that come next will forget the humans, and will awaken horrors if they interfere with Terran worlds while humanity is offstage.

The chapters detailing those characters' experiences alternate with ones where future civilizations show interest in the Forerunners (humans) and their tech and weapons, usually to get an advantage over a neighboring empire. Things always go badly for them. You'd think a clue would come from the "Terrans" name being corrupted to "Terrors" over the millennia.

One of the future-set chapters concerns a researcher whose expedition uncovered an outpost where Terrans had some Atrekna brain-gatherer machines in stasis. The newcomers released the Atrekna robots, which promptly wiped out their expedition, except for one individual who managed to awaken a Confederacy AI that used a modified creation engine to produce a set of injections which the individual used to implant a Terran consciousness into himself, giving him the skills needed to survive and destroy the base. We get a dozen interludes where his civilization figures out what he now is, what he can do, and how to deal with him.

From the tone and events, I thought this might be the last book in the series. It certainly seems to be wrapping up loose ends after three millions-of-worlds wars in three decades, and the temporary extinction of most humans. But the book ends with the customary Sneak Peek of the next volume, so at least one more is coming.

●○○○○ To Please Nicholas - Alexander Hayes (2010 ss)
This is a story in a queer zombies anthology that doesn't have zombies in it (it's more of a Frankenstein's monster). It's written in second-person in a particularly annoying way. And it uses language that's pseudo-profound and fake old-fashioned: “We are each bred to our own desires. Consider the moth is not attracted to the flame but to the greater darkness it perceives behind the fire.”

Yeah, I didn't like it. A grandmother picks up hitchhiking runaways and loners, and uses parts of them to freshen her ever-rotting "grandson". The young man encounters a man who ran out of gas, and after walking with him to the station, has sex with him in the trailer where he lives with his grandmother. Grandmother finds out he let replacement parts get away, and punishes him. He runs away, and starts to rot to death…

●●◐○○ Holidays in the Nudist Colony- Ana Jurić (2021 ss)
This is the third Naturist Collective anthology. In each one, this author has written a story that has the same title as the anthology, which somewhat annoys me.

In this one, Lisel (ex-teacher) and Hans (ex-cop) — they met in Murder in the Nudist Colony — have purchased Happy Valley Naturist Resort, because the elderly owner died, and his widow can't run the place alone. They fix up the place and reopen, only to have few guests. When Lisel was exercising one of the resort's horses one day, it got excited and ran from the field, carrying naked Lisel into town.

She ended up meeting the man who ran a print shop, and he printed up another batch of the flyers Lisel had made last week, which she handed out in Lady Godiva fashion before heading back to the camp. Gustav put up posters, and there was an online story. The resort went on to have a successful reopening and a very busy summer.

●◐○○○ Til the Last Beat - Clancy Nacht (2010 ss)
Sam and Zach have been together for seven years, and Sam wants to get married, but they live in Texas before same-sex marriage was legal in all US states. Sam suggests a neopagan binding ceremony, which Zach reluctantly goes along with. While window-shopping for rings, the couple finds in their mixed-use building an odd Victorian shop that wasn't there yesterday.

Sam drags Zach in, and is enchanted by the place, while Zach sees giant spiders and skeletons and an actual green-skinned witch as saleswoman. The witch sells them wedding bands (in the form of a golden man spooning a silver man), and offers to perform the ceremony, which involves blood-letting and an oath that says they'll stay together even past the last beat of their hearts.

The next day Sam dies in a car accident, and when Zach goes to the morgue, Sam rises as a zombie, and quickly makes Zach one, and the couple continues their domestic existence, eating brains while they slowly rot.

●●◐○○ Painted Masks - Will Forest (2021 ss)
Back at the Noonay Noo Naturist Park on the Caribbean Island of St. Ethel, Miranda T. Alcántara, retired entomologist and founder of the park, has organized a Carnaval festival. She's agreed that Denise and Terence can write about the event on their website ‘Naturist Mandinga,’ which features reviews of naturist places from an Afro-centric viewpoint.

There's an initial dispute when Terence begins taking photos for the site, which is not done without explicit permission at a nudist resort, and he notes that the contract Dr. A signed never mentioned that photos couldn't be taken. Denise finally manages to explain to Terence what the problem is, and he suggests painting the participants instead, and making the painted faces blank. The celebration goes on, and all is well in the end.

●●●○○ Orders {Bullard 9} - Malcolm Jameson (1945 ss)
The Treaty of Juno had officially brought peace to the Solar System (albeit while glossing over a few points). Admiral Bullard now commanded Lunar Base, overseeing the mothballed fleet, all of whose ships would eventually have their weapons removed.

Then Lionel Wallowby, Undersecretary of State for Asteroidal Affairs — and major author of the clause in the treaty that forbid forever the use of force or the threat of force in any situation whatever, regardless of provocation — showed up.

Federal marshals have not been able able to bring in a major criminal hiding out in the Trojans, two small polities that Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn variously claim, which issue the Treaty of Juno fudged by allowing the asteroid groups independence. They say the blanket amnesty clause in the treaty — intended for belligerents — means no one is subject to Solar Federation power.

Wallowby wants Bullard to send out a ship — which won't be able to use or even threaten force — to do the job. Bullard sends Benton to do so, using a plan that has no realistic chance of succeeding, but of course does. This is the final Bullard tale, posthumously published.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Four's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
251+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 77+1 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

My father's issue cut down reading time this week. I also seem to be in a reading lapse, and am watching more videos. Hell, I've even watched some movies, which is rare.

●●●○○ A Day in the Rain - P.A. Choi (2020 ss)
Anabeth was a high school senior who'd been sick for a week, left alone for ten hours every day while her divorced mother worked eight hours as a secretary, and endured an hour-long commute twice a day. But today Anabeth was feeling better, and felt a need to get outside. It was hot and raining, and she removed her nightshirt and panties, and stepped out into the rain. Her house was in a dead end, at the edge of a lightly-populated plat, and it wasn't likely anyone would see her.

Anabeth walked through the field, enjoying the warm rain, then came to the woods, which she crosses through, imagining herself an elf. Then she came upon the lake. After resting a bit from the climb down the hill, she prepared to have a swim, only to see a college-age boy across the lake looking at her. When he waved, Anabeth's nervousness left her, and she began to swim. When next she looked up, she saw the skinny young man stripping, and preparing to do the same.

They met in the middle of the lake, had a brief conversation, then swam to shore and talked further, before Cameron said he had to get back, but that Anabeth had inspired him to do so naked. She watched him leave, then walked home herself, dancing in the rain.

●●●○○ The Soul That Would Not Be Born {Dr. Taverner 04} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
A wealthy woman brings her daughter to see Dr. Taverner. Since three hours after birth, Mona Cailey has been entirely withdrawn, not moving or reacting to anything. Taverner says that if it's a problem with her brain, he can do nothing, but if it's her mind that's the cause, there are possibilities.

Dr. Taverner goes into his usual trance, and consults the young woman's Akashic Record. In her last incarnation, she was the daughter of a Duke in fifteenth-century Italy. Her younger sister had a boyfriend of suitable rank, with a good future, and not-then-Mona stole him. Worse, when a better prospect came along, she betrayed the man to his enemies to get rid of him, and he was killed.

Mona destroyed two lives, and karmic justice is due her. Having seen that at her birth, when a newly-incarnated soul gets a preview of its next life, Mona had chosen to withdraw. The man who died centuries ago, did so calling Mona's former name, so in this life he was drawn to her. In this life he was another shell-shocked soldier with a fiancée, and Mona would be a means to his cure, and her sorrow…

●●●○○ The Monkey's Paw - W.W. Jacobs (1902 ss)
The classic story. I've seen versions of the central idea in TV shows and movies, but this is the first time I've read the tale. A family friend who's been traveling for twenty years, most recently in India, visits a couple and their 22-year-old son. After much drinking, the visitor shows them the monkey's paw, which he says can give three people each three wishes.

He says he's used his three wishes, and will not speak of them, only to say that the wishes always come true in the cruelest way possible. The father says he's mostly happy, and about all that he needs is to pay off the mortgage, so he wishes for ₤200 (about ₤27k today). The next day a lawyer shows up at their door with the money, and bad news…

●●●●○ Edge of Twilight {Behold: Humanity! 22} - Ralts Bloodthorne (2026 nov)
The Terran Age is in remission. Terran Descent Humanity is extinct, and Earth is still hiding in the Bag, with the pocket universe expected to open in some seven thousand years. All the little empires at the edges of Confederacy Space think it's time to expand, since the species that composed sixty percent of the Confederacy military is gone.

Ret.lek gets bored having to stomp out invading forces again and again, and just lets his warmek run on autopilot until finally he faces the Noocracy, which has apparently learned a few things, and makes the Confederacy work for its win.

Tank Battalion Commander Ekret retires after over a century of service, and his body is reset to age twenty. He initially has trouble adapting to civilian life, and develops an alcohol problem, but after a couple of years he recovers, gets a degree, and marries.

Nakteti, once of the first characters introduced in the series (when the small ship she captained was targeted by a Precursor War Machine, and one of the Immortals came to her aid), now the honorary leader of twenty Tnvaru worlds, spends a decade laying safe paths through the territory of the Terran Tomb Worlds, knowing those civilizations that come next will forget the humans, and will awaken horrors if they interfere with Terran worlds while humanity is offstage.

The chapters detailing those characters' experiences alternate with ones where future civilizations show interest in the Forerunners (humans) and their tech and weapons, usually to get an advantage over a neighboring empire. Things always go badly for them. You'd think a clue would come from the "Terrans" name being corrupted to "Terrors" over the millennia.

One of the future-set chapters concerns a researcher whose expedition uncovered an outpost where Terrans had some Atrekna brain-gatherer machines in stasis. The newcomers released the Atrekna robots, which promptly wiped out their expedition, except for one individual who managed to awaken a Confederacy AI that used a modified creation engine to produce a set of injections which the individual used to implant a Terran consciousness into himself, giving him the skills needed to survive and destroy the base. We get a dozen interludes where his civilization figures out what he now is, what he can do, and how to deal with him.

From the tone and events, I thought this might be the last book in the series. It certainly seems to be wrapping up loose ends after three millions-of-worlds wars in three decades, and the temporary extinction of most humans. But the book ends with the customary Sneak Peek of the next volume, so at least one more is coming.

●○○○○ To Please Nicholas - Alexander Hayes (2010 ss)
This is a story in a queer zombies anthology that doesn't have zombies in it (it's more of a Frankenstein's monster). It's written in second-person in a particularly annoying way. And it uses language that's pseudo-profound and fake old-fashioned: “We are each bred to our own desires. Consider the moth is not attracted to the flame but to the greater darkness it perceives behind the fire.”

Yeah, I didn't like it. A grandmother picks up hitchhiking runaways and loners, and uses parts of them to freshen her ever-rotting "grandson". The young man encounters a man who ran out of gas, and after walking with him to the station, has sex with him in the trailer where he lives with his grandmother. Grandmother finds out he let replacement parts get away, and punishes him. He runs away, and starts to rot to death…

●●◐○○ Holidays in the Nudist Colony- Ana Jurić (2021 ss)
This is the third Naturist Collective anthology. In each one, this author has written a story that has the same title as the anthology, which somewhat annoys me.

In this one, Lisel (ex-teacher) and Hans (ex-cop) — they met in Murder in the Nudist Colony — have purchased Happy Valley Naturist Resort, because the elderly owner died, and his widow can't run the place alone. They fix up the place and reopen, only to have few guests. When Lisel was exercising one of the resort's horses one day, it got excited and ran from the field, carrying naked Lisel into town.

She ended up meeting the man who ran a print shop, and he printed up another batch of the flyers Lisel had made last week, which she handed out in Lady Godiva fashion before heading back to the camp. Gustav put up posters, and there was an online story. The resort went on to have a successful reopening and a very busy summer.

●◐○○○ Til the Last Beat - Clancy Nacht (2010 ss)
Sam and Zach have been together for seven years, and Sam wants to get married, but they live in Texas before same-sex marriage was legal in all US states. Sam suggests a neopagan binding ceremony, which Zach reluctantly goes along with. While window-shopping for rings, the couple finds in their mixed-use building an odd Victorian shop that wasn't there yesterday.

Sam drags Zach in, and is enchanted by the place, while Zach sees giant spiders and skeletons and an actual green-skinned witch as saleswoman. The witch sells them wedding bands (in the form of a golden man spooning a silver man), and offers to perform the ceremony, which involves blood-letting and an oath that says they'll stay together even past the last beat of their hearts.

The next day Sam dies in a car accident, and when Zach goes to the morgue, Sam rises as a zombie, and quickly makes Zach one, and the couple continues their domestic existence, eating brains while they slowly rot.

●●◐○○ Painted Masks - Will Forest (2021 ss)
Back at the Noonay Noo Naturist Park on the Caribbean Island of St. Ethel, Miranda T. Alcántara, retired entomologist and founder of the park, has organized a Carnaval festival. She's agreed that Denise and Terence can write about the event on their website ‘Naturist Mandinga,’ which features reviews of naturist places from an Afro-centric viewpoint.

There's an initial dispute when Terence begins taking photos for the site, which is not done without explicit permission at a nudist resort, and he notes that the contract Dr. A signed never mentioned that photos couldn't be taken. Denise finally manages to explain to Terence what the problem is, and he suggests painting the participants instead, and making the painted faces blank. The celebration goes on, and all is well in the end.

●●●○○ Orders {Bullard 9} - Malcolm Jameson (1945 ss)
The Treaty of Juno had officially brought peace to the Solar System (albeit while glossing over a few points). Admiral Bullard now commanded Lunar Base, overseeing the mothballed fleet, all of whose ships would eventually have their weapons removed.

Then Lionel Wallowby, Undersecretary of State for Asteroidal Affairs — and major author of the clause in the treaty that forbid forever the use of force or the threat of force in any situation whatever, regardless of provocation — showed up.

Federal marshals have not been able able to bring in a major criminal hiding out in the Trojans, two small polities that Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn variously claim, which issue the Treaty of Juno fudged by allowing the asteroid groups independence. They say the blanket amnesty clause in the treaty — intended for belligerents — means no one is subject to Solar Federation power.

Wallowby wants Bullard to send out a ship — which won't be able to use or even threaten force — to do the job. Bullard sends Benton to do so, using a plan that has no realistic chance of succeeding, but of course does. This is the final Bullard tale, posthumously published.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Four's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
251+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 77+1 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

My father's issue cut down reading time this week. I also seem to be in a reading lapse, and am watching more videos. Hell, I've even watched some movies, which is rare.

●●●○○ A Day in the Rain - P.A. Choi (2020 ss)
Anabeth was a high school senior who'd been sick for a week, left alone for ten hours every day while her divorced mother worked eight hours as a secretary, and endured an hour-long commute twice a day. But today Anabeth was feeling better, and felt a need to get outside. It was hot and raining, and she removed her nightshirt and panties, and stepped out into the rain. Her house was in a dead end, at the edge of a lightly-populated plat, and it wasn't likely anyone would see her.

Anabeth walked through the field, enjoying the warm rain, then came to the woods, which she crosses through, imagining herself an elf. Then she came upon the lake. After resting a bit from the climb down the hill, she prepared to have a swim, only to see a college-age boy across the lake looking at her. When he waved, Anabeth's nervousness left her, and she began to swim. When next she looked up, she saw the skinny young man stripping, and preparing to do the same.

