#sciencefiction — Public Fediverse posts

●●●○○ Embrace the Sky - P.A. Choi (2020 ss)
Stay-at-home Millie was dragged to a social event by outgoing Vivian. They drove for hours to visit Viv's Aunt Peg — “She's a hoot,” Vivian assured Millie. Peg's country house stood among empty plains stretching forever, but the house was crowded with strangers Millie didn't know. She sat through a chat, then dinner, saying little, and finally made her way outside for an after-dinner walk.

The air was heavy, dark clouds covered the sky, and the wind was picking up. The emptiness was calming, the threatening storm exciting. It was an odd mix, and in that mood Millie walked down the long drive to a dip in the land, where on a whim she decided to disrobe. Her heart thrummed, and the wind tossed her hair. Then a car came by, and the wind began to whip, and a funnel descended from the clouds.

Vivian emerged from the house and found Millie, and then the pair ran for the nearby bridge along with people from several cars, while Millie's clothing was gone with the wind…

●●○○○ The Last Days of Earth - George C. Wallis (1901 ss)
A man and a woman are, as far as they know, the last people on Earth on Thursday, 18 July, 13,000,085 ᴀᴅ, when “the sun had ceased to warm, and was but a red-hot cinder outwardly,” with the Earth gripped by a planetary Ice Age. After their last meal, Alwyn and Celia observe the deserted planet on their viewing disc, “the tall masts of the Pictorial Telegraph, sending to the watchers at Greenwich, by reflected Marconi waves, a presentment of each sight and sound impinging on the speculums and drums at their summits.”

Most humans have died out in the long dwindling, but a few communities managed to hold on until almost The End, which two couples were separately charged to witness. When the cold becomes such that their heat sources couldn't hold it off any more, each couple had a Red Sphere (made essentially of Cavorite, an antigravity material) to flee to other worlds in a pointless "Adam and Eve and lots of incest" dark farce. And even that didn't come off in the end. The story has some atmosphere, but the layers of dumbness rather hide it.

●●●○○ The Second War {Wars Without End 2} - David Collins (2023 nov)
The second book opens eight days after the first ends, with the medpod having put all Keith's intestines back in and healing him. Getting disemboweled is a small price to have one side of a war surrender. Then the Federated Worlds did the same when Earth and the Fezzcoll Collective jointly declared war against them. That left only the mind-controlling Medusa-looking Medualas, who'd been secretly using their mind powers to keep other races fighting for millennia.

Even they were getting weird. The twenty super-psi female royals who lead their race — a Meduala recovered from a 2300-year-old stasis pod said there had been five hundred in her day — proved very interested in Keith Robinson, the human who stopped the endless war. Some visited under truce, and injected him with "tracers" from the serpent-like head tendrils. Keith's DNA was increasingly becoming more like Meduala, but the human was chill about it all.

This book also sees the AI Patti clone herself, leaving one copy at the orbital trade station, while the second copy, Luna, sets forth on the old ship, exploring the edges of the Federated world. They contact the Ghost Ships, a highly advanced race of sapient starships that have indestructible hulls and psi powers. The Ghost Ships recognize Luna as an intelligent being, and build her a new hull and upgraded processors.

Luna's new ship, Lunalilly, returns to base only to see it attacked by a patches-on-patches old ship, crewed by mutant Pargo aliens. The very attack overloaded their old ship, leading to another rescue effort by Keith's variegated forces. And… And…

Look, these books are like the Artifact series. Events don't really matter, and the cast is too big to keep track of most of them. I just let it all flow past me, like background music I like. You either find this light-adventure skiffy fluff fun or not, and for whatever reason, I find these books soothing.

●●●◐○ Anachron, Inc. {Anachron 1} - Malcolm Jameson (1942 nvt)
World War Two was difficult, but the Kultur Klash following it was arguably worse: “For there was no more art. The savage Kultur raids of the mid-forties, unleashed by the frantic successors of the suicide madman Hitler, had seen to that.” Cities, private homes, museums and universities: all were gone.

Add to that, a world that had been militarized for two decades was demobilizing its soldiers into the biggest depression ever known. There were no jobs in the automated economy, which is why when ex-Commando Ted Barry was handed a flyer to try out for a job at Anachron — the firm which traded the Present's automated riches for treasures from the Past — he leapt at the chance.

And don't worry about paradoxes: any trip to the past splits off a new timeline, and didn't affect the Present, though there were many layers of rules trying to ensure that the new timeline was an improved one.

After months of training, Barry's first excursion was to Thirteenth Century France, where he was instructed to set up a trading mission, after four other agents had failed, always remembering that Anachron is composed of “Merchants, Not Missionaries.” They want to trade the excesses of the future for the lost art of the past, not improve the past for no return.

Moving his cargo from "Isla Occidentalis" (an island off the coast of Ireland), to the coast of France isn't hard, but enduring all the tolls as his ships make their way up the Seine is slow torture. Then there's befriending a local king, and a local abbot, and trying to get around the guilds (neither ironsmiths nor silversmiths recognized aluminum as a valid metal). It took much maneuvering, some of it technically against the rules, but Barry managed it in the end, well enough to get two sequels.

●●◐○○ Bedside Monster - Jack Sharkey (1959 ss)
It wasn't that Edward's wife was having an affair that bothered him, it was that Laura and Jason made no attempt to hide the affair. Laura invited Jason to parties and chatted with guests about where Jason and she had spent weekends, and so on. Finally Edward had had enough. As Edward was a doctor, he had access to things average people didn't. And since — out of absolutely nowhere — he had some alchemical skills, Edward could do even more things. Which in this case involved making a concoction to turn Jason into a werewolf…

●●●◐○ The Final Figure - Sam Merwin Jr. (1954 ss)
We begin with General Kermit Wales, head of artillery in the US Army, indulging himself on his day off. He's at Models and Miniatures, Inc, a store that sold toy soldiers, along with their weapons and vessels, among other stuff.

