Jamboree 2017

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For those who like my Xanth novels, an announcement: #39 Five Portraits, which is a sort of sequel to #38 Board Stiff in that it has many of the same characters, and one of the supporting characters in the first, Astrid Basilisk-Cockatrice (ABC), transformed to human form, becomes the main character in the second. She’s a lovely and nice person whose glance kills any who meet it. Sort of like your ideal girlfriend, so for her a veil is not just clothing. She befriends the formerly hostile Demoness Fornax and the two set out to save five odd children (one’s a little girl squid emulating a human; another can fade into mist; a third is gay) from destruction in a future Xanth by bringing them fifty years back to the present and finding adoptive families for them. It’s one of my favorite Xanths. Five Portraits is to be featured in Open Road’s Early Bird Books on Jamboree 25, 2017, down-priced to $1.99 that day. So if you missed it before, now’s your chance to get it at a bargain rate.

I read Elvis Has Not Left the Building, by J R Rain, the second in the 99 cent package of four books. This assumes that Elvis did not die in 1977 at age 42, but faked his death and lived on anonymously as a private investigator. Folk who regard Elvis as ancient history may not realize that he was five months my junior, a contemporary; I was not much of a fan of his music, but feel a devious affinity as a performer, albeit in print. Thirty years later, in his low 70s, Elvis misses the limelight and his daughter, but hesitates to try to get back into things. Meanwhile he gets hired to track down a seeming murder, where a young lady movie star disappears and is presumed dead. Bit by bit he catches obscure clues, while also nudging toward returning to singing. It’s a compelling mystery and human story; Elvis might indeed have felt that way, had he lived. Definitely not junk.

I watched Woman in Gold. The Nazis took a valuable painting of a family member, and now after the war Maria, the original owner, wants to get it back. The present proprietors claim it is theirs, that the Will approved this. But where is the Will? A new young lawyer, Randy, who has Austrian ancestry, gets into it, half a century later. They travel from California to Vienna and Austria to argue her case. The supposed Will is not valid. There are flashbacks to her youth and the Nazi era, with Jews being persecuted. It is uncomfortable to watch. The young couple flees, pursued by the Nazis. They barely escape. Meanwhile, back in the present, they pursue the case in the American court system. Randy is on his own now, and his wife is about to give birth, but she supports him as he and Maria make the case. Then Maria drops out, fearing it’s hopeless, and Randy continues alone, pursuing his course, which is arbitration in Austria. He’s young and inexperienced, but sharp and eloquent. He wins the case, and the paintings are returned. This was based on a true case, and a summary at the end tells of the conclusions of the participants. I find it chilling and gratifying. My own family departed Europe on the last passenger ship out as the Nazis conquered Europe; we were Quaker, not Jewish, and English rather than Austrian, so were not on a kill list, but it was nevertheless a close call.

I watched Minions, a cartoon feature in semi-animation. These are the cute little creatures who resemble cut off yellow fingers in blue jeans with arms, legs, and one or two goggle-framed eyes. They want to find meaning for their lives by serving the most despicable master. The Minions finally manage to connect with Scarlet Overkill, a shapely evil lady who sends them to steal the Crown of England so she can be Queen. Naturally it’s a wild adventure. But things go wrong just as Scarlet is about to be crowned, and the Minions get chased by a horrendous collection of pursuers. Fun nonsense.

I watched 007 Spectre, a James Bond movie. All the actors playing Bond since Roger Moore seem somewhat like impostors to me, but Daniel Craig is a good one. I like the new Miss Moneypenny too, having met her in a prior movie when she accidentally shot him. This starts with a bang, of course, as he assassinates an assassin during a Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico City, takes the man’s special ring, barely escapes with his life, gets canned for acting outside his orders, though he wasn’t, then takes up with the victim’s willing widow. Unbelievable. I love it. I like the scenic backgrounds too, with everyone wearing skeleton costumes and girls with skirts spreading into slowly moving islands, as part of the parade. Then on to infiltrate a global crime syndicate, using the ring as his admission token. But they catch on, and the chase is on. Again. He visits a man with information, who tells him of his daughter Madeleine, then kills himself. Bond goes to see the pretty Madeleine at a snowy mountain retreat—where bad men promptly kidnap her. Bond rescues her, but she’s icy toward him. Yet she decides to go with him, as she wants to know what her father was into, and get things finally settled. Then they are on a train, when a tough bad guy attacks. They fight him off together. “What do we do now?” Madeleine asks. They look at each other, then make passionate love. She has evidently thawed somewhat. I mean, what else, at this stage? Bond always gets the girl in the end, pun intended. Later the chief bad guy, C, captures them and tortures Bond. But with the girl’s help he gets loose and destroys the complex. But it’s not over. They are caught again, and Bond has three minutes to find and rescue Madeleine before the building is destroyed. He manages, and wins the girl, and the bad guy is arrested. Formula, sure, but I think this is the best Bond movie yet.

I watched Martian Child. David, a recent widower who writes science fiction, so he must be a good guy, is lonely; all he has is his dog called Somewhere. A social worker puts him on to Dennis, a special child who thinks he’s from Mars, for adoption. It turns out to be a difficult route, even with the help of David’s sister and maybe also a girlfriend, it can be chancy. Dennis can make Martian wishes that immediately come true. Separation anxiety when Dennis goes to a new school. That reminds me of how it was with my daughter Penny at Sunday school; I had to be in the room the first year, just sitting so she saw I was there. Being self employed helped; I could read a book or write a novel on a clipboard, in pencil. The other children thought I was a quiet assistant, and sometimes came to me for help. The second year I sat in the hall outside, and every fifteen minutes or so Penny would crack the door open to make sure. Yet she grew up to be a bold independent person. Children need the support they need. At any rate, there are some real problems with Dennis, and it messes up David’s life and career. But as he says, children are like aliens, having to learn about our world. Denis decides to return to Mars, which is apt to mean his death, but David manages to talk him out of it, and all ends well, as far as we know. There are emotional truths here.

I read The Grail Quest, the third in the J R Rain quartet of samples. James is a writer of cheap science fiction novels who is suffering bad dreams wherein he finds himself by the cross of someone, seeing the nailed man dying; and then rocks fly, stoning the crucified man and James. He concludes that he must go to England, to the court of King Arthur, to locate the holy cup that is the Grail; only thus will his horror be put to rest. So he goes—and in a hotel dining room he sees a beautiful young woman writing in a journal. Is she another novelist? No, she is filling the pages with a single word: James. His name. This is Marion, summoning him here. Then bad knights attack. She soon leads him to meet King Arthur, who has just reappeared on Earth, and suddenly he is in a horrendous adventure, fighting to save his life. It quickly complicates, and this turns out to be the start of a larger adventure that I presume will be continued in more novels. James turns out to be the, well, reincarnation of one of the king’s close friends, if he can just remember. Much action here, and much philosophy, the nub of which might be that God loves you, if you will only respond. Most folk don’t.

I read Ghost College, the fourth in the quartet. This is a novella introducing Monty, a skeptic about the existence of ghosts, and Ellen, his wife who is a psychic ghost hunter, or as she prefers to put it, a paranormal investigator. Bound to be an interesting combination. They report to a college where ghosts are manifesting, and act to clean them out. In the process Monty becomes a believer; all it takes is to be worked over by a mean-spirited ghost who means to take over your body. The initial manifestation is a little girl, sobbing because she was killed and spiritually enslaved by her music teacher, who is now also a ghost. There are cute bits, such as the description of the manifestations: Screams. Wailing. Footsteps. Sobbing. Monty turns to his wife “Sounds like our first date.” She is not amused. They do manage to save the girl, I think by going back and nullifying her murder so that she returns to life.

I read The Librarian, a novelette wherein Jane, a librarian, learns that her husband Nick is missing from the nature hike he took that morning. Then he tuns up, but there’s something odd. The authorities say he’s radioactive and strange. It turns out that he’s an alien, sent to pick up on the ways of this planet so it can be cataloged for their interstellar library. He didn’t know it until the sudden callback came; they didn’t want an alien bias in his observations. Now he just wants to say farewell to Jane before he is forever gone. He loves her and she loves him, but he has no choice. And that’s essentially the story, until the surprise conclusion.

I watched Lady in the Water, which starts with a mystery: who is swimming in the pool at night, illicitly? The manager, Cleveland Heep, who stutters, wades into the pool to fetch out the pretty girl he catches there, named Story, and almost drowns; she rescues him, then sleeps. He carries her out—only to be spooked by a green wolf-like monster. Story is a narf, which is a sea nymph, who prefers nudity. Cleveland doesn’t stutter in her presence; maybe the nudity has that effect. The monster is after her; he tries to protects her, with the help of the residents, but she gets dragged and scratched. It gets into the building while they are trying to form the group to save her. And by the force of their will, acting their roles, these ordinary people summon the creatures who drive the monster away. Story is saved. This is one weird, compelling fantasy.

I read Vampire Love Story by H T Night, brother of J R Rain, which I picked up on a free special. Josiah is a mixed martial arts fighter whose best friend and roommate Tommy is in the same business. Josiah is out for a morning run when he hears a woman’s screaming, and winds up rescuing a Lena, pretty girl, after beating up five frat boys who meant to deflower her. Then Lena’s friends show up and do some beating up of their own. Realizing that Josiah was a friend to Lena and not a rapist, they take him to their party. One who pays special attention him is lovely red haired Yari. As time passes, he learns that these folk are mostly vampires who can change to birds (maybe bats acre old fashioned), and Yari is the hawk that has been accompanying him when he goes out on runs. At one point she takes him to bed with three of her friends and the four of them keep him in ecstasy for two solid hours. But he also sort of likes Lena, whom he saved. Then his next fight is scheduled—and it’s against his friend Tommy. Neither of them want that, but they don ‘t have a choice. Things continue to complicate. This is one fast moving story, with action and romantic interest, that held my attention throughout.

I read Self Image by Piers Anthony. I had written originally a 6,000 word story on invitation for an anthology, but it bounced because it addressed juvenile sexual interest too candidly. So I expanded it into a 32,500 word novella that thoroughly explores telepathy. In the typical telepathy story it is easy to read minds, as if people are speaking to one another. Real telepathy would not be that way, because minds are complicated with many layers and bypaths, and a foreigner would be lost in the manner of a person landing in a foreign city with no map. What would it be like for a child growing up telepathic? She’d pick up on all the neighborhood feelings, particularly sexual, and tune in on illicit affairs. I also make a distinction between passive and active telepathy. Passive is simply reading what’s on other minds. Active is projecting images and words to those minds, which I call projective telepathy. It starts with a lonely eight year old boy looking for an imaginary friend. What he finds is a girl his age, not what he wanted. She’s not pleased either. But they make do and become friends. They can’t touch; his hand passes right through her body. But she’s not a ghost. She’s the projection of a shut-in girl, her astral self image; this is how she gets some social interaction. Then when they grow up to the age to enter high school, she talks her folks into letting her go there, and the two finally meet physically. In due course he learns how she became telepathic, and he becomes telepathic too. Then he encounters a telepathic dog who needs his help. There are other telepaths who are up to no good, and they systematically eliminate any telepaths who don’t join their ill cause. This of course is mischief. It goes on from there. So if you like a fairly realistic exploration of telepathy, in contrast to the junk telepathy you find elsewhere, here it is.

I watched Prometheus, a 2012 science fiction movie. My kind of junk from the outset. Prometheus was the Titan who may have created man, mythologically, and got severely punished for his gifts to mankind. In an ancient cave they find pictures that suggest that mankind was created by a distant alien species. So in 2094 they send a spaceship, the Prometheus, there to discover the truth, whatever it may be. They find a barren planet with a single pyramid-like building. Inside it there is breathable air, so they take off their spacesuit helmets. As I said junk, but fun. It quickly dissolves into horror, such as the attractive young lady doctor getting mysteriously impregnated by a tentacular monster. She gets it pretty much ripped out of her and struggles to see that the ship does not return to Earth, lest it destroy mankind there to make way for a new order. The lady doctor, the last human survivor, will now go to the alien’s place of origin, to find out what’s what. End of movie. So there is much sound and fury here, but so far it signifies nothing. I have seen similar sequences before, but I’m not sure where. Taken as a whole, this is fascinating but unsatisfying.

I read Werewolf Whisperer by H T Night, sequel to Vampire Love Story. This picks up where the first one leaves off, with Josiah struggling to save and help his best friend Tommy, who gets killed by vampires after their match. Tommy turns out to be a werewolf, and has special powers, such as returning to life after death, but he needs help. Josiah provides it, endeavoring to tame Tommy’s wolf stage so that he can control it and not be a savage beast that has to be chained for three days during the full moon. Meanwhile Josiah is falling in love with Lena, the girl he saved, while Yari is taking an interest in Tommy. A vampire/werewolf couple? That’s highly irregular. Other vampires are still trying to take them out, setting traps for them, so there’s desperate action. Josiah continues to discover and develop his new powers, such as flying not only in his eagle form, but in his man form. He continues to have visions that steer his course in mysterious ways. He is clearly destined for great things, if he survives.

I am old, 82, and my body is slowly fading, much as I hate that. I exercise seriously, and that surely helps keep me going at an age with others are checking out, but I am increasingly careful about it. On alternate days I use my adult scooter to do the mile and a half round trip to pick up newspapers in the morning, and if I need to go out later in the day to pick up mail, I borrow my wife’s bicycle. But one of the fading things is my sense of balance, which means I could take a bike spill. I DON’T WANT A SPILL; it could put me in the hospital. I did mention being old? So my wife bought me an adult trike for Xmas, as it can’t fall over. Therein turned out to be an adventure. I got on it and promptly screeched to a halt lest I fall over. What? I tried again, and did the same. So I paused to figure it out. I’m a slow learner, but I generally get there. Our drive tilts this way and that; I don’t notice it on the scooter or bike, but the three wheeler tilts with it. You may have already suspected that, being smarter than I. When it tilts my reflexes, which turn out to be faster than my normal mind, take hold and correct the seeming fall, which steers me off the drive into the forest. That’s why I hit the hand brakes. Okay, having figured that out, I should be able to proceed without further difficulty. Except that those reflexes haven’t gotten the message. So the first time out I walked the trike down our little hill, maybe a six foot elevation top to bottom, then got back on and veered and halted my erratic way out to the mailbox. That 1.6 miles took me 40 minutes to traverse. That’s let’s see, about 2.8 miles per hour average speed. I could walk it faster. My second excursion took about half an hour; I was improving. Ditto for the third. That’s all I’ve done so far, but in due course I expect to make it, oh, twenty minutes or so. I straight-arm the handlebar repeating aloud “It can’t fall! It can’t fall” as it tilts me seemingly over at a 45 degree angle, probably more like 3 degrees in reality, and I almost feel the hind wheels lifting off the ground. I had a wild dream where our drive was on a 45 degree sideways slope, scary to navigate; I could probably guess the root of it, if I tried. I will gain confidence in time, surely I will, if I don’t crash first. Being old is a lady dog. That too, you probably already suspected.

I don’t pay much attention to TV, as the endless commercials waste my attention and the programs aren’t much. We don’t get cable or satellite, being in the primitive backwoods. My wife knows the local channels, though, and sometimes she puts on one that has reruns of some of the great old shows, like All in the Family and Mash. Recently, Night Court. I remember when there was Cheers, followed by Night Court, and if ever there was a match for the first it was the second. It was a great two half hours. Then the idiot executives got hold of it and moved programs around, breaking up the set and hiding them so that we lost track entirely and didn’t watch any more. I suspect TV would be better off without execs. Recently they played the movie Mary Poppins, about all of which I’d seen before was a sequence wherein she flew the children to a neighboring factory roof where they watched a phenomenal display of puffing smokestacks. But this time it wasn’t there; they went to the roof and nothing much happened. It’s bad enough forgetting things, but I hate remembering things that seem no longer to exist. Sigh.

2016 was a busy year. We had the Xanth TV option, which alas pooped out in the end, and with it my chances to become a bestseller again. Sigh. But I kept writing throughout, with one novel, three novellas, and two collaborations. The total wordage came to just over a quarter million words. The books were Xanth #42 Fire Sail, wherein a young man and a grandma must deliver a boat with a fiery sail to its new proprietor; Service Goat, like a service dog, only with minor changes, such as the goat being an alien telepath; Hair Suite, sequel to Hair Power, with Hair Peace to be written next year. Self Image, described above. Magenta Salvation, collaborative with Ken Kelly. And The Journey, a collaboration with J R Rain of the vampire housewife series, in progress. All great reads, when you get to them. See that you do.

We drive a Prius V, the station wagon in the line of hybrid cars. When we first got it it got about 43 miles to the gallon with ordinary driving around town. But that was five years ago, so I decided to verify the mileage now. I checked for the year 2016, adding up all the miles driven and gallons of gasoline bought, and calculated it, and it came to 42.8. Close enough. One annoyance is that today they dilute the gas with 10% non-fossil fuel, and cars get about 10% less mileage. So where, exactly, is the saving?

The Sunday supplement PARADE had a reprise of an early Ask Marilyn riddle that made headlines: in a quiz show type setting you have the choice of three doors. Behind one is a car, while the other two have goats. Assuming you want the car—I was raised on a goat farm and might choose a goat, but never mind—you choose a door. But before you open it the host opens another door, showing a goat, then asks you if you want to switch choices. Would you be more likely to get the car if you switch? The answer is yes, but pedigreed logicians screamed about Marilyn’s ignorance and the deterioration of thinking in America. But it turned out that Marilyn was right, because you are shifting from a one in three chance to a one in two chance. It was the logicians who didn’t know their minds from holes in the ground. That does make you wonder about the current state of education and logic. I am tempted to draw a parallel to literary critics, who sometimes seem not to know or care what makes a book readable.

Newspaper item on What Matters Most, listing the top ten most impactful historic events. They give lists for the Silent Generation 1928-45, which is mine; you must have noticed how silent I am. Baby Boomers 1946-64. Generation X 1965-80. Millennials 1981-98. Presumably the Greatest Generatuion 1901-27 has largely passed from the scene, and Generation Z, 1998-2014 is too young to have an opinion. 9/11 topped all four lists, while the Silent Generation listed World War II second and the assassination of John Kennedy third. WWII dropped off the list with the Baby Boomers, and the JFK assassination disappeared with Generation X. Wow! I’m with my generation on this one. WWII was the greatest war ever, and it has been forgotten? The JFK assassination was the greatest shocker ever, and it’s gone? Replaced by the Obama election. Now I voted for Obama twice, and believe his presidency has been one of the cleanest and best ever, despite an asinine Congress, but to list that instead of WWII? It seems the world is not run by the Illuminati but by the Ignoranti. We are about to find out what happens when ignorance officially runs our government. I predict that the Obama administration will in due course be viewed as a golden age, followed by the brass age. A series of articles in NEW SCIENTIST for 12-10-2016 starts with one titled “You Are an Asshole.” It says racists and xenophobes are on the march. They sure are.

Surely related: newspaper item refuting the prior one showing that dental flossing doesn’t work, as I remarked in a prior column. Its essence is that we already know it works, so should ignore the double blind studies that say it doesn’t. This is faith-based science. The double blind study is the gold standard of testing, where neither the doctor nor the patient knows who is getting the new drug or procedure, so that subjectivity can’t mess it up. Throw that out at your peril, if you value your heath.

Item in THE WEEK says that an international study found that highly intelligent people tend to be happier when they spend more time alone, working on their goals and interests, rather than socializing with other people. As one who spends most of his time working alone, physically, I can see it. If the average folk deny climate change, don’t believe in evolution, dislike blacks, Jews, gays, and anyone else who is different, say God should damn skeptics to hell, and think that science is irrelevant, why would I want to socialize with them? I’d feel unclean.

SCIENCE NEWS reports on the failed searches for Dark Matter and Dark energy. The prime candidate for the former is the WIMP—Weakly Interacting Massive Particles—that have gravity but just don’t show up on our instruments. So why can’t they be found? As I have remarked before, it’s probably because they don’t exist. So how then to explain why galaxies don’t fly apart from their rotation? I think it’s because we don’t properly understand gravity, the fundamental force that doesn’t integrate well with the other three or four. We assume that the way it acts on our picayune local scale is the way it operates on the galactic scale. Obviously not. So how long will they continue searching for phantoms? We’ll just have to see. There is an alternate theory, which I think is called MOND, that covers this well.

I am a Humanist, and I read their several publications, though my primary interest are is news and science. One problem is I can’t find anything to disagree with there. Being agreeable is dull. An article in a recent issue of FREE INQUIRY is titled “Jesus Probably Did Not Exist.” Now I am agnostic at the verge of atheist, having no belief in the supernatural, and I regard God as supernatural, but I have more or less believed in Jesus. That is, as a man, perhaps deluded, who truly cared about people and the state of the world, and wanted to improve things. So do I have a disagreement here? No, it makes a persuasive case that Jesus must have started as a mythical figure who was converted by later scribes to an earthly one. His first job was simply as a mouthpiece to deliver key messages to the common folk, such as to try to do right and believe in God. But this was more persuasive if he appeared physically to speak the messages. So, years later, they converted him. There is no objective evidence, such as by a Roman or other non-Christian, that such a living man ever existed. Saying “The Bible tells me so” is faith, not objectivity. So it seems I must let Jesus go. Sigh; I sort of liked him. If anyone can show me proof that he really did exist, okay, I’ll listen. That’s the same basis as I will listen to someone who can show me a real live (as it were) ghost, or alien flying saucer, or precognition. So far, no one has. I make my living writing fantasy; I don’t believe it in mundane life. I remain an utter skeptic.

Let me conclude on a fun note from the Jamboree 1th newspaper: a column by Gina Barreca, an English professor at the U of Connecticut, who urges folk to write things down lest they forget. I agree, and do. What intrigues me about her is that she authored a book titled If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse? What a great title! And to answer the question, yes of course they will. I would. Why do women wear loose blouses and lean in, if not to advertise their wares? Just as they wear short skirts and cross their legs when sitting, especially on a stage. They’d be disappointed if we ignored their lovely flashes, which are offered in lieu of their lethal direct gaze, in case they are basilisks. Duh.

Until next time–

PIERS

FeBlueberry 2017

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For those who like to read my books as well as these columns—I trust there are some—there are two sales in FeBlueberry. Xanth #40 Isis Orb, the one originated by a ten year old girl, will be on sale on the 6th through Early Bird Books, downpriced to $1.99 for that day only. Then on the 26th my collection Alien Plot will be available for .99 via Early Bird for that day only. Be there.

I read the third Vampire Love novel, Forever and Always, by H T Night. The first put Josiah, a mixed martial artist, into an association with vampires after he saves one of theirs from gang rape. The second, The Werewolf Whisperer, saw Josiah help his friend and roommate survive as a werewolf. In this third one, while Josiah is away for a month getting special training, his girlfriend Lena and friend Tommy start getting feelings for each other. Uh-oh. But there’s another intriguing woman who has her eye on Josiah, so who knows what will happen? Things complicate, and at the end Lena must choose between the two of them and a third man. Meanwhile Josiah is becoming the foretold leader who will save the vampires from destruction. These are all action-packed fairly wild adventures, with new things constantly appearing. Vampire and werewolf fans should like them, as well a martial arts fans.

I watched Indecent Desires, a 1968 B/W movie. A man finds a cute doll in the trash, maybe 12 inches tall. He strokes her—and a shapely (we see her nude) neighborhood blonde feels the touches and thinks she’s going crazy. It is evidently a voodoo doll tuned to her. He sees the real woman on the street and imagines making love to her. But she’s not for him, and that makes him angry, and he starts torturing the doll by poking a lighted cigarette at her face—which she also feels. Then we see a man making love to the blonde’s brunette friend. Later the first man takes a belt to the doll, beating her up, and the woman feels it. He undresses the doll, and the blonde’s clothing comes off. She refuses to talk to her friends. Then, jealous, he rips the doll’s dead off, which kills the blonde. End of movie. The blurb says it’s one of the most bizarre ones ever made. I think it’s merely inadequate. Who dumped the doll in the trash? Who hexed it to connect to the blonde? Why was an innocent woman brutally killed? There’s no rationale, no proper resolution. There could have been a real story here, in competent hands. As it is, it’s a nice series of lovely nude girl sequences and not much else.