They met in the middle of the lake, had a brief conversation, then swam to shore and talked further, before Cameron said he had to get back, but that Anabeth had inspired him to do so naked. She watched him leave, then walked home herself, dancing in the rain.

●●●○○ The Soul That Would Not Be Born {Dr. Taverner 04} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
A wealthy woman brings her daughter to see Dr. Taverner. Since three hours after birth, Mona Cailey has been entirely withdrawn, not moving or reacting to anything. Taverner says that if it's a problem with her brain, he can do nothing, but if it's her mind that's the cause, there are possibilities.

Dr. Taverner goes into his usual trance, and consults the young woman's Akashic Record. In her last incarnation, she was the daughter of a Duke in fifteenth-century Italy. Her younger sister had a boyfriend of suitable rank, with a good future, and not-then-Mona stole him. Worse, when a better prospect came along, she betrayed the man to his enemies to get rid of him, and he was killed.

Mona destroyed two lives, and karmic justice is due her. Having seen that at her birth, when a newly-incarnated soul gets a preview of its next life, Mona had chosen to withdraw. The man who died centuries ago, did so calling Mona's former name, so in this life he was drawn to her. In this life he was another shell-shocked soldier with a fiancée, and Mona would be a means to his cure, and her sorrow…

●●●○○ The Monkey's Paw - W.W. Jacobs (1902 ss)
The classic story. I've seen versions of the central idea in TV shows and movies, but this is the first time I've read the tale. A family friend who's been traveling for twenty years, most recently in India, visits a couple and their 22-year-old son. After much drinking, the visitor shows them the monkey's paw, which he says can give three people each three wishes.

He says he's used his three wishes, and will not speak of them, only to say that the wishes always come true in the cruelest way possible. The father says he's mostly happy, and about all that he needs is to pay off the mortgage, so he wishes for ₤200 (about ₤27k today). The next day a lawyer shows up at their door with the money, and bad news…

●●●●○ Edge of Twilight {Behold: Humanity! 22} - Ralts Bloodthorne (2026 nov)
The Terran Age is in remission. Terran Descent Humanity is extinct, and Earth is still hiding in the Bag, with the pocket universe expected to open in some seven thousand years. All the little empires at the edges of Confederacy Space think it's time to expand, since the species that composed sixty percent of the Confederacy military is gone.

Ret.lek gets bored having to stomp out invading forces again and again, and just lets his warmek run on autopilot until finally he faces the Noocracy, which has apparently learned a few things, and makes the Confederacy work for its win.

Tank Battalion Commander Ekret retires after over a century of service, and his body is reset to age twenty. He initially has trouble adapting to civilian life, and develops an alcohol problem, but after a couple of years he recovers, gets a degree, and marries.

Nakteti, once of the first characters introduced in the series (when the small ship she captained was targeted by a Precursor War Machine, and one of the Immortals came to her aid), now the honorary leader of twenty Tnvaru worlds, spends a decade laying safe paths through the territory of the Terran Tomb Worlds, knowing those civilizations that come next will forget the humans, and will awaken horrors if they interfere with Terran worlds while humanity is offstage.

The chapters detailing those characters' experiences alternate with ones where future civilizations show interest in the Forerunners (humans) and their tech and weapons, usually to get an advantage over a neighboring empire. Things always go badly for them. You'd think a clue would come from the "Terrans" name being corrupted to "Terrors" over the millennia.

One of the future-set chapters concerns a researcher whose expedition uncovered an outpost where Terrans had some Atrekna brain-gatherer machines in stasis. The newcomers released the Atrekna robots, which promptly wiped out their expedition, except for one individual who managed to awaken a Confederacy AI that used a modified creation engine to produce a set of injections which the individual used to implant a Terran consciousness into himself, giving him the skills needed to survive and destroy the base. We get a dozen interludes where his civilization figures out what he now is, what he can do, and how to deal with him.

From the tone and events, I thought this might be the last book in the series. It certainly seems to be wrapping up loose ends after three millions-of-worlds wars in three decades, and the temporary extinction of most humans. But the book ends with the customary Sneak Peek of the next volume, so at least one more is coming.

●○○○○ To Please Nicholas - Alexander Hayes (2010 ss)
This is a story in a queer zombies anthology that doesn't have zombies in it (it's more of a Frankenstein's monster). It's written in second-person in a particularly annoying way. And it uses language that's pseudo-profound and fake old-fashioned: “We are each bred to our own desires. Consider the moth is not attracted to the flame but to the greater darkness it perceives behind the fire.”

Yeah, I didn't like it. A grandmother picks up hitchhiking runaways and loners, and uses parts of them to freshen her ever-rotting "grandson". The young man encounters a man who ran out of gas, and after walking with him to the station, has sex with him in the trailer where he lives with his grandmother. Grandmother finds out he let replacement parts get away, and punishes him. He runs away, and starts to rot to death…

●●◐○○ Holidays in the Nudist Colony- Ana Jurić (2021 ss)
This is the third Naturist Collective anthology. In each one, this author has written a story that has the same title as the anthology, which somewhat annoys me.

In this one, Lisel (ex-teacher) and Hans (ex-cop) — they met in Murder in the Nudist Colony — have purchased Happy Valley Naturist Resort, because the elderly owner died, and his widow can't run the place alone. They fix up the place and reopen, only to have few guests. When Lisel was exercising one of the resort's horses one day, it got excited and ran from the field, carrying naked Lisel into town.

She ended up meeting the man who ran a print shop, and he printed up another batch of the flyers Lisel had made last week, which she handed out in Lady Godiva fashion before heading back to the camp. Gustav put up posters, and there was an online story. The resort went on to have a successful reopening and a very busy summer.

●◐○○○ Til the Last Beat - Clancy Nacht (2010 ss)
Sam and Zach have been together for seven years, and Sam wants to get married, but they live in Texas before same-sex marriage was legal in all US states. Sam suggests a neopagan binding ceremony, which Zach reluctantly goes along with. While window-shopping for rings, the couple finds in their mixed-use building an odd Victorian shop that wasn't there yesterday.

Sam drags Zach in, and is enchanted by the place, while Zach sees giant spiders and skeletons and an actual green-skinned witch as saleswoman. The witch sells them wedding bands (in the form of a golden man spooning a silver man), and offers to perform the ceremony, which involves blood-letting and an oath that says they'll stay together even past the last beat of their hearts.

The next day Sam dies in a car accident, and when Zach goes to the morgue, Sam rises as a zombie, and quickly makes Zach one, and the couple continues their domestic existence, eating brains while they slowly rot.

●●◐○○ Painted Masks - Will Forest (2021 ss)
Back at the Noonay Noo Naturist Park on the Caribbean Island of St. Ethel, Miranda T. Alcántara, retired entomologist and founder of the park, has organized a Carnaval festival. She's agreed that Denise and Terence can write about the event on their website ‘Naturist Mandinga,’ which features reviews of naturist places from an Afro-centric viewpoint.

There's an initial dispute when Terence begins taking photos for the site, which is not done without explicit permission at a nudist resort, and he notes that the contract Dr. A signed never mentioned that photos couldn't be taken. Denise finally manages to explain to Terence what the problem is, and he suggests painting the participants instead, and making the painted faces blank. The celebration goes on, and all is well in the end.

●●●○○ Orders {Bullard 9} - Malcolm Jameson (1945 ss)
The Treaty of Juno had officially brought peace to the Solar System (albeit while glossing over a few points). Admiral Bullard now commanded Lunar Base, overseeing the mothballed fleet, all of whose ships would eventually have their weapons removed.

Then Lionel Wallowby, Undersecretary of State for Asteroidal Affairs — and major author of the clause in the treaty that forbid forever the use of force or the threat of force in any situation whatever, regardless of provocation — showed up.

Federal marshals have not been able able to bring in a major criminal hiding out in the Trojans, two small polities that Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn variously claim, which issue the Treaty of Juno fudged by allowing the asteroid groups independence. They say the blanket amnesty clause in the treaty — intended for belligerents — means no one is subject to Solar Federation power.

Wallowby wants Bullard to send out a ship — which won't be able to use or even threaten force — to do the job. Bullard sends Benton to do so, using a plan that has no realistic chance of succeeding, but of course does. This is the final Bullard tale, posthumously published.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Four's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
251+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 77+1 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

My father's issue cut down reading time this week. I also seem to be in a reading lapse, and am watching more videos. Hell, I've even watched some movies, which is rare.

●●●○○ A Day in the Rain - P.A. Choi (2020 ss)
Anabeth was a high school senior who'd been sick for a week, left alone for ten hours every day while her divorced mother worked eight hours as a secretary, and endured an hour-long commute twice a day. But today Anabeth was feeling better, and felt a need to get outside. It was hot and raining, and she removed her nightshirt and panties, and stepped out into the rain. Her house was in a dead end, at the edge of a lightly-populated plat, and it wasn't likely anyone would see her.

Anabeth walked through the field, enjoying the warm rain, then came to the woods, which she crosses through, imagining herself an elf. Then she came upon the lake. After resting a bit from the climb down the hill, she prepared to have a swim, only to see a college-age boy across the lake looking at her. When he waved, Anabeth's nervousness left her, and she began to swim. When next she looked up, she saw the skinny young man stripping, and preparing to do the same.

They met in the middle of the lake, had a brief conversation, then swam to shore and talked further, before Cameron said he had to get back, but that Anabeth had inspired him to do so naked. She watched him leave, then walked home herself, dancing in the rain.

●●●○○ The Soul That Would Not Be Born {Dr. Taverner 04} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
A wealthy woman brings her daughter to see Dr. Taverner. Since three hours after birth, Mona Cailey has been entirely withdrawn, not moving or reacting to anything. Taverner says that if it's a problem with her brain, he can do nothing, but if it's her mind that's the cause, there are possibilities.

Dr. Taverner goes into his usual trance, and consults the young woman's Akashic Record. In her last incarnation, she was the daughter of a Duke in fifteenth-century Italy. Her younger sister had a boyfriend of suitable rank, with a good future, and not-then-Mona stole him. Worse, when a better prospect came along, she betrayed the man to his enemies to get rid of him, and he was killed.

Mona destroyed two lives, and karmic justice is due her. Having seen that at her birth, when a newly-incarnated soul gets a preview of its next life, Mona had chosen to withdraw. The man who died centuries ago, did so calling Mona's former name, so in this life he was drawn to her. In this life he was another shell-shocked soldier with a fiancée, and Mona would be a means to his cure, and her sorrow…

●●●○○ The Monkey's Paw - W.W. Jacobs (1902 ss)
The classic story. I've seen versions of the central idea in TV shows and movies, but this is the first time I've read the tale. A family friend who's been traveling for twenty years, most recently in India, visits a couple and their 22-year-old son. After much drinking, the visitor shows them the monkey's paw, which he says can give three people each three wishes.

He says he's used his three wishes, and will not speak of them, only to say that the wishes always come true in the cruelest way possible. The father says he's mostly happy, and about all that he needs is to pay off the mortgage, so he wishes for ₤200 (about ₤27k today). The next day a lawyer shows up at their door with the money, and bad news…

●●●●○ Edge of Twilight {Behold: Humanity! 22} - Ralts Bloodthorne (2026 nov)
The Terran Age is in remission. Terran Descent Humanity is extinct, and Earth is still hiding in the Bag, with the pocket universe expected to open in some seven thousand years. All the little empires at the edges of Confederacy Space think it's time to expand, since the species that composed sixty percent of the Confederacy military is gone.

Ret.lek gets bored having to stomp out invading forces again and again, and just lets his warmek run on autopilot until finally he faces the Noocracy, which has apparently learned a few things, and makes the Confederacy work for its win.

Tank Battalion Commander Ekret retires after over a century of service, and his body is reset to age twenty. He initially has trouble adapting to civilian life, and develops an alcohol problem, but after a couple of years he recovers, gets a degree, and marries.

Nakteti, once of the first characters introduced in the series (when the small ship she captained was targeted by a Precursor War Machine, and one of the Immortals came to her aid), now the honorary leader of twenty Tnvaru worlds, spends a decade laying safe paths through the territory of the Terran Tomb Worlds, knowing those civilizations that come next will forget the humans, and will awaken horrors if they interfere with Terran worlds while humanity is offstage.

The chapters detailing those characters' experiences alternate with ones where future civilizations show interest in the Forerunners (humans) and their tech and weapons, usually to get an advantage over a neighboring empire. Things always go badly for them. You'd think a clue would come from the "Terrans" name being corrupted to "Terrors" over the millennia.

One of the future-set chapters concerns a researcher whose expedition uncovered an outpost where Terrans had some Atrekna brain-gatherer machines in stasis. The newcomers released the Atrekna robots, which promptly wiped out their expedition, except for one individual who managed to awaken a Confederacy AI that used a modified creation engine to produce a set of injections which the individual used to implant a Terran consciousness into himself, giving him the skills needed to survive and destroy the base. We get a dozen interludes where his civilization figures out what he now is, what he can do, and how to deal with him.

From the tone and events, I thought this might be the last book in the series. It certainly seems to be wrapping up loose ends after three millions-of-worlds wars in three decades, and the temporary extinction of most humans. But the book ends with the customary Sneak Peek of the next volume, so at least one more is coming.

●○○○○ To Please Nicholas - Alexander Hayes (2010 ss)
This is a story in a queer zombies anthology that doesn't have zombies in it (it's more of a Frankenstein's monster). It's written in second-person in a particularly annoying way. And it uses language that's pseudo-profound and fake old-fashioned: “We are each bred to our own desires. Consider the moth is not attracted to the flame but to the greater darkness it perceives behind the fire.”

Yeah, I didn't like it. A grandmother picks up hitchhiking runaways and loners, and uses parts of them to freshen her ever-rotting "grandson". The young man encounters a man who ran out of gas, and after walking with him to the station, has sex with him in the trailer where he lives with his grandmother. Grandmother finds out he let replacement parts get away, and punishes him. He runs away, and starts to rot to death…

●●◐○○ Holidays in the Nudist Colony- Ana Jurić (2021 ss)
This is the third Naturist Collective anthology. In each one, this author has written a story that has the same title as the anthology, which somewhat annoys me.

In this one, Lisel (ex-teacher) and Hans (ex-cop) — they met in Murder in the Nudist Colony — have purchased Happy Valley Naturist Resort, because the elderly owner died, and his widow can't run the place alone. They fix up the place and reopen, only to have few guests. When Lisel was exercising one of the resort's horses one day, it got excited and ran from the field, carrying naked Lisel into town.

She ended up meeting the man who ran a print shop, and he printed up another batch of the flyers Lisel had made last week, which she handed out in Lady Godiva fashion before heading back to the camp. Gustav put up posters, and there was an online story. The resort went on to have a successful reopening and a very busy summer.

●◐○○○ Til the Last Beat - Clancy Nacht (2010 ss)
Sam and Zach have been together for seven years, and Sam wants to get married, but they live in Texas before same-sex marriage was legal in all US states. Sam suggests a neopagan binding ceremony, which Zach reluctantly goes along with. While window-shopping for rings, the couple finds in their mixed-use building an odd Victorian shop that wasn't there yesterday.