As he moved past the shelves with Revolutionary War weapons, then Civil War ones, then World War Two ones, he came to the shelf of modern weapons, including that of the 105-GPF, a weapon whose external details shouldn't be released until next month. Then he saw an XT-101, a weapon that was only in the research phase…

“They’re great, aren’t they?” said a twelve-year-old boy also looking at the display. It turns out Toby's grandfather made the figures. General Wales contacted Angus MacReedy, and found he'd been wounded in Anzio during the war, and turned to crafting tin soldiers and such. He claimed it was just logic and extrapolation that let him see what was on the horizon. And he could do it with Soviet weapons, too…

●●●○○ System Collapse {Murderbot 07} - Martha Wells (2023 nov)
After some trauma in the previous book (details of which escape me), Murderbot has suffered a panic attack, and later a nightmare, neither of which is supposed to happen to SecUnits. It just makes the usual mess harder. That being a world the Preservation was exploring having not one but two unregistered human settlements, plus Pre-Corporate-Rim alien contamination turning agribots into killers, and Corporation Barish-Estranza making things more difficult by trying to get the local humans to sign indentured-servitude contracts. The usual mess.

●●○○○ Newd Liberty Day - P. Z. Walker (2021 ss)
Attitudes toward social nudity have varied over the years. By the time of this story — and with the help of some top-level public officials who came out as nudists¹ — there was an annual holiday with nude parades in most towns, with many non-nudists watching the celebrations, and more and more people joining in each year. Prudes were warned in advance to lock themselves inside so as not to see anything that would upset them…

●●●○○ Music When Soft Voices Die… - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
Sir Simon Erskine died after a difficult life. His first wife left him after five years, during which they didn't produce a child, only for her to have one a year after marrying her second husband. Erskine's second, younger, wife also didn't produce a child.

That wife is said to have vanished in the highlands while taking a walk with a family friend, a Black lawyer from South Africa. Neither body was found. Erskine went more than a bit mad, with the collector playing his macabre African drums made from skulls for hours on end in an attempt to call her back.

Ferguson and other collectors and dealers gathered after Erskine's death to buy objects from his estate. As he was exploring the old house and its contents, collector Ferguson encountered a dealer, Menasseh, who was standing by the drums. He looked terrified. He asked Ferguson to meet him later in the week at his shop. There Ferguson learned what had frightened the man. Hint: Menasseh did tattooing on the side.

●●●○○ Far Below - Robert Barbour Johnson (1939 ss)
The story is a long monolog from the leader of the Special Detail to a reporter who'd found out about it. When the New York subway system was being built, it encountered something in the deepest section: human-like underground dwellers that fed on carrion, though they weren't averse to pulling up tracks to cause accidents to produce fresh bodies to dine on.

The monologuing NYPD Inspector Craig — formerly Professor Gordon Craig of the Museum of Natural History — detailed the past history of "Them" and how even the Bible had mentioned “ghouls that burrow in the earth" — though an online search doesn't back that up — and how they used to be more widespread. Craig even talks about communicating with H.P. Lovecraft about them.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Nine's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
289+7 ss | 13+1 nvt | 17+0 nva | 87+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Like the Republican president in For All Mankind coming out as a lesbian.

●●●○○ Embrace the Sky - P.A. Choi (2020 ss)
Stay-at-home Millie was dragged to a social event by outgoing Vivian. They drove for hours to visit Viv's Aunt Peg — “She's a hoot,” Vivian assured Millie. Peg's country house stood among empty plains stretching forever, but the house was crowded with strangers Millie didn't know. She sat through a chat, then dinner, saying little, and finally made her way outside for an after-dinner walk.

The air was heavy, dark clouds covered the sky, and the wind was picking up. The emptiness was calming, the threatening storm exciting. It was an odd mix, and in that mood Millie walked down the long drive to a dip in the land, where on a whim she decided to disrobe. Her heart thrummed, and the wind tossed her hair. Then a car came by, and the wind began to whip, and a funnel descended from the clouds.

Vivian emerged from the house and found Millie, and then the pair ran for the nearby bridge along with people from several cars, while Millie's clothing was gone with the wind…

●●○○○ The Last Days of Earth - George C. Wallis (1901 ss)
A man and a woman are, as far as they know, the last people on Earth on Thursday, 18 July, 13,000,085 ᴀᴅ, when “the sun had ceased to warm, and was but a red-hot cinder outwardly,” with the Earth gripped by a planetary Ice Age. After their last meal, Alwyn and Celia observe the deserted planet on their viewing disc, “the tall masts of the Pictorial Telegraph, sending to the watchers at Greenwich, by reflected Marconi waves, a presentment of each sight and sound impinging on the speculums and drums at their summits.”

Most humans have died out in the long dwindling, but a few communities managed to hold on until almost The End, which two couples were separately charged to witness. When the cold becomes such that their heat sources couldn't hold it off any more, each couple had a Red Sphere (made essentially of Cavorite, an antigravity material) to flee to other worlds in a pointless "Adam and Eve and lots of incest" dark farce. And even that didn't come off in the end. The story has some atmosphere, but the layers of dumbness rather hide it.

●●●○○ The Second War {Wars Without End 2} - David Collins (2023 nov)
The second book opens eight days after the first ends, with the medpod having put all Keith's intestines back in and healing him. Getting disemboweled is a small price to have one side of a war surrender. Then the Federated Worlds did the same when Earth and the Fezzcoll Collective jointly declared war against them. That left only the mind-controlling Medusa-looking Medualas, who'd been secretly using their mind powers to keep other races fighting for millennia.