The second movie on the disc is My Brother’s Wife, from 1966, B/W. The actors are obviously reading their lines. A young man, Frankie. visits his older brother Bob who has gotten married in the two years they’ve been apart. Mary, the wife, is an attractive brunette. They are interested in each other from the start. Her husband doesn’t pay her much attention, but Frankie does. Frankie has a girlfriend of his own, but that doesn’t even slow him down. He happily has sex with both of them, and promises both to go away with each, the moment he gets two thousand dollars, because he’s broke. He’s a real heel. Mary is about to get the money for him, stealing it from her husband, when she discovers a letter to him from the other woman and catches on. She kills herself. End of movie. Why did I bother?

I watched The Last Woman on Earth, a 1960 movie, one of a set of two I got for two dollars. You get what you pay for; maybe some day I’ll learn that. It’s in color, but the colors are washed out. The acting is clumsy. Two men and a woman, Harold, Martin, and Harold’s pretty wife Evelyn, go diving off Puerto Rico, then come up to find everyone on the island dead. Something had deleted the oxygen from the air, while they were underwater, but it is returning, so they can survive. But they’re alone. Thus Ev is the last living woman. She takes a shine to Martin. This is of course additional mischief. They run away together; Harold comes after them, they fight, Martin dies, so it’s just the two of them. End. Again, I fault it for being inadequate. No explanation of the sudden oxygen lapse, no clarification of the extent of it. Is it limited to the island, or is it global? A cosmic accident, or malign alien act? Will it happen again? As it is, it’s just a love triangle of no distinction.

I watched Invasion of the Bee Girls, the other movie on the disc. This one is better. For one thing, it has sexy nude women in it. Men are suddenly dying from sexual overexertion. Some cosmic force is turning some women into queen bees, in that they keep the men at it until they expire. A warning goes out, but many men foolishly refuse to heed it and go right on having sex. Par for that course. There is a video on the nature of bees, especially the queens, interspersed with an extended seduction sequence by an attractive lady doctor who has bees in her laboratory. Then we see what’s she’s up to: radiating and treating young women with special honey so that they become queens too. Julie is assisting an investigator, when they catch her and are in the process of converting her when he catches on and rescues her. They are making ordinary love as the movie ends with music borrowed from Star Trek. It says this is a cult classic. I can see why: sexy nudes and sex.

I watched The Last Unicorn, musical animation with fixed backgrounds. I read the book way back when it came out, and found it okay but not spectacular, and hardly remember it now. When it comes to unicorns I think I did more of a job in my Adept series, where there are herds of them, they play music on their horns, each horn with the sound of a different orchestral instrument, and can change shape. There was going to be a movie, but it never materialized. That’s always been my luck. But let’s see what they did with this one. The white filly unicorn learns that she may be the last of her kind. She is captured and put in a fake monster show with a fake horn plastered on her forehead, as the real one can’t be seen. So she’s another pretend monster, ironically. A young wizard, Mandrake, with real magic but poor control, frees her and the other animals. They go to find the Red Bull, who had driven off all the other unicorns. But the fiery Red Bull is determined to wipe her out. The wizard changes her into the human Lady Amalthea to escape the bull. And the king’s son, Prince Lir, gets interested in her, thinking her human, but can’t seem to win her love by his great deeds. And we learn that the king had the Red Bull drive all the other unicorns into the sea, because only possession of them all makes him happy. And she will soon join them, unless the right elements come together to enable her to defeat the king. And they do; she becomes the unicorn again, fights back against the Red Bull and drives him into the sea, and all the unicorns are freed. It is one rousing climax. She too is freed, but her destiny is not with the prince or with the other unicorns, but it seems to be back in her forest where things don’t die. It’s a great movie.

I watched RPG, the letters standing for Real Playing Game. My novel Killobyte featured a virtual reality game that tries to kill the players, so this is in my territory. My novel was going to be a movie, but they fouled it up and it never appeared. Had they only been willing to follow my novel, instead of change it, when each change just took it farther away from feasibility—but that wasn’t my call. Movie makers can strike me as halfway crazy; you can verify this by asking any other writer who has been passed over for a movie, or had his novel fouled up by them. RPG sets up a contest of ten old people, for a day, in young attractive bodies in an unfamiliar location, only one of whom will survive. They will be killing each other, but they need to know the true identity of whom they kill, or the killer loses when he/she touches the hologram of the supposed deceased. There has to be one death every hour. So each wants to learn his/her own identity, but not have it known to others. There is a circular building in the forest with a charged wall. They start pairing off, male/female, female/female, having sex, enjoying their young bodies while they have them. One woman suspects another is a man, and pushes her into the wall, where the charge kills her. One down. The killer lies about her involvement. The deceased girl turns out to have been a man. A boy tortures and kills a girl, who turns out to have been a singer. A girl tries to kill a boy, but dies herself. A girl attacks a girl. A boy kills a girl. No one can be trusted. It gets easier to guess as the number of survivors diminishes. At last there is one survivor, our protagonist. He pays his entire fortune to get to keep the young body. But it was all pretense, the other players mere actors; his body soon turns old, and they have his fortune. A good taut movie, but with questions, such as why didn’t the rich old man do due diligence before trusting these shysters with his millions? If it was all a charade for the benefit of the one client, why did they have things going on that he couldn’t see? So could they have made a better one from my novel? The potential was there, but given their apparent ineptitude, probably not. Movie makers, like novelists, vary widely in competence, as I trust my reviews show.

I watched The Exotic Time Machine, which turned out to be soft porn, breasts and female genitals shown, actual penetration not. Mostly sex to music, with a thin story line connecting the erotic sequences like beads on a string. It’s a genre, the object being to show lovely flesh in action, repeatedly. Leon and Daria make out on a space station, run afoul of a time portal and suddenly he is in the past, seeing Marie Antoinette, with breasts like balloons, in the boudoir making out with Mimi, her maid. Marie is annoyed because the king sends all her lovers to the guillotine. So she quickly seduces Leon, the king catches them and sends Lean to the Bastille. Daria, trying to rescue him, finds herself in Arabia, in the Sultan’s harem, where the other women set up her action. Aladdin shows up and makes out with one of the girls. Then they are taken to the sultan, where Shahrazad dances for him. Speaking as one who collects the Arabian Nights tales and adapted one for a novel, Hasan, I can report that this is sadly garbled. But that’s hardly the point; bare breasts and butts are the point. Meanwhile back at the Bastille Mimi rescues Leon and makes out with him. Then Daria finds them and conjures them back to the future, Mimi too. Where fascists are in charge; it seems they have changed history. Mimi must be returned, though she may now be pregnant with Leon’s child. Hmm. As these things go, it’s okay.

I watched the Discover video Evolve: Size. Ants are small, elephants are large, but the total mass of ants outweighs that of elephants on Earth by a huge amount. There were pygmy elephants, one tenth the weight of the big ones. They were on an island off California, until mankind arrived and ate them. Why so small? With diminishing resources, the small one were more agile and better able to forage. There once were dragonflies with a wingspan of three feet, when there was more oxygen in the atmosphere. Insects are limited because their surface air tubes can service only so much flesh. But bacteria stayed small for three and a half billion years. Gravity is limiting; size can grow in the water. The blue whale is the largest creature who ever lived. Whales started out on land, then moved to the water. About six million years ago whales grew large; scientists are not sure why. My guess is to avoid being shark bait. Blue whales eat krill, 800 feet below the surface. The biggest land creatures were vegetarian sauropods like Brachiosaurus, 30 tons. They had much longer necks than giraffes, with with lighter bones, 60% filled with air, but strong. When the asteroid struck 65 million years ago, the big creatures died while the small mammals survived. My theory is that the mammals were also mostly deep in caves, shielded from the firestorm that was the surface. They were protected by the temperature shielding the deep rock provided. Then they emerged and took over the vacated surface. And grew larger. But carnivores were limited by the underlying predatory ratios; Tyrannosaurus Rex was probably as large as a predator could get and still find enough to eat. Human beings are governed too; the taller the man, the more children he has, while women do better petite. Sexual selection. But we are smaller now than we were 50,000 years ago. How come? They ran out of food. They had to turn to the plants growing out of the garbage mounds. Today with a better food supply, we are growing again. How big can we get? It’s complicated, but probably not much more than six foot two, and five eight for women.

I watched Monster Island. Josh wins a vacation on a jungle island in the Bermuda Triangle, and invites his high school friends along, hoping to win back his girlfriend, but that seems unlikely. During a show a giant wasp attacks and carries off a girl, Carmen Electra, who Josh was starting to get interested in. So the boat leaves with most of them, but Josh stays to try to rescue Carmen, along with seven others. They encounter a giant praying mantis. Then a manlike green water monster, the piranha man. They are rescued by an older man from the Department of atomic energy who seems crazy. He says the island will soon sink. They continue with their rescue mission, losing members to a praying mantis, a giant spider, giant ant; then are joined by Atomic Energy man, who changed his mind. Human slaves serve the big Queen Ant; they get them to revolt and attack the ant. They finally are rescued by a helicopter as the volcano blows. Josh, proving his courage and constancy, while others tend to fold or cheat when the going gets rough, finally wins back his girlfriend. It’s a wild, largely nonsensical, but fun movie. The monster insects are a bit too mechanical to be completely convincing. However, Carmen Electra plays herself, and it’s fun watching her sing and dance. Sort of like getting a free show along with the movie.

I read Astro City #11 Private Lives. In my day Donald Duck comics were 52 pages in full color for a dime but needless to say, that day is long gone. This is 176 full color pages for around fifteen dollars, part of a series I seem to be reading in random order. This one concerns the private lives of those associated with the super heroes, a look behind the scenery as it were. The first story concerns Kim, the Silver Adept, champion of the light, the savior of myriad living souls across countless realities. Only it’s from the perspective of her office manager, an ordinary woman who has to scramble constantly to keep things on schedule when Kim oversleeps, as she often does. And in another story, Ellie, who loves machines and constantly repairs and befriends them, even killer machines, so when things go wrong they return to her. The ordinary folk, out of the limelight, who do the work. It’s an interesting take on the superhero business, and probably accurate.

I watched Battledogs, which I got for two dollars. It starts out with a bang: a young woman at an airport feels discomfited and goes to a rest room stall, where we see her badly scratched arm. Then she shifts into a wolf and charges out to kill people. And there are many wolves wreaking havoc, leaving a trail of mutilated bodies. The police try to contain the damage. In due course she reverts to her human form. The authorities seem to know about the condition, and mean to treat it. A bite infects a victim, who becomes a werewolf. It seems they have to keep the victims’ heart rates down, keep them calm so they won’t transform. One major, Brian, is trying to handle the problem amicably, understanding and treating the wolves. But it seems that a general has different ideas; he wants a ruckus so that the military will get more funding. Also, he wants a weapon: wolves with the minds of men. The young woman is the focus; both sides want her, for good or ill, respectively. This intransigence makes the good guys get hunted while the wolves invade the city. If they get out of the city before the authorities bomb the bridges, the world is doomed. So it’s wolves vs machine guns. But the good guys do find the cure, and maybe romance at the end. This is one taut action film, probably not too sensible if thought about, but well worth the money.

I watched Shock Treatment, a musical “sequel” — the quotes are theirs—to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. So you know from the outset it will be wild. The protagonists are Brad and Janet, the staid couple who ran afoul of the demented happenings in Rocky. Denton, where they live, is a completely normal town; everyone knows that and you’d better believe it. Maybe Brad doesn’t quite believe it, so they have him committed to Dentonvale, the local loony bin—I mean, hospital. Actually Denton is one giant TV studio, with the citizens watching every nuance from their grandstand seats ad cheering on the event in the manner of a football game. They put him in a cage in a straight jacket, gagged, and work on Janet, to talk her into being more sexy. The hospital personnel are reminiscent of horror movies, including a sexy nurse whose short skirt often shows off her panties. Soon Janet is in a slinky black outfit, and she’s not bad; she can sing and slink with the best of them. Maybe too well; the crowd starts demanding more Janet instead of the other stars, who may be getting a trifle jealous. She’s stealing the show! There’s a little song and dance at every stage, and of course it’s all a stage. So does it match the original? Not really.

I read Vampires Vs. Werewolves by H T Night, the fourth in the Vampire Love series. Lena finally clarifies that it is Josiah she loves, and they are happy for a while; in fact she gets pregnant with twins. Then he gets involved in a combat deal to save his friend Tommy, and doesn’t tell Lena because, well, she may still have feelings for Tommy. When she finds out she feels betrayed, and departs. And disappears. It turns out that the bad promoter has captured her, and will kill her if Josiah and Tommy don’t perform, such as in a final big match where one must kill the other. That annoys them both, and they wind up rescuing Lena and going after the bad guy. Along the way is an encounter with The Deity, a godlike lady who helps Josiah get his mind straight. Also a phenomenal series of mixed martial arts matches featuring the Seven Deadly Sins. For example Tommy has to fight to the death against Lust, the shapeliest immortal female ever. He doesn’t want to kill her, but. They finally manage to unify the warring vampires and werewolves against a common enemy. So there is plenty here for fans of supernatural martial arts.

I watched Dark Streets. This is a blues movie, not my genre, but the description mentioned “the most seductive music ever created,” and I was curious. For four dollars it was worth a look. Chaz has it all: a hot nightclub, two glamorous singers, sexy dancers, and that seductive music. Then his father dies, apparently murdered, and others close to him are getting killed. There are financial problems. A cop brings a friend of his, Madelaine, and she’s lovely and a top singer, but is she also a spy? Meanwhile there keep being city blackouts that darken the streets and interfere with the nightclub. Are they connected? As it turns out, yes, and poor Chaz, betrayed at every turn, is the ultimate victim, dead. This is indeed a dark street. As for the seductive music, I found it sad instead. But it’s an interesting movie.

I read Armistice, the Inlari Sagas, by four authors: M J Kelley, Dana Leipold, Wolf Dietcich, and Elaine Chao. This is a kind of sequel to Interspecies, which I reviewed here last year. Both relate to the presence on Earth of the inlari, humanoid aliens with horns, who have been chased from world to word by relentless enemies. At first they are welcomed to Earth, and their technology brings advantages, but later relations are mixed, and the two species go to internecine war. These are twenty stories along the way, positive neutral, negative, showing the different personal interactions. What strikes me is its seeming reflection on existing situations on Earth. Such as the experience of the Jews as global exiles, the American Indians as displaced inhabitants, the African Americans as enslaved immigrants, or the gay/lesbian community as it comes out of the shadows. Some are treated well; some not well; some are brutally slaughtered. There are atrocities on both sides, and woe betide those on either side who show compassion for the other. This seems to be inevitable when differing cultures mix, unfortunately. I read this with appreciation but not much pleasure, because of its painful truths.

I read Pallitine Lost, by Roderick Davidson., sequel to Pallitine Rising, which I reviewed in 2013. In the prior novel, the girl Taryn had dubious beginnings but straightened out in due course and came of age, thanks to the generosity of her Pallitine sponsor. Now after his death she becomes a Pallitine herself, and is immediately immersed in serious adventure. A plague is spreading; at first the authorities didn’t take it too seriously, but suddenly it became monstrous and voracious and they have to find its cause and deal with it before it wipes out everything. It turns out to be spread by the mixing of blood, somewhat in the manner of rabies. Taryn gets wounded and blooded, as it were, and is infected. They manage to save her, but the mischief is not entirely gone, and it seems she will inevitably become one of the zombie-like damned. So she hurries to accomplish her mission before that happens. But an evil sorcerer is working to spread it, and he is no easy case; he can do remarkable and deadly magic, and seems to have no conscience. It gets ugly before the conclusion, and that is only a partial victory; the battle has not yet been won. The action is hard hitting and the outcome uncertain. No romance; perhaps that remains to be seen. There’s another novel coming.

I watched Bermuda Tentacles, science fantasy adventure. My kind of junk. The USA president is down in the Bermuda Triangle, so our crack navy team is sent to rescue him. They encounter giant metallic tube worms that tower above the ships, a hundred feet over the water, and attack. They dive toward the capsule that contains the president, avoiding the tube worms. The worms turn out to be the projections from a much bigger underwater creature of extraterrestrial origin. The crew finds itself inside an alien city that is inside the monster. They land in it and search for the president’s pod. There’s a lot of old equipment here, collected over the centuries. Small tentacles attack from the water, picking off individuals. Flying metal globes attack from the air. They reach the president just before his air runs out, but have to fight their way out. Tentacles galore! They make it to their craft with the president and power out past the tentacles. But the monster follows, rising into the air like an enormous starfish, and starts lasering ships. They decide on the nuclear option, though this may wipe out many people including themselves. But maybe they can fly the bomb into the monster and have it implode. They have to wait for it to attack another target, because only then is it briefly vulnerable. That means serious losses, but it works. There’s even a tiny bit of a hint of possible romance at the end. This turned out to be less junky and more exciting than I expected.

Last Column I discussed my travails on the Adult Trike. They continue. The tilt in the drive is not that much, but my reflexes steer me off regardless. It reminds me of something at a fun-house when I was a child. There was a huge man shape with stairs inside it, so people could enter at the foot and exit at the head. There was a continuous line of people going through. I think it was the entrance to the horror house. Every so often it would wiggle a little, and there would be a chorus of girlish screams. Then it would chortle HO HO HO! I wondered why such a little wiggle caused such alarm. Now, about 75 years later, I finally understand. It was like a trike tilt. That sensation of falling is maddeningly compelling. Your logic tells you there’s no real danger, but your body dates from fifty million years back (sorry, anti-evolutionists; I am not one of you) when it was dangerous to fall out of a tree, and any indication a fall was starting brought an immediate defensive reaction. Those who lacked that reaction died, and have no descendants. Now you know. I continued to fight it. One time I slowed almost to a stop, maybe a tenth of a mile an hour, and did make it nervously through without swerving. Another time I tried hugging the right side, to avoid the worst of the tilts, but my right hind wheel go caught in the brush and I had to get off and extract it. Another time I tried to swerve left before the worst of the tilt, went zooming out of control across the center and screeched to a stop on the left side as the trike tumbled over. I got scratches on my left hand and a nasty little gouge on my left forearm. (Pause here for the monster’s HO HO HO!) So yes, I succeeded in falling on my tricycle. How was it possible in the space of about three feet? Well, the tilt made me over-react, and then I overreached again as I seemed about to sail into the trees, and that threw my weight against the side hard enough to tumble the trike over. If I hadn’t reacted I’d have been okay. Sigh. I’ll keep trying; brace yourselves for future reports of the old man on his trike.

We get constantly deluged with solicitations, mostly for money. If we answered them all we’d go broke; each is an insatiable black hole. The thing about it is that they are all for good causes. Did you ever hear of a solicitation for a bad cause? Yes, the hungry children of the world do need feeding. The American Constitution does need defending. The old school does need money to operate on. We’d like to help them all, but we can’t, so we have become quite choosy, while feeling constantly guilty. One thing I note is that each cause seems to think it is the only one doing the job, when there may be hundreds in that specialty, plus whole governments trying to help. I feel that’s a form of dishonesty. They should admit that they are one cause of a number of that type, then argue why they deserve your money more than the others do. At such time, if ever, I see that kind of honesty, I’ll really have a problem turning them down.

For those of you who didn’t notice: our email server was down for about three days, and nothing got through to us. Finally they fixed it, but we’re not sure they told the senders that their notes were not getting through. Anyone who tried to contact me and got no bounce and no response, that’s probably why. I hope not too many million dollar movie offers got lost. Speaking of which the Xanth TV option expired in NoRemember, a fitting month, but then was restored in Dismember, then lost again. Then it sprouted again in Jamboree. Maybe this time it will hold. Readers keep asking my why I don’t have a Xanth movie, as if I could wave my little finger and it would happen. I’ve been trying for twenty years to get a movie, but the billionaires who finance such things are not noted for their common sense and don’t realize what a potential market there is for Xanth. Yet.

I set aside the time I used to use for archery practice for Chores I wouldn’t otherwise get around to. I quit archery because I was losing too many arrows, when they went where they chose instead of where I aimed them. It’s been a good trade-off; I have accomplished many good things. This time I used the time to properly define and list and shelve the new books I acquired the past two years. You’d think this would be an easy routine. Ha! It’s not as bad as tilting on the trike, but it is a challenge. First I have to figure out their Library of Congress alphanumerical designation. It should be in the book, behind the title page, but usually isn’t, so I have to work it out for myself. There’s the challenge. One was Ancient Ice Mummies, that my wife gave me for Christmas two years ago. Remember Otzi, the Ice Man of 5,000 years age? I have him as a character in my GEODYSSEY series. He may be the world’s oldest murder mystery. He was shot in the back and left to be hidden by a passing glacier. His daughter was bereft. (I know more about my characters than the archaeologists do.) So how is this book to be defined? I finally decided GL for prehistoric archaeology and worked out the rest of the coding; that’s where it goes on my library shelf. There there was a little book and disc on King Tut; that’s in the DT section. Then Female Nude. That’s under N, no not for Nude, for Art. But how can I just define it and put it away on the shelf? I had to page through it again. You wonder who actually looks at such pictures? I do. Once you’ve seen one breast, you’ve seen them all? I want to see them all! Bad Girls Need Love Too, the collection of provocative covers from the 1960s. Talk about sexy! That goes under PN, and yes it needs another page by page examination. Then there’s Dirty Minds, about how our brains influence love, sex, and relationships. That’s the one where the lady author got into an fMRI imager and masturbated to climax so they could record her brain in the process. Feisty girl! She remarks on how epileptic seizures may inspire intense religious devotion. Interesting insight, no? Maybe my problem with religion is that I’m not epileptic. And He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut. Many insights there. So this was no rapid processing, but it had its rewards. I’d be more efficient if I could turn off my mind and feeling, as others do. To me, that’s life.

I like words, maybe because I do use them in my business of writing fiction. The right word in the right place is vital to me, and I can spend considerable time getting it right. Any serious writer will understand. I have a considerable vocabulary, for all that in my looming dotage I often can’t remember a word I use constantly; I mentioned in a prior column how my wife needed to come up with a word I’d lost, “pizza.” So it surprises me when I encounter one I’ve never heard of. In the past month there were two: kakistocracy and anhedonia. The first means government by the worst people in society; the HIGHTOWER LOWDOWN used it when pondering the recent election. The second is a lack of pleasure or the capacity to experience it, which state some of us liberals may find ourselves in as a result of that election. Columnist David Brooks used it to describe Donald Trump. I have paid more attention to Brooks’ columns since reading his sociology book, phrased as a novel, The Social Animal, one of the best I’ve read recently. Then there’s the description columnist Leonard Pitts quoted, where a West Virginia bureaucrat called First Lady Michelle Obama “an ape in heels.” Now that’s an interesting word in such a context, ape. The bureaucrat denied this was racist. Well, I remember the old saying about defining a duck: if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. I’m inclined to call this one Donald, as we head into the Duck Dynasty.