Sam drags Zach in, and is enchanted by the place, while Zach sees giant spiders and skeletons and an actual green-skinned witch as saleswoman. The witch sells them wedding bands (in the form of a golden man spooning a silver man), and offers to perform the ceremony, which involves blood-letting and an oath that says they'll stay together even past the last beat of their hearts.

The next day Sam dies in a car accident, and when Zach goes to the morgue, Sam rises as a zombie, and quickly makes Zach one, and the couple continues their domestic existence, eating brains while they slowly rot.

●●◐○○ Painted Masks - Will Forest (2021 ss)
Back at the Noonay Noo Naturist Park on the Caribbean Island of St. Ethel, Miranda T. Alcántara, retired entomologist and founder of the park, has organized a Carnaval festival. She's agreed that Denise and Terence can write about the event on their website ‘Naturist Mandinga,’ which features reviews of naturist places from an Afro-centric viewpoint.

There's an initial dispute when Terence begins taking photos for the site, which is not done without explicit permission at a nudist resort, and he notes that the contract Dr. A signed never mentioned that photos couldn't be taken. Denise finally manages to explain to Terence what the problem is, and he suggests painting the participants instead, and making the painted faces blank. The celebration goes on, and all is well in the end.

●●●○○ Orders {Bullard 9} - Malcolm Jameson (1945 ss)
The Treaty of Juno had officially brought peace to the Solar System (albeit while glossing over a few points). Admiral Bullard now commanded Lunar Base, overseeing the mothballed fleet, all of whose ships would eventually have their weapons removed.

Then Lionel Wallowby, Undersecretary of State for Asteroidal Affairs — and major author of the clause in the treaty that forbid forever the use of force or the threat of force in any situation whatever, regardless of provocation — showed up.

Federal marshals have not been able able to bring in a major criminal hiding out in the Trojans, two small polities that Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn variously claim, which issue the Treaty of Juno fudged by allowing the asteroid groups independence. They say the blanket amnesty clause in the treaty — intended for belligerents — means no one is subject to Solar Federation power.

Wallowby wants Bullard to send out a ship — which won't be able to use or even threaten force — to do the job. Bullard sends Benton to do so, using a plan that has no realistic chance of succeeding, but of course does. This is the final Bullard tale, posthumously published.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Four's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
251+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 77+1 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

My father's issue cut down reading time this week. I also seem to be in a reading lapse, and am watching more videos. Hell, I've even watched some movies, which is rare.

●●●●○ The Clouds of Saturn - Michael McCollum (1991 nov)
In the late 2000s, humans discovered that Sol was entering a more active phase, and within a century the oceans of Earth would begin to boil. After a couple of years of chaos, twenty percent of Earth's GDP went into basic research, trying to find some way to save the planet, or barring that, save humankind. The first goal failed, but enough was learned to accomplish the second. People were transported to Saturn in million-person cryosleeper arks, which were disassembled to build floating cities.

Centuries later, tens of thousands of cloud cities float in the clearer Belts of the ringed planet's atmosphere, mostly in small associations of three to five cities. But now the growing Northern Alliance is trying to force cities to join them, either via economic pressures and political subversion as the Accretionists wish, or via quicker conquest as the Militarist faction desires.

Captain Larson Sands and his five crew members are hired as privateers to defend New Philadelphia against the Alliance. Larson's brother — and co-pilot Halley's fiancé — is stationed on the city's command blimp, and dies in the conflict. The upset and broke Larson then gets pulled into a scheme that can get him money and a measure of vengeance, only to find his crew has been used as dupes by the Militarist faction to make the Accretionist First Councilor of the Northern Alliance look bad.

This in turn sees the crew on the run, and having rescued the held-hostage princess daughter of the Factor of Titan, head of the partner civilization that provides the metals that Saturn doesn't have. As part of their raid on Cloudcroft, the Alliance capitol, Halley had copied data from the First Councillor's private computer, which Titan computer techs deciphered¹ to show that the Alliance was on the verge of securing shield technology that would guarantee its conquest of Saturn. That expands the story greatly, and even leads to expeditions to boiling Earth to dig up old tech.

●●●○○ The Bureaucrat {Bullard 8} - Malcolm Jameson (1944 ss)
Lieutenant Benton wanted to be part of "the greatest war in history" (against whom, poor readers never learn), but his rich mother bought enough war bonds that she could get him assigned to the Vindictive, a ship pulled out of mothballs to hover over Manhattan and "protect" the Bourse, the financial heart of the Solar Union. For which read, a place for young financiers, and sons of wealthy traders, to nominally serve in the military, universal male conscription being active.

Benton's father had served with (now Grand Admiral) Bullard, and the young officer had gone to him to try to get transferred to a real combat ship. But someone mired as deep in bureaucracy as Bullard could hardly draft orders affecting only one ship, let alone one officer. Still, should certain orders be drafted that affected a whole class of ships (all but one of which were in junkyards)…

Benton got to serve on a real warship, and in one of those "the Enterprise is the only ship in the sector available" scenarios, ended up winning a pivotal engagement, and even chancing on a form of jump drive from the way the Vindictive's new and old engines, radically different, interfered with each other.

●●●○○ The Man Who Sought {Dr. Taverner 03} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
Arnold Black raced motorcars and aeroplanes. He'd had an accident some months ago — he'd gone off a cliff, and had been unconscious for three days — and since then he'd been odd. He was in love with a woman he'd never met, who might not even exist, and he raced all over, hoping to meet her. If it kept up, he'd surely die in another crash.

Dr. Taverner, psychologist and occultist, took the case. He determined that Black had revived memories from a previous life, and that his and a female soul had been repeatedly entwined throughout history. In a lucid dream, Taverner consulted the Akashic Records, and found out that the female soul was currently incarnate, and was a young woman of similar age to Black, and that she even lived in England, for they were often drawn together.

So when Elaine Tyndall showed up, knowing she was in love with some man, but unaware of who he was or where he lived, Dr. Taverner was hopeful of a happy conclusion to the two cases…

●●●○○ Just the Three of Them at the End of the World - John Grover (2010 ss)
Three gay roommates — tough rentboy Troy, bitchy drag queen Alan, and shy newly-out Josh — deal with a zombie outbreak. They manage to fight their way out of their apartment building — even having to bash in the skull of Mrs. Gomez, who always gave them a plate of cookies when she made some for her grandkids — nearly losing Alan along the way: he was readying for a competition, and it's tough to run in a slinky dress.

Things don't go well once they make it to the streets, trying to get to the house of a friend with a car in which they hoped to get out of town.

●●●◐○ The Girl Who Fought Back {Wanderers 02} - David Collins (2026 nov)
Ye gods. Not only does this series have the same type of FTL the Artifact series does, it also uses "friction" (impulse) drives, and has medpods that use smelly sensor slime. Collins is copying from himself, except that where Ben and his friends go around exploring and solving problems, Dan and his friends go around troubleshooting and exploring. They even found a derelict spaceship in deep space in this book, something which happens all the time in the other series.

In any case, on a Mars-type world famous for having ancient alien artifacts, a buried spaceship is found. Since Kinnis is doing her public service sentence there (after stealing a university spaceship in the first book), she manages to copy the computer's data, and calls her friends to get her so they can see if the ten-thousand-years-gone race is still out there.

The Azur stops for supplies at a frontier Collective planet, where ultra-rich Captain Dan buys out the indentured service contracts of a couple of Grelderkin (humanoid porcupines), one an FTL tech, the other a general mechanic, to have them as crew on the exceptionally long journey to the alien plant.

They find the alien homeworld suffered a Skynet event, and it's taken millennia for the humans, thrown back to 1920s levels, to be on the verge of beating the six remaining AI hubs and their killer robots. As happens in the Artifact tales, the ship also ends up picking up a new crewperson, this time a Minote (four-armed humanoid with twin prehensile tails) from the Skynet world, who'll be with them for the next book.

The book also ends with the remnants of the criminal cabal (that they took down in the previous volume) attempting to assassinate them, only to fail. Fast, light adventure, very very like the Artifact series.

●●○○○ The Redneck Games - René Beauchemin (2021 ss)
After covid lockdown ends, Alan and Anne are glad to be able to go to Sunny Green Acres again. At their nudist camp they meet up with other retired friends like Bill and Candace. After lockdown, other people had wanted to try new things, and the old folk saw several young couples — one even with children — at the camp, as well as two First Nations couples and a Black couple.

Anne had a successful potluck dinner at their trailer, and then everyone participated in the traditional games of toilet-seat throwing and the rest. A fine time was had by all, though the tale is dull.

●◐○○○ Highway of Eternity - Clifford D. Simak (1986 nov)
Boone was a man who could "step around the corner" into another realm when faced with imminent death. Corcoran was a man who, after a head injury, could see things other people couldn't. When an odd but profitable client went missing, investigator Corcoran called in his reporter friend Boone to help look for him. They found an invisible box attached to a skyscraper due to be demolished, and when the authorities moved up the deadline, Boone stepped them into the transporter, which took them centuries into the past.

There they encountered an eccentric family on the run from the Infinites, aliens who'd convinced future humans that base corporeal life should be avoided, and converted most of humankind into sparkling lights. The Infinites sent a robotic murderbot after them, and they fled hastily in three transporters, ending up separated in three different times.

Some were in the pre-human-migration Southwest, others in the post-Infinites pastoral future, others got involved with aliens. Things happen without much plot or character development. People run hither and yon without reason, running from killerbots and looking for each other. At one point Corcoran climbs a magic-beanstalk-size tree (that only he can see) surrounded by a spiral staircase, only to fall off when he's miles up — and magically appear in the gray realm that is the Highway of Eternity, where he finds his companions waiting for him.

The last chapter reveals that most of the nonsense was orchestrated by a minor character who is in reality godlike, in order to arrange a meet-cute that he hopes will result in a superior human.

●●●○○ Unrest in Cowpat - Stephanie Kincaid (2010 ss)
Harry's been in a bad mood all his life, and it got worse when his son came out of the closet. When Celeste tells him that Ben and Keith are going to get married, it's too much, and that night he dies of a heart attack.

After being delayed a respectful two months, the wedding happens, and it's again too much for Harry: he rises from his grave as a zombie to protest it. Celeste kicks him out of the house for continuing to be so hateful, so Harry goes in search of others who share his views. He rouses quite a few from the graveyard, and they hold a protest march…

●●●○○ The Dark Demon - Robert Bloch (1936 ss)
When young author Ithan learns that famed horror writer Edgar Gordon lives in his town, he approached him, and the older man became a friend and mentor. Gordon talked of the inspiration for his stories: all of them came from dreams. He wrote tales of eldritch oddity and intelligent beings of monstrous form who lived beyond normal space.

Over the years, Gordon's tales became stranger and stranger, until the regular publishers wouldn't touch his work, and he was forced to turn to private printers. Then Gordon revealed that he had been chosen by the Old Gods as a harbinger of their return…

●●●○○ Blank… - Harlan Ellison (1957 ss)
Rike Akisimov's crimes were so horrid that the faceless, unemotional jurymech had sentenced him to the penal colony on Io for a thousand years, adding that it was “essential to the good of humanity that [his] kind be eliminated from the universe.”

But Akisimov managed to escape custody when he was being transferred to the vehicle meant to take him to the spaceport. He grabbed a mind-blanking cap from a passing pedestrian and fled the psycops, heading for Driver Hall. His only chance at freedom was the stars, and to get a ship into inverspace he needed that rarest type of psioid, a Driver.

He managed to kidnap one and take off ahead of the authorities, and the Driver did what he wanted, but with a twist…

●○○○○ Eureka! - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
An ultra-short story meant to amuse. Not a Feghoot, since there's no pun. Possibly a shaggy-dog story, though it's not long-winded, and the ending is more "that's dumb" than funny. The tale is about a scientist known for his weird discoveries coming to a colleague's lab to demonstrate his latest find.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Three's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
243+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 74+3 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Because the First Councillor had set up the secret computer himself, rather than having some competent tech set up a system that was actually secure.

●●●●○ The Clouds of Saturn - Michael McCollum (1991 nov)
In the late 2000s, humans discovered that Sol was entering a more active phase, and within a century the oceans of Earth would begin to boil. After a couple of years of chaos, twenty percent of Earth's GDP went into basic research, trying to find some way to save the planet, or barring that, save humankind. The first goal failed, but enough was learned to accomplish the second. People were transported to Saturn in million-person cryosleeper arks, which were disassembled to build floating cities.

Centuries later, tens of thousands of cloud cities float in the clearer Belts of the ringed planet's atmosphere, mostly in small associations of three to five cities. But now the growing Northern Alliance is trying to force cities to join them, either via economic pressures and political subversion as the Accretionists wish, or via quicker conquest as the Militarist faction desires.

Captain Larson Sands and his five crew members are hired as privateers to defend New Philadelphia against the Alliance. Larson's brother — and co-pilot Halley's fiancé — is stationed on the city's command blimp, and dies in the conflict. The upset and broke Larson then gets pulled into a scheme that can get him money and a measure of vengeance, only to find his crew has been used as dupes by the Militarist faction to make the Accretionist First Councilor of the Northern Alliance look bad.

This in turn sees the crew on the run, and having rescued the held-hostage princess daughter of the Factor of Titan, head of the partner civilization that provides the metals that Saturn doesn't have. As part of their raid on Cloudcroft, the Alliance capitol, Halley had copied data from the First Councillor's private computer, which Titan computer techs deciphered¹ to show that the Alliance was on the verge of securing shield technology that would guarantee its conquest of Saturn. That expands the story greatly, and even leads to expeditions to boiling Earth to dig up old tech.

●●●○○ The Bureaucrat {Bullard 8} - Malcolm Jameson (1944 ss)
Lieutenant Benton wanted to be part of "the greatest war in history" (against whom, poor readers never learn), but his rich mother bought enough war bonds that she could get him assigned to the Vindictive, a ship pulled out of mothballs to hover over Manhattan and "protect" the Bourse, the financial heart of the Solar Union. For which read, a place for young financiers, and sons of wealthy traders, to nominally serve in the military, universal male conscription being active.

Benton's father had served with (now Grand Admiral) Bullard, and the young officer had gone to him to try to get transferred to a real combat ship. But someone mired as deep in bureaucracy as Bullard could hardly draft orders affecting only one ship, let alone one officer. Still, should certain orders be drafted that affected a whole class of ships (all but one of which were in junkyards)…

Benton got to serve on a real warship, and in one of those "the Enterprise is the only ship in the sector available" scenarios, ended up winning a pivotal engagement, and even chancing on a form of jump drive from the way the Vindictive's new and old engines, radically different, interfered with each other.

●●●○○ The Man Who Sought {Dr. Taverner 03} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
Arnold Black raced motorcars and aeroplanes. He'd had an accident some months ago — he'd gone off a cliff, and had been unconscious for three days — and since then he'd been odd. He was in love with a woman he'd never met, who might not even exist, and he raced all over, hoping to meet her. If it kept up, he'd surely die in another crash.

Dr. Taverner, psychologist and occultist, took the case. He determined that Black had revived memories from a previous life, and that his and a female soul had been repeatedly entwined throughout history. In a lucid dream, Taverner consulted the Akashic Records, and found out that the female soul was currently incarnate, and was a young woman of similar age to Black, and that she even lived in England, for they were often drawn together.