Even they were getting weird. The twenty super-psi female royals who lead their race — a Meduala recovered from a 2300-year-old stasis pod said there had been five hundred in her day — proved very interested in Keith Robinson, the human who stopped the endless war. Some visited under truce, and injected him with "tracers" from the serpent-like head tendrils. Keith's DNA was increasingly becoming more like Meduala, but the human was chill about it all.

This book also sees the AI Patti clone herself, leaving one copy at the orbital trade station, while the second copy, Luna, sets forth on the old ship, exploring the edges of the Federated world. They contact the Ghost Ships, a highly advanced race of sapient starships that have indestructible hulls and psi powers. The Ghost Ships recognize Luna as an intelligent being, and build her a new hull and upgraded processors.

Luna's new ship, Lunalilly, returns to base only to see it attacked by a patches-on-patches old ship, crewed by mutant Pargo aliens. The very attack overloaded their old ship, leading to another rescue effort by Keith's variegated forces. And… And…

Look, these books are like the Artifact series. Events don't really matter, and the cast is too big to keep track of most of them. I just let it all flow past me, like background music I like. You either find this light-adventure skiffy fluff fun or not, and for whatever reason, I find these books soothing.

●●●◐○ Anachron, Inc. {Anachron 1} - Malcolm Jameson (1942 nvt)
World War Two was difficult, but the Kultur Klash following it was arguably worse: “For there was no more art. The savage Kultur raids of the mid-forties, unleashed by the frantic successors of the suicide madman Hitler, had seen to that.” Cities, private homes, museums and universities: all were gone.

Add to that, a world that had been militarized for two decades was demobilizing its soldiers into the biggest depression ever known. There were no jobs in the automated economy, which is why when ex-Commando Ted Barry was handed a flyer to try out for a job at Anachron — the firm which traded the Present's automated riches for treasures from the Past — he leapt at the chance.

And don't worry about paradoxes: any trip to the past splits off a new timeline, and didn't affect the Present, though there were many layers of rules trying to ensure that the new timeline was an improved one.

After months of training, Barry's first excursion was to Thirteenth Century France, where he was instructed to set up a trading mission, after four other agents had failed, always remembering that Anachron is composed of “Merchants, Not Missionaries.” They want to trade the excesses of the future for the lost art of the past, not improve the past for no return.

Moving his cargo from "Isla Occidentalis" (an island off the coast of Ireland), to the coast of France isn't hard, but enduring all the tolls as his ships make their way up the Seine is slow torture. Then there's befriending a local king, and a local abbot, and trying to get around the guilds (neither ironsmiths nor silversmiths recognized aluminum as a valid metal). It took much maneuvering, some of it technically against the rules, but Barry managed it in the end, well enough to get two sequels.

●●◐○○ Bedside Monster - Jack Sharkey (1959 ss)
It wasn't that Edward's wife was having an affair that bothered him, it was that Laura and Jason made no attempt to hide the affair. Laura invited Jason to parties and chatted with guests about where Jason and she had spent weekends, and so on. Finally Edward had had enough. As Edward was a doctor, he had access to things average people didn't. And since — out of absolutely nowhere — he had some alchemical skills, Edward could do even more things. Which in this case involved making a concoction to turn Jason into a werewolf…

●●●◐○ The Final Figure - Sam Merwin Jr. (1954 ss)
We begin with General Kermit Wales, head of artillery in the US Army, indulging himself on his day off. He's at Models and Miniatures, Inc, a store that sold toy soldiers, along with their weapons and vessels, among other stuff.

As he moved past the shelves with Revolutionary War weapons, then Civil War ones, then World War Two ones, he came to the shelf of modern weapons, including that of the 105-GPF, a weapon whose external details shouldn't be released until next month. Then he saw an XT-101, a weapon that was only in the research phase…

“They’re great, aren’t they?” said a twelve-year-old boy also looking at the display. It turns out Toby's grandfather made the figures. General Wales contacted Angus MacReedy, and found he'd been wounded in Anzio during the war, and turned to crafting tin soldiers and such. He claimed it was just logic and extrapolation that let him see what was on the horizon. And he could do it with Soviet weapons, too…

●●●○○ System Collapse {Murderbot 07} - Martha Wells (2023 nov)
After some trauma in the previous book (details of which escape me), Murderbot has suffered a panic attack, and later a nightmare, neither of which is supposed to happen to SecUnits. It just makes the usual mess harder. That being a world the Preservation was exploring having not one but two unregistered human settlements, plus Pre-Corporate-Rim alien contamination turning agribots into killers, and Corporation Barish-Estranza making things more difficult by trying to get the local humans to sign indentured-servitude contracts. The usual mess.

●●○○○ Newd Liberty Day - P. Z. Walker (2021 ss)
Attitudes toward social nudity have varied over the years. By the time of this story — and with the help of some top-level public officials who came out as nudists¹ — there was an annual holiday with nude parades in most towns, with many non-nudists watching the celebrations, and more and more people joining in each year. Prudes were warned in advance to lock themselves inside so as not to see anything that would upset them…

●●●○○ Music When Soft Voices Die… - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
Sir Simon Erskine died after a difficult life. His first wife left him after five years, during which they didn't produce a child, only for her to have one a year after marrying her second husband. Erskine's second, younger, wife also didn't produce a child.

That wife is said to have vanished in the highlands while taking a walk with a family friend, a Black lawyer from South Africa. Neither body was found. Erskine went more than a bit mad, with the collector playing his macabre African drums made from skulls for hours on end in an attempt to call her back.