Couple of reader feedbacks promote further discussion. D E Evans said that regardless what THE HUMANIST magazine says, there is no need to throw Jesus away, while doubting the credibility of the Resurrection. He provided a link to an article by Neil Carter, titled “An Atheist’s Defense of the Historicity of Jesus.” I’m agnostic rather than atheist, but this is close to home. Two selected quotes make the point: “The existence of two or three professionals within the study of antiquity claiming that Jesus never existed does not signal a sea change in that field.” “But the many contradictions and variations we encounter within the gospels (and noncanonical books) point to the unreliability of the sources, but not necessarily to the complete nonexistence of their central figure.” This relates to a point I have made, that most issues are not either/or, but along a broad spectrum in between. Jesus may not have existed as a God, but also, may not never have existed, ungrammatical as that may seem. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The author suspects that the truth is indeed in between, and that there may be “layers of legend” over a kernel of original history. I can see it; there could have been a wandering preacher who was later considerably enhanced and divinitized by those eager to believe. It has happened elsewhere.

And guns. I received a savage condemnation on “smart” guns. “The so-called ‘smart’ gun is not smart at all, it’s quite possibly the dumbest, most useless, and most dangerous invention in history. In the first place, it would mean no one can use anyone else’s weapon, which is its intent, but which would cripple our ability to train with weapons that we do not own. It would also mean much more expensive weapons that poor people can’t afford.” And on for another page. Obviously I had little understanding of the philosophy of my reader, and he has I think even less of mine. But to address just what I have quoted: I do not agree that the smart gun is stupid or evil, but if I did, I think something like poison gas would be worse. What I have objected to is the NRA’s (that’s the National Rifle Association, which purports to represents hunters and such) resistance to a smart gun even being put on sale; that severely limits my own right to buy a gun, as the smart gun may be the only kind I would want. I think the NRA is hypocritical here. Making the smart gun available is hardly the same as banning all other guns, and I suspect only a nut would think so. I would want a gun that could not be stolen and used against me, or somehow gotten hold of by a child and dangerously fired. Such a gun is hardly dumb, useless, or dangerous compared to regular guns. As for training—why not train with your own gun? But if you want to train with other guns, then do so; they are pretty freely available elsewhere, and training centers surely have many you can borrow or rent for the occasion. Then, fully trained, you might elect to buy a smart gun of the type you prefer. How can any rational person oppose that? Why does the NRA? I conjecture that the NRA’s real mission is not freedom of arms so much as the profit to be made from unrestricted gun sales, and the money of criminals and idiots is just as good as that of responsible folk. The carnage following such sales is not their concern, right? Even so, their denial of the smart gun makes no sense to me. Do they really want to guarantee that there is no safe gun available? That’s nuts, and I use that term in the sense of crazy. If you don’t want a smart gun, don’t get one; don’t try to enforce your foible on others. I would welcome any rational response, as I got with my Jesus comment.

Book review in THE HUMANIST of the book His Porn, Her Pain, by Marty Klein. Intriguing title, and I saw a picture of her looking over his shoulder with utter horror. Now that pornography, that is, sexual expression, is freely available via the internet, has the world really gone to hell? Does porn really lead to violence, mental illness, and community dysfunction, as the anti-pornists assert? The answer becomes vague, but seems to be no. The antis resort to misinformation, which alone suggests that they know their cause is lost. It seems that religion is the main opposition, which makes me wonder why this should be a religious obsession. I may have commented before on how in the old days the Israeli authorities were losing devotees to neighboring cults that offered sex with luscious priestesses as an inducement, so they tried to make sex itself sinful. This had nothing really to do with morality, and everything to do with competition for members and their money. That attitude spread to Christianity, I think via the apostle Paul, and persists today. Maybe not coincidentally, religious observance is fading today. I don’t see that as necessarily a bad thing.

I have a pile of clippings as usual, and am already well beyond the length I prefer for these columns, so will give them short shrift. George Will remarks on how today at some educational institutions anything over a score of 70% is a grade A, and students take correction as an insult and violently resist learning. Thus we seem to be heading into an age of proud ignorance. That explains a lot, politically. NEW SCIENTIST reviews a book, The Myth Gap, that says too much information today is shrouded it obscure terminology, and what is needed is to tell it instead in stories of passion. Amen! They should hire fiction writers to translate technical information to human terms. Bizarro cartoon that made me laugh: engineers looking at a large dam from downstream, and one says “I’m cool with putting a mural on a dam. It’s the subject matter that’s creeping me out.” The mural is a realistic depiction of cracks leading into a gap in the wall, with water surging out. A new edition of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf, banned for 70 years in Germany, is now a bestseller there. They are really interested in seeing how that warped mind lead to the horrors of the Nazis. I read it in high school—it wasn’t banned in America—and was morbidly impressed myself. Hitler wanted to be a architect, but didn’t make the grade, so became a politician instead. Parallels can be drawn to today’s politics around the world. It’s scary. Another newspaper article “Can home remedies curb cold?” says Vitamin C can shorten the duration of a cold by about ten percent. This is yet another example of the promotion of ignorance. They have tested Vitamin C only in relatively low doses, so that it has only marginal effect. That’s like giving a man dying of thirst a thimbleful of water, and saying water has only slight effect. I tell you yet again: take one gram an hour, and Vitamin C may stifle your cold entirely. I have not had a cold get out of hand in decades. That’s a lot of C, so don’t do it unless actually fighting a cold, and do be prepared for some indigestion. Why don’t they do a real double blind test? Because the big pharmaceutical companies that make their riches on the equivalent of snake oil would lose a huge amount of money if folk could so readily avoid colds and not need snake oil. News item: the eight richest men have as much money as over half the world’s poorest population. They’re still hungry for more. Another item: we truly are stardust; key elements of our bodies were made in supernovae. Conservatives really are better looking than average. It seems that personal attractiveness leads to better jobs and more money, and thus they want to maintain the status quo. How then, to account for my own liberalism? Well, I didn’t do it by being attractive, I did it by getting lucky after getting screwed by the status quo. Now you know. Locally an outfit called Food Not Bombs was feeding the hungry, and got arrested for it. What? Turned out that they were more interested in confrontation than in getting along, so did not cooperate with the system or the police. When a lady police officer tried to reason with them, they shouted slogans to drown her out. They were actually more about bombs than food. And an article about Snopes, the online fact checker: it is getting attacked itself, apparently by those who don’t want facts replacing misinformation. Sad commentary, no?

So meanwhile what have I been doing, apart from reading books, viewing old movies, and opinionating on the state of the world? In Jamboree I wrote several chapters of the collaborative novel with J R Rain, The Journey, plus a couple of stories. Writing is mainly what I do. Next month I’ll catch up on more reading and viewing, write another story, then get serious about Xanth #43 Jest Right, about the comedienne no one takes seriously. That will surely shorten the next few HiPiers columns. Are you relieved? Our TV tower malfunctioned; it no longer rotates, and the serviceman said that the pre-amp atop it is probably shot, but he doesn’t climb towers any more. No one does. So we’re stuck with essentially one station, the closest one, from Ocala. We’re not thrilled, but haven’t figured out what to do. I don’t pay a lot of attention to the TV, but my wife does. Sigh. And one night I couldn’t sleep, as happens on occasion, so went to the study to read, so as not to disturb my wife and because reading puts me to sleep. I soon nodded off, so turned out the light, then set out to make my way in darkness back to the bedroom. And got lost in my own study. I groped for the hall to the bedroom, and couldn’t find it. I felt for a wall, but found no wall. Where was I? I finally blundered into the bathroom, turned on the light, and discovered that I had gotten oriented so that I was facing east when I thought I was facing north. No wonder the terrain was unfamiliar. I could have tumbled down the stairs. In future I will turn on a light ahead before I turn off the light behind; better wasting a few steps than getting lost. Yes, I see my critics nodding; they are surprised only that it took me so long to discover that I am a moron. But with luck my true readers who think I am smart will have fallen asleep before they reach this part. Okay, until next time–

PIERS

Marsh 2017

HI-

The Authors Guild has a statement they’d like everyone to see: the White House now bans reporters from several major news services from attending press briefings. AG calls this an assault on the free flow of information and says it can’t be countenanced. President Donald Trump has declared war on the press, which is a violation of one of the fundamental principles of democracy, notably the spirit of the First Amendment of the Constitution. I agree, in significant part. I believe that presidential press conferences are public business and the public, that is in this case its representative the press, has a right to be there. If the authorities want to give private briefings, then they may exclude parties as they wish; the news will surely soon circulate. But it does suggest that this president has fundamentally un-American leanings. He simply wants to suppress any criticism of anything he does by any party, in the manner of a dictator. To insulate himself from any objective assessment. Only yes-men are welcome. This is mischief.

I read the first Astro City graphic novel, Life in the Big City. Remember, I reviewed the eleventh one, Private Lives, last column. Yet, oddly, this one does not feel like the first. It has a listing and description of the major characters in the middle, but the overlap between that and the characters actually featured is only about 50%. There seems to be a past history in unlisted volumes. Regardless, this one is fun. It features mainly Samaritan, who rather resembles Superman but hails not from a far planet but from the 35th century. We here are in the 21stcentury, so you can see he’s about 1,400 years in our future. He’s so busy saving lives, combating crime and generally doing good deeds, while holding down a mundane job as Clark Kent—oops, I mean Asa Martin–that he has practically no time to himself. But in his dreams he flies free. Later his friends set him up with a date with the wondrous woman Winged Victory, one of those not described in the characters list. They discover that they’ve both been so busy they’ve forgotten how to handle a date, so it’s awkward. They talk, they argue, she throws a temper tantrum, but then at the end they kiss. They’ll be seeing more of each other soon, I suspect.

I read The Journey, by J R Rain and Piers Anthony, which I think is our ninth collaboration and a good one. Young Floyd has to take The Journey required of all villagers before they are recognized as adults, though he is ill equipped and will probably get killed. But then the girl he loves from afar, Amelie, appears and rescues him from a press gang that means to abduct him as a galley slave in a ship. Only she’s not really Amelie; she is Faux (pronounced Foe) Fee, a dusky elf, whom Amelie hired to safeguard him. That may cost Amelie her soul, as the Fee do not work cheap. Then Ravager, a hunting elf, comes after them wanting to ravage Faux. So it complicates quickly. They have wild adventures, such as getting caught by the Lilliputians, along with Jonathan Swift, providing Swift great literary inspiration, and wind up at Xanadu, where Floyd rescues the Damsel with a Dulcimer. Read it.

I read The Summoning, by Paul Meiniczek. This is the third in the Trencit Legacy series, and there will surely be more. I reviewed Ogre’s Passing in 2008 and The Rooting of Evil in 2009. My aging memory retained only a vague notion of the others, but I was able to follow this one readily enough. These are powerful fantasy stories that have not only compelling action sequences, but careful explorations of devious human motives. You really can’t trust anything, as the monsters are not ravening idiots and the leaders have their own layered agendas. The main characters, Sarion and his friend Forlern, are honest straightforward loyal minions of the empire, but those they deal with are complicated mixtures. Sarion is out in the jungle seeking information on a deadly enemy, while Forlern is in the city trying to locate and destroy a hidden predator. Both encounter folk who can’t be classified as friend or enemy but who must be worked with. Sarion rescues the daughter of an enemy, and is subject to savage pursuit by truly formidable monsters. Forlern is broached by likely enemies who may be potential friends. Sarion has a rod whose power he may need to invoke in order to survive, but that magic may wipe out the one who invokes it. Decisions simply are not easy. I recommend this novel and this series as potent physical and mental narrative. It has a new publisher, and that may help it become better known. If you read only one adventure fantasy this year, this is the one.

I watched Star Trek Beyond, with the original cast played by different actors. That is, Captain Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Bones, Sulu, sightly ladies, etc, on the Enterprise, looking approximately like the original actors. It will do; I like the flashes of skirted legs and peeks down blouses, unrealistic as such outfits are for space travel. On the way to help a culture in need, the ship is ambushed, damaged, and has to crash land on the nearest planet. They manage to eject and survive, but now they’re stranded on an alien world. Alien worlds always have breathable air, however, and comfortable gravity, and green trees. Aliens also have sexy humanoid women; I think it’s in the Galactic Book of Rules. So this is science fantasy: that is, supposedly science, but actually fantasy. Most viewers may not know the difference, or care. Regardless, it’s a fun adventure. They get together, salvage old equipment, and set out to rescue captives. They reconstitute an old wreck and take off. They mess up the alien communications by broadcasting rock music. Then lead them into crashing in Yorktown Central Park, I think. They finally do save the base and eliminate the bad guy. Fun for what it is.

I watched Mission Impossible. This starts fast. Ethan receives a disc defining his mission, should he elect to perform it. Then it clarifies that this is the Syndicate, the enemy, and he is doomed. His agency gets shut down, its responsibilities transferred to the CIA. He’s on his own, with his disbanded team. The Syndicate is made of up of supposedly dead British agents who are out to destabilize the world with assassinations and other mischief. This needs to be stopped. There’s an assassination attempt at a Vienna opera which Ethan foils with the help of a lovely British secret agent, Ilsa. But where does her loyalty really lie? Maybe with the Syndicate. She tells him they need to get an electronic file that is stored where it is impossible to reach it. So of course they’ll try. There’s a car vs motorcycle chase, helluva sequence. It winds up in a complicated tense showdown all of whose details I didn’t follow, but it’s riveting. Ethan finally saves the girl, whom he may see again some day. I think my senile mind is too slow to keep with with the pace of modern thriller adventures, but this one was fun in its fashion.

I watched The Revenant. This is a grim one. It starts with a Pawnee ambush of trappers, a savage battle beside a river, with arrows striking silently. 33 men are lost; the survivors make it to the boat and escape with some of their pelts. Then Glass, the main character, gets mauled by a bear. He finally kills it, but is in a bad way. One of the men figures he’d be better off dead, and tries to kill him. His son protests, and the man kills the son. The others, fearful of nearby enemy Indians, desert him, leaving him half buried in the dirt. He drags himself out, through the snow, gets to the river, makes a fire. Cauterizes his wounds, scavenges for food in the dirt. Hides from the Indians. Floats down the icy river, the rapids. Treks onward. Meets a Pawnee man who has fire and a dead buffalo for food. He lost his family too. They travel together. Glass gets ill, the Indian medicates him through it. Rescues Indian maiden Powaqa who had been abducted and was getting raped; frees her. Moves on, gets pursued; horse killed. Takes shelter naked inside the body, for warmth. Finally reaches his home base, tells them what happened. Goes after the man who killed his son. Finally catches him. Grisly battle. The Pawnee finish off the man. I think Powaqa is with them, so they let Glass alone. Glass sees his dead wife, and maybe is ready to die himself. End of movie. Powerful, memorable, not fun to watch. Aspects that remain in my mind are how honor and treachery are mixed. The Pawnee man treats Glass with compassion and honor; then at the end the Pawnee enemies pretend not to see him, because I think they would be obliged to kill him if they did. Only Powaqa turns her head to gaze at him in passing; she has clearly given word of the manner he helped her. So much conveyed in that silent look!

I watched Independence Day: Resurgence. Near future Earth, spaceships, moon base, bases on the moons of other planets, interpersonal tensions, alien contact. My kind of junk. Too many people too quickly for my taste, but I can always re-watch the video if I have to. An alien ship comes, they fire on it, it crashes on the moon. Maybe they should have been nicer, because then comes horrendous fire in the sky of Earth, wiping out seaboard cities. Earth fought off the aliens twenty years ago, but this time they’re coming on worse. The mission is to fly into the Queen Bee’s ship and nuke it. But force fields contain the explosion so that’s not good. There’s no chance, but humanity fights back anyway. It turns out that another alien culture who is fighting that conquering one came to help Earth—and Earth attacked it. I knew they should have been more careful about that alien ship! But they hatch a plan to mousetrap the bad guys. In the end there’s a showdown with the Queen Bee, appearing as a kind of walking dinosaur skeleton with tentacles while her mind takes over nearby machines. But in the end they do manage to kill her, and Earth is saved. That’s a relief.

I read Curbside Assistance and the Benefit of Mistakes, by Jacob William Watters, who is a doctor, so you can see the relevance of the title. This is self published at Xlibris. This reminder for those who don’t know: I was an early investor in Xlibris, back in 1997, because I wanted true self publishing to exist. I made my fortune by the traditional publishing system, but I hated the way it stifled new talent. The art of writing was under the yoke of financial expedience; a writer who was not lucky enough to catch the profit-minded eye of a publisher was out of luck. That was 99% of them, including, I suspected, the most talented ones. Now Xlibris is long since a part of a larger self publishing complex, and I have no association with it aside from my novels republished there, and doubt that it maintains the standards it had in my day. But it and its siblings do remain there for new writers, along with electronic publishing. Now we are getting to see what we couldn’t in the old days, the thoughts of the 99%, and this is an example. It is a book of poetry. I don’t regard myself as a judge of poetry, but I do pick up impressions. One is the cover, which shows a young woman who might have something on her mind, but well never know what, because the poem “Having Never Said” reveals that she died at age 20. What might her friends have said to her, had they but known there would be no later chance? I didn’t know her, but it bothers me regardless. Another poem is “The Penis is My Sickness.” That is the view of a feminist, condemning all men, because one woman was sexually abused. And “Dark of Me” with its thoughts, such as “Beauty is so often mistaken for goodness.” It certainly is. The poem makes the point that we tend to judge by the external form, when it’s the guts inside that actually make the person. So while I wouldn’t call these poems great works of literature, they do have thoughts that are worth pondering.

I read The Billionaire’s Secretary, by L J Love. This is mainstream romance, first of a trilogy. Aurora is a high class secretary for billionaire John Guyton, interacting with his three sons. She is first attracted to Zach, the handsome playboy, but he treats her like a one night stand. Then she gets interested in more responsible Will, and that becomes a solid connection. The third brother, Robin, objects, figuring she’s just out to get whatever she can from a rich man, but it soon builds into true love. Meanwhile someone is trying to frame Zach and blackmail leading officers of the company in an effort to bring it down. Aurora does some clever detective work and foils the plot. So it’s financial mischief and hot romance, an enjoyable read.

I read Stormy Weather by Steve Rollins. Storm Donovan is a lawyer who tackles interesting cases; he’s rich and doesn’t need the money. He also meets interesting women. But someone seems to be stalking him, leaving gruesomely mutilated corpses of those he associates with. He receives a threatening letter penned in blood. So he goes to his cop friend for help. The prime suspect turns up dead. When he’s on a date with an intriguing lady it seems that someone is laying siege to his house. This is scary, apart from messing up his date. Some of his clients are doozies too, such as the girl who publicly offers the judge some fast nookie. It’s a wild ride—the story, I mean; the judge was not amused—marred only by too long a setup for the next novel in the series instead of a dramatic climax. It is nevertheless a fun and at times eye-opening read.

Small problem: a wasp has set up shop in our front rain gauge. That’s the more accurate one. No problem, you say? Then you don’t know me. While I will happily squelch a publisher who shits on a writer, I won’t hurt a wasp unless I have to. We live in the forest and try to get along with the creatures of the forest; after all, they were here first. The outer walls of our house are bedecked with the mud daub nests of native creatures. So here is this wasp building her nest at the one inch mark of the gauge. When it rains more than that she’ll be drowned out. Come JeJune it will be our monsoon season with many inches of rain. That wasp will lose her home and any young ones incubating. But I lack the means to convey that reality to her. So far I have been emptying out the gauge when it rains less than an inch at a time and the wasp hasn’t protested. I hate to see her go to so much effort only to be washed out. All I can do is watch, fearing the inevitable, much as I do the current political scene.

Incidentals: they have discovered at 8th continent, Zealandia, under the ocean except for its highest sections, such as what is now New Zealand; 94% of it is below. The Mark Trail comic says that they heard a startling sound from the Mariana Trench, possibly a new kind of whale. Maybe, unless it is an alien creature slowly rising from the deepest depths to consume the world. Florida Republican Speaker of the House says that most mass shootings occur in gun-free zones. The news checker Politifact checked, and found that he is drawing from cherry-picked statistics; the case is murky, and they rate it Half True. In an advice column a woman who sleeps alone not by choice has some sex toys to entertain her. She is worried that if she dies and her loved ones discover the toys, what will they think of her? The columnist says she’ll die with a smile on her face. I find this answer unhelpful. I appreciate her potential embarrassment, death notwithstanding; I’d feel much the same in that situation. Or she could suffer a seizure and wind up in the hospital alive, only to die of embarrassment. Unfortunately I haven’t come up with a helpful answer for her. News item about an estranged husband who stalked a woman for years, sometimes attacking her, and she petitioned the court for protection but was ignored. Now he has killed her. It seems that’s what it takes to get legal attention: you start by dying. Why does that rankle me? Gun injuries and deaths among Florida children have spiked; one child is shot every 17 hours. This too annoys me; children do get into things, it’s their nature, but if folk used Smart Guns their children would not die of their curiosity. Researchers at Harvard have created what could become the most valuable material on the planet: solid metallic hydrogen. It requires one hell of a squeeze to press that buoyant gas into a solid, but they did it. If they find a way to make a lot of it, cheap, it could be used to create room temperature superconductors, which in turn could lead to magnetically levitated high speed trains, faster computers, and ultra efficient cars. I am definitely interested; put me on the waiting list. Item quoted in THE WEEK about colleges suppressing free speech, typically when liberals protest the prospect of visiting conservative speakers. In one case masked rioters smashed windows, beat people, and started fires. I am liberal, but these hoodlums do not speak for me; they should be arrested and punished the same as any other law breakers. So what would I do about a conservative speaker whose views I found intolerable? I’d attend the event, and when the time came for questions from the floor I’d politely ask some pointed ones. I have done it before; once I got applauded for it. If you don’t like an event, don’t attend it; don’t try to deny others their right to attend. I would hope that conservatives would agree with me in this. It’s a matter of free speech, a fundamental American value. (This is a public information bulletin, for those who evidently don’t know.) And an item in NEW SCIENTIST on torture, which the new administration proposes to use again, unfortunately. It says the purpose of modern interrogation is to get the truth, and torture is the worst possible method for this, because the victim says whatever is needed to make the torture stop, rather than the truth. Yes, I remember how the prior Bush administration used torture, and got the answer they wanted, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and invaded Iraq because of it—only to find that it wasn’t true. A significant portion of the mischief in the region today, such as ISIS, is because of that lie obtained by torture. Now we’re going to go that route again? This is madness! So what is the alternative? To talk, listen well, cross check, and make sense of diverse bits of information. It’s an art, for those with the skill and patience to practice it. The truth is there to be fathomed, carefully. Apart from that, of course, is the fact that torture is morally repugnant. You don’t agree?

The Post Orifice delivered to us the torn cover of the Holiday Special NEW SCIENTIST, no magazine attached. So we called, and in due course received a replacement issue. It’s 100 pages and has interesting material. One item consists of intellectual puzzles, the answers promised in due course. Now we have received the issue with those answers. The first one is VII = I, a seven matchstick layout. Move one match to make the equation correct. Okay, I moved the second I to cross the equals mark: VI͵¹ (does not equal) I. My wife had a different answer, which also seemed valid to me; unfortunately now she can’t remember it. The official answer, it turns out, is to move the fourth from the left and add it to the V to make it the square root of I equals I. Okay, that works too. I never was very good at matching official answers, but I generally have good answers of my own, as this example shows.

And an article in NEW SCIENTIST titled “Why am I here?” says that as far as the universe is concerned we are nothing but fleeting and randomly assembled collections of energy and matter. But just because life is ultimately meaningless needn’t stop us from searching for meaning while we are alive. Or as I put it in an author’s note decades ago, life has meaning only if we live for meaning. This article is a study of purpose. People with a greater sense of purpose live longer, sleep better, and have better sex. Those seem like pretty good recommendations to me. One study indicates that people with a stronger sense of purpose tend to have more money. That, too. Is this the same as religion? They conclude no; religiosity doesn’t lend the same benefits. Those who have a purpose beyond self gratification seem to do better. I, as an agnostic person who is trying to do what he can to make the world a slightly better place, have no problem with these conclusions. The article concludes “It’s never too late to start seeking the meaning of life.” Amen.