So when Elaine Tyndall showed up, knowing she was in love with some man, but unaware of who he was or where he lived, Dr. Taverner was hopeful of a happy conclusion to the two cases…

●●●○○ Just the Three of Them at the End of the World - John Grover (2010 ss)
Three gay roommates — tough rentboy Troy, bitchy drag queen Alan, and shy newly-out Josh — deal with a zombie outbreak. They manage to fight their way out of their apartment building — even having to bash in the skull of Mrs. Gomez, who always gave them a plate of cookies when she made some for her grandkids — nearly losing Alan along the way: he was readying for a competition, and it's tough to run in a slinky dress.

Things don't go well once they make it to the streets, trying to get to the house of a friend with a car in which they hoped to get out of town.

●●●◐○ The Girl Who Fought Back {Wanderers 02} - David Collins (2026 nov)
Ye gods. Not only does this series have the same type of FTL the Artifact series does, it also uses "friction" (impulse) drives, and has medpods that use smelly sensor slime. Collins is copying from himself, except that where Ben and his friends go around exploring and solving problems, Dan and his friends go around troubleshooting and exploring. They even found a derelict spaceship in deep space in this book, something which happens all the time in the other series.

In any case, on a Mars-type world famous for having ancient alien artifacts, a buried spaceship is found. Since Kinnis is doing her public service sentence there (after stealing a university spaceship in the first book), she manages to copy the computer's data, and calls her friends to get her so they can see if the ten-thousand-years-gone race is still out there.

The Azur stops for supplies at a frontier Collective planet, where ultra-rich Captain Dan buys out the indentured service contracts of a couple of Grelderkin (humanoid porcupines), one an FTL tech, the other a general mechanic, to have them as crew on the exceptionally long journey to the alien plant.

They find the alien homeworld suffered a Skynet event, and it's taken millennia for the humans, thrown back to 1920s levels, to be on the verge of beating the six remaining AI hubs and their killer robots. As happens in the Artifact tales, the ship also ends up picking up a new crewperson, this time a Minote (four-armed humanoid with twin prehensile tails) from the Skynet world, who'll be with them for the next book.

The book also ends with the remnants of the criminal cabal (that they took down in the previous volume) attempting to assassinate them, only to fail. Fast, light adventure, very very like the Artifact series.

●●○○○ The Redneck Games - René Beauchemin (2021 ss)
After covid lockdown ends, Alan and Anne are glad to be able to go to Sunny Green Acres again. At their nudist camp they meet up with other retired friends like Bill and Candace. After lockdown, other people had wanted to try new things, and the old folk saw several young couples — one even with children — at the camp, as well as two First Nations couples and a Black couple.

Anne had a successful potluck dinner at their trailer, and then everyone participated in the traditional games of toilet-seat throwing and the rest. A fine time was had by all, though the tale is dull.

●◐○○○ Highway of Eternity - Clifford D. Simak (1986 nov)
Boone was a man who could "step around the corner" into another realm when faced with imminent death. Corcoran was a man who, after a head injury, could see things other people couldn't. When an odd but profitable client went missing, investigator Corcoran called in his reporter friend Boone to help look for him. They found an invisible box attached to a skyscraper due to be demolished, and when the authorities moved up the deadline, Boone stepped them into the transporter, which took them centuries into the past.

There they encountered an eccentric family on the run from the Infinites, aliens who'd convinced future humans that base corporeal life should be avoided, and converted most of humankind into sparkling lights. The Infinites sent a robotic murderbot after them, and they fled hastily in three transporters, ending up separated in three different times.

Some were in the pre-human-migration Southwest, others in the post-Infinites pastoral future, others got involved with aliens. Things happen without much plot or character development. People run hither and yon without reason, running from killerbots and looking for each other. At one point Corcoran climbs a magic-beanstalk-size tree (that only he can see) surrounded by a spiral staircase, only to fall off when he's miles up — and magically appear in the gray realm that is the Highway of Eternity, where he finds his companions waiting for him.

The last chapter reveals that most of the nonsense was orchestrated by a minor character who is in reality godlike, in order to arrange a meet-cute that he hopes will result in a superior human.

●●●○○ Unrest in Cowpat - Stephanie Kincaid (2010 ss)
Harry's been in a bad mood all his life, and it got worse when his son came out of the closet. When Celeste tells him that Ben and Keith are going to get married, it's too much, and that night he dies of a heart attack.

After being delayed a respectful two months, the wedding happens, and it's again too much for Harry: he rises from his grave as a zombie to protest it. Celeste kicks him out of the house for continuing to be so hateful, so Harry goes in search of others who share his views. He rouses quite a few from the graveyard, and they hold a protest march…

●●●○○ The Dark Demon - Robert Bloch (1936 ss)
When young author Ithan learns that famed horror writer Edgar Gordon lives in his town, he approached him, and the older man became a friend and mentor. Gordon talked of the inspiration for his stories: all of them came from dreams. He wrote tales of eldritch oddity and intelligent beings of monstrous form who lived beyond normal space.

Over the years, Gordon's tales became stranger and stranger, until the regular publishers wouldn't touch his work, and he was forced to turn to private printers. Then Gordon revealed that he had been chosen by the Old Gods as a harbinger of their return…

●●●○○ Blank… - Harlan Ellison (1957 ss)
Rike Akisimov's crimes were so horrid that the faceless, unemotional jurymech had sentenced him to the penal colony on Io for a thousand years, adding that it was “essential to the good of humanity that [his] kind be eliminated from the universe.”

But Akisimov managed to escape custody when he was being transferred to the vehicle meant to take him to the spaceport. He grabbed a mind-blanking cap from a passing pedestrian and fled the psycops, heading for Driver Hall. His only chance at freedom was the stars, and to get a ship into inverspace he needed that rarest type of psioid, a Driver.

He managed to kidnap one and take off ahead of the authorities, and the Driver did what he wanted, but with a twist…

●○○○○ Eureka! - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
An ultra-short story meant to amuse. Not a Feghoot, since there's no pun. Possibly a shaggy-dog story, though it's not long-winded, and the ending is more "that's dumb" than funny. The tale is about a scientist known for his weird discoveries coming to a colleague's lab to demonstrate his latest find.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Three's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
243+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 74+3 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Because the First Councillor had set up the secret computer himself, rather than having some competent tech set up a system that was actually secure.

●●●●○ The Clouds of Saturn - Michael McCollum (1991 nov)
In the late 2000s, humans discovered that Sol was entering a more active phase, and within a century the oceans of Earth would begin to boil. After a couple of years of chaos, twenty percent of Earth's GDP went into basic research, trying to find some way to save the planet, or barring that, save humankind. The first goal failed, but enough was learned to accomplish the second. People were transported to Saturn in million-person cryosleeper arks, which were disassembled to build floating cities.

Centuries later, tens of thousands of cloud cities float in the clearer Belts of the ringed planet's atmosphere, mostly in small associations of three to five cities. But now the growing Northern Alliance is trying to force cities to join them, either via economic pressures and political subversion as the Accretionists wish, or via quicker conquest as the Militarist faction desires.

Captain Larson Sands and his five crew members are hired as privateers to defend New Philadelphia against the Alliance. Larson's brother — and co-pilot Halley's fiancé — is stationed on the city's command blimp, and dies in the conflict. The upset and broke Larson then gets pulled into a scheme that can get him money and a measure of vengeance, only to find his crew has been used as dupes by the Militarist faction to make the Accretionist First Councilor of the Northern Alliance look bad.

This in turn sees the crew on the run, and having rescued the held-hostage princess daughter of the Factor of Titan, head of the partner civilization that provides the metals that Saturn doesn't have. As part of their raid on Cloudcroft, the Alliance capitol, Halley had copied data from the First Councillor's private computer, which Titan computer techs deciphered¹ to show that the Alliance was on the verge of securing shield technology that would guarantee its conquest of Saturn. That expands the story greatly, and even leads to expeditions to boiling Earth to dig up old tech.

●●●○○ The Bureaucrat {Bullard 8} - Malcolm Jameson (1944 ss)
Lieutenant Benton wanted to be part of "the greatest war in history" (against whom, poor readers never learn), but his rich mother bought enough war bonds that she could get him assigned to the Vindictive, a ship pulled out of mothballs to hover over Manhattan and "protect" the Bourse, the financial heart of the Solar Union. For which read, a place for young financiers, and sons of wealthy traders, to nominally serve in the military, universal male conscription being active.

Benton's father had served with (now Grand Admiral) Bullard, and the young officer had gone to him to try to get transferred to a real combat ship. But someone mired as deep in bureaucracy as Bullard could hardly draft orders affecting only one ship, let alone one officer. Still, should certain orders be drafted that affected a whole class of ships (all but one of which were in junkyards)…

Benton got to serve on a real warship, and in one of those "the Enterprise is the only ship in the sector available" scenarios, ended up winning a pivotal engagement, and even chancing on a form of jump drive from the way the Vindictive's new and old engines, radically different, interfered with each other.

●●●○○ The Man Who Sought {Dr. Taverner 03} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
Arnold Black raced motorcars and aeroplanes. He'd had an accident some months ago — he'd gone off a cliff, and had been unconscious for three days — and since then he'd been odd. He was in love with a woman he'd never met, who might not even exist, and he raced all over, hoping to meet her. If it kept up, he'd surely die in another crash.

Dr. Taverner, psychologist and occultist, took the case. He determined that Black had revived memories from a previous life, and that his and a female soul had been repeatedly entwined throughout history. In a lucid dream, Taverner consulted the Akashic Records, and found out that the female soul was currently incarnate, and was a young woman of similar age to Black, and that she even lived in England, for they were often drawn together.

So when Elaine Tyndall showed up, knowing she was in love with some man, but unaware of who he was or where he lived, Dr. Taverner was hopeful of a happy conclusion to the two cases…

●●●○○ Just the Three of Them at the End of the World - John Grover (2010 ss)
Three gay roommates — tough rentboy Troy, bitchy drag queen Alan, and shy newly-out Josh — deal with a zombie outbreak. They manage to fight their way out of their apartment building — even having to bash in the skull of Mrs. Gomez, who always gave them a plate of cookies when she made some for her grandkids — nearly losing Alan along the way: he was readying for a competition, and it's tough to run in a slinky dress.

Things don't go well once they make it to the streets, trying to get to the house of a friend with a car in which they hoped to get out of town.

●●●◐○ The Girl Who Fought Back {Wanderers 02} - David Collins (2026 nov)
Ye gods. Not only does this series have the same type of FTL the Artifact series does, it also uses "friction" (impulse) drives, and has medpods that use smelly sensor slime. Collins is copying from himself, except that where Ben and his friends go around exploring and solving problems, Dan and his friends go around troubleshooting and exploring. They even found a derelict spaceship in deep space in this book, something which happens all the time in the other series.

In any case, on a Mars-type world famous for having ancient alien artifacts, a buried spaceship is found. Since Kinnis is doing her public service sentence there (after stealing a university spaceship in the first book), she manages to copy the computer's data, and calls her friends to get her so they can see if the ten-thousand-years-gone race is still out there.

The Azur stops for supplies at a frontier Collective planet, where ultra-rich Captain Dan buys out the indentured service contracts of a couple of Grelderkin (humanoid porcupines), one an FTL tech, the other a general mechanic, to have them as crew on the exceptionally long journey to the alien plant.

They find the alien homeworld suffered a Skynet event, and it's taken millennia for the humans, thrown back to 1920s levels, to be on the verge of beating the six remaining AI hubs and their killer robots. As happens in the Artifact tales, the ship also ends up picking up a new crewperson, this time a Minote (four-armed humanoid with twin prehensile tails) from the Skynet world, who'll be with them for the next book.

The book also ends with the remnants of the criminal cabal (that they took down in the previous volume) attempting to assassinate them, only to fail. Fast, light adventure, very very like the Artifact series.

●●○○○ The Redneck Games - René Beauchemin (2021 ss)
After covid lockdown ends, Alan and Anne are glad to be able to go to Sunny Green Acres again. At their nudist camp they meet up with other retired friends like Bill and Candace. After lockdown, other people had wanted to try new things, and the old folk saw several young couples — one even with children — at the camp, as well as two First Nations couples and a Black couple.

Anne had a successful potluck dinner at their trailer, and then everyone participated in the traditional games of toilet-seat throwing and the rest. A fine time was had by all, though the tale is dull.

●◐○○○ Highway of Eternity - Clifford D. Simak (1986 nov)
Boone was a man who could "step around the corner" into another realm when faced with imminent death. Corcoran was a man who, after a head injury, could see things other people couldn't. When an odd but profitable client went missing, investigator Corcoran called in his reporter friend Boone to help look for him. They found an invisible box attached to a skyscraper due to be demolished, and when the authorities moved up the deadline, Boone stepped them into the transporter, which took them centuries into the past.

There they encountered an eccentric family on the run from the Infinites, aliens who'd convinced future humans that base corporeal life should be avoided, and converted most of humankind into sparkling lights. The Infinites sent a robotic murderbot after them, and they fled hastily in three transporters, ending up separated in three different times.

Some were in the pre-human-migration Southwest, others in the post-Infinites pastoral future, others got involved with aliens. Things happen without much plot or character development. People run hither and yon without reason, running from killerbots and looking for each other. At one point Corcoran climbs a magic-beanstalk-size tree (that only he can see) surrounded by a spiral staircase, only to fall off when he's miles up — and magically appear in the gray realm that is the Highway of Eternity, where he finds his companions waiting for him.

The last chapter reveals that most of the nonsense was orchestrated by a minor character who is in reality godlike, in order to arrange a meet-cute that he hopes will result in a superior human.

●●●○○ Unrest in Cowpat - Stephanie Kincaid (2010 ss)
Harry's been in a bad mood all his life, and it got worse when his son came out of the closet. When Celeste tells him that Ben and Keith are going to get married, it's too much, and that night he dies of a heart attack.

After being delayed a respectful two months, the wedding happens, and it's again too much for Harry: he rises from his grave as a zombie to protest it. Celeste kicks him out of the house for continuing to be so hateful, so Harry goes in search of others who share his views. He rouses quite a few from the graveyard, and they hold a protest march…

●●●○○ The Dark Demon - Robert Bloch (1936 ss)
When young author Ithan learns that famed horror writer Edgar Gordon lives in his town, he approached him, and the older man became a friend and mentor. Gordon talked of the inspiration for his stories: all of them came from dreams. He wrote tales of eldritch oddity and intelligent beings of monstrous form who lived beyond normal space.

Over the years, Gordon's tales became stranger and stranger, until the regular publishers wouldn't touch his work, and he was forced to turn to private printers. Then Gordon revealed that he had been chosen by the Old Gods as a harbinger of their return…

●●●○○ Blank… - Harlan Ellison (1957 ss)
Rike Akisimov's crimes were so horrid that the faceless, unemotional jurymech had sentenced him to the penal colony on Io for a thousand years, adding that it was “essential to the good of humanity that [his] kind be eliminated from the universe.”

But Akisimov managed to escape custody when he was being transferred to the vehicle meant to take him to the spaceport. He grabbed a mind-blanking cap from a passing pedestrian and fled the psycops, heading for Driver Hall. His only chance at freedom was the stars, and to get a ship into inverspace he needed that rarest type of psioid, a Driver.

He managed to kidnap one and take off ahead of the authorities, and the Driver did what he wanted, but with a twist…

●○○○○ Eureka! - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
An ultra-short story meant to amuse. Not a Feghoot, since there's no pun. Possibly a shaggy-dog story, though it's not long-winded, and the ending is more "that's dumb" than funny. The tale is about a scientist known for his weird discoveries coming to a colleague's lab to demonstrate his latest find.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Three's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
243+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 74+3 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Because the First Councillor had set up the secret computer himself, rather than having some competent tech set up a system that was actually secure.