Ferguson and other collectors and dealers gathered after Erskine's death to buy objects from his estate. As he was exploring the old house and its contents, collector Ferguson encountered a dealer, Menasseh, who was standing by the drums. He looked terrified. He asked Ferguson to meet him later in the week at his shop. There Ferguson learned what had frightened the man. Hint: Menasseh did tattooing on the side.

●●●○○ Far Below - Robert Barbour Johnson (1939 ss)
The story is a long monolog from the leader of the Special Detail to a reporter who'd found out about it. When the New York subway system was being built, it encountered something in the deepest section: human-like underground dwellers that fed on carrion, though they weren't averse to pulling up tracks to cause accidents to produce fresh bodies to dine on.

The monologuing NYPD Inspector Craig — formerly Professor Gordon Craig of the Museum of Natural History — detailed the past history of "Them" and how even the Bible had mentioned “ghouls that burrow in the earth" — though an online search doesn't back that up — and how they used to be more widespread. Craig even talks about communicating with H.P. Lovecraft about them.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Nine's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
289+7 ss | 13+1 nvt | 17+0 nva | 87+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Like the Republican president in For All Mankind coming out as a lesbian.

●●●○○ Embrace the Sky - P.A. Choi (2020 ss)
Stay-at-home Millie was dragged to a social event by outgoing Vivian. They drove for hours to visit Viv's Aunt Peg — “She's a hoot,” Vivian assured Millie. Peg's country house stood among empty plains stretching forever, but the house was crowded with strangers Millie didn't know. She sat through a chat, then dinner, saying little, and finally made her way outside for an after-dinner walk.

The air was heavy, dark clouds covered the sky, and the wind was picking up. The emptiness was calming, the threatening storm exciting. It was an odd mix, and in that mood Millie walked down the long drive to a dip in the land, where on a whim she decided to disrobe. Her heart thrummed, and the wind tossed her hair. Then a car came by, and the wind began to whip, and a funnel descended from the clouds.

Vivian emerged from the house and found Millie, and then the pair ran for the nearby bridge along with people from several cars, while Millie's clothing was gone with the wind…

●●○○○ The Last Days of Earth - George C. Wallis (1901 ss)
A man and a woman are, as far as they know, the last people on Earth on Thursday, 18 July, 13,000,085 ᴀᴅ, when “the sun had ceased to warm, and was but a red-hot cinder outwardly,” with the Earth gripped by a planetary Ice Age. After their last meal, Alwyn and Celia observe the deserted planet on their viewing disc, “the tall masts of the Pictorial Telegraph, sending to the watchers at Greenwich, by reflected Marconi waves, a presentment of each sight and sound impinging on the speculums and drums at their summits.”

Most humans have died out in the long dwindling, but a few communities managed to hold on until almost The End, which two couples were separately charged to witness. When the cold becomes such that their heat sources couldn't hold it off any more, each couple had a Red Sphere (made essentially of Cavorite, an antigravity material) to flee to other worlds in a pointless "Adam and Eve and lots of incest" dark farce. And even that didn't come off in the end. The story has some atmosphere, but the layers of dumbness rather hide it.

●●●○○ The Second War {Wars Without End 2} - David Collins (2023 nov)
The second book opens eight days after the first ends, with the medpod having put all Keith's intestines back in and healing him. Getting disemboweled is a small price to have one side of a war surrender. Then the Federated Worlds did the same when Earth and the Fezzcoll Collective jointly declared war against them. That left only the mind-controlling Medusa-looking Medualas, who'd been secretly using their mind powers to keep other races fighting for millennia.

Even they were getting weird. The twenty super-psi female royals who lead their race — a Meduala recovered from a 2300-year-old stasis pod said there had been five hundred in her day — proved very interested in Keith Robinson, the human who stopped the endless war. Some visited under truce, and injected him with "tracers" from the serpent-like head tendrils. Keith's DNA was increasingly becoming more like Meduala, but the human was chill about it all.

This book also sees the AI Patti clone herself, leaving one copy at the orbital trade station, while the second copy, Luna, sets forth on the old ship, exploring the edges of the Federated world. They contact the Ghost Ships, a highly advanced race of sapient starships that have indestructible hulls and psi powers. The Ghost Ships recognize Luna as an intelligent being, and build her a new hull and upgraded processors.

Luna's new ship, Lunalilly, returns to base only to see it attacked by a patches-on-patches old ship, crewed by mutant Pargo aliens. The very attack overloaded their old ship, leading to another rescue effort by Keith's variegated forces. And… And…

Look, these books are like the Artifact series. Events don't really matter, and the cast is too big to keep track of most of them. I just let it all flow past me, like background music I like. You either find this light-adventure skiffy fluff fun or not, and for whatever reason, I find these books soothing.

●●●◐○ Anachron, Inc. {Anachron 1} - Malcolm Jameson (1942 nvt)
World War Two was difficult, but the Kultur Klash following it was arguably worse: “For there was no more art. The savage Kultur raids of the mid-forties, unleashed by the frantic successors of the suicide madman Hitler, had seen to that.” Cities, private homes, museums and universities: all were gone.

Add to that, a world that had been militarized for two decades was demobilizing its soldiers into the biggest depression ever known. There were no jobs in the automated economy, which is why when ex-Commando Ted Barry was handed a flyer to try out for a job at Anachron — the firm which traded the Present's automated riches for treasures from the Past — he leapt at the chance.

And don't worry about paradoxes: any trip to the past splits off a new timeline, and didn't affect the Present, though there were many layers of rules trying to ensure that the new timeline was an improved one.

After months of training, Barry's first excursion was to Thirteenth Century France, where he was instructed to set up a trading mission, after four other agents had failed, always remembering that Anachron is composed of “Merchants, Not Missionaries.” They want to trade the excesses of the future for the lost art of the past, not improve the past for no return.

