BURIED CAESARS(The Toby Peters Mysteries Book 14) by Stuart M. Kaminsky
DARK MATTER (BK 1 of HADRON Series) by Stephen Arseneault
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Britannica, Part I of a 3-part series: ( part I, part II, part III ) Jody Scott, "the greatest writer you've never heard of," (F&SF Mag) and recipient of enough critical praise and peer recognition to choke a small pony, did not make money from her writing! And yet she wrote full time, 5 or 6 hours a day almost every day for 40 years without having also to hold down a job. How she managed that has been the subject of some speculation. As Jody's spouse and business partner for 30 years I figured I would spill the beans here and now, entre nous as it were, as to exactly what we did to earn a living. When Jody and I meet in the late '70's she is selling Irondale Lots. This becomes the model for the land business we will found a few years later. But to understand what Irondale was, how it worked and how it came about we need to flashback a couple decades. Some time after the Leites and Berkeley and Circle Magazine, Jody meets OT Wood, a brilliant painter, but not a model of mental stability. She thinks to herself, 'We should make a baby together, it's bound to be brilliant.' So they do, make a baby together that is, but OT's mom commits suicide in LA and they decide California is for the birds and make the grueling, pre-interstate trek up Highway 99 to Seattle. At that time considered the uncivilized end of the world, just before you tumble off the map. OT is worthless as a breadwinner and soon gone anyway. With a kid to support, no family or friends in the area, no money, no savings, no welfare state to fall back on, Jody answers an ad in the paper for an Encyclopedia Britannica sales position, gets the job and hires a babysitter- even though she has no money with which to pay the babysitter. The training and sales routines for the "Sperm-of-the-Month club," in chapter 17 of I, Vampire is based on that Britannica experience.
With her usual determination and skill, Jody is a smashing success! The babysitter gets paid and the checks started rolling in. She even manages to pen a novel during these years, but selling is a job and like all jobs, if you stop doing it, it stops paying you. There has to be a better way than selling all day, raising a child alone and squeezing in a little writing when time and exhaustion allow. Enter E.P. Jeff Jaffarian, one time pal of Richard Nixon, sometime photographer and pornographer, recent tax auction purchaser of a platted-into-lots-but-since-reclaimed-by-the-forest town on the banks of Puget Sound called Irondale. -Mary Whealen Reprinted from 2016 with a few changes.
Not much has changed in a year.... Oh wait, we have a new president, I almost forgot! Instead of America's first woman president, we have..... Donald Trump. (America's most overtly authoritarian, constitutionally ignorant, separation of powers-hating, science-denying, pathologically narcissistic bully president. About which 1/4 to 1/3 of the population is happy.) Go figure. As Jody used to say, "The best revenge is to flourish and prosper," and "Don't let the bastards get you down." So..... Happy Pride Month Everyone! In 1977 when I marched in my first Gay Pride March (it hadn't yet morphed into a parade), I could not have imagined that in my lifetime there would be gay marriage. The prejudice was too deep, too institutionalized, too unquestioned. Growing up I didn't internalize homophobia and as an adult I was self-employed which meant my livelihood couldn't be threatened, so for me personally it wasn't bad, but a lot of innocent people have suffered quite a lot from the cruelty of straight people. (Y'all have a lot to answer for!) Jody was the most upbeat, youthful, interested, resilient person I've ever met-- by a considerable margin, and yet I could see even upon her the effects of growing up as a lesbian through the 1930's, 40's, 50's. Those were decades when you could get arrested, thrown in a loony bin and shock-treated, your livelihood, relationships, your future ruined by the scandal of being found to be gay. You could be killed almost with impunity by any heterosexual who felt threatened by your mere existence. (All still true in many parts of the world.) Gay bars were routinely raided and usually owned by the mafia. And as we saw last June in Orlando, we are not immune even here, even now. And as we see with the election of Donald Trump, with his rule-of-law-threatening proclivities, even the rights now secured are not necessarily secure. Jody and her pal Don were thrown in jail in Texas for a week for being queer, in the days before Miranda rights, and if not for her ingenuity in sneaking out a note to a lawyer, they might have been there much longer. Jody died in December 2007. Domestic partnership for the state of Washington was only a few months old and we hadn't registered for it. (A fact that would get some play after she died when her son sued me 4 times because he didn't accept our spousal relationship.) She didn't live to see the unbelievable momentum as state after state legalized gay marriage; as it became the law of the land nationally. I am astounded and thrilled about this, but it is also bittersweet; it comes too late for me and Jody. -Mary Whealen FIVE TO THE FUTURE: All New Novelettes of Tomorrow and Beyond UNO!.. DOS! ONE-TWO! TRES! QUATRO! by Ernest Hogan A counter-culture figure from the wrong side of the tracks escorts a tabloid journalist through the barrio. When a riot breaks out they flee in his batmobile-like car to the secret lair of his scientist mother where they encounter a pyramid from outer space. Poking fun at xenophobia and linear thinking, Uno is an invitation to peel back the reality-mask of linear thinking and embrace the mutual contradictions and chaos of poetry. A theme Hogan seems fond of. QUEEN OF THE CATS by Emily Davenport Jean is the sole survivor of alien invaders. She adopts all the now-orphaned cats of the neighborhood. She is in turn "adopted" by Vad, one of the invaders. When these invaders are defeated by the lizard people, Vad, now sole survivor of his race, flees back to Jean, and she pleads for her life and his. The lizard person lets them live, and also leaves her a supply of cat food. Moral: Taking care