#bokbooks — Public Fediverse posts

●●●○○ 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.)

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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
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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.