So what did I do in the month of FeBlueberry, apart from struggling with things like my adult trike? I wrote a short story that I was unsatisfied with because I couldn’t remember a song it associates with, and 29,000 words of Xanth #43 Jest Right, or a generous quarter of the whole. This is the one about the lady nobody takes seriously. That’s a problem when Xanth is about to be taken over by Ragna Roc, when the big bird escapes confinement and starts nullifying all who oppose him. Our protagonist Jess is the only one who knows the danger, if she can just get others to take her seriously. Ragna Roc, remember, was in Xanth #32 Two to the Fifth and almost took over Xanth then; he’s not pleased about having his conquest delayed over a decade. So you’d better hope that I figure out how to stop him the second time, lest this novel be rendered into illusion before it takes effect.

PIERS

Apull 2017

HI-

The Journey, my latest collaboration with J R Rain, is to be published this Apull. It’s about 39,000 words, featuring Floyd, a young man sent on The Journey, a rite of passage for children to become adult citizens. He is poorly equipped, but of course survival is a significant aspect of it, sorting out the competent from the incompetent. He is intercepted by Amelie, the girl of his dreams, who saves him from a pursuing press gang that means to make him a galley slave. Only it’s not Amelie, but Faux, a magic Fee (a species of Elf) woman Amelie has engaged to help him, though this may cost Amelie her soul. Thereafter it gets wild, as they encounter all manner of challenges and travel to Asia, to Xanadu, where Coleridge’s Kubla Khan once ruled. This is a story any reader who likes my fantasy should enjoy; let me know if you don’t.

On the 21st Xanth #39 Five Portraits is being promoted by BookBub and will be downpriced to $1.99 for that day only. So if you missed it—how could you? And to think you call yourself a fan!—here is your chance to get it dirt cheap.

On the 22nd Xanth # 41 Ghost Writer in the Sky will also be downpriced to $1.99 for one day. That one will catch you up to the present, with more in the pipeline.

I read Vacuum Flowers by Michael Stanwick. This is a densely detailed science fiction novel wherein a young woman who thinks of herself as Rebel wakes immobilized, prepped for surgery, and nobody will tell her anything. Sounds like typical hospital treatment, but she doesn’t take it lying down, as it were. She manages to trick a nurse into un-immobilizing her, then manages to get up and sneak out. She’s an independent sort. The story builds from there, as she escapes pursuit, finds a friend she may or may not be able to trust, and learns more about her situation. She’s actually an imprint of a person, and the other personality in this body may take over, abolishing her, so it remains chancy. A giant unscrupulous corporation wants her alive or dead, for something in her mind. It is one weird future society with all manner of super science and imprinted personalities, but perhaps a bit much for the reader who prefers adventure without thought.

I read Lost Eden, by J C Rain and Elizabeth Basque. I understand it is a novelization; that is, a novel written from a movie screenplay. As I read, I tended to see the likely movie images in my mind. Jack Rome manages to save twelve year old Tessla from arduous slave labor as a camel jockey. She’s a lovely girl even at that age, but her master keeps her gaunt so as not to add weight to the racing camel. Jack manages to free her, but falls over a cliff himself and she thinks he is dead. Twenty years later they meet again, and though he is reluctant, he is obliged to try to help her recover her son, kidnapped by her ex husband. She is coerced into locating the Garden of Eden, which it seems still exists today, hidden in a volcano in backwoods Iran. They find it, but the bad guys are hot on their trail. There follows mayhem, and machine guns and hellfire missiles take on the Guardian Angels of the Garden. Continuous violent action. Do I believe the Garden is there? No; I believe it was in the Lake Victoria region of Africa, during one of the periods when it was dry. But this remains a compelling story.

I read The Wonder by J D Beresford, published in 1911. As you might expect, the language is apt, but the narration is tedious. It takes forever to move slightly forward, and I do not recommend it for contemporary readers. It is the story of a child prodigy who cares nothing about other people, only about learning, so that from infancy on he reads voraciously and understands things that most folk never do. Then he turns up dead, drowned, probably murdered by a resentful acquaintance. There is no real investigation and he is soon buried and forgotten. And that’s it. It really doesn’t pass muster by present day standards of story telling.

I read Jaytar’s Journey-Quest by Juan R Rodriguez Jr., the first of his five volume Lands of Opullus series. I have remarked before how in the old days only about one percent of aspiring writers ever got anything published. How I have worked to open up publishing for the other 99%. These range in quality from excellent down to abysmal. The dream of writing and publishing a novel may have little relation to actual writing talent. Many writers are part smart, able to generate ideas but not to express them effectively, or possessing nice expressive ability without having much actually to say. I feel they all deserve their public display, and let the readers rather than the editors or money hungry publishers decide the merits. Well, this one is unpublishable by any commercial standard. The author has enthusiasm, imagination, and a story, but virtually no idea of the requirements of presentation. Paragraphing, spelling, narrative efficiency—forget it. To read this you must turn off your critical mind and go for the story itself. Prince Jaytar is a child survivor of a treacherous sneak attack that completely wipes out the personnel and government of his kingdom. But there is hope, as he undergoes extensive training, and teams with his cousin, Prince Ang-Sar, to fight back and reconquer the kingdom. In places it is like a scavenger hunt, as they must fetch whole series of magic artifacts, including different weapons and devices, to forward their mission. Such as a magic kettle that pours out food without ever emptying. They rescue other kings, princes, and princesses, earning their lasting gratitude, and in due course assemble a remarkable array of royal companions and armies. Finally they do battle the arch enemy, and manage to prevail, though Jaytar has a bad moment. So as I said, there is a story for those with the fortitude to glean it, but this is definitely part of the lower 99%. I suspect it will never gain a favorable review, but it could find its readers, too many of whom are not represented by established reviewers or critics. Those who object to establishment standards may find Jaytar worthwhile.

So what was I doing the month of Marsh? Writing another 50,000 words of Xanth #43 Jest Right, the one about the lady jester nobody takes seriously. She loves being a success as a comedienne, but that curse really messes up her love life. This effort of writing squeezed out much of my reading and letter writing, and all of my video viewing. My daughter says not to worry, nobody cares about video reviews anyway. Now there’s a backlog. I expect to finish writing the novel next month, then catch up on the reading, letters, and viewing, so brace yourselves for a lot of nothing much.

A mailing from the Southern Poverty Law Center says that Donald Trump’s victory has unleashed a barrage of hate. The bigots and racists figure their time has come, and and now it’s open season on blacks, Muslims, Jews, gays, women, and anybody else who isn’t a rightist white male protestant. They have a map showing the active hate groups in every state of the union. This appalls me to think that America, a land of immigrants—and I am one of them—has come to this. But I note that the Republicans, who voted 60 times to abolish Obamacare when it didn’t count, finally got their chance to do it for real—and didn’t. I guess when they realized that screwing over twenty million people, many of them Trump supporters, out of their medical insurance might lead to reprisals next election. Fancy that!

The Hightower Lowdown reminds us that in 2014 America’s CEOs earned 350 times what the average worker did, creating the world’s greatest income gap. That’s the unfettered free market in action. So now the city of Portland, Oregon, is doing something about it. They added a surcharge to the local tax bill of any corporation that gives its top exec more than 100 times the median pay of its workers. I like than, except that if I were doing it, the ratio would be more like ten times, not a hundred times.

An employment agency in England, my country of origin, has a dress code for women that requires that they wear non-opaque tights, have hair with no visible roots, wear regularly re-applied makeup, and appear in shoes with a heel between two and four inches high. Talk of sexism! Those high heels give women ten times the foot ailments of men, and I see it as akin to foot binding in China, hobbling women in public. And they’re also supposed to make sure that men can get regular peeks through their underwear? Does anyone actually care about the quality of the work they do, or are they merely painted dolls to decorate the premises? A receptionist who was sent home without pay for wearing flat shoes started a petition against this code. More power to her. The very idea that a woman should wear sensible shoes! Now Parliament is getting into the act, promising to stop this crap. I certainly hope so.

Remember Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias”? The statue of the king of kings who said “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair”? Well, they have found pieces of a huge statue near Cairo, Egypt, that is believed to be that of Pharaoh Ramses II, the original Ozymandias who ruled Egypt 3,000 years ago. It was a 26 foot tall colossus made of quartzite. The poem remarked how nothing remained but the desert sands. Thus the frivolous vanity of a ruler I took to be fictional. Live and learn. I featured Ozymandias as a character in one of my novels, frozen in the ice of Hell. Yes, Hell did freeze over; you didn’t know?

Science fiction anticipates many things that later come to pass. There are lady robots in my fiction that in some respects put real women to shame. They don’t get headaches or times of the month, for example. One of them becomes conscious and sues to be recognized as a legal person, in To Be a Woman, part of Metal Maiden. Now a California company, Abyss Creations, promises to have a lifelike, artificially intelligent, sex capable robot woman ready for sale by the end of 2017. They already make life size silicone love dolls that can’t move or speak but evidently can do the deed for around $7,000. I presume the animated robot will be more expensive. Too bad; I’d certainly like to have one. Meanwhile I’ll believe it when I see the lady robots campaigning against high heels. It’s hard enough for a robot to stand on two lovely legs to begin with, without having to perch on stilts.

When we moved to our tree farm in 1988 we planted assorted flowers. One was a night blooming jasmine that did well for several years before expiring. Another was a pink azalea, one of about 25 of different colors, but the others all perished in the course of time. This one survives and prospers, and on a day in Jamboree had 250 flowers. Then its season faded in FeBlueberry, and there was only one flower bravely hanging on in Marsh. Another was a Turk’s Cap hibiscus, which sent up stalks as high as ten feet, with over a hundred flowers, until in the past year the deer discovered it and ate it back until most of it is dead. Sigh; we like the deer, but wish they would leave our flowers alone. Another was a star jasmine, which would put out a solitary star shaped flower every so often, that lasted only a day. Then as it spread across our back yard, there were more flowers each year. One day I counted 50. Last year the high day was 84. This year the high day was 180.

We, being cheap, refuse to get locked into cable or satellite TV for fees like $150 a month. So we got a 50 foot TV tower put up, and that brought in about 45 stations, as we are midway between Tampa Bay, Orlando, and Gainesville, three broadcasting centers. But then it went wrong. We paid over $500 for fixes, and suddenly even more channels were coming in. Until about four hours after the serviceman left. Then they quit. Now they generally come in by day and poop out erratically by night. We called, but they say it can’t be the equipment, it must be bad reception conditions. How come those bad conditions weren’t operative before? Well, maybe somebody put up a new tower near us that interferes. So it seems we’re stuck. We’re not pleased. I don’t pay much attention to TV, but my wife does. We do not want to be herded into a satellite corral, however eager they may be to fleece us.

Newspaper has a review of a new anti-Scientology play in Tampa. I’ve been anti-Scientology since before it existed, circa 1950, when fantasy writer L Ron Hubbard first presented Dianetics in Astounding Science Fiction magazine as a new science of the mind. I thought it was rubbish then, and still do. Stage by stage it has been taking over the city of Clearwater, Florida, but that’s another story. This one woman show is Squeeze My Cans by Cathy Schenkelberg, a disaffected devotee. Provocative title; exactly what or where are her cans? Turns out they are the handles of an E-meter, the device used in auditing. What did you think they were?

Two letters in the newspaper, titled What Democrats Believe and What Republicans Believe, by John Morse and Mary Cascio respectively. Democrats believe that all citizens have the right to vote, and voting should be made easier, not harder. That we should not be currying favor with dictators. That everyone should have adequate health insurance. That global warming needs to be confronted, not ignored. That gun violence can be addressed without infringing the Second amendment. That tax policies that help the rich get richer while the poor get poorer will not lead to a prosperous nation. That the Constitution means it about promoting the general welfare. Republicans believe that it is common sense to suppress voter fraud. That the Democrats under Obama were snuggling up with the Cuban dictatorship. That health care should be based on free markets, not forced down the throats of citizens by the government. That the environment should be protected. That some of the most violent cities, like Chicago, have the strictest gun laws. That pro-growth tax reform will help workers and businesses. Okay, I have been a registered independent from when I first got my citizenship and registered in 1959, but from here the Democrat manifesto seems reasonable while the Republican one is mostly a tissue of code words, omissions, and personal attacks. Obamacare was passed without a single Republican vote, so it was forced down the throats of those who would rather see poor folk hurry up and die, not the twenty plus million who finally could get insurance. The so-called free market generally screws those who need health care most by jacking up prices beyond affordability, as was the case before Obamacare. Suppress voter fraud? Hardly any has ever been documented, but measures to suppress it have instead systematically suppressed minority votes. Republican tax reform is code for making the rich richer and the poor poorer, as the Democrat protested. Global warming? Not a Republican word about it, as they say it’s a hoax. Protecting the environment? The Republicans talk the talk but definitely don’t walk the walk, as Florida politics show. What an exercise in hypocrisy!

I have a pile of additional clippings, but I have a novel to return to writing, so this is enough of my fulminations for now.

PIERS

Mayhem 2017

HI-

I have mentioned that there has been a movie/TV option on the Xanth series. There have been options before that looked promising, but crashed before takeoff, and this one has been on, off, on, off, and on, so until it actually happens, I am cautious. I fear the example of Philip K Dick, a talented writer who became far more successful and famous after he died than before. I suspect that annoyed him. I would rather have my fame before I die, thanks all the same. According to the announcements, they are planning to do both a movie and a TV series. More details will follow, and I will mention them here as I learn them. Those who are able to go freely online, as I am not, may know them before I do.

Xanth #38 Board Stiff will be featured in Early Bird Books on May 3rd, downpriced to $1.99 in the USA. You can just catch it, if you read this column on time. That’s where lovely Kandy goes to a wishing well to ask for Adventure, Excitement, and Romance—and gets changed into a wooden board. Actually the well has granted her wish, just not in a way she understands at first. Her would-be boyfriend uses the board to bash monsters. The board is very good at that.

I read One Love by H T Night, the fifth in the Vampire Love Story series. It starts slowly, but does get there. Josiah’s girlfriend Lena is hugely pregnant with twins and would like to get married. Can this be done among their kind? It seems it can, and he buys her an engagement ring. Meanwhile he is organizing for the big battle against Krull, the evil enemy vampire, and learning new things about himself. Such that he is mortal, not immortal; he can die; that affects his outlook. Also, he is also a werewolf. A vampire werewolf? He may be the only one. But this helps him recruit werewolves to his cause. Then Krull captures him and tortures him cruelly before his friends rescue him. He really needs more troops on his side, so he sets out to get his former enemy Atticai to join him. How to do that? He learns that Atticai’s one true love, Donya, was killed over forty years ago and Atticai never got over it. But Donya lives; she was abducted and word was spread that she died. So Josiah gathers a task force and makes a daring raid to rescue Donya. She is now 40 years older, of course, but still a lovely woman. They succeed, and Josiah returns her to Atticai. Then, his force augmented, he makes a surprise daytime raid on Krull’s army. Vampires aren’t supposed to be active by day, you see, but there are ways around it. They kill half of Krull’s warriors and retreat. The second part of the campaign is a trap: they are more than ready for the inevitable counterattack. They win and kill Krull, then retire to three private islands. Lena’s twins are born, one of who has extraordinary powers from the start. For example, while being born he reaches out and touches his mother, healing her and restoring her to full health. It is clear that we’ll be hearing more about him. So all ends well, for now.

I read Divine Blood, by H T Night, the sixth in the Vampire Love Story series. In this one Josiah become a family man devoted to raising his twin boys, Joshua and Jason. But sometimes he neglects to give his wife Lena enough attention, and this annoys her; there are family arguments. There is also mischief on the vampire islands they have settled on. A new vampire leader, Brock, comes and is competent but not wholly ethical. His young son is ill, so he asks Josiah to have his boy Jason heal him. Jason starts to, then quits, because part of his healing process is to sense the future life of the patient, and he sees that the boy will grow up to be utterly evil, causing global disaster. Better to let him die. That does not sit well with the father. When the boys reach their 18th birthday, Jason disappears. Brock has taken him, and says that when his son dies, so will Jason. That does not sit well with Joshua. This probably means war among the vampires. So he organizes to search the island and rescue Jason—when the novel ends. Fear not, there are two more novels in the series.

I finished writing Xanth #43 Jest Right, and promptly pigged out on videos. The first one was Summer Heat, a soft core erotic story of a young man staying the summer at the estate of his attractive aunt. There’s a door between their rooms, and he can see through the keyhole when his aunt changes clothing and when she makes love with her husband. Naturally he gets all excited. There’s an appealing French maid his age, and she seems amenable, but he’s really more interested in his aunt. We get to see their lovely nude bodies when he does. He persuades Maid to seduce Uncle, so as maybe to make Aunt available. He imagines seducing Aunt. And Aunt, increasingly annoyed by Uncle’s dalliance, finally allows it to happen, though the movie ends before we see any detail. The problem with regular films is that they don’t dare show too much lest the religious folk go after them, and with porno films that they’re all repetitive sex with no stories. So how is this as a compromise? Not bad, though not great. It does have a story and does have bare bodies, and simulated sex, and realistic emotions. So it will do.

I watched The 5th Wave. This is a story of the end of the world as we know it, as experienced by the girl Cassie. There are five waves of destruction. First all electronic communications are wiped out. Then a tsunami wipes out much physically. Then deadly illness strikes. The 4thwave, they believe, is aliens taking over humans and sowing dissension and death. Finally will come the dread fifth wave that will finish the job. Cassie and her little brother Sam are on the bus to safety; she exits to rescue his teddy bear and the bus leaves without her. Gunfire breaks out and her father is killed. She takes a gun and flees, heartbroken. We learn that the aliens are like tentacular parasites that get into human brains and run the bodies; the only way to eliminate them is to kill the hosts. The alien campaign, in broad outline, is first to pick off the easy ones, like children and the ill and old; that’s the first three waves. Then go after the harder ones, as is occurring in the 4th wave. Cassie, alone, fights on. She gets shot in the thigh, passes out, and is rescued by Evan. They go to rescue Sam, and become lovers. Meanwhile Sam gets together with Zombie, a regular teen, and they are recruited into a fighting squad with a tough female leader. They can track the Others because they glow green when seen through the right lens. Then they discover that it’s backwards: humans glow green. They have actually been trained to kill the last humans. They are the 5th Wave. And Evan is a double agent. Then it gets complicated. This is about as effective an action movie as I’ve seen; it pushes the right buttons.

I watched The Perils of Pauline, which I got from curiosity, having heard about it all my life. It’s in black and white, as it dates way back, from 1933. It was run as a weekly theater serial. The good guys are clean cut and well spoken, while the bad guys are mean looking scoundrels. Pauline is a pretty young woman, always completely clothed, whose father, Dr Hargrave, is a noted scientist searching for a secret nerve gas in Indo-China. That gas wiped out an ancient civilization. The evil Dr. Bashan plots to steal it. Thugs try to abduct Pauline, but American hero Robert Warde fights them off. Meanwhile bombs are falling and the building is collapsing around them. End of chapter 1. They find the ancient formula engraved on a stone disk, in Sanskrit, but there is only half the disk. Pauline tucks it into her waistband and catches a rickshaw while the bad guys follow. They catch her and take the disk. Now the search is on for the other half, which may be hidden in Borneo. If the bad guys find it, they will have the world at their mercy. They head out to sea in a speedboat. A violent storm comes as they fight. End of chapter 2. Having gotten away from the bad guys and the storm, they continue the search. A bad guy sneaks in while they sleep on the boat, but a python scares him off. Then a leopard pounces at Pauline. End of chapter 3. But the replay in the next chapter shows that she was merely screaming to the side while the big cat landed on a crewman. The bad guy, Fang, escapes in the water, but there are crocodiles there. No matter; they don’t bother their own kind. Our heroes proceed inland with native bearers, going to the temple. The legend says the hand of a white woman will take it. Pauline, a white woman, does get it. Then apes chase her. And the bad guys catch her as she screams. End of chapter 4. The replay has the bad guys get the disk with no screaming. Nice glimpses of local wildlife: apes, leopard, hyena, warthog, hippopotamus, zebras, antelope, tiger. Even a native war dance. There is a raid and the village is set afire. End of chapter 5. Pauline unties and rescues her father during the distraction. They take the two halves of the disk from Bashan. Pauline is chased by natives and hides in a cave. Then a tiger pounces. End of chapter 6. The replay shows Warde arriving just in time to scare off the tiger. They run to the airplane and take off. Next they catch a ship to Singapore. The bad guys pursue them there. A woman sneaks into Pauline’s hotel room to steal the disk halves; they fight and Pauline falls into a shark-infested pool. End of chapter 7. The replay shows them escaping the sharks. They catch a plane to India, following directions on the disk. I gather that one half disk has directions rather than the formula; it’s like a scavenger hunt. They go to a temple, run afoul of the bad guys, get locked in, and fall into a deep well. End of chapter 8. The replay shows them falling into the well, which has water below. Their friends lower a ladder and they climb out. Next they catch a plane to New York. But the bad guys are on the same plane. They go to the Egyptian wing of the museum, where one of them falls into a plaster container and becomes a comically ghostly figure, and to a sarcophagus, carrying the key vase, Pauline trips and falls, and it breaks open—and explodes. End of chapter 9. The replay shows she survives it and they get the half disk. Now they have the complete formula. Hargrave will test it before turning it over to the government. Meanwhile Pauline will carry the formula on her person. But the bad guys are still scheming to get it. They sneak into her room at night and grab her. End of chapter 10. The replay shows the good guys arriving just in time to scare off the bad guys. All is well, for now. Hargrave discovers that a single drop of part of the formula can make an explosive reaction. The bad guys attack the laboratory, fire breaks out, and the building is burning. They are trapped. The building collapses. End of chapter 11. The replay shows them running to a window and calling for help—then being fished out of water. Did I miss something? They must have jumped just in time. So Hargrave is in another laboratory to compound it. The bad guys ace still scheming. They invade, there is fighting, and the police catch them. Bashan and Fang are gabbing the mix, release the gas, and die. Warde and Pauline decide to become a couple. End of series. Not much as today’s adventures go, but it satisfies my curiosity.

I watched Blackway, a tough adventure of the Pacific Northwest in winter. A nasty rogue cop, Blackway, is harassing Lillian and she needs help, but everyone in town fears Blackway. Lester, played by Anthony Hopkins, who lost his own daughter, decides to try to help her, though it seems hopeless. He enlists his friend Nate, quiet because he stutters, but one tough fighter. They search for Blackway, but nobody wants to tell them where he is. Lester doesn’t take no far an answer, sometimes resulting in violence, which Nate handles, and even a fire that brings the fire trucks. Finally they locate him, in an isolated cabin in the forest. There is an ugly fight and Lester shoots Blackway to death. He will not be mourned. Probably Lillian and Nate will get together. An ugly but compelling story.

I watched Abandoned, wherein Mary, a high powered career woman, takes her new boyfriend Kevin to the hospital for minor outpatient surgery on his leg. It will be only an hour. Except that when she returns to his room he’s not there, and there’s no record of him. They say his doctor was not in that day, and there’s no record of his nurse. Even the security camera hardly shows him. In fact no one was scheduled on the entire floor today. His bag with his computer is gone from the car. She can’t even prove Kevin exists. They think she’s crazy, and put her under 72 hour observation. She flees and hides in the morgue. She gets a call from Kevin: they’ve got him somewhere in the hospital. He says not to trust anyone. Then she gets hit by a car in the parking garage and knocked out. Then comes the pitch: she must arrange for a ten million dollar payoff or Kevin dies. It is a conspiracy, and Kevin is in on it. They say Kevin never existed; it was fake for their whole relationship. But there is one honest detective who was working on her case and smells a rat; he alerts the police and returns to rescue her. No, he’s married; he was just doing his job. This is reminiscent of Jodie Foster’s FlightPlan.