Moving his cargo from "Isla Occidentalis" (an island off the coast of Ireland), to the coast of France isn't hard, but enduring all the tolls as his ships make their way up the Seine is slow torture. Then there's befriending a local king, and a local abbot, and trying to get around the guilds (neither ironsmiths nor silversmiths recognized aluminum as a valid metal). It took much maneuvering, some of it technically against the rules, but Barry managed it in the end, well enough to get two sequels.

●●◐○○ Bedside Monster - Jack Sharkey (1959 ss)
It wasn't that Edward's wife was having an affair that bothered him, it was that Laura and Jason made no attempt to hide the affair. Laura invited Jason to parties and chatted with guests about where Jason and she had spent weekends, and so on. Finally Edward had had enough. As Edward was a doctor, he had access to things average people didn't. And since — out of absolutely nowhere — he had some alchemical skills, Edward could do even more things. Which in this case involved making a concoction to turn Jason into a werewolf…

●●●◐○ The Final Figure - Sam Merwin Jr. (1954 ss)
We begin with General Kermit Wales, head of artillery in the US Army, indulging himself on his day off. He's at Models and Miniatures, Inc, a store that sold toy soldiers, along with their weapons and vessels, among other stuff.

As he moved past the shelves with Revolutionary War weapons, then Civil War ones, then World War Two ones, he came to the shelf of modern weapons, including that of the 105-GPF, a weapon whose external details shouldn't be released until next month. Then he saw an XT-101, a weapon that was only in the research phase…

“They’re great, aren’t they?” said a twelve-year-old boy also looking at the display. It turns out Toby's grandfather made the figures. General Wales contacted Angus MacReedy, and found he'd been wounded in Anzio during the war, and turned to crafting tin soldiers and such. He claimed it was just logic and extrapolation that let him see what was on the horizon. And he could do it with Soviet weapons, too…

●●●○○ System Collapse {Murderbot 07} - Martha Wells (2023 nov)
After some trauma in the previous book (details of which escape me), Murderbot has suffered a panic attack, and later a nightmare, neither of which is supposed to happen to SecUnits. It just makes the usual mess harder. That being a world the Preservation was exploring having not one but two unregistered human settlements, plus Pre-Corporate-Rim alien contamination turning agribots into killers, and Corporation Barish-Estranza making things more difficult by trying to get the local humans to sign indentured-servitude contracts. The usual mess.

●●○○○ Newd Liberty Day - P. Z. Walker (2021 ss)
Attitudes toward social nudity have varied over the years. By the time of this story — and with the help of some top-level public officials who came out as nudists¹ — there was an annual holiday with nude parades in most towns, with many non-nudists watching the celebrations, and more and more people joining in each year. Prudes were warned in advance to lock themselves inside so as not to see anything that would upset them…

●●●○○ Music When Soft Voices Die… - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
Sir Simon Erskine died after a difficult life. His first wife left him after five years, during which they didn't produce a child, only for her to have one a year after marrying her second husband. Erskine's second, younger, wife also didn't produce a child.

That wife is said to have vanished in the highlands while taking a walk with a family friend, a Black lawyer from South Africa. Neither body was found. Erskine went more than a bit mad, with the collector playing his macabre African drums made from skulls for hours on end in an attempt to call her back.

Ferguson and other collectors and dealers gathered after Erskine's death to buy objects from his estate. As he was exploring the old house and its contents, collector Ferguson encountered a dealer, Menasseh, who was standing by the drums. He looked terrified. He asked Ferguson to meet him later in the week at his shop. There Ferguson learned what had frightened the man. Hint: Menasseh did tattooing on the side.

●●●○○ Far Below - Robert Barbour Johnson (1939 ss)
The story is a long monolog from the leader of the Special Detail to a reporter who'd found out about it. When the New York subway system was being built, it encountered something in the deepest section: human-like underground dwellers that fed on carrion, though they weren't averse to pulling up tracks to cause accidents to produce fresh bodies to dine on.

The monologuing NYPD Inspector Craig — formerly Professor Gordon Craig of the Museum of Natural History — detailed the past history of "Them" and how even the Bible had mentioned “ghouls that burrow in the earth" — though an online search doesn't back that up — and how they used to be more widespread. Craig even talks about communicating with H.P. Lovecraft about them.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Nine's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
289+7 ss | 13+1 nvt | 17+0 nva | 87+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Like the Republican president in For All Mankind coming out as a lesbian.

●●●○○ Embrace the Sky - P.A. Choi (2020 ss)
Stay-at-home Millie was dragged to a social event by outgoing Vivian. They drove for hours to visit Viv's Aunt Peg — “She's a hoot,” Vivian assured Millie. Peg's country house stood among empty plains stretching forever, but the house was crowded with strangers Millie didn't know. She sat through a chat, then dinner, saying little, and finally made her way outside for an after-dinner walk.

The air was heavy, dark clouds covered the sky, and the wind was picking up. The emptiness was calming, the threatening storm exciting. It was an odd mix, and in that mood Millie walked down the long drive to a dip in the land, where on a whim she decided to disrobe. Her heart thrummed, and the wind tossed her hair. Then a car came by, and the wind began to whip, and a funnel descended from the clouds.

Vivian emerged from the house and found Millie, and then the pair ran for the nearby bridge along with people from several cars, while Millie's clothing was gone with the wind…

●●○○○ The Last Days of Earth - George C. Wallis (1901 ss)
A man and a woman are, as far as they know, the last people on Earth on Thursday, 18 July, 13,000,085 ᴀᴅ, when “the sun had ceased to warm, and was but a red-hot cinder outwardly,” with the Earth gripped by a planetary Ice Age. After their last meal, Alwyn and Celia observe the deserted planet on their viewing disc, “the tall masts of the Pictorial Telegraph, sending to the watchers at Greenwich, by reflected Marconi waves, a presentment of each sight and sound impinging on the speculums and drums at their summits.”