●●●●○ The Clouds of Saturn - Michael McCollum (1991 nov)
In the late 2000s, humans discovered that Sol was entering a more active phase, and within a century the oceans of Earth would begin to boil. After a couple of years of chaos, twenty percent of Earth's GDP went into basic research, trying to find some way to save the planet, or barring that, save humankind. The first goal failed, but enough was learned to accomplish the second. People were transported to Saturn in million-person cryosleeper arks, which were disassembled to build floating cities.

Centuries later, tens of thousands of cloud cities float in the clearer Belts of the ringed planet's atmosphere, mostly in small associations of three to five cities. But now the growing Northern Alliance is trying to force cities to join them, either via economic pressures and political subversion as the Accretionists wish, or via quicker conquest as the Militarist faction desires.

Captain Larson Sands and his five crew members are hired as privateers to defend New Philadelphia against the Alliance. Larson's brother — and co-pilot Halley's fiancé — is stationed on the city's command blimp, and dies in the conflict. The upset and broke Larson then gets pulled into a scheme that can get him money and a measure of vengeance, only to find his crew has been used as dupes by the Militarist faction to make the Accretionist First Councilor of the Northern Alliance look bad.

This in turn sees the crew on the run, and having rescued the held-hostage princess daughter of the Factor of Titan, head of the partner civilization that provides the metals that Saturn doesn't have. As part of their raid on Cloudcroft, the Alliance capitol, Halley had copied data from the First Councillor's private computer, which Titan computer techs deciphered¹ to show that the Alliance was on the verge of securing shield technology that would guarantee its conquest of Saturn. That expands the story greatly, and even leads to expeditions to boiling Earth to dig up old tech.

●●●○○ The Bureaucrat {Bullard 8} - Malcolm Jameson (1944 ss)
Lieutenant Benton wanted to be part of "the greatest war in history" (against whom, poor readers never learn), but his rich mother bought enough war bonds that she could get him assigned to the Vindictive, a ship pulled out of mothballs to hover over Manhattan and "protect" the Bourse, the financial heart of the Solar Union. For which read, a place for young financiers, and sons of wealthy traders, to nominally serve in the military, universal male conscription being active.

Benton's father had served with (now Grand Admiral) Bullard, and the young officer had gone to him to try to get transferred to a real combat ship. But someone mired as deep in bureaucracy as Bullard could hardly draft orders affecting only one ship, let alone one officer. Still, should certain orders be drafted that affected a whole class of ships (all but one of which were in junkyards)…

Benton got to serve on a real warship, and in one of those "the Enterprise is the only ship in the sector available" scenarios, ended up winning a pivotal engagement, and even chancing on a form of jump drive from the way the Vindictive's new and old engines, radically different, interfered with each other.

●●●○○ The Man Who Sought {Dr. Taverner 03} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
Arnold Black raced motorcars and aeroplanes. He'd had an accident some months ago — he'd gone off a cliff, and had been unconscious for three days — and since then he'd been odd. He was in love with a woman he'd never met, who might not even exist, and he raced all over, hoping to meet her. If it kept up, he'd surely die in another crash.

Dr. Taverner, psychologist and occultist, took the case. He determined that Black had revived memories from a previous life, and that his and a female soul had been repeatedly entwined throughout history. In a lucid dream, Taverner consulted the Akashic Records, and found out that the female soul was currently incarnate, and was a young woman of similar age to Black, and that she even lived in England, for they were often drawn together.

So when Elaine Tyndall showed up, knowing she was in love with some man, but unaware of who he was or where he lived, Dr. Taverner was hopeful of a happy conclusion to the two cases…

●●●○○ Just the Three of Them at the End of the World - John Grover (2010 ss)
Three gay roommates — tough rentboy Troy, bitchy drag queen Alan, and shy newly-out Josh — deal with a zombie outbreak. They manage to fight their way out of their apartment building — even having to bash in the skull of Mrs. Gomez, who always gave them a plate of cookies when she made some for her grandkids — nearly losing Alan along the way: he was readying for a competition, and it's tough to run in a slinky dress.

Things don't go well once they make it to the streets, trying to get to the house of a friend with a car in which they hoped to get out of town.

●●●◐○ The Girl Who Fought Back {Wanderers 02} - David Collins (2026 nov)
Ye gods. Not only does this series have the same type of FTL the Artifact series does, it also uses "friction" (impulse) drives, and has medpods that use smelly sensor slime. Collins is copying from himself, except that where Ben and his friends go around exploring and solving problems, Dan and his friends go around troubleshooting and exploring. They even found a derelict spaceship in deep space in this book, something which happens all the time in the other series.

In any case, on a Mars-type world famous for having ancient alien artifacts, a buried spaceship is found. Since Kinnis is doing her public service sentence there (after stealing a university spaceship in the first book), she manages to copy the computer's data, and calls her friends to get her so they can see if the ten-thousand-years-gone race is still out there.

The Azur stops for supplies at a frontier Collective planet, where ultra-rich Captain Dan buys out the indentured service contracts of a couple of Grelderkin (humanoid porcupines), one an FTL tech, the other a general mechanic, to have them as crew on the exceptionally long journey to the alien plant.

They find the alien homeworld suffered a Skynet event, and it's taken millennia for the humans, thrown back to 1920s levels, to be on the verge of beating the six remaining AI hubs and their killer robots. As happens in the Artifact tales, the ship also ends up picking up a new crewperson, this time a Minote (four-armed humanoid with twin prehensile tails) from the Skynet world, who'll be with them for the next book.

The book also ends with the remnants of the criminal cabal (that they took down in the previous volume) attempting to assassinate them, only to fail. Fast, light adventure, very very like the Artifact series.

●●○○○ The Redneck Games - René Beauchemin (2021 ss)
After covid lockdown ends, Alan and Anne are glad to be able to go to Sunny Green Acres again. At their nudist camp they meet up with other retired friends like Bill and Candace. After lockdown, other people had wanted to try new things, and the old folk saw several young couples — one even with children — at the camp, as well as two First Nations couples and a Black couple.

Anne had a successful potluck dinner at their trailer, and then everyone participated in the traditional games of toilet-seat throwing and the rest. A fine time was had by all, though the tale is dull.

●◐○○○ Highway of Eternity - Clifford D. Simak (1986 nov)
Boone was a man who could "step around the corner" into another realm when faced with imminent death. Corcoran was a man who, after a head injury, could see things other people couldn't. When an odd but profitable client went missing, investigator Corcoran called in his reporter friend Boone to help look for him. They found an invisible box attached to a skyscraper due to be demolished, and when the authorities moved up the deadline, Boone stepped them into the transporter, which took them centuries into the past.

There they encountered an eccentric family on the run from the Infinites, aliens who'd convinced future humans that base corporeal life should be avoided, and converted most of humankind into sparkling lights. The Infinites sent a robotic murderbot after them, and they fled hastily in three transporters, ending up separated in three different times.

Some were in the pre-human-migration Southwest, others in the post-Infinites pastoral future, others got involved with aliens. Things happen without much plot or character development. People run hither and yon without reason, running from killerbots and looking for each other. At one point Corcoran climbs a magic-beanstalk-size tree (that only he can see) surrounded by a spiral staircase, only to fall off when he's miles up — and magically appear in the gray realm that is the Highway of Eternity, where he finds his companions waiting for him.

The last chapter reveals that most of the nonsense was orchestrated by a minor character who is in reality godlike, in order to arrange a meet-cute that he hopes will result in a superior human.

●●●○○ Unrest in Cowpat - Stephanie Kincaid (2010 ss)
Harry's been in a bad mood all his life, and it got worse when his son came out of the closet. When Celeste tells him that Ben and Keith are going to get married, it's too much, and that night he dies of a heart attack.

After being delayed a respectful two months, the wedding happens, and it's again too much for Harry: he rises from his grave as a zombie to protest it. Celeste kicks him out of the house for continuing to be so hateful, so Harry goes in search of others who share his views. He rouses quite a few from the graveyard, and they hold a protest march…

●●●○○ The Dark Demon - Robert Bloch (1936 ss)
When young author Ithan learns that famed horror writer Edgar Gordon lives in his town, he approached him, and the older man became a friend and mentor. Gordon talked of the inspiration for his stories: all of them came from dreams. He wrote tales of eldritch oddity and intelligent beings of monstrous form who lived beyond normal space.

Over the years, Gordon's tales became stranger and stranger, until the regular publishers wouldn't touch his work, and he was forced to turn to private printers. Then Gordon revealed that he had been chosen by the Old Gods as a harbinger of their return…

●●●○○ Blank… - Harlan Ellison (1957 ss)
Rike Akisimov's crimes were so horrid that the faceless, unemotional jurymech had sentenced him to the penal colony on Io for a thousand years, adding that it was “essential to the good of humanity that [his] kind be eliminated from the universe.”

But Akisimov managed to escape custody when he was being transferred to the vehicle meant to take him to the spaceport. He grabbed a mind-blanking cap from a passing pedestrian and fled the psycops, heading for Driver Hall. His only chance at freedom was the stars, and to get a ship into inverspace he needed that rarest type of psioid, a Driver.

He managed to kidnap one and take off ahead of the authorities, and the Driver did what he wanted, but with a twist…

●○○○○ Eureka! - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
An ultra-short story meant to amuse. Not a Feghoot, since there's no pun. Possibly a shaggy-dog story, though it's not long-winded, and the ending is more "that's dumb" than funny. The tale is about a scientist known for his weird discoveries coming to a colleague's lab to demonstrate his latest find.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Three's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
243+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 74+3 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Because the First Councillor had set up the secret computer himself, rather than having some competent tech set up a system that was actually secure.

●●●●○ The Clouds of Saturn - Michael McCollum (1991 nov)
In the late 2000s, humans discovered that Sol was entering a more active phase, and within a century the oceans of Earth would begin to boil. After a couple of years of chaos, twenty percent of Earth's GDP went into basic research, trying to find some way to save the planet, or barring that, save humankind. The first goal failed, but enough was learned to accomplish the second. People were transported to Saturn in million-person cryosleeper arks, which were disassembled to build floating cities.

Centuries later, tens of thousands of cloud cities float in the clearer Belts of the ringed planet's atmosphere, mostly in small associations of three to five cities. But now the growing Northern Alliance is trying to force cities to join them, either via economic pressures and political subversion as the Accretionists wish, or via quicker conquest as the Militarist faction desires.

Captain Larson Sands and his five crew members are hired as privateers to defend New Philadelphia against the Alliance. Larson's brother — and co-pilot Halley's fiancé — is stationed on the city's command blimp, and dies in the conflict. The upset and broke Larson then gets pulled into a scheme that can get him money and a measure of vengeance, only to find his crew has been used as dupes by the Militarist faction to make the Accretionist First Councilor of the Northern Alliance look bad.

This in turn sees the crew on the run, and having rescued the held-hostage princess daughter of the Factor of Titan, head of the partner civilization that provides the metals that Saturn doesn't have. As part of their raid on Cloudcroft, the Alliance capitol, Halley had copied data from the First Councillor's private computer, which Titan computer techs deciphered¹ to show that the Alliance was on the verge of securing shield technology that would guarantee its conquest of Saturn. That expands the story greatly, and even leads to expeditions to boiling Earth to dig up old tech.

●●●○○ The Bureaucrat {Bullard 8} - Malcolm Jameson (1944 ss)
Lieutenant Benton wanted to be part of "the greatest war in history" (against whom, poor readers never learn), but his rich mother bought enough war bonds that she could get him assigned to the Vindictive, a ship pulled out of mothballs to hover over Manhattan and "protect" the Bourse, the financial heart of the Solar Union. For which read, a place for young financiers, and sons of wealthy traders, to nominally serve in the military, universal male conscription being active.

Benton's father had served with (now Grand Admiral) Bullard, and the young officer had gone to him to try to get transferred to a real combat ship. But someone mired as deep in bureaucracy as Bullard could hardly draft orders affecting only one ship, let alone one officer. Still, should certain orders be drafted that affected a whole class of ships (all but one of which were in junkyards)…

Benton got to serve on a real warship, and in one of those "the Enterprise is the only ship in the sector available" scenarios, ended up winning a pivotal engagement, and even chancing on a form of jump drive from the way the Vindictive's new and old engines, radically different, interfered with each other.

●●●○○ The Man Who Sought {Dr. Taverner 03} - Dion Fortune (1922 ss)
Arnold Black raced motorcars and aeroplanes. He'd had an accident some months ago — he'd gone off a cliff, and had been unconscious for three days — and since then he'd been odd. He was in love with a woman he'd never met, who might not even exist, and he raced all over, hoping to meet her. If it kept up, he'd surely die in another crash.

Dr. Taverner, psychologist and occultist, took the case. He determined that Black had revived memories from a previous life, and that his and a female soul had been repeatedly entwined throughout history. In a lucid dream, Taverner consulted the Akashic Records, and found out that the female soul was currently incarnate, and was a young woman of similar age to Black, and that she even lived in England, for they were often drawn together.

So when Elaine Tyndall showed up, knowing she was in love with some man, but unaware of who he was or where he lived, Dr. Taverner was hopeful of a happy conclusion to the two cases…

●●●○○ Just the Three of Them at the End of the World - John Grover (2010 ss)
Three gay roommates — tough rentboy Troy, bitchy drag queen Alan, and shy newly-out Josh — deal with a zombie outbreak. They manage to fight their way out of their apartment building — even having to bash in the skull of Mrs. Gomez, who always gave them a plate of cookies when she made some for her grandkids — nearly losing Alan along the way: he was readying for a competition, and it's tough to run in a slinky dress.

Things don't go well once they make it to the streets, trying to get to the house of a friend with a car in which they hoped to get out of town.

●●●◐○ The Girl Who Fought Back {Wanderers 02} - David Collins (2026 nov)
Ye gods. Not only does this series have the same type of FTL the Artifact series does, it also uses "friction" (impulse) drives, and has medpods that use smelly sensor slime. Collins is copying from himself, except that where Ben and his friends go around exploring and solving problems, Dan and his friends go around troubleshooting and exploring. They even found a derelict spaceship in deep space in this book, something which happens all the time in the other series.

In any case, on a Mars-type world famous for having ancient alien artifacts, a buried spaceship is found. Since Kinnis is doing her public service sentence there (after stealing a university spaceship in the first book), she manages to copy the computer's data, and calls her friends to get her so they can see if the ten-thousand-years-gone race is still out there.

The Azur stops for supplies at a frontier Collective planet, where ultra-rich Captain Dan buys out the indentured service contracts of a couple of Grelderkin (humanoid porcupines), one an FTL tech, the other a general mechanic, to have them as crew on the exceptionally long journey to the alien plant.

They find the alien homeworld suffered a Skynet event, and it's taken millennia for the humans, thrown back to 1920s levels, to be on the verge of beating the six remaining AI hubs and their killer robots. As happens in the Artifact tales, the ship also ends up picking up a new crewperson, this time a Minote (four-armed humanoid with twin prehensile tails) from the Skynet world, who'll be with them for the next book.