I watched God Help the Girl. Eve sings and writes songs while in a mental health clinic. She runs away and gets together with a young aspiring musician, James. They get together with one of his students, Cassie, and do impromptu little songs and dances. They form a band, recruiting other musicians to fill it out. The blurb says it’s charming. The blurb is correct. Eve is singing with Cassie when she deliberately overdoses on her pills and winds up back in the clinic. This is no horror incarceration; they really do want what is best for her. It amounts to a summer when things are confused but essentially right. Then it passes and the three will go their ways, Eve to sanity, Cassie maybe to fame, James to his music, none of it quite as right as it was in that magic season. It’s lovely and sad.

I watched The Man from Elysian Fields. Byron worked seven years to write his novel. It turned out to be a loser. How can he support his family? So—he becomes a male escort. As a novelist myself I hesitate to comment on the message there for writers, but it is true that the average writer can’t survive on his earnings from writing; the great majority have day jobs. Byron’s first assignment is the wife of a truly successful award-winning author. Who turns out to be okay with the arrangement. He wants his younger wife to be satisfied, he now being too ill to accommodate her. He asks Byron to critique his novel in progress. The problem is, it stinks. Byron has to tell him that. This becomes a collaboration, rewriting the novel. In effect, Byron is becoming the escort of the husband as much as of the wife. He hates it, but he’s locked in, financially. It takes so much of his time that his wife is distressed. Then she sees the business card for Elysian Fields, the escort service. Then he gets screwed out of his collaborative credit. This sort of thing, too, happens. All my collaborations have been handshake agreements, but I’ve always shared the money and credit evenly, except in one case where my collaborator was dead before it started; it was more of a memorial effort, though it is perhaps my favorite and did win an award. That was Through the Ice, with Robert Kornwise. Anyway, the movie ends halfway happily, with Byron finally making it on his own as a writer, and getting his wife back. She had read his book and understood the feeling in it: his love for her, that he had been unable to express before he wrote it. This is a more thoughtful movie than I anticipated.

I watched Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, a wild fantasy. Jake worshiped his grandfather, but Grandpa told weird stories about children with fantastic powers, such as being incredibly strong, or invisible, or able to start fires by a touch, or being filled with live bees, or able to project his dreams like movies, and Miss Peregrine, who could turn into a falcon. When Grandpa dies mysteriously, with his eyes missing, they take Jake to the British Isles where Miss P’s home was, hoping he’ll recover his sanity when he sees there’s nothing there. But it was bombed in 1943 and is now a shell, and there were no survivors. He goes there and meets their ghosts, only they’re real. Such as lovely Emma, who is so light she needs lead shoes to hold her onto the ground. They have made a loop, repeating a day before the bombing over and over, though they do remember and details change, and outsiders like Jake visit them over the years. They remember Grandpa from when he was young. A rebel discovered that if a person raided the loops and consumed the eyes of others he could reverse the magic that made the rebels monsters. They have a hideous campaign that it seems only Jake can thwart, because he can see the invisible monsters called Hollows. Then it gets wild. Jake marshals the children, and saves them, and thus also his grandfather—who sends him back to find the loop and Emma, for they have fallen in love. This is one great unbelievable story.

I watched Elektra, who the cover blurb says is the sexiest action hero ever to burst from the pages of Marvel Comics. She’s the world’s most lethal assassin, restored from death herself. She goes to an island, meets her neighbor and his 13 year old daughter, nice folk. Then she gets her assignment: kill them both. She balks. Then The Hand, a Japanese outfit, sends assassins to kill them, and Electra defends them, killing the assassins. They are not pleased, and send their top assassin, who has magical abilities. Electra’s associates think she is doomed. So the hunt is on. Why are they after this man and his daughter? We don’t know, but it is clear that they are something special. Bit by bit we learn: they too are deadly fighters. The Hand tried to recruit them, but failed, so now means to eliminate them. To save them Elektra makes a deal with the top assassin: they will fight and winner takes all. But there are also the other assassins, who can manifest as hawks, wolves, or snakes. Elektra finally wins as much by luck as skill, and moves on, physically at least. This is a slam bang action adventure, not long on credibility, but fun.

I read Creating Life—the Art of World Building, by Randy Ellefson. This in the first of three volumes. It is nonfiction, though it has every kind of fantastic concept. The author’s is a software developer and musician whose heart is in fantasy, who was written novels himself, so he understands the process. His goal is to help you along in the chore of working out your fictive background, so you have a more coherent and consistent framework for your characters and action. It is exhaustive, well written, and knowledgeable, and there’s a website where you can delve deeper. I, as a successful science fiction and fantasy writer, have generated many worlds, so this material is familiar, but it would have been easier and probably better had I had a reference like this. It is realistic, recognizing that the average writer may not have the patience to work out all the details before getting into the action. “Only you can decide where to begin, but it’s recommended to take any idea and run with it, writing down whatever occurs to you. If there are problems with it, they can be fixed later as you update and improve upon it.” So you can use this volume as a reference while you are writing, and return to it when your writing flags. “So where to you start? Where your heart lies.”

Newspaper item titled “You just cannot multitask.” Its thesis is that you need to focus on one thing at a time, or lose efficiency. Toggling back and forth between tasks actually slows you and impedes creativity. Truly innovative thinking occurs in monotasking, following a logical path of associated thoughts and ideas. That’s persuasive, but wrong. We constantly multitask, and benefit significantly thereby. For example, when I make the mile and a half loop along our drive to pick up newspapers or mail, part of my attention is on my feet as I walk, run, scoot, or trike along, and on the territory, noting the scenery, plants, and bunnies along the way. Most of my mind is on the current nuance of the fiction I am writing at the moment, and often enough I get nice breakthroughs then. Two quite different tasks, and meanwhile my body is tending it its own functions, like breathing, digestion, and memory processing. We spend much, perhaps most, of our lives on autopilot, our bodies doing routine things like making beds, washing dishes, eating meals, driving to work, and other repetitive chores, while our minds explore more interesting things, such as just what the cute neighbor girl meant when she glanced sidelong at you and quirked a smile. The problem comes when we try to do two physical things at once, like making beds while washing dishes, or two mental things, like reading a book while talking with a friend. Driving while texting is a no-no, of course; both require attention and eyes. But you can listen to a radio song while driving, or an audio version of one of my novels. So multitasking is a fact of life. Just don’t abuse it.

Provocative sport decision: a female golf player had a two stroke lead. Then a viewer noticed something from the film of the prior day’s play. She had had a one foot putt, marked her ball, put it back and made her shot. But she had inadvertently put it back in a slightly different place. No one noticed until the spectator saw the replay. So they retroactively penalized her two strokes for that, and then, because she had signed her score card which was, retroactively, decided to be wrong, she got another two stroke penalty. So instead of being two strokes ahead she was two strokes behind, and it cost her the match. This is what golf officials feel is fair play? In other sports, if the officials miss an infraction, it is ignored, especially when it make no difference in the play. She could have sunk that one foot putt from any place around it. Maybe we should apply those rules to other sports, and retroactively change the scores of football, basketball, baseball games and such, because of fouls the officials missed at the time. Or maybe the dunderheads who evidently rule golf should be called to account. Maybe when they die and go to Heaven, St. Peter should penalize them retroactively four marks for that wrong decision and they will wind up in Hell, where their concept of fairness is standard. Then justice will have been served, no?

I was sent a link to a site relating to which countries have the least internet freedom. I do believe freedom in important, but am not sure that the status of a given country with respect to internet freedom is relevant to my interest here at HiPiers, which is mainly promotion of my books, helping other writers find publishers, and exhibition of my opinionations. But for those who are interested, here is the site: https://www.comparitech.com/blog/informaton-security/cyber-security-statistics/

Interesting word: Mpemba, though it is not in my big dictionaries. Take a cup of hot water and a cup of cold water and put them in a cold environment, and some folk claim the hot water will freeze faster than the cold water. This is called the Mpemba effect. This should be very easy to test, but it seems there has been no credible experiment to verify it. I think it’s nonsense, and suspect that it such time as a test is done, the word will fade from circulation.

Which brings me back to another fantasy concept: Dark Matter, which I have discussed before. It is conjectured to exist because galaxies spin faster than they should without flying apart, so they figure they must be more massive that they look and conjecture that this ghostly stuff provides the extra. Only problem is that they can’t find it, any more than they can find any other invisible ghost. A more likely explanation is that they simply don’t understand how gravity works on that scale. One alternate theory is MOND, or Modified Newtonian Dynamics, which says that gravity is a bit different at the galactic range than it is up close. Another is that it is an emergent phenomenon relating to entanglement. Maybe the way human literature is emergent when we get a large enough number of smart apes together learning language.

I believe in free speech, from the First Amendment on down. But it is getting difficult it places. What about those who freely spread falsehoods? They have been known to win elections thereby. Now it seems there are those who, in the name of liberalism, are practicing censorship. Banning conservative speakers from college campuses; rioting in the streets and beating up supporters of conservative causes; that sort of thing. I have been out of college for some time—I gradated in 1956—but if a conservative speaker came to make his case, I’d listen, then refute his nonsense in an orderly matter. Now with the internet and anonymous bots the lies can drown out the truth. But if we start censuring the bad stuff as obscene, soon it won’t be safe to say “America and Apple Pie” without getting censored for obscenity. I don’t know the answer.

One of my concerns is food. That is, with more and more people and dwindling resources, there may come an ugly crunch where there simply isn’t enough food to go around, and mass starvation won’t be limited to dark Africa. Article in NEW SCIENTIST suggests that we may have to acquire new tech and tastes. Such as city rooftop farms. Such as farming algae. Such as eating insects. Termites, grasshoppers, and caterpillars are better sources of protein than beef or chicken and eat under one tenth the feed. There’s efficiency for you! Now they can make yeast that produces milk using only a tenth the land that a cow does. Or we can grind up insects and whatnot to powder, then use that as toner for 3D printing any kind of food you care for. As a vegetarian I suffer some mixed feelings about this sort of thing, but it’s definitely interesting. Face it: our overuse of sugar is fattening us into early death. These alternatives could change that, or at least make sugar much cheaper.

Health: eating right is important, but so is exercise. I do both, of course. But there are different types and intensities of exercise. Now it seems that interval training is excellent: short bursts of intense activity interspersed with recovery periods of lower intensity exercise. Our body energy is produced by the mitochondria, but as we age they become less efficient. It seems that interval training can not only slow that process, but sometimes actually reverse it. That smells like getting younger. The best single exercise is running, and I practice that also. Another item says that one hour of running may add seven hours to your life, and runners live about three years longer than non-runners. I am 82 and don’t look it. However I doubt I’ll ever look 18 again. I will have more on life extension next column; there are interesting breakthroughs.

One of my passing interests is the Shroud of Turin. That’s the cloth that supposedly covered Jesus Christ when he died. Some time back it was debated, and I read an article in THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER more or less disparaging it, while the Catholic Church wanted to know whether it was real. Now I am a skeptic about Jesus; I like him, and had him as a character in my big novel Tarot, but I am not sure he ever existed as a person. I am more certain about God and the Afterlife: they don’t exist. But in that debate I pretty much sided with the Catholic Church. Why? Because SKEPTICAL seemed to be out to prove the Shroud was a fake, while the Church, which really does believe in magic though they don’t call it that, preferring to call it miracles, just wanted to know the truth. I prefer an open mind to a closed one. The conclusion finally was that the Shroud was indeed a fake, unsurprisingly. But now, nigh 40 years later, the question has reactivated. There seems to be new evidence, or new interpretation of old evidence. There was blood on the shroud, red, when it should have dried black. But when a person is tortured, the liver produces bilirubin, which keeps the blood red forever. Jesus was tortured. It was type AB, found in only about two percent of the population, with the highest percentage in Palestine, where Jesus was. They could even determine that some blood was pre-mortem—before death—and some postmortem, or after death. The blood was on the cloth before the image was. Other details contributed to the conclusion that the man was tortured to death on a cross. The fabric was the type used in those days, but carbon dating showed it to be from 1260-1318, way after Jesus’ time. However, the shroud had been stored in a casket with silver brackets; a fire broke out, melting the silver and burning portions of the shroud. That would have messed up the carbon dating. All of which leaves a reasonable doubt. It may indeed be a fake, but the case is not closed.

Peace: historians determined that since 3600 BC the world has known only 300 years of peace; there have been over 14,000 wars, killing more than three and a half billion people. I will have more to say on that in future, too; violence is not necessarily all bad.

Now a long-running study indicates that lowering salt in the diet doesn’t lower blood pressure. Now they tell us. My wife has been on a low salt diet for decades, and I have gradually lost my taste for salt. We probably won’t change at this late date.

Newspaper reports say that there may have been Neandertals in California more than a hundred thousand years ago. I believe it. In fact, I conjecture that they never left. They merged with the incoming folk and took over the movie industry. That would account for a lot of the violence and stupidity, wouldn’t it?

Meanwhile, as mentioned above, I completed writing Xanth #43, Jest Right, 102,000 words, about a young woman nobody takes seriously, so she becomes a jester. She does great making folk laugh, but she falls in love with the show’s proprietor, who recognizes her as his sort of woman intellectually, but he can’t take her seriously emotionally. That complicates their love life. Then they encounter a deadly serious threat to Xanth, and must work with children from Xanth #39 Five Portraits to try to thwart it. I think it’s a good novel, and I hope you agree at such time as it gets published.

And Doug Harter has updated the Xanth Character Database; you can find it in its place at the site. I do appreciate the way some fans do the work that is now too complicated for my senile mind.

PIERS

JeJune 2017

HI-

I’m between novels, and catching up on videos and books, making this one of those interminably long columns, over 10,000 words. Just skip over the stuff that bores you. Here and there I may say something of interest.

Open Road’s Early Bird Books will offer The Metal Maiden collection on sale JeJune 24 for $1.99. That’s the one that features Elasa Fembot, crafted as a sex robot, who achieves consciousness and sues to be legally recognized as a person. You can’t tell her from a flesh woman, except that she doesn’t need to eat and she’s better in bed. She wants to marry her boyfriend and love him alone. I can’t say it’s great literature, but the first novella, To Be A Woman, does contain one of my favorite sequences, which I am rephrasing inaccurately from memory, where the opposition lawyer berates Elasa, saying she will never conceive a child by her lover, become pregnant, give birth, or be a mother. She’s a machine, incapable of any of that. Faced with that harsh reality, heartbroken, she breaks down in tears. But here’s the thing: they were trying to make her react like a machine, saying in a monotone I DON’T CARE. Instead, she reacted like a woman, devastated, and the heart of the world went out to her, and she won her case when she thought she’d lost it. Then she set about trying to do those very things and become a mother. One reader remarked in amazement: that’s some sex! Yes, it is. Three days before that, JeJune 21st, they will offer The Xanth Novels bundle, down priced to $2.99. I’m not sure what’s included, but it is surely a bargain. You can’t go wrong with Xanth, unless you’re hopelessly sane. You wouldn’t be reading this if you were, now would you?

I watched The One I Love. The blurb said they were on the brink of separation, so went to a beautiful vacation house in an attempt to revive their marriage. Then it became surreal. That intrigued me, so I bought it and watched it. And—that’s exactly how it is. Ethan and Sophie start having discontinuities, she saying they just had sex when he knows they didn’t. It turns out that there are alternate versions of themselves that appear when only one of them enters the house. These versions are more appealing than the originals. It’s a weird kind of therapy. Finally the two of them meet the two alternates, making an interesting foursome. It seems that only one of each can escape this setting, and the alternates do want to escape. The men fight, and Ethan takes Sophie home—only to realize too late that he got the wrong one. That’s a disturbing conclusion. If I understand it correctly, the therapy is to use duplicates to interact with the originals and get them to appreciate each other better. But in this case the duplicates fell in love with the originals and wanted to go home with them. And the duplicate Sophie winds up getting the original Ethan. If that’s meant to make me wince, well, it does. What of the original Sophie?

I watched Under the Skin, set in back country Scotland. This is a slow moving story of a predator alien female who looks like a lovely human woman who lures men into sexual liaisons and it seems consumes them, but we see it only symbolically: she, nude, walking backwards, he, nude, walking forward to her and gradually disappearing into the ground until he is gone. Then she hunts for another. As erotic science fiction goes, this is minimal. She tries to eat human food, but it just makes her sick. She picks up an ugly man, and spares him. Then she dates a nice man and has actual sex with him and is surprised; it seems she didn’t know what went into what, before. Then she gets chased down in the woods by a man intent on rape, but he is spooked off when her torso gets ripped and it turns out to be a covering for the robot-like alien creature inside. Then she goes up in flames. It seems that starting to feel human was a mistake.

I watched Transcendence. They are working to develop a sentient machine, or conscious robot with the full range of human emotions. But there is opposition: AI labs are simultaneously attacked and many scientists killed. Dr. Will Caster’s lab is the only one still capable of developing machine sentience, or “transcendence.” But he has been wounded and will soon die. So he arranges to have his own consciousness uploaded, so he can continue his work. But is the resulting cyborg still human? Is it really Will? The opposition remains active, determined to prevent transcendence. So this is a much a thriller as as exploration of the subject. Will’s girlfriend Evelyn is now a target. They construct a new city in the desert, with solar collections and equipment. The opposition doesn’t hesitate to make brutal raids, but at the same time Will is spreading his awareness across the world, integrating global resources. Evelyn is pleased; she’s gotten everything she ever wanted. But a friend passes her a note saying RUN FROM THIS PLACE. That’s probably excellent advice. There’s no telling what side this global intellect is on. Nanobots are ubiquitous, floating in the air, changing the world. But is it a better world? We can’t be sure.

I watched Far and Away, set in the largely barren landscape of the west coast of Ireland, 1892. Joseph wants to bring justice to his oppressive landlord, who burned down Joseph’s house when Joseph’s father died with the rent unpaid. But the gun explodes when he shoots at the landlord, knocking him out. He winds up in the care of the landlord’s mother, and a series of mishaps sees hem accompanying the landlord’s pretty daughter Shannon when she runs away from home to America. As it turns out, they need each other, this lowborn brawler and highborn lady. They pose as brother and sister so they can share a room. She gets a job plucking chickens while he does prizefighting. Then things go bad. Meanwhile back in Ireland the landlord’s house gets raided and burned down. The man there who likes her, Stephen, comes to Boston to recover her. She gets shot and Joseph turns her over to Stephen so she can survive. Then we jump eight months, to out west where he is working on the railroad. Then he joins a caravan to Oklahoma, where there is a race to win free land. Shannon is there; Stephen means to win prime land for the two of them. It’s a phenomenal race, with riders getting dumped, wagons overturning, and general chaos. And in the end Shannon chooses Joseph, and they have their land. So it’s a standard love story, but a fine one.

I read Always Darkest, by Jess and Keith Flaherty. This ranges from Heaven to Hell, with most of the action in between, on contemporary Earth. The assumption is that Jesus Christ was not celibate, and married Mary Magdalene and sired a line that continues to this day. That has been done before; my fading memory can’t quite recall the title. The Celestine Prophecy? But this is a different story. There is one Emerald Hill Prophecy that indicates that a part angelic girl will be born in this line who will have the power to severely shake things up, perhaps even change the balance of power between Heaven and Hell. The minions of Hell question the validity of the prophecy; it may be fake; but they don’t want to take the chance. So when news comes that she has in fact appeared, Hell marshals its forces to take her out promptly, by assassination or capture, maybe torturing her into compliance. The problem is they don’t know exactly where she is; Heavenly wards hide her well. One of those minions is Lord Ronoven, and he, among others such as the evil Lilith, heads to Earth to locate her. As Ben he quietly moves around, gradually getting a sense of her location. But there are problems. One is that Ben is at heart a decent fellow. Another is that Mal, the girl in question, turns out to be a lovely creature. One thing leads to another, and they fall in love. Now Ben is out to protect her, not kill her. Some of his friends from Hell side with him. Then Lilith comes, leading to an ugly confrontation that literally lays things waste around Burlington, Vermont, where Mal lives. Much of this novel is Romance, but when the minions of Hell make the scene it gets savagely violent. Mal escapes, but it’s not over; there will be another novel. There are nice quotes prefacing the chapters, such as “If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.” Hyman Rickover. “The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.” Leon Trotsky. Taken as a whole, it’s a solid fantasy novel with interesting thoughts along the way.

I watched Forbidden Zone. I thought it was an alien possession story, but it turned out to be soft core sex. Five young women get together naked at a swimming pool and exchange their memories of an odd night of bliss with a handsome man. This leads into some flashes of past times, such as the old American west, and remarkably artistic erotic sequences. Images from each girl’s mind are projected so that they all can see them and feel them. Their erotic fantasies intersect, making a weird montage. The alien is trying to discover what turns them on. So is it all imaginary? We’re not sure. But it’s about as interesting an erotic vision as I have seen.

I bought the entire Star Trek series on sale, from 1966 through 2005, over 500 hours of it, and in due course I’ll watch it. I was unable to watch them on any regular basis when they came out, and wanted to start at the beginning. Finally I can. In 1967 our (late) daughter Penny5 was born and we were in the throes of family-hood. It worked out that my TV watching time was limited to the second halves of a number of early episodes. Now, fifty years later, I am able to see the first halves. Thus some of these episodes became familiar only at their halfway points. I suspect this is an unusual, if not unique, perspective.

The first episode, “The Man Trap,” starts right in without preamble and no explanation of details such as how the personnel were selected for this important mission, or the different colors of uniform worn by different crew members. The women are sightly with flattering costumes; I love those legs! They are routinely checking a planetary settlement, when a crewman dies of sudden salt depletion. Then another. One of the settlers changes instantly to another person, clothing and all. Something sinister is going on here. He/she assumes the likeness of a crewman and gets beamed aboard ship. Uh-oh. He desperately craves salt. More crewmen turn up dead. They catch on: the shape changer needs salt. Finally they manage to kill it, and it is revealed as a hideous monster.

The second episode, “Charlie,” concerns to a seventeen year old youth by that name who comes to the Enterprise with strange powers and social ignorance. He has never seen a live woman before, and is instantly smitten. When objects bother him, he makes them disappear. When folk annoy him, he makes them disappear. He can make people act completely out of character or transform them into animals. Thus the ship is in the power of a badly mixed up adolescent. Finally the godlike power that made him takes him back despite his desperate protests. I saw part of this when it first came out; viewing it fifty years later I am struck by the quality of the acting. Star Trek was well done from the start, and the emotions come across persuasively.

The third episode, “Where No Man has Gone Before,” has the Enterprise on the track of a ship 200 years before that mysteriously disappeared. Some intangible force in space burns out the drive. A crewman has been injured, and seems to have developed extraordinary powers, and they are wary. This echoes the prior episode. They need to be rid of him in a hurry. Spock says they should kill him while they still can. He reads their minds and knows it. On a barren planet he makes a marvelous garden, and the comely lady doctor joins him, becoming like him. But she retains enough humanity to help Kirk kill the man. There is also a twenty minutes discussion on the disc of three episodes, describing the effort to recover the faded original material, and to replay the music entirely. How they added some relevant details to make it more realistic, while remaining true to the spirit of the original. The design of the Enterprise, making it theoretically functional in real life. These are dedicated fans, and this is a quality effort.

I read Snake in the Grass by Ron Leming. Snake is a feisty sexy hundred pound girl whose job is to go get the oddball stories for her newspaper, assisted by her friend the weird photographer Batty. One story is about gold balls that are appearing around a village in Mexico, apparently dropping from the sky. Finding one is easy; keeping it is dangerous, because thugs are going after them. When they go after other stories, there are more gold balls. One is huge, a yard thick. Snake has a bad feeling about this, and she’s right. The mystery builds, becoming more fantastic—we’re talking gnomes, zombies, alien incursion, and religion here–until there is a wild battle at the end, where Snake discovers formidable powers she hadn’t known she had, such as instantly healing injured people. Along the way she also discovers love, no, not with Batty, who turns out to be a brother, but with a fine handsome man, Dakota, who is truly her type. We also get the full sermon delivered by a religious snake handler, and a Hell bender it is. This is a delightful novel to read, starting fast and continuing fascinating, with candid thoughts throughout. I love Snake; any reader will, male, female, or other. I recommend it to any reader who wants to be entertained while learning about the world, natural and supernatural.