Most humans have died out in the long dwindling, but a few communities managed to hold on until almost The End, which two couples were separately charged to witness. When the cold becomes such that their heat sources couldn't hold it off any more, each couple had a Red Sphere (made essentially of Cavorite, an antigravity material) to flee to other worlds in a pointless "Adam and Eve and lots of incest" dark farce. And even that didn't come off in the end. The story has some atmosphere, but the layers of dumbness rather hide it.

●●●○○ The Second War {Wars Without End 2} - David Collins (2023 nov)
The second book opens eight days after the first ends, with the medpod having put all Keith's intestines back in and healing him. Getting disemboweled is a small price to have one side of a war surrender. Then the Federated Worlds did the same when Earth and the Fezzcoll Collective jointly declared war against them. That left only the mind-controlling Medusa-looking Medualas, who'd been secretly using their mind powers to keep other races fighting for millennia.

Even they were getting weird. The twenty super-psi female royals who lead their race — a Meduala recovered from a 2300-year-old stasis pod said there had been five hundred in her day — proved very interested in Keith Robinson, the human who stopped the endless war. Some visited under truce, and injected him with "tracers" from the serpent-like head tendrils. Keith's DNA was increasingly becoming more like Meduala, but the human was chill about it all.

This book also sees the AI Patti clone herself, leaving one copy at the orbital trade station, while the second copy, Luna, sets forth on the old ship, exploring the edges of the Federated world. They contact the Ghost Ships, a highly advanced race of sapient starships that have indestructible hulls and psi powers. The Ghost Ships recognize Luna as an intelligent being, and build her a new hull and upgraded processors.

Luna's new ship, Lunalilly, returns to base only to see it attacked by a patches-on-patches old ship, crewed by mutant Pargo aliens. The very attack overloaded their old ship, leading to another rescue effort by Keith's variegated forces. And… And…

Look, these books are like the Artifact series. Events don't really matter, and the cast is too big to keep track of most of them. I just let it all flow past me, like background music I like. You either find this light-adventure skiffy fluff fun or not, and for whatever reason, I find these books soothing.

●●●◐○ Anachron, Inc. {Anachron 1} - Malcolm Jameson (1942 nvt)
World War Two was difficult, but the Kultur Klash following it was arguably worse: “For there was no more art. The savage Kultur raids of the mid-forties, unleashed by the frantic successors of the suicide madman Hitler, had seen to that.” Cities, private homes, museums and universities: all were gone.

Add to that, a world that had been militarized for two decades was demobilizing its soldiers into the biggest depression ever known. There were no jobs in the automated economy, which is why when ex-Commando Ted Barry was handed a flyer to try out for a job at Anachron — the firm which traded the Present's automated riches for treasures from the Past — he leapt at the chance.

And don't worry about paradoxes: any trip to the past splits off a new timeline, and didn't affect the Present, though there were many layers of rules trying to ensure that the new timeline was an improved one.

After months of training, Barry's first excursion was to Thirteenth Century France, where he was instructed to set up a trading mission, after four other agents had failed, always remembering that Anachron is composed of “Merchants, Not Missionaries.” They want to trade the excesses of the future for the lost art of the past, not improve the past for no return.

Moving his cargo from "Isla Occidentalis" (an island off the coast of Ireland), to the coast of France isn't hard, but enduring all the tolls as his ships make their way up the Seine is slow torture. Then there's befriending a local king, and a local abbot, and trying to get around the guilds (neither ironsmiths nor silversmiths recognized aluminum as a valid metal). It took much maneuvering, some of it technically against the rules, but Barry managed it in the end, well enough to get two sequels.

●●◐○○ Bedside Monster - Jack Sharkey (1959 ss)
It wasn't that Edward's wife was having an affair that bothered him, it was that Laura and Jason made no attempt to hide the affair. Laura invited Jason to parties and chatted with guests about where Jason and she had spent weekends, and so on. Finally Edward had had enough. As Edward was a doctor, he had access to things average people didn't. And since — out of absolutely nowhere — he had some alchemical skills, Edward could do even more things. Which in this case involved making a concoction to turn Jason into a werewolf…

●●●◐○ The Final Figure - Sam Merwin Jr. (1954 ss)
We begin with General Kermit Wales, head of artillery in the US Army, indulging himself on his day off. He's at Models and Miniatures, Inc, a store that sold toy soldiers, along with their weapons and vessels, among other stuff.

As he moved past the shelves with Revolutionary War weapons, then Civil War ones, then World War Two ones, he came to the shelf of modern weapons, including that of the 105-GPF, a weapon whose external details shouldn't be released until next month. Then he saw an XT-101, a weapon that was only in the research phase…

“They’re great, aren’t they?” said a twelve-year-old boy also looking at the display. It turns out Toby's grandfather made the figures. General Wales contacted Angus MacReedy, and found he'd been wounded in Anzio during the war, and turned to crafting tin soldiers and such. He claimed it was just logic and extrapolation that let him see what was on the horizon. And he could do it with Soviet weapons, too…

●●●○○ System Collapse {Murderbot 07} - Martha Wells (2023 nov)
After some trauma in the previous book (details of which escape me), Murderbot has suffered a panic attack, and later a nightmare, neither of which is supposed to happen to SecUnits. It just makes the usual mess harder. That being a world the Preservation was exploring having not one but two unregistered human settlements, plus Pre-Corporate-Rim alien contamination turning agribots into killers, and Corporation Barish-Estranza making things more difficult by trying to get the local humans to sign indentured-servitude contracts. The usual mess.