of others engenders empathy which decreases genocide, or, Cats are the universal solvent! FOLLOW YOUR DREAM by Cynthia Ward Set in a private Japanese girls school, there's the jealous, spoiled, rich brat; the girl who, in a hilarious and inspired bit of utterly delicious silliness, talks really loudly- like loud enough to shatter windows!, and is really a long-lost princess of the dragon riders; and her BFF who possesses superhero abilities and is really the orphaned daughter of the hovering spaceships. This is an homage to Japanese anime, very funny and one of my favorites! DREAMWEAVER by Arthur Byron Chess is a cynical cop working missing persons. A thankless and doomed exercise in futility in a world where people jump in time and place, intentionally or inadvertently, leaving no followable trail. A chance encounter places in his hand a magical talisman that leads the world-weary detective to discover, eventually, his own destiny. WRITTEN ON RIBS by M. CHRISTIAN Soviet-era Russians disseminate bootleg, illegal recording of western music on old X-ray films. Something I did not know and find fascinating! But as in all "prohibitions," this life-affirming demand is filled by for-profit criminals. Ribs does a wonderful job of conveying the sense of living under a repressive regime, the mundane and routine pettiness of it, and how repression rolls downhill. The writing in Five to the Future is of uniformly excellent and pleasing quality, and although the editor put no thematic constraints upon the contributors, this seems a thematically cohesive collection to me. Not in the sense of "grey-quadrupeds-piloting-space-freighters" but more in feeling. With the exception of Hogan's story there is a certain nostalgia to the pieces, a wistfulness; and in all the stories humor is an element, sometimes crucially so. And Strange Particle Press has produced an excellent cover for the anthology. The high quality of the book is marred by lapses in the proofreading (missing words, extra words, wrong words....), which are inexcusable, but few enough in number they can be overlooked by speculative fiction readers who will surely enjoy these talented writers and their deserving stories. Recommended. -Mary Whealen (Disclaimer: Strange Particle Press also publishes Jody.) read more reviews The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers Ashby Santoso is the owner and captain of a space-boring ship, he's the contractor folks call when they need a wormhole drilled. Ashby is a human, a minor race recently admitted to the Galactic Commons (GC). His crew is a melange of species that make up the GC. Their latest, very lucrative contract: a long normal-space haul to the distant Toremi territory to bore a wormhole back. But not all the Toremi are in favor of this new alliance and space, particularly out in the sticks, can sometimes be deadly. Angry Planet is a character-driven story about an ordinary, likable crew doing an ordinary, yet kind of thrilling spacer job. The depictions of different species, their viewpoints, and how they manage to get along and function together is very well drawn; Chambers is an excellent writer, delightful to read. The story is quite human-centric, and so we get a skewed view of this Galactic Commons, in which the human species is but a minor player, but this is a small quibble. Thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended! 4 out of 5 stars. -Mary Whealen read more reviews The Diary of an Immortal by David J. Costello A medic involved in the liberation of Dachau concentration camp discovers a cache of pills with the astonishing claim that, taken daily, they will confer immortality. Steven begins taking pills as a panacea to the brutal reality of war and the camps. From Germany to New York to to China and Tibet, Diary of an Immortal takes us on a greatest-hits tour of many of the major historical happening post WW2, as the protagonist seeks first the truth behind the immortality formula and its origin, and then to stop the forces that seek to use it to unleash another evil messiah unto the world. Early on the novel asks "How does it change one's perspective and reality to become immortal?" and a connection between music and extra-sensory states of awareness is postulated, but these fertile novelistic questions are soon abandoned for what is essentially a cops-n-robbers tale with an overlay of eastern mysticism. The author is a talented writer and the storytelling compelling enough, but I was disappointed by the theme tease: 3 out of 5 stars. -Mary Whealen read more reviews The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino In an act of rebellion the son and heir of an 18th century Italian nobleman climbs into the trees of his family's estate and refuses to come back down. Thus opens Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees. Aided by his brother Biagio who narrates the novel, Cosimo spends the rest of his life off-ground. He scouts arboreal routes throughout the surrounding countryside, interacts with townspeople, befriends a brigand, adopts a dog, fights pirates, becomes baron himself, has love affairs, reads widely, finds and loses the love of his life... It is the time of Voltaire and Rousseau, the age of enlightenment, and Cosimo is enthralled with the new ideas of equality, fraternity, liberty and reason. These emergent ideals, as it turns out, are unequal to transforming human nature and society, but Cosimo has been changed, and throughout his life, and death, he defies convention and remains that rarest of birds, an individual. ("'I too,' replied Cosimo, 'have lived many years for ideals which I would never be able to explain to myself; but I do something entirely good. I live on trees.'") Fantastical and yet mundane (after all, a life is a life, full of the usual ups and downs, even when that life is lived in the trees!), Baron is a celebration of the individual in the sense we think of that, as sovereign of one's own life. Although very different in style, in Italo Calvino and Jody Scott, born the same year, I detect a similar moral compass, for Baron is morality tale (as perhaps all fairytales are), but one that can also be read and enjoyed just for its sheer quixotic whimsy. Highly recommended. -Mary Whealen read more reviews. |
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