I watched Star Trek #4, “The Naked Time.” They discover the planet barren, the colonizers dead. The people seemed to be going about routine activities when they suddenly died, except for oddities, such as a fully clothed man dying in the shower. Were they mad? Then the crewman who beamed down there with Spock gets restless and questions man’s mission in space. He gets violent, then dies. Spock, with a different metabolism, is unaffected, but then the malady spreads. Something gets on the skin that soon makes them crazy. Seemingly drunk crewmen get hold of key controls and the ship is in chaos, spiraling down to doom in the planet’s atmosphere. Then it starts affecting Spock too. His human half is overwhelmed, but his Vulcan half steadies him. And Kirk. Then Dr. McCoy–”Bones”–gets it analyzed, and makes a formula to nullify it, and starts curing stricken crew members including Kirk. They power away from the planet, but go so fast they go backward in time to three days before. With that warning they will surely avoid mischief this time.

Episode 5, “The Enemy Within” starts weird: Captain Kirk beams back aboard from planetside. Then, moments later, a second Kirk is beamed aboard. A transporter malfunction made a duplicate. But the duplicate is opposite in nature. Uh-oh. The other Kirk attacks a woman, who scratches him on the cheek. So he is identifiable—until he covers the scratch. Then the two Kirks encounter each other, two halves of the same man; neither can fully fill the office of Captain. They find a way to phase the duplicates of an animal back together, but the animal dies. That’s a bad sign. Meanwhile four crewmen are freezing to death, literally, on the planet. They have to act. They beam the duplicates and bring them back, united. Then beam up the four stranded crewmen. All is well again. But it was a scary business.

Episode 6, “Mudd’s Women” They encounter another spaceship that is trying to avoid them. It gets struck by an asteroid, but they manage to beam aboard four people: a cowboy type man, Mudd, and three lovely women: his cargo. The women have a magnetic effect on all men who see them. Mudd has a bad police record which includes smuggling. The ship used up most of their lithium crystals in the rescue, and now needs more. Then the women start aging. Mudd gives them pills and they become young again. So that’s their secret: they’re artificially young. The lithium miners want the girls, but Kirk says no; this evidently smacks of white slavery. But they do finally forge a deal.

Episode 7, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” They are checking a planet whose illustrious Dr. Corby has not communicated in five years. Is he still alive? One of the Enterprise ladies, Nurse Christine, is in love with him. Then he contacts them. Kirk and Christine beam down, but things are odd. Crewmen get killed. There are humanoid androids, robots that look and act just like humans, such as the lovely Andrea and the giant Ruk. They make an android copy of Kirk who acts just like the original one, except for his contempt for Spock as a halfbreed. But things fall apart, and the androids start killing each other as they wrestle with nascent emotions. Dr. Corby is also an android, and also is destroyed.

Episode 8, “Miri,” has them discover another Earth, far from the original one. A party beams down: Kirk, Spock, Bones, Janice, plus two guards. This one is set in 1960, deserted, except for children, such as Miri. But the adults died of plague 300 years ago; how can there be children? They age only a month in a hundred years. As they enter puberty they contract the disease, go mad, and die. Now the Enterprise folk are getting it, except for Spock. They need to develop a vaccine, but the children have stolen their transmitter and refuse to take the threat seriously. Finally Kirk convinces them, and they make the vaccine. The children will be saved.

Episode 9 “Dagger Of The Mind,” has the Enterprise delivering supplies to Tantalus, a penal colony. A prisoner manages to get beamed aboard and starts making trouble. He is Dr. Simon Van Gelder who got fouled up trying his own treatment. Kirk beams down with sexy Helen Noel, a qualified psychiatric doctor with whom he has a prior relationship. He finds this awkward. But all may not be as it seems. Dr. Adams, at Tantalus, may not be legitimate. On the ship, Van Gelder is trying to warn them, but evidently has an imposed mental block. Spock uses his mind meld on him and learns that Dr. Adams has placed his own thoughts in Van Gelder’s mind. Meanwhile at Tantalus Kirk is suspicious—and Adams implants wrong notions in his mind. But he gets Helen to cut off the power, interrupting the treatment, and allowing the enterprise crew to get past the force field and set things right. Phew!

I read Survival of the Prettiest, by Nancy Etcoff. The title is reminiscent of one I reviewed last year, Curvology, and they address a similar interest, but are different books. This one establishes that our appreciation of female beauty is universal; there may be cultural distinctions, but a lovely woman in dark Africa is lovely in Asia or Europe too. It’s in the genes. Folk assume that prettiness equates to niceness, intelligence, health, and so on, though often this is not the case. But prettiness is a significant factor in our culture. Pretty folk are more popular, earn more, marry better, and are more respected. There are nice comments along the way: “Racism is real, race may not be.” For most of human history, marriage was for the young. “The highest frequency of brides was in the twelve to fifteen years old age category, and the largest category for grooms was eighteen.” It turns out that in movies younger women are in such favor that there was considerable opposition to matching forty five year old Meryl Streep in the role of the forty five year old farmer’s wife in The Bridges of Madison County. “Women who had never married turned out to be significantly more intelligent than the woman who had married.” Of course there’s more than one way to interpret that: men marry pretty girls rather than smart ones, but it could be that the smartest women prefer not to get involved with men. Times are changing: “If the sixties was all about sex without babies, the nineties is all about babies without sex.” While men are generally attracted to women for their appearance, and women to men for their money, you would think that once a woman gets well established she would look for other things in a man. But women who make good money still want men who make more money. Some things don’t change: using makeup goes back at least 40,000 years. But when it comes to breasts, the author misses the point, she remarks how human females are the only mammals to develop and maintain breasts throughout adulthood, though they signal infertility in all others. I have discussed this before, and it seems that I alone in the world understand the reason. When our species rose from four feet to two feet, it lead to a cascade of complications. Babies could no longer run along with their mothers; they had to be carried. This meant that the woman was handicapped in fleeing enemies or in foraging for herself. She had to have the assistance of a man not just for one minute to get pregnant, but all the time. Without it, she and her baby could not survive. So nature made an amazing reversal, and made her lactating breasts become sexually appealing rather than a sexual turnoff. Because only sex would compel the constant closeness of a man, and she had to be ready to provide it at any time. A woman can give a man sex day or night, standing or lying, awake or asleep, front side or back side, clothed or unclothed, healthy or ill, willing or unwilling. In fact she can do it even when freshly dead. She’s a sex machine, and her breasts constantly advertise it, even when covered. And it works. That’s what the family unit is all about: survival of the woman and the offspring. Men know this, but are largely helpless to avoid it. Because only the offspring of the breast worshipers survived to make our present society. That’s the power of the breast that the author missed, the real reason for its constant fullness. Still, this is a good and interesting book.

I watched Episode 10, “The Corbomite Maneuver.” The Enterprise encounters a big spinning multicolored cube in deep space. It blocks their way, wherever they go. Then it closes in on them, emitting dangerous radiation. They finally blast it, its mystery remaining. Then comes a sphere a mile in diameter. A voice says they have ignored and destroyed a warning buoy, and will be destroyed if they make any hostile move. They prepare to depart, but an alien head appears and says they will be destroyed. Kirk regards this as a kind of game of poker, and bluffs, saying they have corbomite that will destroy any attacker. Then the alien assigns a tug to haul the Enterprise to a planet for internment. They manage to stall the tug, then beam aboard it and encounter—a childlike human, looking maybe four years old. Now they will establish relations.

Episode 11 “The Menagerie Part 1” Spock receives a message to divert immediately to a space station. But that station sent no such message. What’s going on? Spock talks privately with the paralyzed former commander of the Enterprise, Captain Pike, under whom he served, telling him that he has no choice but to disobey that man’s order. Then he fakes an order from Kirk to accept special instructions, beams aboard, and hijacks the ship on a secret mission. What is he up to? Kirk and the base commander follow in a shuttle. Spock turns himself in for mutiny as Kirk is beamed aboard. Kirk, Pike, and the base commander conduct a trial for mutiny. They review the odd events of thirteen years ago, when a landing party seeks to rescue a group of scientists stranded on a distant planet Talus IV, for eighteen years. There is a pretty young woman there, born when they crashed. Except that it’s all an illusion; there are no survivors. Instead there are big-headed aliens who take the landing party captive.

Episode 12 “The Menagerie Part 2” picks up where Part 1 leaves off. Captain Pike is captive on Talus IV and subject to the illusion of a primitive castle, being attacked by a warrior. The girl Vina is there, but since she is imaginary he doesn’t accept her. Or is she? She says she is a human woman, but she can appear as any woman he might like. She was the sole survivor of the crash. He is to be breeding stock, with her. First they are in a lovely park, Vina a sweet innocent girl, then in a show where she is a sexy green exotic dancer. But it turns out that the real Vina was adult, and is now 18 years older. Hmm. She is also ugly; the aliens had no good model of a real woman when they reconstructed her features. But with illusion that can make her beautiful. The aliens conclude that humans are too violent for their purposes, and let them go. Now Captain Pike will join Vina on Talus IV, living a life of wonderful illusion. That is, he with his body restored, she with her beauty. And Spock will not be prosecuted.

I read Sons of Josiah by H T Night, the seventh in the eight novel series. This picks up where the sixth one, Divine Blood, leaves off, with Josiah going to rescue his kidnapped son Jason. The nasty vampire Brock wants Jason to heal his son Pierce, but Jason refuses because Piece is evil in a manner reminiscent of Adolph Hitler and if he lives will ruin the world. Several of Josiah’s closest friends refuse to accompany him, which is odd, but werewolf Tommy does, along with his wife Lena and other son Joshua. They fight their way into the enemy island, which is defended by vampire bats who believe that they are the good guys. Along the way Josiah suffers a transition that gives him added power, but he is confused by the forces acting on him. Finally they find Jason, who has been crucified, literally, with pins through his wrists and ankles, and a dreadful crown of thorns jammed into his head. They do manage to rescue him, but all are badly injured. There is a question whether it was right to save Jason, as it seems he was fated to die. Then Tommy tells Josiah a secret he has kept for decades, which is that love can do anything. Then there is a bright light, and—it is time for the next novel, Love Conquers All.

I read The General’s Little Angel by Breanna Hayse. This is an autobiography that reads like a novel. The author is a nurse and a therapist dealing with physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, and it has numbers to call for those who need help. This is not my scene but interests me because some of my readers have suffered, and I have heard some savage stories over the decades. In one case a girl’s prom date took a hammer to her, his face expressionless. She thought he was trying to kill her, but he only battered and raped her. In another a woman accepted what she thought was a friendly ride home, only to find herself amid men out for sex, consent not needed. They stripped her, put her on hands and knees, put a pistol to her rectum, and challenged her to protest. Neither dared report the abuse. The police often don’t take such charges seriously, and a girl can get herself killed if she squeals. Yes, they told me what they could not tell the police, trusting me, and they remain anonymous. Breanna was conceived accidentally, and survived being aborted, but her parents let her know early on that her very existence messed up their lives. She was truly an unwanted child. She struggled to avoid beatings, and any orifice she had was fair game from age 5 on. She finally escaped into the marine corps, where she became an assistant to the commanding general. She was good at it, and he took her in as a daughter figure. He spanked her bare bottom hard when she misbehaved, such as by swearing, but there was no sex. Then she got raped by a man she had trusted, and rather than tell, fearing for the general’s reputation—the rapist threatened to accuse the general of molesting her—she left his employment and married. Her husband was a bad man, constantly abusing her, but she feared she would not be believed if she told the truth. Ever thus. Finally, when she had had a sufficient measure of that punishment, she divorced him and found a good man to marry, and became a nurse and therapist, trying to help other woman in similar straits. Many years later she tried to locate the general, her beloved benefactor, so she could tell him the truth at last, only to learn that he had died several years before. Now she still tries to help others, by telling her own story, publicly baring her ass as it were, and by her fiction, trusting that a fictive narrator may get through where nonfiction would not. I recommend this book to anyone with any similar concern, for the references even if the reader is not interested in the main story. She gives some statistics: one in three woman and one in four men are victims of physical violence by an intimate partner. 76% of intimate partner physical violence victims are female; 24% are male. Only half of it is ever reported to law enforcement. Why do some people hurt themselves, such as by cutting? It’s a symptom of emotional pain. Or, as my correspondents tell me, because it makes the mental pain go away. For a while. Making the girl promise not to cut herself any more doesn’t really help; what is needed is to abate her emotional pain, and that is no easy fix. The last ten percent of the book is the first chapter of Justice for Liberty, featuring a girl named Liberty who escapes a plural marriage type “religion.” This promises to be another kind of revelation. Unscrupulous men use coercive religion to gain sexual access to underage girls, and woe betide the girl who protests. It’s ugly and does need to be exposed. But there may be serious consequences for anyone with the temerity to expose it; these are not nice folk.

I read the final novel of the octet, Love Conquers All. There is a bright light, and there are Josiah’s dead parents and sister. They have an important message for him, which they will tell him next time they visit. That turns out, in due course, to be that, having messed up the prophecy by saving Jason, Josiah must be ready to give up his life; only then will his wife, sons, and friends survive. He is not willing to do that, and there are huge battles that wipe out most of the vampires. The majority are plainly against him, his success and fame of yesteryear seemingly forgotten. What is most painful is that even many of his closest supporters are turning away. Right and wrong are clear; how can they be confused? This echoes the problem of honest folk who try to do the right thing, only to find that most other folk prefer to take the easier route of not making waves, even blaming the one who is trying to do the right thing. I’ve been there myself uncomfortably frequently, and I doubt I am the only one. Finally he agrees, bids farewell to his family and friends, and delivers himself to his undeserving enemy to be tortured and killed. His enemy is happy to oblige; it’s an ugly sequence. But there turns out to be a hidden loophole, and he manages to kill his enemy and save the vampires. Then his supporters return. This is perhaps the grimmest novel of the series despite the happy ending. What about folk who fade when doing the right thing becomes inconvenient? They seem to be the majority.

I watched Star Trek #13 “The Conscience of the King.” They are watching the play Macbeth and suspect that the actor is actually Kodos, a supposedly dead criminal. They are scheduled to check out a fabulous source of food that could solve all problems of hunger, but delay to check this out first. Kirk arranges to transport the ensemble to its next performance so he can see Lenore, the young pretty actress who plays Lady Macbeth, and investigate the mystery. She is Kodos’ daughter. Spock is perplexed, investigates, and discovers that the few witnesses to Kodos’ evil actions have been dying when the troupe is near. Kirk is likely to be the next target. But he needs proof before he can act. It turns out that Lenore has been doing the killing, to protect her father. He neither knew about nor wanted this. Then she accidentally kills Kodos, and it is over.

#14, “Balance of Terror,” sees two of the crew are about to be married when news comes that an Earth outpost is suddenly under attack, interrupting the ceremony. There is a neutral zone between the Earth Empire and the Romulan Empire that has not been violated for a century, but now the outposts are being destroyed. An alien ship appears to attack, then disappears. Thu alien’s ship and weapon seem to be superior to Earth’s. They get a glimpse of the alien captain—and he is a Vulcan, like Spock. The Romulans may be a Vulcan offshoot. The two ships engage, in their fashion, firing blindly. It becomes a match of strategy, each trying to locate the other for an effective shot. The Enterprise plays dead for hours, then catches the other ship by surprise. The other captain refuses to be rescued, and dies with his ship. Only one man on the enterprise is lost: the would-be groom. This is one savagely compelling episode.

#15. “Shore Leave.” They land on a garden planet, to unwind, and find themselves in Alice in Wonderland. Dr. McCoy—Bones—sees a large white rabbit who is running late, and a little girl is pursuing him. Kirk and a crewlady, Barrows, beam down on Spock’s advice, because Kirk needs to relax and recover. Sulu finds a delightful antique pistol. Kirk encounters Finnegan, an old nemesis practical joker who decks him and laughs. A flight of birds. And Ruth, an old girlfriend, unchanged in 15 years. But there’s also a mounted knight, a tiger, an ancient airplane, all deadly. It’s an amusement park, the images triggered by their thoughts. Once they understand that, and govern their thoughts, it’s ideal.

And a Star Trek supplement, “To Boldly Go,” telling of the challenge of making it the first season. They ran out of scripts and needed two more, so they adapted the pilot episode, which did not use Kirk, Spock, etc, making an envelope where Spock makes them view what happened thirteen years before, the two parts of “The Menagerie.” Thus they filled in their gap, and the show went on. It was a real challenge, getting through that first season, before the show got really popular with fans and the studio. It was interesting, also, seeing the actors as they were nigh 40 years later, hardly recognizable.

I read The Telomere Effect by Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel. It’s about shoe laces, and they decorate the chapters. Actually there’s a bit more to it than that. The shoe laces are an analogy for chromosomes, the strings of genes that are fundamental to the building blocks of life. The DNA strands. You know, the double helix. But like laces, they can fray at the ends, and eventually come apart, and that’s not healthy. So shoe laces have little caps that protect them from wear, and so do chromosomes. Those caps are called telomeres, tee-lo-meres. End of story? Not quite. With each replication of the chromosome the telomeres wear down a little, having fewer layers, until finally they give out, the chromosome frays, sickness comes, and the cell dies. In a pretty direct sense, the telomeres measure out the lifespan of the cell. Since you are composed of living cells, you can’t afford too much of that. So it behooves us to encourage the telomeres to last longer. If they lasted indefinitely, we might live that long, and cancer cells do. The good news is that we don’t need fancy medication to do it; simple changes of lifestyle can extend and even sometimes lengthen the telomeres. This book is a virtual how-to manual on how to do that. It is in the process a manual on improved heath. Diet, sleep, exercise, reduction of stress, all contribute. Along the way are some nice observations, such as the overweight woman who said that within her was a thin girl trying to get out, but she could be pacified with cookies. Or the chart that shows how closely income inequality correlates with mental disease and violence. Japan has the lowest rates of inequality and mental disease, while the USA has the highest of both. It seems that’s not coincidence. Taken as a whole, this is a book that can benefit just about anyone seriously interested in health and long life. So how do I do in their various little tests of lifestyle? Very well, actually, though one of their tests has a miss-coded answer key that makes its result meaningless. Even books on genetics need proofreading, lest they fray. Elsewhere I read that intermittent hard exercise lengthens telomeres. That’s the kind I do. Runners live longer, for similar reason.

I watched Star Trek #16. They must deliver medicine to a planet suffering plague, but also must check out a nearby quasar or odd celestial manifestation. Spock commands the shuttle launched to check the quasar, with seven aboard including Bones and Scottie, but there is magnetic interference and the shuttle gets out of control. They land on a habitable planet, but with the interference the ship will have severe trouble locating them. They are out of fuel and can’t take off. But maybe they can use their Phasar pistols for power to take off, in a while. A huge apelike creature hurls a spear that kills a crewman. Are the natives about to attack the shuttle? Should they try to kill the natives first? The natives attack the shuttle with huge rocks. They manage to take off, but their orbit is decaying. The. Enterprise manages to beam them aboard as the shuttle burns up.

#17 “The Squire of Gothos.” They spy a strange planet and head toward it. Then Sulu and Kirk disappear, just popping out of existence in the control room. Spock takes over. Messages appear on the screen. There has to be life on this life-inhospitable planet. Bones and two crewmen beam to the planet to investigate. They find themselves on a verdant green world, not at all like the prior description. There’s a castle. They enter and discover Kirk and Sulu like statues. General Trelane, a dude in a blue robe, explains how he summoned them and recreated a familiar Earth setting for them. Except that because this planet is 900 light years distant from Earth, he is 900 years out of date. He has created this oasis on this otherwise barren planet, and he holds them as captive “guests.” But they manage to beam back aboard the ship. Only to be followed by Trelane, who is evidently not a life form. He conjures them back to his castle, including a number of the women. He conjures a gown onto one and dances with her. Kirk challenges him to a duel, then shoots the mirror, revealing the machine that generates this oasis. They beam back to the Enterprise, but when they try to escape the system, the planet Gothos keeps appearing before them. Kirk goes to settle personally with Trelane. Then Trelane’s invisible parents intervene, curbing him and allowing Kirk to return to the ship.

#18 “Arena” sees them beam to a planet, invited to an outpost, only to discover that the outpost has been destroyed. They are under attack, and so is the Enterprise. The invitation was evidently faked. Sulu is in charge in the absence of Kirk and Spock. They manage to return to the ship, then pursue the alien ship that attacked the outpost. They go to Warp Factor 7, which is dangerous, then to Warp Factor 8, more-so. They catch up—and find themselves in stasis. A third party sets up a combat between Kirk and the Gorn captain. Only the winner and his ship will survive; the loser will be destroyed. Kirk faces a sort of green man with a reptilian head, Hollywood’s idea of an alien captain. The Gorn is strong but slow and clumsy. Kirk finds the ingredients of gunpowder and knocks the Gorn back, but declines to kill him, because the alien may simply have been defending his territory. That impresses the arbiter, who in turn spares Kirk and the ship.

I bought a new computer, so that I can have a more reliable one for the next novel or novella or story. Naturally I’m in trouble. It’s not working the way I need it to, and I am running into dead ends trying to organize it. As I have remarked on occasion, I have absolutely no belief in the supernatural, which is why the supernatural seems to be chronically out to get me. I remember way back about 65 years ago, to make a pay phone call you had to pick up the receiver, wait for the operator, tell her the number, then put in the correct amount of change. Simple enough, right? I couldn’t do it; my phone jinx prevented it. In fact I developed a phone phobia it took me decades to overcome; modern technology that eliminated the need to wait for an operator helped. My roommate was disgusted. “I’ll show you how to do it,” he said. So we both jammed into the phone booth, picked up the receiver, and waited. After twenty minutes of silence he gave up in disgust, and after that he didn’t hassle me about my not being able to make a call. It never happened to him on his own, only when he was with me. It’s also why I don’t like to travel alone; they cancel my flight, they miss connections, and so on. I have stories that are amusing only in retrospect. So now with a new computer the jinx is in force. One example: I need to be able to input and output files, but the new one has no file handler so I can’t do it. What? you ask disbelievingly. Okay, I finally did a system Find on Dolphin, my file handler. It turns out not to have been installed. How do I install it? I have to go online. The system doesn’t go online; I haven’t gotten that far yet, and if it did, I wouldn’t know how to connect where I need to. I live and work offline, and use dial-up when I need do, except that that no longer works for me either. So what am I to do? All I want is a computer that isn’t Windows or Apple, that I can turn on and use without having to be an expert in its innards, much as I drive my car without knowing its innards, or watch the TV. I’m a writer; I don’t want to have to fight the system to get my work done. I use Linux as a matter of principle; I’m not into it for fun, and I don’t enjoy the challenge of making it work garden variety style. How did I get by before? I had a geek. You know, someone competent in computers. I had a great one, but he died. I got another, but then he moved to Texas. Okay, let’s put this on the line, as it were: do I have a Linux-competent geek type fan in my area, which is Citrus County, Florida, male, female, or alien, who could come in and set my system right, and be available for when it goes wrong, as it inevitably will? I’ll pay the going rates for the time. Email me if you’re competent and interested.