●●○○○ Newd Liberty Day - P. Z. Walker (2021 ss)
Attitudes toward social nudity have varied over the years. By the time of this story — and with the help of some top-level public officials who came out as nudists¹ — there was an annual holiday with nude parades in most towns, with many non-nudists watching the celebrations, and more and more people joining in each year. Prudes were warned in advance to lock themselves inside so as not to see anything that would upset them…

●●●○○ Music When Soft Voices Die… - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
Sir Simon Erskine died after a difficult life. His first wife left him after five years, during which they didn't produce a child, only for her to have one a year after marrying her second husband. Erskine's second, younger, wife also didn't produce a child.

That wife is said to have vanished in the highlands while taking a walk with a family friend, a Black lawyer from South Africa. Neither body was found. Erskine went more than a bit mad, with the collector playing his macabre African drums made from skulls for hours on end in an attempt to call her back.

Ferguson and other collectors and dealers gathered after Erskine's death to buy objects from his estate. As he was exploring the old house and its contents, collector Ferguson encountered a dealer, Menasseh, who was standing by the drums. He looked terrified. He asked Ferguson to meet him later in the week at his shop. There Ferguson learned what had frightened the man. Hint: Menasseh did tattooing on the side.

●●●○○ Far Below - Robert Barbour Johnson (1939 ss)
The story is a long monolog from the leader of the Special Detail to a reporter who'd found out about it. When the New York subway system was being built, it encountered something in the deepest section: human-like underground dwellers that fed on carrion, though they weren't averse to pulling up tracks to cause accidents to produce fresh bodies to dine on.

The monologuing NYPD Inspector Craig — formerly Professor Gordon Craig of the Museum of Natural History — detailed the past history of "Them" and how even the Bible had mentioned “ghouls that burrow in the earth" — though an online search doesn't back that up — and how they used to be more widespread. Craig even talks about communicating with H.P. Lovecraft about them.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Nine's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
289+7 ss | 13+1 nvt | 17+0 nva | 87+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Like the Republican president in For All Mankind coming out as a lesbian.

●●●○○ Embrace the Sky - P.A. Choi (2020 ss)
Stay-at-home Millie was dragged to a social event by outgoing Vivian. They drove for hours to visit Viv's Aunt Peg — “She's a hoot,” Vivian assured Millie. Peg's country house stood among empty plains stretching forever, but the house was crowded with strangers Millie didn't know. She sat through a chat, then dinner, saying little, and finally made her way outside for an after-dinner walk.

The air was heavy, dark clouds covered the sky, and the wind was picking up. The emptiness was calming, the threatening storm exciting. It was an odd mix, and in that mood Millie walked down the long drive to a dip in the land, where on a whim she decided to disrobe. Her heart thrummed, and the wind tossed her hair. Then a car came by, and the wind began to whip, and a funnel descended from the clouds.

Vivian emerged from the house and found Millie, and then the pair ran for the nearby bridge along with people from several cars, while Millie's clothing was gone with the wind…

●●○○○ The Last Days of Earth - George C. Wallis (1901 ss)
A man and a woman are, as far as they know, the last people on Earth on Thursday, 18 July, 13,000,085 ᴀᴅ, when “the sun had ceased to warm, and was but a red-hot cinder outwardly,” with the Earth gripped by a planetary Ice Age. After their last meal, Alwyn and Celia observe the deserted planet on their viewing disc, “the tall masts of the Pictorial Telegraph, sending to the watchers at Greenwich, by reflected Marconi waves, a presentment of each sight and sound impinging on the speculums and drums at their summits.”

Most humans have died out in the long dwindling, but a few communities managed to hold on until almost The End, which two couples were separately charged to witness. When the cold becomes such that their heat sources couldn't hold it off any more, each couple had a Red Sphere (made essentially of Cavorite, an antigravity material) to flee to other worlds in a pointless "Adam and Eve and lots of incest" dark farce. And even that didn't come off in the end. The story has some atmosphere, but the layers of dumbness rather hide it.

●●●○○ The Second War {Wars Without End 2} - David Collins (2023 nov)
The second book opens eight days after the first ends, with the medpod having put all Keith's intestines back in and healing him. Getting disemboweled is a small price to have one side of a war surrender. Then the Federated Worlds did the same when Earth and the Fezzcoll Collective jointly declared war against them. That left only the mind-controlling Medusa-looking Medualas, who'd been secretly using their mind powers to keep other races fighting for millennia.

Even they were getting weird. The twenty super-psi female royals who lead their race — a Meduala recovered from a 2300-year-old stasis pod said there had been five hundred in her day — proved very interested in Keith Robinson, the human who stopped the endless war. Some visited under truce, and injected him with "tracers" from the serpent-like head tendrils. Keith's DNA was increasingly becoming more like Meduala, but the human was chill about it all.

This book also sees the AI Patti clone herself, leaving one copy at the orbital trade station, while the second copy, Luna, sets forth on the old ship, exploring the edges of the Federated world. They contact the Ghost Ships, a highly advanced race of sapient starships that have indestructible hulls and psi powers. The Ghost Ships recognize Luna as an intelligent being, and build her a new hull and upgraded processors.

Luna's new ship, Lunalilly, returns to base only to see it attacked by a patches-on-patches old ship, crewed by mutant Pargo aliens. The very attack overloaded their old ship, leading to another rescue effort by Keith's variegated forces. And… And…

Look, these books are like the Artifact series. Events don't really matter, and the cast is too big to keep track of most of them. I just let it all flow past me, like background music I like. You either find this light-adventure skiffy fluff fun or not, and for whatever reason, I find these books soothing.