The book also ends with the remnants of the criminal cabal (that they took down in the previous volume) attempting to assassinate them, only to fail. Fast, light adventure, very very like the Artifact series.

●●○○○ The Redneck Games - René Beauchemin (2021 ss)
After covid lockdown ends, Alan and Anne are glad to be able to go to Sunny Green Acres again. At their nudist camp they meet up with other retired friends like Bill and Candace. After lockdown, other people had wanted to try new things, and the old folk saw several young couples — one even with children — at the camp, as well as two First Nations couples and a Black couple.

Anne had a successful potluck dinner at their trailer, and then everyone participated in the traditional games of toilet-seat throwing and the rest. A fine time was had by all, though the tale is dull.

●◐○○○ Highway of Eternity - Clifford D. Simak (1986 nov)
Boone was a man who could "step around the corner" into another realm when faced with imminent death. Corcoran was a man who, after a head injury, could see things other people couldn't. When an odd but profitable client went missing, investigator Corcoran called in his reporter friend Boone to help look for him. They found an invisible box attached to a skyscraper due to be demolished, and when the authorities moved up the deadline, Boone stepped them into the transporter, which took them centuries into the past.

There they encountered an eccentric family on the run from the Infinites, aliens who'd convinced future humans that base corporeal life should be avoided, and converted most of humankind into sparkling lights. The Infinites sent a robotic murderbot after them, and they fled hastily in three transporters, ending up separated in three different times.

Some were in the pre-human-migration Southwest, others in the post-Infinites pastoral future, others got involved with aliens. Things happen without much plot or character development. People run hither and yon without reason, running from killerbots and looking for each other. At one point Corcoran climbs a magic-beanstalk-size tree (that only he can see) surrounded by a spiral staircase, only to fall off when he's miles up — and magically appear in the gray realm that is the Highway of Eternity, where he finds his companions waiting for him.

The last chapter reveals that most of the nonsense was orchestrated by a minor character who is in reality godlike, in order to arrange a meet-cute that he hopes will result in a superior human.

●●●○○ Unrest in Cowpat - Stephanie Kincaid (2010 ss)
Harry's been in a bad mood all his life, and it got worse when his son came out of the closet. When Celeste tells him that Ben and Keith are going to get married, it's too much, and that night he dies of a heart attack.

After being delayed a respectful two months, the wedding happens, and it's again too much for Harry: he rises from his grave as a zombie to protest it. Celeste kicks him out of the house for continuing to be so hateful, so Harry goes in search of others who share his views. He rouses quite a few from the graveyard, and they hold a protest march…

●●●○○ The Dark Demon - Robert Bloch (1936 ss)
When young author Ithan learns that famed horror writer Edgar Gordon lives in his town, he approached him, and the older man became a friend and mentor. Gordon talked of the inspiration for his stories: all of them came from dreams. He wrote tales of eldritch oddity and intelligent beings of monstrous form who lived beyond normal space.

Over the years, Gordon's tales became stranger and stranger, until the regular publishers wouldn't touch his work, and he was forced to turn to private printers. Then Gordon revealed that he had been chosen by the Old Gods as a harbinger of their return…

●●●○○ Blank… - Harlan Ellison (1957 ss)
Rike Akisimov's crimes were so horrid that the faceless, unemotional jurymech had sentenced him to the penal colony on Io for a thousand years, adding that it was “essential to the good of humanity that [his] kind be eliminated from the universe.”

But Akisimov managed to escape custody when he was being transferred to the vehicle meant to take him to the spaceport. He grabbed a mind-blanking cap from a passing pedestrian and fled the psycops, heading for Driver Hall. His only chance at freedom was the stars, and to get a ship into inverspace he needed that rarest type of psioid, a Driver.

He managed to kidnap one and take off ahead of the authorities, and the Driver did what he wanted, but with a twist…

●○○○○ Eureka! - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
An ultra-short story meant to amuse. Not a Feghoot, since there's no pun. Possibly a shaggy-dog story, though it's not long-winded, and the ending is more "that's dumb" than funny. The tale is about a scientist known for his weird discoveries coming to a colleague's lab to demonstrate his latest find.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Three's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
243+8 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 74+3 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Because the First Councillor had set up the secret computer himself, rather than having some competent tech set up a system that was actually secure.

●●●◐○ His Father's Son {Ethical Vampires 2} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2001 nov)
Security expert Richard Dun once dated Stephanie Anders, secretary of Philip Bourland, a Security Chief for the Canadian government. Being a vampire, Richard couldn't have the family Stephanie wanted, and she eventually married Luis Trujillo, a coffee importer — who ended up being the forced-to-smuggle-drugs brother of narco-king Alejandro.

Luis cooperated with the authorities, and many Colombian drug cartels suffered. But Alejandro remained free, so Bourland and Dun set Stephanie and Luis up with new identities in Texas. Then one day Richard got an emergency email from Stephanie saying something was wrong. Richard went to Dallas and found out things were very wrong. He had to hunt down killers and get revenge for what they'd done.

The novel continues the Forever Knight-style flashbacks to Richard's younger vampire days, dealing with thematically similar events.

●●●◐○ Still Rolling - Angelia Sparrow (2010 ss)
The zombie uprising has occurred, and Yolanda is a “big ol’ diesel dyke” who makes the run between the agri-fortress near Wichita and and the university in Kansas City, along with her wife Alice, who's sick and resting in the sleeper. The story is Yolanda talking nonstop to the man she picked up, just out of his bunker because he ran out of food.

Turns out things are worse than Yolanda's Tale of the End of the World lets on, and no one on board will be surviving this journey…

●●○○○ The Fourth of July at Alamo Ranch Nudist Park - Michael Beyer (2021 ss)
Fifteen-year-old Devon has lived in the residential nudist complex for five months, along with his widowed father, Frank; his new stepmother, Sherry; and his two thirteen-year-old stepsisters, Mandy and Tandy. Their father, Brent, remains close, and has semi-adopted Devon. Now Brent's parents are visiting the camp, along with Valerie, Brent's college-age cousin.

We deal with Devon and Beau's (another teen cousin) reactions to naked Valerie, and the grandparents less than enthusiastic reaction to nudity.

●●●●○ The Permanent Stiletto - W.C. Morrow (1897 ss)
A spurned lover stabs a young man in the chest. His friend Imber calls a doctor, who determines from the angle of the stiletto's blade that it pierced the aorta; if it's removed, Arnold will bleed out in minutes. The doctor mentions that there's a daring young surgeon in the hotel; he's called in.

Young Doctor Entrefort agrees with Doctor Rowell that removing the stiletto would be fatal. Leaving it in place — after the hilt is removed — might allow Arnold to survive weeks or months, albeit in pain, and in diminished capacity. Arnold doesn't like this and tries to pull the blade out, but is too weak. Dr. Entrefort leans in and whispers that he'll see the woman is tried for murder if Arnold attempts that again. He accedes.

Entrefort sends for a workman he knows, and the hilt is cut off below the level of the chest wall. Dr. Entrefort closes the incisions he'd made, and prescribes Arnold some drugs. Horrible enough, but the true horror occurs four years later, when Entrefort encounters Imber, and learns that Arnold still lives. Entrefort and his new wife visit Arnold…

●●●◐○ The Girl Who Dropped In {Wanderers 01} - David Collins (2025 nov)
Formulaic. I've started four series by David Collins, and without exception, each begins with a mid-twenties, white American man getting accidentally involved with aliens. In this case, Daniel Baker was an electrical engineer getting ready to move into his not-quite-ready cabin, when there was a loud party in the apartment above his.

David spent the night in his cabin, and returned to his apartment to shower and eat, only to find a young woman passed out drunk on his balcony, fallen from the apartment above. Sue Glitch, it turned out, was not from around here. She was the descendant of humans who'd been picked up centuries ago for research, and was a citizen of the multi-species Collective. Her two rich-and-dumb friends had basically stolen a university vessel and dragged her on a months-long Spring Break on Earth.

Next thing you know, there's a (shot up by fighter jets) flying saucer in David's cabin's backyard, he's harboring three fugitive aliens, and he ends up fleeing Earth with them. David was then drafted by Sue's once-famous explorer grandfather and his alien government friends to investigate why the citizens of the Collective are getting dumber.

With the help of David's Earth friend Leon, three non-human women (a doctor, a grifter, and a tech expert), and his new girlfriend Sue, David did exactly that, flying from place to place on Grandfather's spaceship. David also upgraded Max, the shipmind, from limited artificial intelligence to fully-sapient digital person. And the book ends with David and friends on their own ship, set to have more adventures, as in the Artifact series.

●●○○○ The Red One - Jack London (1918 ss)
Bassett the naturalist stopped of at Guadalcanal for a day of specimen-gathering. When he heard the remarkable sound, he plunged into the jungle seeking it, despite the protests of his 'native' (from a nearby island) guide. Soon enough the guide was dead, as was the English boy assisting Bassett. Only his shotgun kept the local headhunting tribe from dealing Bassett the same fate.

Bassett's ship moved on. Bassett survived for weeks, though catching who-knows-what local fevers. He eventually managed to live with the locals (though the shaman kept asking if he was ready to die, since his head would be the jewel of the man's shrunken head collection). He even 'married' a local woman to have an ally to search for the thing making the wonderful noise. It turned out to be a huge red sphere in a crater, clearly a spaceship…

The story suffers from racism, stupidity, and not actually doing anything with the great discovery, but had a few interesting bits.

●●●○○ Brimstone Bill {Bullard 7} - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
The Pollux is transporting the prisoners captured in the last story to Luna Station, where the ship's crew will transfer to Earth to meet their wives and girlfriends. Except the ship is rerouted to Juno Skydocks for maintenance, in a way that Captain Bullard reads as paying off a politician whose votes the Navy needed. Senator Fenning owns the Skydocks, a fifth-rate repair base conveniently near gambling houses and brothels the Senator also owned.

One of the people included with the prisoners wasn't a combatant, merely a grifter who'd been caught up in the chaos. Bullard remembered him as Brimstone Bill, a preacher who'd been so forceful as to get a Lieutenant Bullard to donate a whole pay packet when he encountered the trickster on Venus. Bullard used 'Bill' to set up a situation so that his crew wasn't robbed blind in the casinos or whorehouses.

●●●○○ An Unexpected Ascension Day - Stan Muir (2021 ss)
Raphaël enjoyed nudism, his wife Clara not so much, though she'd gone as far as accompanying him to a nudist beach — topless. When the kids had a Friday off scheduled, Raphaël suggest going to a recently remodeled naturist resort for a long weekend. Clara didn't like the idea, but agreed the kids could have the deciding vote, and the family ended up going.

The kids enjoyed the the beach, the pony rides, the pools, and the other young people, while Raphaël had gone to many nudist parks when single, so he liked it. Clara was still disturbed by the idea of public nudity, though she enjoyed the way the kids had quickly found friends.

Clara wore a sarong for the first two days, until a discussion with the mother of the boy her son had made friends with. Jeanne told Clara of how she'd come to accept nudism, seeing how her son played with the son of another couple who they found were nudists. Everything just seemed natural. Finally Clara joined in the nudity.

●●●○○ Another Murder in the Buff {Jesse Montogomery 02} - Greg Kauffman-Starkey (2024 nov)
Two years ago, Jesse Mongomery solved his first murder at the Happy Valley Naturist Society, where the rich and privileged come to play and leave their cares and their clothes behind. He's been the security chief there since then. In this book he deals with the murder of a CEO who's come up with the next big social media app, and who's as arrogant and mean as you expect a techbro to be.

Suspects include the two assistants Simms brought to Happy Valley with him, both of whom he treats badly; the priest who counseled the man, who's for some reason also showed up at the nudist resort; the star of the musical revue whom he'd heckled off stage; and the beefy waiter with a crush on the star, who'd argued loudly with Simms.

The mystery is handled fairly casually. Jesse reviews the security cameras installed after the last murder, and he talks with the suspects, but I don't get the feel he tries to hard. (But then again, I often feel that mysteries just drift along aimlessly until one random observation solves the case.)

Jesse also thinks a lot about body issues (he's twenty or thirty pounds overweight, which the female officer who accompanies the hearse notes disparagingly) and discusses the positives of nudism a lot, which seems more like advertising than plot. But the case is eventually solved, with Jesse finding the killer (who wasn't the one the cops had been betting on), and Jessie's relationship with Christie progressing.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Two's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
237+6 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 68+6 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

Holiday at the Nudist Colony is not proving particularly interesting so far, but since each story is by a different author, I'll keep chancing it.

●●●◐○ His Father's Son {Ethical Vampires 2} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2001 nov)
Security expert Richard Dun once dated Stephanie Anders, secretary of Philip Bourland, a Security Chief for the Canadian government. Being a vampire, Richard couldn't have the family Stephanie wanted, and she eventually married Luis Trujillo, a coffee importer — who ended up being the forced-to-smuggle-drugs brother of narco-king Alejandro.

Luis cooperated with the authorities, and many Colombian drug cartels suffered. But Alejandro remained free, so Bourland and Dun set Stephanie and Luis up with new identities in Texas. Then one day Richard got an emergency email from Stephanie saying something was wrong. Richard went to Dallas and found out things were very wrong. He had to hunt down killers and get revenge for what they'd done.

The novel continues the Forever Knight-style flashbacks to Richard's younger vampire days, dealing with thematically similar events.

●●●◐○ Still Rolling - Angelia Sparrow (2010 ss)
The zombie uprising has occurred, and Yolanda is a “big ol’ diesel dyke” who makes the run between the agri-fortress near Wichita and and the university in Kansas City, along with her wife Alice, who's sick and resting in the sleeper. The story is Yolanda talking nonstop to the man she picked up, just out of his bunker because he ran out of food.

Turns out things are worse than Yolanda's Tale of the End of the World lets on, and no one on board will be surviving this journey…

●●○○○ The Fourth of July at Alamo Ranch Nudist Park - Michael Beyer (2021 ss)
Fifteen-year-old Devon has lived in the residential nudist complex for five months, along with his widowed father, Frank; his new stepmother, Sherry; and his two thirteen-year-old stepsisters, Mandy and Tandy. Their father, Brent, remains close, and has semi-adopted Devon. Now Brent's parents are visiting the camp, along with Valerie, Brent's college-age cousin.

We deal with Devon and Beau's (another teen cousin) reactions to naked Valerie, and the grandparents less than enthusiastic reaction to nudity.

●●●●○ The Permanent Stiletto - W.C. Morrow (1897 ss)
A spurned lover stabs a young man in the chest. His friend Imber calls a doctor, who determines from the angle of the stiletto's blade that it pierced the aorta; if it's removed, Arnold will bleed out in minutes. The doctor mentions that there's a daring young surgeon in the hotel; he's called in.

Young Doctor Entrefort agrees with Doctor Rowell that removing the stiletto would be fatal. Leaving it in place — after the hilt is removed — might allow Arnold to survive weeks or months, albeit in pain, and in diminished capacity. Arnold doesn't like this and tries to pull the blade out, but is too weak. Dr. Entrefort leans in and whispers that he'll see the woman is tried for murder if Arnold attempts that again. He accedes.