I read Murderous Minds, by Dean A Haycock, PhD. This is a detailed exploration of the nature of psychopathy. My interest dates from when I wrote The Sopaths, my novel of the related condition sociopathy. Dr. Haycock says that most folk use the two terms interchangeably, though he seems not entirely easy with that, and neither am I. The former condition is a mental disease, while the latter, as I define it, is not. In my novel overpopulation results in the supply of souls running out, so that babies starting getting born without souls, and therefore no capacity for empathy, compassion, or conscience. You might think small children would not represent much of a threat. Think again. In the mundane realm the cause is less clear, but the symptoms are similar. A full psychopath—there is a gradient, with some being worse than others—doesn’t give a shit for the rights or feelings of others. He—most are male—wants what he wants, be it power, money or sex, and hardly cares how he gets it. There are gruesome case histories of men raping and murdering children, of violent crimes done on the spur of the moment for money, with no pangs of remorse. Psychopaths are not nice folk, for all that they can often charm psychiatrists when they want to got out of prison or mental hospitals. This rings true in my experience; I recognize the syndrome in a number of folk I have interacted with in the course of my life, and as a child I soon ascertained that child psychiatrists had little notion of the real nature of children. I told them what they wanted to hear and went my way. It is similar with psychopaths. They fool the psychiatrists and get released, and resume their asocial ways. As the book points out, there are two general types: the stupid ones that wind up in prison, and the smart ones that don’t. I am bothered, though, by one of the defining attributes: bed wetting. I was a bed wetter as a child, but never a psychopath. In distant retrospect I conclude that I wet my bed because I was a deep sleeper and troubled by tensions in my family. The transforming point in my life was when I figured out that I was the recipient of, not the cause of, those tensions. In due course my parents divorced, and I made my own marriage, profiting from the lessons I had learned the hard way, so that my own marriage has lasted over 60 years and my children never suffered the way I did. I am different from regular folk; I have seen the astonishment in the faces of others many times as they realize how they misjudged me, but that’s not psychopathy. The real psychopaths are folk you don’t want to know, associate with, do business with, room with, or marry. I recognized the type as I read about it in this book; I wish I had recognized it before interacting, as that would have saved me grief. At any rate, there do seem to be some differences in the brains of psychopaths, though a brain scan can never identify one for certain. Why does the syndrome survive in our species? Because in some instances it is a net benefit. I regret that when discussing empathy the author does not discuss mirror neurons, the basis for empathy. On the other hand I appreciate his discussion of the works of Philip K Dick, who was not a psychopath but did address problems of the mind. Dick may have been halfway crazy but was a good writer with some quite challenging thoughts about the nature of reality. This book is probably too technical for the average entertainment reader, but it does have its points. The author refrains from making pointed parallels to our present political spectrum, where psychopathy is an evident advantage. Maybe he lost his nerve, not being psycho himself. 

Our TV now comes in mostly by day and not by night. But we had rain, and wet weather makes it come in, so we got to watch an evening movie. This was the remake of Dirty Dancing, whose original version I remember from decades ago. This struck me as less dirty and more artful, with the protagonist being a young woman who always preferred books to social activities. But she gets interested, and when the partner of a leading man has to drop out, she steps in to take her place. It is a steep learning curve, but she is determined and manages to carry through. I loved the mannered dancing, side by side as they get the steps and motions exactly right. I admired the scene where she does the challenging swan-like pose, held up at arm’s length over her partner’s head, as if she is flying. Her mother rises up out of her chair in sheer amazement. Her bookish child is doing this? I also liked a scene near the end, where her partner is trying to preserve her innocence, and she bangs on his door demanding to be let in. Finally he charges out and sweeps her in for an ardent kiss, and more. She has in a sense graduated.

We live in the forest, on our tree farm, so we see the local wild life and sometimes get involved. Gopher tortoises burrow beside our house, and an armadillo likes to dig out our buried garbage, leaving it freshly strewn. That’s not ideal for composting. Finally I put fencing down flat on the ground, and that seems to have stopped the digging. Now there are several volunteer tomato plants growing there. We like the deer, but one comes and munches on our Turk’s Cap Hibiscus, so that while we had up to a hundred flowers in prior years, this year it’s more like ten, if that. I’m trying to figure out how to protect them, but it’s harder to outwit a determined deer than you might think. This year a lady wasp decided to colonize our rain gauge, attaching her beginning nest at the one inch line. I didn’t know how to tell her that this was not a safe place. Sure enough, when we had a two inch rain it got submerged. I emptied it carefully, and business continued; now there were half a dozen wasps. What, spray it out? Surely you jest. I’m trying to get along with our forest neighbors, not exterminate them. Then the nest fell down to the bottom of the gauge, but they continued. So finally I put up a second gauge, as I do track our rainfall. Whereupon the wasps vacated. So now I have two gauges there. Ah, well. Meanwhile another wasp nest formed near our back door, and the wasps started stinging me when I passed by to water our plants during the drought. I try to practice live and let live, but this crossed the line. They figured they now owned our yard. So I clipped down the frond where the nest was located and took it to the far slide of the yard, where they are free to continue or depart as they choose. Maybe they got the message; they no longer harass me.

Then there was the wren’s nest. One day it appeared in our closed garage, complete with five eggs. Carroll and Lina Wren had set up shop midst our junk, evidently having a way in and out. So we let them be. But maybe two weeks later the nest was empty and the birds gone. The eggs never got to hatch. We figure a snake found it. Sigh. We like all the local wildlife, but nature is indeed red in tooth and claw, or maybe in this case, scale and fang.

I wear sandals made of rubber, plastic, or imitation leather, but they are getting old and don’t always glue back together perfectly. So Daughter Cheryl, who keeps an eye on we fading oldsters, found some new ones on sale for about a hundred dollars less than the Birkenstocks (I call them Burp ‘n Stops), being about $25 instead of $125, and they are doing well. Cheryl also brought truckloads of gravel to fill in the holes along our three-quarter mile drive. There is a poem that says “A son is a son until he takes a wife/ But a daughter’s a daughter all of her life.” We had the wit to have daughters.

I have been slowly going through cartoon books we have been given or loaned. One is the complete New Yorker set, 650 pages, maybe 2,000 cartoons, with included discs covering the rest of their 38,000 cartoons. Some are funny, while some I simply don’t get. My favorite so far is a picture of a couple floating along a blissful river, with perfect weather, harp playing heralds, towering columns, peacocks, a damsel with a dulcimer, and so on, a virtual paradise. “What was the name of that tranquilizer we took?” he asks her. I’d like to know that too. Another is from the sometimes naughty Shoebox Hall of Fame volume, “Chad is disappointed to learn that the see-through nightie he bought doesn’t work.” She is posing right in right in front of him, gloriously visible through the nightie, but he can’t see through her to watch the game on TV. What an idiot! And a dumb blonde joke: he gives her a surprise party. “Today’s your birthday.” “It is?” she asks, surprised. I used to send my blond daughter Penny dumb blonde jokes, and she used to send me dumb blond jokes. Note the spelling: with the E it’s a woman; without it, it’s male, or the color. Many people get it wrong. And no, blondes aren’t really dumb; for one thing, half of them are dyed brunettes. For another, dumb often means mute, which they aren’t. And one I encountered when cleaning up the study, from The Far Side: a man entering Hell has to choose between two doors. One says “Damned if you do.” The other says “Damned if you don’t.” Forget Hell; Life is too often like that, isn’t it?

I am a workaholic. I am constantly going, whether writing, reading, watching videos or whatever, as this column indicates, and the very notion of doing nothing appalls me. I am also a writer some fans call a creative genius. (That ugly sound you just heard was my critics choking to death on bitter laughter. My critics have a high attrition rate. Serves them right, no?) Article reprinted in THE WEEK is titled “A Better Way to Work.” It seems that many of our most revered figures work with intense focus, but only for four hours a day. The rest of the time they are hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Charles Darwin, who expounded the theory of evolution, was one. Charles Dickens, the literary giant, was another. Leading mathematicians, great musicians, chess legend Bobby Fischer, Microsoft founder Bill Gates—they’re all over. Where did I go wrong? My writing time is indeed limited, because I have letters to answer, books to read, meals to make; life constantly gets in the way. Maybe it’s all for the best after all.

Admiration: in Mexico a young woman won an ultra-marathon—31 miles—wearing sandals and a skirt. She carried no special accessories, she just ran—and beat the other women. More power to her!

Editor’s letter in the June 2, 2017 issue of THE WEEK scares me in retrospect. Editor in Chief William Falk remarks on the meteor of 66 million years ago, that did enormous damage and wiped out the dinosaurs. He says that according to a new BBC documentary they have found that it had hit in the worst possible place: the shallow coastal waters where the underlying sediments were filled with gypsum, that generated a cloud of sulfur that brought on a record cold snap. Had it hit thirty seconds sooner, or later, it would have struck deeper ocean and not done that, and most dinosaurs would have survived. Probably the mammals would not have risen to prominence, including we humans. Thirty seconds! We like to think that we came to the fore from merit, but we were remarkably lucky.

Article in NEW SCIENTIST about atheism. Let me clarify, as I have done before, that I am an agnostic. The theist says “There is a God, and He is Mine.” How does he know? For this, faith is not sufficient, as every religion thinks it is the only true one. There needs to be something objective, and so far that evidence has not been produced. Yes, many of the religiostic folk are ready to kill in the name of their gods, but that’s passion, not proof. The atheist says “There is no god.” Okay, how does he know? Maybe there’s no objective proof that any god exists, but neither is there any proof that no god exists. So the atheist is operating on faith also: faith that there is no god. The agnostic says “The proof is not in, either way.” I am agnostic because that is the only truly rational position . Show me a god, and I’ll believe. Show me a flying saucer, and I’ll believe. Show me a real live ghost and I’ll believe. Until then, I have faith that I am the only really sensible one in the arena. Okay, the article has interesting thoughts, such as that the reason churches are full of death imagery is that the fear of death is good for their business. Religion usually features a belief in the supernatural. Also there are creation beliefs, afterlife beliefs, magical causation beliefs, rituals, and sacred non-negotiable values. But, some say, atheism must be a religion in itself, the religion of non-belief. They may have a case there, if the atheist s operating on faith. But the article refutes that, because it is like saying that the OFF switch on a lamp is a form of light. Nonbelief is nonbelief, not religion. I conclude with a lovely motto the article presents: “Thank God I’m an atheist.” Or in my case, an agnostic.

No new word on the Xanth movie or TV series, but they surely remain in the works. I’ve got faith. Stay tuned.

PIERS

Jewel Lye 2017
HI- 

This is an inordinately long column, about 16,000 words when I normally try for about 3,000. This is mainly because I watched the Star Trek original season and made notes on every episode. So if that bores you, just skip past any paragraph that starts “Episode” until you get to something more to your taste.

{Web underling’s note: In converting from the file format Mr. A prefers to the HTML coding needed for this site, we often encounter wacky bits of code the underling must cull. There was so much this time, the underling relied on a timesaving search-and-replce technique, then tried to clean up the text wrap. Any stray blank spaces in the middle of words indicated where that process did not quite work. Apologies for the ragged reading.}

Open Road has two promotions of my books this month: WereWoman on July 4th for $1.99, so you can catch it if you hurry, and Xanth #40 Isis Orb July 29th for 2.99. WereWoman features Phil, a novice private eye in a community of supernaturals, or supes: werewolves, witches, demons, vampires, goblins, ghosts, succubi, zombies, and who knows what else. He is unusual in that he is a were who changes not into an animal, but into a woman. That helps him conceal his identity on a spy mission. Then something starts killing supes, and a sexy witch hires him to handle it. Then it gets complicated. I am now pondering a sequel, possibly titled E Motion. If you like supernatural events, this is your novel. Isis Orb was summarized by a ten year old girl, who is older now, and I believe she likes what I made of it. You should too.

An anthology I have a story in is now available at Amazon. This is Forsaken Stories Abandoned Places. Mine is “Privy,” about an outhouse that still stinks a decade after being deserted. Hmm; there’s a odor; what’s going on? My story also appeared in Cautionary Tales.

I watched the Discover video “Clash of the Cavemen,” which concerns the Neandertals versus the Cromagnons, the first modern man. The Neandertals had dominated Europe for a hundred thousand years, and drove out any moderns who intruded, but in the end could not compete with the moderns. They were tougher, but not as smart. The moderns had better technology, such as sharper, lighter spears, warmer clothing, better shelters. The two species diverged about 400,000 years ago and were 99.9% similar genetically, but the moderns were artistic and probably far superior in language. Symbolism made their minds more versatile. The moderns’ larynx was lower and better able to sound vowels; probably their language was superior. When hunting, Neandertals ambushed big game and fought it up close, which lead to injuries. The moderns evolved to run, and are among the best long distance runners in the animal kingdom, so they can hunt on the open plain. The Neandertals could not; they were not built to run well. For perhaps 5,000 years both species shared Europe. How did they interact? They must have fought on occasion. They must have interbred. Kidnapped Neandertal women would have been used for sex, and some might have conceived. The video says there’s no genetic record, but more recent research indicates that there is a trace. My story “Beast Wife” tells how a Neandertal woman, outcast from her tribe and facing starvation, makes a deal with a Cromagnon hunting party she encounters: unlimited sex in exchange for food and protection for herself and her baby. They accept and take her into their tribe, and a trace of that lineage remains today. How did they go extinct? One theory is that our diseases wiped them out, as they had no immunity. We saw that when the Europeans invaded the Americas: their diseases wiped out 90% of the natives, making the conquest relatively easy. It does happen. Also, as the video does not say, the Neandertals may have gotten devastated by a super volcano and almost wiped out, clearing the way for the invading horde. Naturally the victors credit their superior qualities rather than the blind luck of being safely in
Africa when the volcano blew out. Ever thus.

I watched Rogue One, a Star Wars prequel. I found it a bit hard to follow, but of course I date from a generation or two back; my brain is relatively fossilized. Jyn Erso, daughter of scientist Galen Erso, is a daring fugitive. Galen is marked for death, because he is involuntarily working on the Death Star, the Empire’s ultimate weapon. But he has programmed a secret flaw in it that will destroy it if invoked. If they steal the plans to the Death Star they can take it out. He sends a message to Jyn to tell her that. The situation seems hopeless for the Rebellion, but a few volunteers join Jyn to make the raid on the data vault. They call themselves Rogue One. If you like weird machines, wild action, and phenomenal slow motion crashes, they are here galore. They get the plans and broadcast them to the galaxy so that anyone can use them. Mission accomplished, maybe.

I watched Solace, an Anthony Hopkins movie. There’s something about that first name that appeals to me; maybe some day I’ll figure it out. He, as John Clancy, is a sensible doctor, but psychic, with isolated flashes, and when he meets the pretty lady cop, Katherine, he gets a flash of her head freshly bloodied with a bullet He didn’t want to get involved, but that changes his mind. The blurb says that the serial killer they are after can read minds. That’s not exactly the case, but close enough, and makes it a challenge. He’s like John, psychic, only better. As they follow clues, they are doing exactly what the killer wants them to do; it’s a trap. There’s another angle: the killer seems to kill folk who are going to die soon anyway, from causes like cancer. Then the killer, Charles Ambrose, comes to John and explains how it’s really mercy killing he does, sparing folk terminal agony and medical expenses that will wipe out their families. Then it becomes a contest between psychic and psychic. Charles is tired of this burden and wants John to take over. Katherine gets shot but survives; Charles dies, as he intended to And John may indeed take over. This is a thriller with a difference.

I watched Fathers and Daughters Jake is a novelist who is arguing with his wife when they crash. She dies, he gets brain trauma. He is left to raise his five year old daughter Katie, “ Potato Chip” They love each other, but he needs treatment at a mental hospital first, so he won’t go into psychosis. Katie stays with her aunt, Jake’s wife’s sister, and her family. Seven months later he is out, but sister wants to adopt Katie. They are better equipped to raise her than Jake is. Then we segue to Katie 25 years later, who feels incapable of love. She has sex with men she doesn’t even like, just to have some sort of feeling. She’s a social worker who works with distressed children, notably Lucy, a black girl who lost her mother a year ago and hasn’t talked since. They are going to transfer her elsewhere, evidently not having helped her. Then she talks: she wants to stay with Katie. But the rules of social work do not permit this, and they lose each other, to mutual distress. Meanwhile, 25 years earlier, Jake is autographing copies of his books when he develops severe tremors. Critics start panning his books. In the future Katie meets an aspiring writer she really comes to like. She also teaches Lucy to ride a bike, just as her father taught her. But she is conflicted about being a girlfriend. Jake, now a successful novelist, suffers a bad seizure and dies while Katie is still a child. She messes up her relationship with her boyfriend, but in the end realizes that she has found love and they reunite. This is no simple love story; it’s a complicated one, with difficult shades of gray, more like real life. Real people are complicated.

I watched 10 Cloverfield Lane, which despite its dull title is a thriller. Michelle is mad at her boyfriend, and drives off—only to crash. She wakes in an underground bunker, her leg chained, with an IV in her arm. Her captor is an older man, Howard, and another man, a neighbor Emmett, is also there. It appears that Howard is not completely sane. Michelle makes a break for it, trying to get out, but there’s a woman outside demanding desperately to get in. Michelle doesn’t trust that either. So they’re there with plenty of food, games to play, a sort of family. There’s the sound of helicopters: the enemy proceeding with Phase Two, cleaning out survivors of Phase One? There is evidence that Howard is lying about his family. Did he kill his wife and daughter, or kill a neighbor girl? Michelle and Emmett are uncertain. They plan to overpower Howard and go for help outside. But Howard catches on and shoots Emmett, and dissolves the body in a barrel of acid. Now it’s just Howard and Michelle. Te wul[d evidently like to have a more intimate relationship with this pretty girl. She flees him, dons a protective suit, breaks out, and discovers breathable air outside. There are aliens out there, with their weird spacecraft, and they are soon after her. She escapes them too, and is on the way to join the surviving remnant of humanity. What a relief!

I watched Wonder Woman, not the current movie but the prior animated version. It is set in the framework of the Greek gods and goddesses. The Amazons are hidden away on a secret island for centuries. Then a modern fighter plane crash lands on it and the Amazons are chasing the downed pilot, Steve. They make him prisoner. Then the imprisoned god of war, Ares, escapes via treachery, and Diana is designated to pursue him into the contemporary world and deal with him. She becomes Wonder Woman. She and Steve go into that realm, but Ares is already well on the way to loosing the forces of Hell to devastate the world. There will be much slaughter and many souls descending to Hell to serve its lord. Now the regular Amazons fight back, and there is war. The good girls finally win. Wonder Woman returns to act as liaison and to be with Steve. It’s a fun movie, albeit somewhat lightweight. I suspect the current movie is similar.

I read My Shorts by Arthur M. Doweyko. The shorts in question are thirteen of his short stories, despite the cover illustration of underpants on the clothesline. I won’t comment on every one, except to say that they are diverse and often surprising, though the volume could have used copyediting. “The Probability Machine” sees the protagonist ignorantly messing with a machine that sees the near future, bringing disaster. You know, like a kid finding a loaded gun and playing with it; bound to be mischief. In “Linda” Linda uses a stone to bash a soldier so that her family can escape; if there was more of a point, I missed it. “P’sall Senji” sees Harry encounter a green alien who is wounded. The alien warns him of danger to the president; don’t let the alien emissary touch the president. Then the alien disintegrates, and its up to Henry to save the president. He tries, only to find himself as part of the alien trap. He should have stayed clear. “Harry and Harry” is a tricky time travel story. “The Catch” seems ordinary, with a wife and daughter waiting for their men to return with the catch, and an ugly shock at the end. “The Boy Who Couldn’t Lie” has a boy who tells lies that then come true. That messes him up until he figures out a way to make one lie really pay. “Cold Heart” has men land on a nice planet and meet the lovely telepathic Lan. Then it gets ugly. “Companion” raises a provocative question: if you destroy a computer game that is sentient—that is, conscious—is it murder? “Blue Ice” offers a service where you can pay to have your DNA checked to accurately predict the time of your death. Would you do it? “Andrew the Last” sees the last cyborg with a human brain about to be upgraded—but will that improve or eliminate his real self? “Cherry Creek” is set in 1881 when young men start dying unexpectedly and suspiciously. It seems that a generation ago an American Indian girl was accidentally killed, and the fact cowered up. Now it seems that her ghost is killing the grown children of the men who killed her, and leaving black feathers to mark their bodies. Can the last one escape? She tries, but. Overall you are bound to find something on your wavelength in this collection, and you might find yourself thinking about some of the issues touched. I regard the thoughts as more important than the plots.

I watched Li’l Abner, which is old enough to be in black and white. Sadie Hawkins Day is coming to hillbilly Dogpatch, and pretty Daisy Mae is not the only girl with an eye on handsome ignorant Abner. He thinks he’s going to die in a day, so he plans to marry Daisy tomorrow. But first he means to capture Earthquake McGoon, to get the reward on him, $25, so his family can live happily ever after. Comes the race, and Daisy has competition in Wendy Wildcat. All sorts of shenanigans as the girls chase the boys. But Daisy finally catches him. Then the bonus feature Private Snuffy Smith. This is another slapstick backwoods story. Hootin’ Hollar Moonshiners battle with revenuers. Then one of their batches turns things invisible. So he makes his dog invisible, and other people think he’s imagining the animal, except for the barking. They have lost track of a new range finder, and are conducting a search that looks like an invasion of Hootin’ Hollar, with tanks and airplanes. It becomes like a pitched battle. It’s a mock battle; soldiers dusted with flour are officially dead, but not everyone knows that. Farce throughout, but fun.

I watched Charlotte’s Web. I read the book long ago and wanted to see it “live” for all that it’s animation. It’s a musical. The sow has piglets on the farm, but one’s a runt and can’t get in to the teat to feed. The farmer is about to kill it, as it won’t survive, but daughter Fern tearfully begs him to spare it. So he gives it to her to raise. It’s mutual love at first sight. Thus Wilbur Pig joins the family. Until he gets big, when he is sold to another farm and has to separate from Fern. He learns he can talk, as all the animals can, though the adult humans are in denial about that. But he is unhappy because he misses his friend Fern. He needs a new friend. He finally finds one in Charlotte, a spider, and another in a gosling. Fern visits, so they are reunited to a degree, and she can understand the animals. But there is a looming shadow: when fall comes, Wilbur will be slaughtered for meat. Charlotte is trying to think of a way to save him. She weaves the words SOME PIG into her web, attracting a crowd, but the effect doesn’t last. Same thing with TERRIFIC, and RADIANT, and HUMBLE. In the fall they take him to the fair to show him off, the Humble Pig. If he wins the prize maybe he’ll be spared. Sigh; another pig wins. But Wilbur also wins a medal, and is saved, thanks in large part to Charlotte’s efforts. Charlotte herself has finished her life, and dies of old age. They save her egg sac, and in the spring over a hundred baby spiders hatch, three of whom stay to keep Wilbur company. He is happy, but never forgets Charlotte. I think the movie does justice to the book, and it’s a poignant story that doesn’t hide the fact of death in the background.

I watched Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn, two classic Mark Twain tales merged into one the movie narrated by Twain himself, theoretically. Been a long times since I read the books, and I don’t much remember the details. Tom and Huck are hiding in the cemetery when they witness a murder. They don’t dare tell lest the murderer come after them. Next day Tom is punished for getting caught out at night by having to whitewash the picket fence. He persuades friends to do it as a privilege. He’s a persuasive rascal. Then an innocent man is about to be hanged for the murder because of the false testimony of a supposed friend. They dig under the jail wall to free him, but he is recaptured and put on trial. Then Tom starts to testify, and the murderer makes a break for it. Then they think Tom has drowned, so he gets to attend his own funeral service. Then they see robbers fetching their cache of coins; they think the robbers will take them to the Big Eyes Caves. Tom takes girlfriend Becky there, and they get lost without light, then hunted by the bad man. They escape, and Tom finds his way out in the morning. Tom and Huck return to find the stolen treasure; the bad guy catches him, but they escape and he dies in the cave. Tom and Huck are rich, now well dressed as they part company. Huck travels the Mississippi River with his friend the runaway slave Jim. Tom and Huck never see each other again, but the narrator still has the slingshot Huck was carrying. Hmm. It’s a wild story, but seems reasonably true to the originals as I faintly remember them.