●●●◐○ Anachron, Inc. {Anachron 1} - Malcolm Jameson (1942 nvt)
World War Two was difficult, but the Kultur Klash following it was arguably worse: “For there was no more art. The savage Kultur raids of the mid-forties, unleashed by the frantic successors of the suicide madman Hitler, had seen to that.” Cities, private homes, museums and universities: all were gone.

Add to that, a world that had been militarized for two decades was demobilizing its soldiers into the biggest depression ever known. There were no jobs in the automated economy, which is why when ex-Commando Ted Barry was handed a flyer to try out for a job at Anachron — the firm which traded the Present's automated riches for treasures from the Past — he leapt at the chance.

And don't worry about paradoxes: any trip to the past splits off a new timeline, and didn't affect the Present, though there were many layers of rules trying to ensure that the new timeline was an improved one.

After months of training, Barry's first excursion was to Thirteenth Century France, where he was instructed to set up a trading mission, after four other agents had failed, always remembering that Anachron is composed of “Merchants, Not Missionaries.” They want to trade the excesses of the future for the lost art of the past, not improve the past for no return.

Moving his cargo from "Isla Occidentalis" (an island off the coast of Ireland), to the coast of France isn't hard, but enduring all the tolls as his ships make their way up the Seine is slow torture. Then there's befriending a local king, and a local abbot, and trying to get around the guilds (neither ironsmiths nor silversmiths recognized aluminum as a valid metal). It took much maneuvering, some of it technically against the rules, but Barry managed it in the end, well enough to get two sequels.

●●◐○○ Bedside Monster - Jack Sharkey (1959 ss)
It wasn't that Edward's wife was having an affair that bothered him, it was that Laura and Jason made no attempt to hide the affair. Laura invited Jason to parties and chatted with guests about where Jason and she had spent weekends, and so on. Finally Edward had had enough. As Edward was a doctor, he had access to things average people didn't. And since — out of absolutely nowhere — he had some alchemical skills, Edward could do even more things. Which in this case involved making a concoction to turn Jason into a werewolf…

●●●◐○ The Final Figure - Sam Merwin Jr. (1954 ss)
We begin with General Kermit Wales, head of artillery in the US Army, indulging himself on his day off. He's at Models and Miniatures, Inc, a store that sold toy soldiers, along with their weapons and vessels, among other stuff.

As he moved past the shelves with Revolutionary War weapons, then Civil War ones, then World War Two ones, he came to the shelf of modern weapons, including that of the 105-GPF, a weapon whose external details shouldn't be released until next month. Then he saw an XT-101, a weapon that was only in the research phase…

“They’re great, aren’t they?” said a twelve-year-old boy also looking at the display. It turns out Toby's grandfather made the figures. General Wales contacted Angus MacReedy, and found he'd been wounded in Anzio during the war, and turned to crafting tin soldiers and such. He claimed it was just logic and extrapolation that let him see what was on the horizon. And he could do it with Soviet weapons, too…

●●●○○ System Collapse {Murderbot 07} - Martha Wells (2023 nov)
After some trauma in the previous book (details of which escape me), Murderbot has suffered a panic attack, and later a nightmare, neither of which is supposed to happen to SecUnits. It just makes the usual mess harder. That being a world the Preservation was exploring having not one but two unregistered human settlements, plus Pre-Corporate-Rim alien contamination turning agribots into killers, and Corporation Barish-Estranza making things more difficult by trying to get the local humans to sign indentured-servitude contracts. The usual mess.

●●○○○ Newd Liberty Day - P. Z. Walker (2021 ss)
Attitudes toward social nudity have varied over the years. By the time of this story — and with the help of some top-level public officials who came out as nudists¹ — there was an annual holiday with nude parades in most towns, with many non-nudists watching the celebrations, and more and more people joining in each year. Prudes were warned in advance to lock themselves inside so as not to see anything that would upset them…

●●●○○ Music When Soft Voices Die… - John Keir Cross (1944 ss)
Sir Simon Erskine died after a difficult life. His first wife left him after five years, during which they didn't produce a child, only for her to have one a year after marrying her second husband. Erskine's second, younger, wife also didn't produce a child.

That wife is said to have vanished in the highlands while taking a walk with a family friend, a Black lawyer from South Africa. Neither body was found. Erskine went more than a bit mad, with the collector playing his macabre African drums made from skulls for hours on end in an attempt to call her back.

Ferguson and other collectors and dealers gathered after Erskine's death to buy objects from his estate. As he was exploring the old house and its contents, collector Ferguson encountered a dealer, Menasseh, who was standing by the drums. He looked terrified. He asked Ferguson to meet him later in the week at his shop. There Ferguson learned what had frightened the man. Hint: Menasseh did tattooing on the side.

●●●○○ Far Below - Robert Barbour Johnson (1939 ss)
The story is a long monolog from the leader of the Special Detail to a reporter who'd found out about it. When the New York subway system was being built, it encountered something in the deepest section: human-like underground dwellers that fed on carrion, though they weren't averse to pulling up tracks to cause accidents to produce fresh bodies to dine on.

The monologuing NYPD Inspector Craig — formerly Professor Gordon Craig of the Museum of Natural History — detailed the past history of "Them" and how even the Bible had mentioned “ghouls that burrow in the earth" — though an online search doesn't back that up — and how they used to be more widespread. Craig even talks about communicating with H.P. Lovecraft about them.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Thirty-Nine's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
289+7 ss | 13+1 nvt | 17+0 nva | 87+2 nov |
#Reading #ScienceFiction #Books #Bookstodon #BokBooks
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Like the Republican president in For All Mankind coming out as a lesbian.

I believe—" the voice was dry—"implicit in what you originally asked was that so necessary distinction between those who do good and who are good.

#ScienceFiction #SamuelRDelany