Entrefort sends for a workman he knows, and the hilt is cut off below the level of the chest wall. Dr. Entrefort closes the incisions he'd made, and prescribes Arnold some drugs. Horrible enough, but the true horror occurs four years later, when Entrefort encounters Imber, and learns that Arnold still lives. Entrefort and his new wife visit Arnold…

●●●◐○ The Girl Who Dropped In {Wanderers 01} - David Collins (2025 nov)
Formulaic. I've started four series by David Collins, and without exception, each begins with a mid-twenties, white American man getting accidentally involved with aliens. In this case, Daniel Baker was an electrical engineer getting ready to move into his not-quite-ready cabin, when there was a loud party in the apartment above his.

David spent the night in his cabin, and returned to his apartment to shower and eat, only to find a young woman passed out drunk on his balcony, fallen from the apartment above. Sue Glitch, it turned out, was not from around here. She was the descendant of humans who'd been picked up centuries ago for research, and was a citizen of the multi-species Collective. Her two rich-and-dumb friends had basically stolen a university vessel and dragged her on a months-long Spring Break on Earth.

Next thing you know, there's a (shot up by fighter jets) flying saucer in David's cabin's backyard, he's harboring three fugitive aliens, and he ends up fleeing Earth with them. David was then drafted by Sue's once-famous explorer grandfather and his alien government friends to investigate why the citizens of the Collective are getting dumber.

With the help of David's Earth friend Leon, three non-human women (a doctor, a grifter, and a tech expert), and his new girlfriend Sue, David did exactly that, flying from place to place on Grandfather's spaceship. David also upgraded Max, the shipmind, from limited artificial intelligence to fully-sapient digital person. And the book ends with David and friends on their own ship, set to have more adventures, as in the Artifact series.

●●○○○ The Red One - Jack London (1918 ss)
Bassett the naturalist stopped of at Guadalcanal for a day of specimen-gathering. When he heard the remarkable sound, he plunged into the jungle seeking it, despite the protests of his 'native' (from a nearby island) guide. Soon enough the guide was dead, as was the English boy assisting Bassett. Only his shotgun kept the local headhunting tribe from dealing Bassett the same fate.

Bassett's ship moved on. Bassett survived for weeks, though catching who-knows-what local fevers. He eventually managed to live with the locals (though the shaman kept asking if he was ready to die, since his head would be the jewel of the man's shrunken head collection). He even 'married' a local woman to have an ally to search for the thing making the wonderful noise. It turned out to be a huge red sphere in a crater, clearly a spaceship…

The story suffers from racism, stupidity, and not actually doing anything with the great discovery, but had a few interesting bits.

●●●○○ Brimstone Bill {Bullard 7} - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
The Pollux is transporting the prisoners captured in the last story to Luna Station, where the ship's crew will transfer to Earth to meet their wives and girlfriends. Except the ship is rerouted to Juno Skydocks for maintenance, in a way that Captain Bullard reads as paying off a politician whose votes the Navy needed. Senator Fenning owns the Skydocks, a fifth-rate repair base conveniently near gambling houses and brothels the Senator also owned.

One of the people included with the prisoners wasn't a combatant, merely a grifter who'd been caught up in the chaos. Bullard remembered him as Brimstone Bill, a preacher who'd been so forceful as to get a Lieutenant Bullard to donate a whole pay packet when he encountered the trickster on Venus. Bullard used 'Bill' to set up a situation so that his crew wasn't robbed blind in the casinos or whorehouses.

●●●○○ An Unexpected Ascension Day - Stan Muir (2021 ss)
Raphaël enjoyed nudism, his wife Clara not so much, though she'd gone as far as accompanying him to a nudist beach — topless. When the kids had a Friday off scheduled, Raphaël suggest going to a recently remodeled naturist resort for a long weekend. Clara didn't like the idea, but agreed the kids could have the deciding vote, and the family ended up going.

The kids enjoyed the the beach, the pony rides, the pools, and the other young people, while Raphaël had gone to many nudist parks when single, so he liked it. Clara was still disturbed by the idea of public nudity, though she enjoyed the way the kids had quickly found friends.

Clara wore a sarong for the first two days, until a discussion with the mother of the boy her son had made friends with. Jeanne told Clara of how she'd come to accept nudism, seeing how her son played with the son of another couple who they found were nudists. Everything just seemed natural. Finally Clara joined in the nudity.

●●●○○ Another Murder in the Buff {Jesse Montogomery 02} - Greg Kauffman-Starkey (2024 nov)
Two years ago, Jesse Mongomery solved his first murder at the Happy Valley Naturist Society, where the rich and privileged come to play and leave their cares and their clothes behind. He's been the security chief there since then. In this book he deals with the murder of a CEO who's come up with the next big social media app, and who's as arrogant and mean as you expect a techbro to be.

Suspects include the two assistants Simms brought to Happy Valley with him, both of whom he treats badly; the priest who counseled the man, who's for some reason also showed up at the nudist resort; the star of the musical revue whom he'd heckled off stage; and the beefy waiter with a crush on the star, who'd argued loudly with Simms.

The mystery is handled fairly casually. Jesse reviews the security cameras installed after the last murder, and he talks with the suspects, but I don't get the feel he tries to hard. (But then again, I often feel that mysteries just drift along aimlessly until one random observation solves the case.)

Jesse also thinks a lot about body issues (he's twenty or thirty pounds overweight, which the female officer who accompanies the hearse notes disparagingly) and discusses the positives of nudism a lot, which seems more like advertising than plot. But the case is eventually solved, with Jesse finding the killer (who wasn't the one the cops had been betting on), and Jessie's relationship with Christie progressing.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Two's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
237+6 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 68+6 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

Holiday at the Nudist Colony is not proving particularly interesting so far, but since each story is by a different author, I'll keep chancing it.

●●●◐○ His Father's Son {Ethical Vampires 2} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2001 nov)
Security expert Richard Dun once dated Stephanie Anders, secretary of Philip Bourland, a Security Chief for the Canadian government. Being a vampire, Richard couldn't have the family Stephanie wanted, and she eventually married Luis Trujillo, a coffee importer — who ended up being the forced-to-smuggle-drugs brother of narco-king Alejandro.

Luis cooperated with the authorities, and many Colombian drug cartels suffered. But Alejandro remained free, so Bourland and Dun set Stephanie and Luis up with new identities in Texas. Then one day Richard got an emergency email from Stephanie saying something was wrong. Richard went to Dallas and found out things were very wrong. He had to hunt down killers and get revenge for what they'd done.

The novel continues the Forever Knight-style flashbacks to Richard's younger vampire days, dealing with thematically similar events.

●●●◐○ Still Rolling - Angelia Sparrow (2010 ss)
The zombie uprising has occurred, and Yolanda is a “big ol’ diesel dyke” who makes the run between the agri-fortress near Wichita and and the university in Kansas City, along with her wife Alice, who's sick and resting in the sleeper. The story is Yolanda talking nonstop to the man she picked up, just out of his bunker because he ran out of food.

Turns out things are worse than Yolanda's Tale of the End of the World lets on, and no one on board will be surviving this journey…

●●○○○ The Fourth of July at Alamo Ranch Nudist Park - Michael Beyer (2021 ss)
Fifteen-year-old Devon has lived in the residential nudist complex for five months, along with his widowed father, Frank; his new stepmother, Sherry; and his two thirteen-year-old stepsisters, Mandy and Tandy. Their father, Brent, remains close, and has semi-adopted Devon. Now Brent's parents are visiting the camp, along with Valerie, Brent's college-age cousin.

We deal with Devon and Beau's (another teen cousin) reactions to naked Valerie, and the grandparents less than enthusiastic reaction to nudity.

●●●●○ The Permanent Stiletto - W.C. Morrow (1897 ss)
A spurned lover stabs a young man in the chest. His friend Imber calls a doctor, who determines from the angle of the stiletto's blade that it pierced the aorta; if it's removed, Arnold will bleed out in minutes. The doctor mentions that there's a daring young surgeon in the hotel; he's called in.

Young Doctor Entrefort agrees with Doctor Rowell that removing the stiletto would be fatal. Leaving it in place — after the hilt is removed — might allow Arnold to survive weeks or months, albeit in pain, and in diminished capacity. Arnold doesn't like this and tries to pull the blade out, but is too weak. Dr. Entrefort leans in and whispers that he'll see the woman is tried for murder if Arnold attempts that again. He accedes.

Entrefort sends for a workman he knows, and the hilt is cut off below the level of the chest wall. Dr. Entrefort closes the incisions he'd made, and prescribes Arnold some drugs. Horrible enough, but the true horror occurs four years later, when Entrefort encounters Imber, and learns that Arnold still lives. Entrefort and his new wife visit Arnold…

●●●◐○ The Girl Who Dropped In {Wanderers 01} - David Collins (2025 nov)
Formulaic. I've started four series by David Collins, and without exception, each begins with a mid-twenties, white American man getting accidentally involved with aliens. In this case, Daniel Baker was an electrical engineer getting ready to move into his not-quite-ready cabin, when there was a loud party in the apartment above his.

David spent the night in his cabin, and returned to his apartment to shower and eat, only to find a young woman passed out drunk on his balcony, fallen from the apartment above. Sue Glitch, it turned out, was not from around here. She was the descendant of humans who'd been picked up centuries ago for research, and was a citizen of the multi-species Collective. Her two rich-and-dumb friends had basically stolen a university vessel and dragged her on a months-long Spring Break on Earth.

Next thing you know, there's a (shot up by fighter jets) flying saucer in David's cabin's backyard, he's harboring three fugitive aliens, and he ends up fleeing Earth with them. David was then drafted by Sue's once-famous explorer grandfather and his alien government friends to investigate why the citizens of the Collective are getting dumber.

With the help of David's Earth friend Leon, three non-human women (a doctor, a grifter, and a tech expert), and his new girlfriend Sue, David did exactly that, flying from place to place on Grandfather's spaceship. David also upgraded Max, the shipmind, from limited artificial intelligence to fully-sapient digital person. And the book ends with David and friends on their own ship, set to have more adventures, as in the Artifact series.

●●○○○ The Red One - Jack London (1918 ss)
Bassett the naturalist stopped of at Guadalcanal for a day of specimen-gathering. When he heard the remarkable sound, he plunged into the jungle seeking it, despite the protests of his 'native' (from a nearby island) guide. Soon enough the guide was dead, as was the English boy assisting Bassett. Only his shotgun kept the local headhunting tribe from dealing Bassett the same fate.

Bassett's ship moved on. Bassett survived for weeks, though catching who-knows-what local fevers. He eventually managed to live with the locals (though the shaman kept asking if he was ready to die, since his head would be the jewel of the man's shrunken head collection). He even 'married' a local woman to have an ally to search for the thing making the wonderful noise. It turned out to be a huge red sphere in a crater, clearly a spaceship…

The story suffers from racism, stupidity, and not actually doing anything with the great discovery, but had a few interesting bits.

●●●○○ Brimstone Bill {Bullard 7} - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
The Pollux is transporting the prisoners captured in the last story to Luna Station, where the ship's crew will transfer to Earth to meet their wives and girlfriends. Except the ship is rerouted to Juno Skydocks for maintenance, in a way that Captain Bullard reads as paying off a politician whose votes the Navy needed. Senator Fenning owns the Skydocks, a fifth-rate repair base conveniently near gambling houses and brothels the Senator also owned.

One of the people included with the prisoners wasn't a combatant, merely a grifter who'd been caught up in the chaos. Bullard remembered him as Brimstone Bill, a preacher who'd been so forceful as to get a Lieutenant Bullard to donate a whole pay packet when he encountered the trickster on Venus. Bullard used 'Bill' to set up a situation so that his crew wasn't robbed blind in the casinos or whorehouses.

●●●○○ An Unexpected Ascension Day - Stan Muir (2021 ss)
Raphaël enjoyed nudism, his wife Clara not so much, though she'd gone as far as accompanying him to a nudist beach — topless. When the kids had a Friday off scheduled, Raphaël suggest going to a recently remodeled naturist resort for a long weekend. Clara didn't like the idea, but agreed the kids could have the deciding vote, and the family ended up going.

The kids enjoyed the the beach, the pony rides, the pools, and the other young people, while Raphaël had gone to many nudist parks when single, so he liked it. Clara was still disturbed by the idea of public nudity, though she enjoyed the way the kids had quickly found friends.

Clara wore a sarong for the first two days, until a discussion with the mother of the boy her son had made friends with. Jeanne told Clara of how she'd come to accept nudism, seeing how her son played with the son of another couple who they found were nudists. Everything just seemed natural. Finally Clara joined in the nudity.

●●●○○ Another Murder in the Buff {Jesse Montogomery 02} - Greg Kauffman-Starkey (2024 nov)
Two years ago, Jesse Mongomery solved his first murder at the Happy Valley Naturist Society, where the rich and privileged come to play and leave their cares and their clothes behind. He's been the security chief there since then. In this book he deals with the murder of a CEO who's come up with the next big social media app, and who's as arrogant and mean as you expect a techbro to be.

Suspects include the two assistants Simms brought to Happy Valley with him, both of whom he treats badly; the priest who counseled the man, who's for some reason also showed up at the nudist resort; the star of the musical revue whom he'd heckled off stage; and the beefy waiter with a crush on the star, who'd argued loudly with Simms.

The mystery is handled fairly casually. Jesse reviews the security cameras installed after the last murder, and he talks with the suspects, but I don't get the feel he tries to hard. (But then again, I often feel that mysteries just drift along aimlessly until one random observation solves the case.)

Jesse also thinks a lot about body issues (he's twenty or thirty pounds overweight, which the female officer who accompanies the hearse notes disparagingly) and discusses the positives of nudism a lot, which seems more like advertising than plot. But the case is eventually solved, with Jesse finding the killer (who wasn't the one the cops had been betting on), and Jessie's relationship with Christie progressing.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Two's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
237+6 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 68+6 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

Holiday at the Nudist Colony is not proving particularly interesting so far, but since each story is by a different author, I'll keep chancing it.

●●●◐○ His Father's Son {Ethical Vampires 2} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2001 nov)
Security expert Richard Dun once dated Stephanie Anders, secretary of Philip Bourland, a Security Chief for the Canadian government. Being a vampire, Richard couldn't have the family Stephanie wanted, and she eventually married Luis Trujillo, a coffee importer — who ended up being the forced-to-smuggle-drugs brother of narco-king Alejandro.

Luis cooperated with the authorities, and many Colombian drug cartels suffered. But Alejandro remained free, so Bourland and Dun set Stephanie and Luis up with new identities in Texas. Then one day Richard got an emergency email from Stephanie saying something was wrong. Richard went to Dallas and found out things were very wrong. He had to hunt down killers and get revenge for what they'd done.

The novel continues the Forever Knight-style flashbacks to Richard's younger vampire days, dealing with thematically similar events.

●●●◐○ Still Rolling - Angelia Sparrow (2010 ss)
The zombie uprising has occurred, and Yolanda is a “big ol’ diesel dyke” who makes the run between the agri-fortress near Wichita and and the university in Kansas City, along with her wife Alice, who's sick and resting in the sleeper. The story is Yolanda talking nonstop to the man she picked up, just out of his bunker because he ran out of food.

Turns out things are worse than Yolanda's Tale of the End of the World lets on, and no one on board will be surviving this journey…

●●○○○ The Fourth of July at Alamo Ranch Nudist Park - Michael Beyer (2021 ss)
Fifteen-year-old Devon has lived in the residential nudist complex for five months, along with his widowed father, Frank; his new stepmother, Sherry; and his two thirteen-year-old stepsisters, Mandy and Tandy. Their father, Brent, remains close, and has semi-adopted Devon. Now Brent's parents are visiting the camp, along with Valerie, Brent's college-age cousin.

We deal with Devon and Beau's (another teen cousin) reactions to naked Valerie, and the grandparents less than enthusiastic reaction to nudity.

●●●●○ The Permanent Stiletto - W.C. Morrow (1897 ss)
A spurned lover stabs a young man in the chest. His friend Imber calls a doctor, who determines from the angle of the stiletto's blade that it pierced the aorta; if it's removed, Arnold will bleed out in minutes. The doctor mentions that there's a daring young surgeon in the hotel; he's called in.

Young Doctor Entrefort agrees with Doctor Rowell that removing the stiletto would be fatal. Leaving it in place — after the hilt is removed — might allow Arnold to survive weeks or months, albeit in pain, and in diminished capacity. Arnold doesn't like this and tries to pull the blade out, but is too weak. Dr. Entrefort leans in and whispers that he'll see the woman is tried for murder if Arnold attempts that again. He accedes.

Entrefort sends for a workman he knows, and the hilt is cut off below the level of the chest wall. Dr. Entrefort closes the incisions he'd made, and prescribes Arnold some drugs. Horrible enough, but the true horror occurs four years later, when Entrefort encounters Imber, and learns that Arnold still lives. Entrefort and his new wife visit Arnold…

●●●◐○ The Girl Who Dropped In {Wanderers 01} - David Collins (2025 nov)
Formulaic. I've started four series by David Collins, and without exception, each begins with a mid-twenties, white American man getting accidentally involved with aliens. In this case, Daniel Baker was an electrical engineer getting ready to move into his not-quite-ready cabin, when there was a loud party in the apartment above his.

David spent the night in his cabin, and returned to his apartment to shower and eat, only to find a young woman passed out drunk on his balcony, fallen from the apartment above. Sue Glitch, it turned out, was not from around here. She was the descendant of humans who'd been picked up centuries ago for research, and was a citizen of the multi-species Collective. Her two rich-and-dumb friends had basically stolen a university vessel and dragged her on a months-long Spring Break on Earth.

Next thing you know, there's a (shot up by fighter jets) flying saucer in David's cabin's backyard, he's harboring three fugitive aliens, and he ends up fleeing Earth with them. David was then drafted by Sue's once-famous explorer grandfather and his alien government friends to investigate why the citizens of the Collective are getting dumber.

With the help of David's Earth friend Leon, three non-human women (a doctor, a grifter, and a tech expert), and his new girlfriend Sue, David did exactly that, flying from place to place on Grandfather's spaceship. David also upgraded Max, the shipmind, from limited artificial intelligence to fully-sapient digital person. And the book ends with David and friends on their own ship, set to have more adventures, as in the Artifact series.

●●○○○ The Red One - Jack London (1918 ss)
Bassett the naturalist stopped of at Guadalcanal for a day of specimen-gathering. When he heard the remarkable sound, he plunged into the jungle seeking it, despite the protests of his 'native' (from a nearby island) guide. Soon enough the guide was dead, as was the English boy assisting Bassett. Only his shotgun kept the local headhunting tribe from dealing Bassett the same fate.

Bassett's ship moved on. Bassett survived for weeks, though catching who-knows-what local fevers. He eventually managed to live with the locals (though the shaman kept asking if he was ready to die, since his head would be the jewel of the man's shrunken head collection). He even 'married' a local woman to have an ally to search for the thing making the wonderful noise. It turned out to be a huge red sphere in a crater, clearly a spaceship…

The story suffers from racism, stupidity, and not actually doing anything with the great discovery, but had a few interesting bits.

●●●○○ Brimstone Bill {Bullard 7} - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
The Pollux is transporting the prisoners captured in the last story to Luna Station, where the ship's crew will transfer to Earth to meet their wives and girlfriends. Except the ship is rerouted to Juno Skydocks for maintenance, in a way that Captain Bullard reads as paying off a politician whose votes the Navy needed. Senator Fenning owns the Skydocks, a fifth-rate repair base conveniently near gambling houses and brothels the Senator also owned.

One of the people included with the prisoners wasn't a combatant, merely a grifter who'd been caught up in the chaos. Bullard remembered him as Brimstone Bill, a preacher who'd been so forceful as to get a Lieutenant Bullard to donate a whole pay packet when he encountered the trickster on Venus. Bullard used 'Bill' to set up a situation so that his crew wasn't robbed blind in the casinos or whorehouses.

●●●○○ An Unexpected Ascension Day - Stan Muir (2021 ss)
Raphaël enjoyed nudism, his wife Clara not so much, though she'd gone as far as accompanying him to a nudist beach — topless. When the kids had a Friday off scheduled, Raphaël suggest going to a recently remodeled naturist resort for a long weekend. Clara didn't like the idea, but agreed the kids could have the deciding vote, and the family ended up going.

The kids enjoyed the the beach, the pony rides, the pools, and the other young people, while Raphaël had gone to many nudist parks when single, so he liked it. Clara was still disturbed by the idea of public nudity, though she enjoyed the way the kids had quickly found friends.

Clara wore a sarong for the first two days, until a discussion with the mother of the boy her son had made friends with. Jeanne told Clara of how she'd come to accept nudism, seeing how her son played with the son of another couple who they found were nudists. Everything just seemed natural. Finally Clara joined in the nudity.

●●●○○ Another Murder in the Buff {Jesse Montogomery 02} - Greg Kauffman-Starkey (2024 nov)
Two years ago, Jesse Mongomery solved his first murder at the Happy Valley Naturist Society, where the rich and privileged come to play and leave their cares and their clothes behind. He's been the security chief there since then. In this book he deals with the murder of a CEO who's come up with the next big social media app, and who's as arrogant and mean as you expect a techbro to be.

Suspects include the two assistants Simms brought to Happy Valley with him, both of whom he treats badly; the priest who counseled the man, who's for some reason also showed up at the nudist resort; the star of the musical revue whom he'd heckled off stage; and the beefy waiter with a crush on the star, who'd argued loudly with Simms.

The mystery is handled fairly casually. Jesse reviews the security cameras installed after the last murder, and he talks with the suspects, but I don't get the feel he tries to hard. (But then again, I often feel that mysteries just drift along aimlessly until one random observation solves the case.)

Jesse also thinks a lot about body issues (he's twenty or thirty pounds overweight, which the female officer who accompanies the hearse notes disparagingly) and discusses the positives of nudism a lot, which seems more like advertising than plot. But the case is eventually solved, with Jesse finding the killer (who wasn't the one the cops had been betting on), and Jessie's relationship with Christie progressing.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Two's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
237+6 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 68+6 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

Holiday at the Nudist Colony is not proving particularly interesting so far, but since each story is by a different author, I'll keep chancing it.

●●●◐○ His Father's Son {Ethical Vampires 2} - P.N. Elrod, Nigel Bennett (2001 nov)
Security expert Richard Dun once dated Stephanie Anders, secretary of Philip Bourland, a Security Chief for the Canadian government. Being a vampire, Richard couldn't have the family Stephanie wanted, and she eventually married Luis Trujillo, a coffee importer — who ended up being the forced-to-smuggle-drugs brother of narco-king Alejandro.

Luis cooperated with the authorities, and many Colombian drug cartels suffered. But Alejandro remained free, so Bourland and Dun set Stephanie and Luis up with new identities in Texas. Then one day Richard got an emergency email from Stephanie saying something was wrong. Richard went to Dallas and found out things were very wrong. He had to hunt down killers and get revenge for what they'd done.

The novel continues the Forever Knight-style flashbacks to Richard's younger vampire days, dealing with thematically similar events.

●●●◐○ Still Rolling - Angelia Sparrow (2010 ss)
The zombie uprising has occurred, and Yolanda is a “big ol’ diesel dyke” who makes the run between the agri-fortress near Wichita and and the university in Kansas City, along with her wife Alice, who's sick and resting in the sleeper. The story is Yolanda talking nonstop to the man she picked up, just out of his bunker because he ran out of food.

Turns out things are worse than Yolanda's Tale of the End of the World lets on, and no one on board will be surviving this journey…

●●○○○ The Fourth of July at Alamo Ranch Nudist Park - Michael Beyer (2021 ss)
Fifteen-year-old Devon has lived in the residential nudist complex for five months, along with his widowed father, Frank; his new stepmother, Sherry; and his two thirteen-year-old stepsisters, Mandy and Tandy. Their father, Brent, remains close, and has semi-adopted Devon. Now Brent's parents are visiting the camp, along with Valerie, Brent's college-age cousin.

We deal with Devon and Beau's (another teen cousin) reactions to naked Valerie, and the grandparents less than enthusiastic reaction to nudity.

●●●●○ The Permanent Stiletto - W.C. Morrow (1897 ss)
A spurned lover stabs a young man in the chest. His friend Imber calls a doctor, who determines from the angle of the stiletto's blade that it pierced the aorta; if it's removed, Arnold will bleed out in minutes. The doctor mentions that there's a daring young surgeon in the hotel; he's called in.

Young Doctor Entrefort agrees with Doctor Rowell that removing the stiletto would be fatal. Leaving it in place — after the hilt is removed — might allow Arnold to survive weeks or months, albeit in pain, and in diminished capacity. Arnold doesn't like this and tries to pull the blade out, but is too weak. Dr. Entrefort leans in and whispers that he'll see the woman is tried for murder if Arnold attempts that again. He accedes.

Entrefort sends for a workman he knows, and the hilt is cut off below the level of the chest wall. Dr. Entrefort closes the incisions he'd made, and prescribes Arnold some drugs. Horrible enough, but the true horror occurs four years later, when Entrefort encounters Imber, and learns that Arnold still lives. Entrefort and his new wife visit Arnold…

●●●◐○ The Girl Who Dropped In {Wanderers 01} - David Collins (2025 nov)
Formulaic. I've started four series by David Collins, and without exception, each begins with a mid-twenties, white American man getting accidentally involved with aliens. In this case, Daniel Baker was an electrical engineer getting ready to move into his not-quite-ready cabin, when there was a loud party in the apartment above his.

David spent the night in his cabin, and returned to his apartment to shower and eat, only to find a young woman passed out drunk on his balcony, fallen from the apartment above. Sue Glitch, it turned out, was not from around here. She was the descendant of humans who'd been picked up centuries ago for research, and was a citizen of the multi-species Collective. Her two rich-and-dumb friends had basically stolen a university vessel and dragged her on a months-long Spring Break on Earth.

Next thing you know, there's a (shot up by fighter jets) flying saucer in David's cabin's backyard, he's harboring three fugitive aliens, and he ends up fleeing Earth with them. David was then drafted by Sue's once-famous explorer grandfather and his alien government friends to investigate why the citizens of the Collective are getting dumber.

With the help of David's Earth friend Leon, three non-human women (a doctor, a grifter, and a tech expert), and his new girlfriend Sue, David did exactly that, flying from place to place on Grandfather's spaceship. David also upgraded Max, the shipmind, from limited artificial intelligence to fully-sapient digital person. And the book ends with David and friends on their own ship, set to have more adventures, as in the Artifact series.

●●○○○ The Red One - Jack London (1918 ss)
Bassett the naturalist stopped of at Guadalcanal for a day of specimen-gathering. When he heard the remarkable sound, he plunged into the jungle seeking it, despite the protests of his 'native' (from a nearby island) guide. Soon enough the guide was dead, as was the English boy assisting Bassett. Only his shotgun kept the local headhunting tribe from dealing Bassett the same fate.

Bassett's ship moved on. Bassett survived for weeks, though catching who-knows-what local fevers. He eventually managed to live with the locals (though the shaman kept asking if he was ready to die, since his head would be the jewel of the man's shrunken head collection). He even 'married' a local woman to have an ally to search for the thing making the wonderful noise. It turned out to be a huge red sphere in a crater, clearly a spaceship…

The story suffers from racism, stupidity, and not actually doing anything with the great discovery, but had a few interesting bits.

●●●○○ Brimstone Bill {Bullard 7} - Malcolm Jameson (1942 ss)
The Pollux is transporting the prisoners captured in the last story to Luna Station, where the ship's crew will transfer to Earth to meet their wives and girlfriends. Except the ship is rerouted to Juno Skydocks for maintenance, in a way that Captain Bullard reads as paying off a politician whose votes the Navy needed. Senator Fenning owns the Skydocks, a fifth-rate repair base conveniently near gambling houses and brothels the Senator also owned.

One of the people included with the prisoners wasn't a combatant, merely a grifter who'd been caught up in the chaos. Bullard remembered him as Brimstone Bill, a preacher who'd been so forceful as to get a Lieutenant Bullard to donate a whole pay packet when he encountered the trickster on Venus. Bullard used 'Bill' to set up a situation so that his crew wasn't robbed blind in the casinos or whorehouses.

●●●○○ An Unexpected Ascension Day - Stan Muir (2021 ss)
Raphaël enjoyed nudism, his wife Clara not so much, though she'd gone as far as accompanying him to a nudist beach — topless. When the kids had a Friday off scheduled, Raphaël suggest going to a recently remodeled naturist resort for a long weekend. Clara didn't like the idea, but agreed the kids could have the deciding vote, and the family ended up going.

The kids enjoyed the the beach, the pony rides, the pools, and the other young people, while Raphaël had gone to many nudist parks when single, so he liked it. Clara was still disturbed by the idea of public nudity, though she enjoyed the way the kids had quickly found friends.

Clara wore a sarong for the first two days, until a discussion with the mother of the boy her son had made friends with. Jeanne told Clara of how she'd come to accept nudism, seeing how her son played with the son of another couple who they found were nudists. Everything just seemed natural. Finally Clara joined in the nudity.

●●●○○ Another Murder in the Buff {Jesse Montogomery 02} - Greg Kauffman-Starkey (2024 nov)
Two years ago, Jesse Mongomery solved his first murder at the Happy Valley Naturist Society, where the rich and privileged come to play and leave their cares and their clothes behind. He's been the security chief there since then. In this book he deals with the murder of a CEO who's come up with the next big social media app, and who's as arrogant and mean as you expect a techbro to be.

Suspects include the two assistants Simms brought to Happy Valley with him, both of whom he treats badly; the priest who counseled the man, who's for some reason also showed up at the nudist resort; the star of the musical revue whom he'd heckled off stage; and the beefy waiter with a crush on the star, who'd argued loudly with Simms.

The mystery is handled fairly casually. Jesse reviews the security cameras installed after the last murder, and he talks with the suspects, but I don't get the feel he tries to hard. (But then again, I often feel that mysteries just drift along aimlessly until one random observation solves the case.)

Jesse also thinks a lot about body issues (he's twenty or thirty pounds overweight, which the female officer who accompanies the hearse notes disparagingly) and discusses the positives of nudism a lot, which seems more like advertising than plot. But the case is eventually solved, with Jesse finding the killer (who wasn't the one the cops had been betting on), and Jessie's relationship with Christie progressing.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Two's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
237+6 ss | 13+0 nvt | 14+0 nva | 68+6 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

Holiday at the Nudist Colony is not proving particularly interesting so far, but since each story is by a different author, I'll keep chancing it.

◍◍◍◍◍ 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…

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

◍◍◍◍◍ 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…

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

◍◍◍◍◍ 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…

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

◍◍◍◍◍ 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…

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

◍◍◍◍◍ 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…

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