I watched Star Trek Episode #19 “Tomorrow is Yesterday.” The Enterprise is getting drawn into a star, resists, and gets flung into the past: 1960s Earth. A fighter plane comes after it, they use the tractor beam on it, but it breaks up. They do rescue the pilot, Captain Christopher. He wants to go home, but now he knows too much, and his knowledge will mess up the future and maybe eliminate them all. But if they don’t return him, that will mess up the future similarly. They beam down to a top secret base to eliminate dangerous records, only to complicate things further. Finally they move back even farther, to take Christopher to a time just before this happened, so he doesn’t remember. Then they fling back to their own time. Meanwhile their computer system is messed up, calling Kirk “Dear.”

Episode #20 “Court Martial.” They have suffered damage in an Ion storm and must set down on Star Base 11 for repairs. There Kirk is arrested for murder and perjury. He was blamed for an error during a storm, years ago, culpable negligence that cost Finney his life. He demands a court martial to clear his name. Meanwhile he encounters an old girlfriend there, Areel, who is assigned to prosecute. The case is damning, but Spock discovers an anomaly. The computer, which is in effect Kirk’s accuser, is not performing perfectly. Why not? They do a sound check, eliminating the sounds of all their heartbeats, and find one remaining: Finney, who is after all alive. He has pied the computer and the ship, but Kirk fixes it before it crashes. And of course wins his case.

Episode #21 “The Return of the Archons.” Sulu and another man are beamed down to a planet to search for a ship lost a century ago, but something is strange, and only Sulu returns, essentially mindless. Kirk and Spock lead a party to investigate. All the folk there seem mindless. Until some sort of witching hour, when they seem to go crazy. At another hour they return to “normal” mindlessness. It’s the Festival. It seems to be a kind of religion, Landrew must be obeyed. The visitors are not of the Body. Thu natives slowly attack, but the crew stun them. Is it telepathic control? They are essentially under siege of Landrew. Cloaked figures enforce compliance. They wonder whether there is a computer controlling the folk. Kirk and Spock fake conversion, assisted by one of the devotees who does not like the control. They face down the machine and it destroys itself.

Episode #22 “Earth Seed.” They discover an ancient Earth spaceship deep in space, but it is not crewed by humans. Kirk, Bones, Scotty, and shapely Lt. McGivers, a specialist in 1990s Earth, beam aboard. There are humans there, in suspended animation, 72 of them. It is the Botany Bay, and there is no historical record of it. They revive an Indian who is a superior person, physically. His name is Kahn, a former ruthless leader. McGivers is fascinated with him, and he takes advantage of that, and makes her his accomplice so he can take over the Enterprise. His own personnel now control the ship. But when he tries to kill Kirk, McGivers changes sides and saves him. They fight, Kirk wins, and drops Kahn and his people off at a habitable world, together with McGivers, who chooses to join them.

Episode 23 “A Taste of Armageddon.” They visit the alien colony Eminiar VII, on the orders of the Ambassador. They seem entirely human, especially Mea, the woman who greets them. They are at war with another planet in their system. The war is by computers; those “killed” have 24 hours to report for disintegration. The personnel of the Enterprise are “killed” and ordered to go planetside, but they catch on. Kirk takes Mea prisoner before she can be disintegrated. Scotty, in charge of the ship, refuses to lower the defensive screens; he is justifiably suspicious. Thanks to supreme nerve, Kirk, Spock, and Scotty finally prevail, save themselves and the ship and ending the war. This is one tense episode.

Episode 24 “This Side of Paradise.” They check as agricultural colony, Omicron, fearing that the people have not survived, because of deadly radiation. But they have survived and seem fine. There’s a woman, Leila, whom Spock knew six years before. There are no animals, not even insects, yet their crops are fine. A flower blasts Spock with vapor and makes him emotional. Now he loves Leila, and is more interested in kissing her than in his duties. Then the others get dosed by the flowers. Only Kirk is unaffected. A plant is beamed aboard, and the whole crew starts beaming down. It turns out that the plant spores drift through space until they find the right planet, collect in plants, and give their new hosts perfect health and contentment. Kirk alone remains as he was. Until he gets blasted again by a flower, and changes. But fights it off. Then provokes Spock to anger, and the strong emotion overrides the spores. Then they provoke others, including the colonists, until all are free of the spores. The colony will be resettled elsewhere, where they can truly accomplish things instead of living in the happy illusion of paradise.

I read Reverie of Gods by Diego Valenzuela. He write The Armor of God, which I reviewed here in 2014, and The Unfinished World, 2016. This is a larger novel. There are many characters; the main one is Leander, who is assigned to a mission that is theoretically a test, a kind of qualifying for advancement. It is led by Claire, and they encounter Adel and little Eva. But it quickly get serious, as people connected get brutally killed. Hardly anything is as it first seems. One night Adel seduces Leander, but then it turns out that it wasn’t really her, but an alien female emulating Adel, who is killing others. Then he does have an affair with the real Adel, but she’s not what she seems either, and neither is the child Eva. There’s a formidable plot to destroy the present order that Leander somehow has to thwart while trying to save Adel’s life, because he loves her. That’s only part of one thread of a complex tapestry. There’s a lot to assimilate here, as the author has worked out a world where universities are called cradles, and many folk have “irises” that are deadly built in mind controlled weapons, each different. Unfortunately it needs copy editing; there are typos and wrongly chosen words throughout, and portions become avoidably confusing. It’s like a powerful spaceship with unfinished details, still well worth your while if you like mental challenge.

Episode 25 “The Devil in the Dark” has miners on a far planet Janus VI getting mysteriously killed by something unseen. They are burned to crisps. The Enterprise must deal with this problem. It seems that very strong corrosive is being used. They conjecture that this is silicon based life, as there are basketball sized balls of silicon scattered through the mine. They spy the monster, which looks like a giant humped pepperoni pizza, and shoot it, but only dislodge a small section. Analysis confirms the silicon. Then Kirk encounters it,and there is a standoff; it does not attack. Spock mind melds with it and learns it is a Horta, highly intelligent. and in great pain. He touches it, and learns that the silicon nodules are the Horta’s eggs, about to hatch, which the miners have been destroying. They compromise: the Horta tunnels, and the miners take the elements. Each profits. I like that resolution.

Episode 26 “Errand of Mercy” has trouble with the Klingons. The Enterprise is headed to the colony Organia when they get attacked. They destroy the enemy ship and resume their flight to the planet. Kirk and Spock beam down to check the situation, leaving Sulu in charge of the ship. But the natives see no danger and decline to take any defensive action. The Klingons invade; Kirk and Spock are stranded on Organia, and soon made captive. The Klingon commander, Kor, rather respects Kirk as a worthy enemy. Then the Organians make all weapons on both sides too hot to handle. Then they reveal themselves as pure energy creatures, far beyond the warring parties.

Episode 27 is “The Alternative Factor.” They approach a lifeless planet. Then the galaxy’s magnetic field blinks twice, and life appears on the planet, apparently human. This should be impossible. Kirk, Spock, and four men beam to the surface, where they find Lazarus, a man who says they can still be stopped. HQ sends a Code 1, invasion status. The commander says the effect was noted across the galaxy, but strongest here. They must investigate. Lazarus says it’s a thing they have to destroy. Lazarus seems to fight an invisible foe. He says he’s a time traveler, as is the enemy. He steals dilithium crystals the ship needs for power. The enemy is from a parallel universe, an antimatter realm; if the two meet, there will be total annihilation. Kirk puts the two Lazarus’s together and destroys the connection. The universe is now safe.

Episode 28 is “The City on the Edge of Forever.” The Enterprise, approaching a planet, is shaken by a series of ripples in space/time that burn out one device and shake up the personnel. Dr. McCoy–”Bones”–gets accidentally overdosed with 50 times the proper medicinal dose. He beams himself down to the planet, and Kirk, Spock, and four others go after him. They encounter ancient ruins that are still operating, a time portal. McCoy leaps through it, changing history, eliminating their present. Uh-oh. Kirk and Spock follow, hoping to catch Bones and eliminate whatever he did to wipe out their future. They arrive in Depression America, maybe a week before Bones, get jobs at a mission house run by pretty Edith Keeler, and set about collecting electronic tubes and such to construct a mnemonic device to locate McCoy. Kirk dates Edith, at her behest. Spock’s device foresees that Edith will either die, or become a vital figure in Earth’s future course. She must be the key that Bones affects. But which alternative secures their future? Her life or her death? Bones arrives, and a native steals his transporter. It seems that Bones saves Edith from getting killed, and that deviously leads to Germany’s victory in World War Two, and the change of history. They must see that Edith dies on schedule. But Kirk has fallen in love with Edith. Then she dies in a car accident and Kirk lets it happen. They return to the future. All is well…

Episode 29 “Operation Annihilate!” They trace a plague of mass insanity that travels from world to world in one section of the galaxy. Can they stop it from striking again? Kirk’s married brother Sam lives there. They rescue his wife Aurelia and his son, but Sam is dead, and then Aurelia dies. They encounter flying blobs resembling those of Heinlein’s novel The Puppet Masters that puncture people and inject tissue that controls them. One attacks Spock, putting him into intense pain. He fights it off and returns to the planet to capture one of the creatures so they can examine it. They conclude that it is an almost indestructible brain cell in a larger creature. Will they have to destroy the planet to stop it? Kirk refuses to accept that. He conjectures that maybe intense light can kill it. They try it on Spock. It works, but blinds him. They they discover that they could have used another frequency; they didn’t have to blind him. Fortunately he recovers his sight; Vulcans heal well. They have stopped the plague and saved the planet.

Season Two, Episode 1 “Amok Time.” Spock is acting strangely emotional, even throwing fits. He requests shore leave on planet Vulcan, and Kirk grants it but orders Spock to sick bay. Bones concludes that Spock must get to Planet Vulcan immediately or he will die. They go there for Spock to meet his promised wife. Kirk and Bones beam down with Spock to witness the ceremony. The intricacies of the situation require that Spock and Kirk fight to the death, but Bones arranges it so that Kirk’s death is more apparent than real. He survives, and Spock is glad, and no longer interested in marriage. This interests me for another reason: it was one of the ones I saw the second half of, way back when, and I remember that it was a different Vulcan woman. This is not the same as the original. For one thing the present woman is prettier, and more completely clothed. They thought I wouldn’t notice?

Episode 2 “Who Mourns for Adonais.” The Enterprise is halted in space by a giant hand formed of energy. A huge face appears before the ship, and they are obliged to visit planetside. Their host says he is Apollo, and they are to worship him. He magically garbs the lovely historian Carolyn in a sexy gown and walks away with her. They try to oppose him, but he has too much power. Then Carolyn rejects him. He conjures a storm, the ship fires on the source of his power thus revealed, and he loses it, and fades out.

Episode 3 “The Changeling.” They are going to a settled planet, but there are no signs of life. Then something crashes into them at warp speed. They are under attack. It is Nomad. They beam it aboard. It’s a machine. It floats to Kirk. It calls Kirk the Creator. Its mission is to eliminate imperfection. Its creator was Roykirck; that’s why it confuses Kirk for him. It was thought destroyed, but survived damaged. But it may decide to exterminate them. It kills Scotty, then revives him. It wipes Uhura’s memory and they set about reeducating her. Spock mind-reads it and learns that it’s not the original Nomad; it merged with another program. Now it means to go to Earth and destroy life there. Kirk shows it that it is imperfect, and it destroys itself. That saves mankind.

Episode 4 “Mirror, Mirror.” They teed dilithium crystals, but the proprietors are reluctant. Kirk, Scotty, Uhura, and Bones beam back aboard—to a ship where a bearded Spock governs. They are in different uniforms. In fact, in a different universe, where assassination of officers is a way to advance in rank. How do they return to their own? Meanwhile Kirk must rain death on a planet, or be assassinated by Spock, who will then become captain. Kirk also has a sexy girlfriend, Marlena. They make plans to transfer back to their own universe, but Spock catches them. Marlena helps them prevail. Kirk tries to persuade Spock to take over and change the ugly course they are following, with Marlena’s formidable help. Spock says he will consider it. They beam back and all is well again, at least in this universe.

Episode 5 “The Apple.” They beam down to a planet resembling the Garden of Eden, but it has some deadly plants. They are being stalked by stealthy humanoids. Something from the planet nullifies much of the power of the Enterprise; it will crash in a few hours if not fixed. It seems that mischief is afoot. They try to beam back up, but this fails. Kirk, Spock, Bones and others are trapped on the planet. They capture a native, who takes them to the leader, Vaal, who seems to be a statue whose open mouth accepts their offerings. The natives seem not to know about human reproduction; there are no children. Then they get the word: kill the strangers. The mission fights off the natives, and the ship fires on Vaal and kills it. The natives will learn to cope, to love, and to have children.

Episode 6 “The Doomsday Machine.” The solar system they are headed for has been destroyed. Only a derelict ship remains. These are not good signs. Kirk, Bones, Scotty and a party beam aboard the ship. They find one survivor, the dazed captain. It seems that an immense robot from another galaxy breaks up planets and eats the pieces. A doomsday machine. Now that machine appears, like a planetoid sized minnow with a giant fiery maw, and orients on the Enterprise. The wreck’s captain pulls rank and takes over, determined to attack the robot. Spock finally relieves him of command, but he steals a shuttle craft and goes after the machine. He flies into its maw, doing it minor damage. Kirk flies the derelict ship into it, overloads the engine, and explodes it inside the maw, finally terminating it as he gets beamed back in the last second.

Episode 7 “Catspaw.” Kirk, Spock, and Bones beam down to a planet where Scotty and Sulu have disappeared. It is foggy and bleak, and wailing spooks say Kirk will die. They find a castle, enter and find a black cat. They walk into a trap and wake chained to a wall. Scotty and Sulu appear, dazed, and release them. They meet Korob, the wizardly master of the castle. And Sylvia, who suspends an image of the enterprise above a candle flame, and via sympathetic magic the ship overheats. Sylvia interviews Kirk, alone, trying to seduce him, showing that she can assume many woman forms. I note that the cat is never present when Sylvia is. Kirk plays her better than she plays him. She catches on, a woman scorned. Korob releases them while the furious cat returns. She is indeed the cat, but both are illusions. The aliens are finally revealed in their real form as they die: weird blue birdlike things.

Episode 8 “I, Mudd.” A visitor takes over the ship. He turns out to be an andr oid , and requires the ship. So they make a four day detour. It turns out that Mudd, a con man of t he prior Season One Episode 6, “Mudd’s Women,” has managed to set this up, and now has two hundred thousand men and pretty women, androids. They need human input, and Kirk is to be it. Mudd has an android emulating his own nasty wife so he can mock her. He gives the androids purpose. Now the whole crew is landbound while the androids crew the ship. They mean to serve all mankind, and thus control it. Kirk supervises a show that is completely illogical, confusing the master mind. They craft a paradox that paralyzes it. Then they set Mudd up with reprogrammed androids, including several copies of his shrewish wife to berate him. Lovely!

Episode 9 “Metamorphosis” They are supposed to medicate and deliver a lady ambassador to a critical area, but get sidetracked to a small earthlike planet. They meet Zefram, who supposedly died 150 years ago, but he is kep t alive by The Companion,” a mysterious presence. The lady’s illness progresses; they need to get her to the ship for treatment, but the entity that governs this planet prevents it. Then the entity merges with the lady, and she loves Zefram. But she can’t leave the planet, so Zefram will stay. They will find another ambassador to stop the war.
Episode 10 “Journey to Babel.” They go to Vulcan to pick up the ambassador and his wife, to deliver them to Planet Babel for a conference It turns out that they are Spock’s parents. There are a nu m ber of other ambassadors aboard, not all of them friendly with each other. The Vulcan has words with a different ambassador—who later turns up murdered. That makes the Vulcan a suspect. He also suffers from the equivalent of a heart condition; Spock must donate blood for surgery. Then Kirk gets attacked and injured and Spock must take over. He can’t take the time to save his father, despite the pleading of his human mother. Kirk pr e tends to be more recovered than he is, and relieves Spock—just in time for the crisis. He handles it, and Spock’s father survives. Spock’s mother understands neither father nor son.

Episode 11 “Friday’s Child.” They beam down to meet dangerous natives, to make a agreement for valuable minerals. But there is a klingon there, who kills a crewman. This is mischief. Meanwhile there is a distress call from a freighter being attacked by a klingon ship. Scotty, in charge, goes to help. But it’s a fake, meant to lead them astray. Meanwhile, on land, they seek to rescue the pregnant Capellan woman Eleen (pronounced Elly-en), widow of the former chief. She is about to give birth. She does, but doesn’t want the baby. But finally accepts it. Scotty backs off the klingon ship, then rescues the stranded party. All ends well.

Episode 12 “The Deadly Years.” They report for a routine resupply for a colony, only to discover the inhabitants impossibly aged. Maybe it’s a Romulan experiment. Kirk meets a former girlfriend, Mireme. He also starts suffering small m emory lapses, and arthritis. He’s aging, as so are other ship members who went to the planet. They have maybe a week to live. Except for one, Chekov. The Commodore requires a competency hearing to replace Kirk, and Spock reluctantly has to go along. The Commodore takes over, but he has never had a field command and gets the ship in trouble. They devise a possible cure using adrenalin, and Kirk takes it. He recovers, takes back command, bluffs out the Romulans, and saves the ship.

Episode 13 “Obsession” They have just confirmed a vein of mineral 20 times as hard as diamond: Dikironio. But a deadly mist is killing men, draining their blood of hemoglobin. Something like this wiped out half the crew of the Farragut ship 11 years ago. Kirk was a young officer on his first mission there. Now he’s obsessed with this possible intelligent danger to the galaxy. They intersect it in space, and its gets into the ship. Spock is able to withstand it. Kirk sets a trap for it, at g reat risk to himself, and manages to destroy it.

Episode 14 “Wolf in the Fold.” Kirk, Bones, and Scotty, on therapeutic shore leave on Argeli us, watch a sexy dancing girl. Then outside she gets stabbed, and Scotty is there with a knife and no memory of the occasion Uh-oh. Then comes a second killing, and Scotty is implicated again. T h en a third. They beam the party aboard where they use a computer to examine Scotty’s mind and memory. The name Jack the Ripper comes up: could it be a nonhuman murderer? So it seems, and now it controls the ship’s computer. They null that by tranquilizing all the ship’s personnel and putting the computer on the solution of pi, an endless calculation, then beam the thing into space.

Episode 15 “The Trouble with Tribbles.” They are headed for Sherman Planet, that both humans and klingons claim, and receive an emergency call from space station K-7. It’s not an emergency; they merely want to protect a superior strain of grain. Insults are exchanged, and there is a human/klingon brawl. Uhura, on shore leave, gets an adorable little creature: a tribble. It multiplies and next day they have dozens of the cute little furry cooing fluff balls. Meanwhile on the space station a klingon provokes a brawl by telling Scotty the Enterprise is a garbage scow. The tribbles continue to multiply, threatening to overwhelm the ship and the space station Kirk wants them off—but how? Then they start dying. Something in the special grain is killing them. It has been poisoned. The tribbles don’t like klingons, and the sentiment is mutual The shyster who sold the first tribble is assigned the 17 year chore of cleaning them out of the space station Scotty transports all the ship’s tribbles to the klingon ship just before it leaves Hmm. This is one fun, naughty story.

I watched the comment by David Gerrold, who wrote the tribbles episode. They made an animation episode, which had both advantages and limitations. The tribbles turned out pink, because the colorist was color blind. (You’d think color perception would be a requirement for a colorist. Evidently not. I don’t understand Hollywood.) He discusses the problem of fans suggesting ideas and then thinking that anything similar in the program is stolen from them, even if it was in the works before they suggested it. Yes, that happens; it has happened to me, though I carefully give credit to reader ideas I use. Gerrold says “May all of your tribbles be little ones.” They were going to do a live action sequel, but had a new director who I suspect was a klingon, who d idn’t like tribbles.

Then on that disc is an episode of Deep Space 9 with its completely different ship and characters. They warp back to the time of t he first Enterprise in pursuit of a bad man who means to kill Kirk and change the course of history. That would be disastrous for those of the far future. So they avoid direct contact and search for the culprit, preventing him from his mischief. From this I learned the meaning of uniform colors: regular crew people wear red, leaders wear other colors like blue or gold They discover tribbles. One of them meets his own great grandmother, who he finds attractive, and wonders whether he is destined to become his own great grandfather. The paradox is scary. We see a replay of the human/klingon brawl, this time witnessed by the visitors from the future. It seems that one of the future women came from this time; she recognizes Dr. McCoy but of course does not introduce herself. Maybe I’ll find out about her when I get to that series. They find the planted bomb and beam it to space, where it explodes. History has been saved. The captain does briefly meet Kirk without revealing his origin. They return to their own time. “Trials and Tribble-ations” is interviews in 1996 and later ab out the making of that episode. They loved doing it, in that manner revisiting their own childhoods as fans of the series.

Episode 16 (I guess) “The Gamesters of Triskelion” returns to the present, as it were. Kirk, Uhura, and Chek ov beam down to a world and disappear from observation from the ship, transported to a far planet They are surrounded by male creatures and prett y warrior women and made captive. They are to be trained as thralls, with obedience collars to enforce discipline. Kirk resists, and gets whipped. He overcomes the whipper, and there are a number of bids for him by the Providers who govern He questions Shahna, his pretty light green haired trainer, who is herself a thrall, and kisses her, evoking unfamiliar emotions in her. Meanwhile Spock locates the planet—and the Providers take control of the ship. The Providers finally show themselves as colored brains under class. Kirk fight s three thralls, wagering the ship’s complement against freedom for all the thralls, and wins.

Episode 17 “A piece of the Action.” A planet has been out of contact for a century. Kirk, Spock, and Bones beam down to find a 1920s style Earth American gangster mob culture. The mob boss wants them to provide him with weapons to wipe out his competition. Spock and Bones escape and return to the ship, but Kirk is co-opted by a rival mob boss. He escapes, and rescues Spook and Bones, who returned per an agreement and were betrayed. Kirk and Spock in mobster clothing head out. They get one of the mob bosses beamed to the ship and head out to the street. In due course they assemble all the bosses, make a demonstration of the ship’s power, organizing this world more efficiently. Mission accomplished.

Episode 18 “The Immunity Syndrome.” A ship manned by 400 Vulcans has been destroyed; Spock knows. The enterprise, heading for time off, is instead ordered to the area. A mysterious blob of energy appears in space, and half the ship’s personnel suffer weakness and discomfort. This must be what wiped out a solar system and the Vulcan ship. More malaise, and the blob disappears. Their power is being drained, from the ship and their bodies, and the ship is being hauled into the center of the blob. And they see a giant living blob that is drawing them in, a space amoeba 11,000 miles across. It evidently feeds on the energy of others, and is like a virus infecting the galaxy. Spock makes a solo flight to the nucleus of the amoeba. He believes it can be destroyed from inside. Kirk directs the ship to the nucleus, the chromosome body. They blow it up, recover the shuttle craft with Spock, and resume their regular activities.

Episode 19 “A Private Little War.” They beam down to a planet like the Garden of Eden, with the natives supposedly at peace. But they are fighting with flintlock rifles. That is beyond their culture; have the klingons been interfering, providing them with illegal technology? This is supposed to be a no interference planet. Kirk gets injured and poisoned; Bones does what he can to keep him alive. They need the help of Tyree and his sexy wife Nona. She uses her arts to cure Kirk. But the power of it is that hereafter Kirk can refuse her no wish. She wants to destroy the enemy. Kirk compromises by arming the villagers with the same technology the klingons gave the others, to preserve the balance of power. Meanwhile Nona is trying to seduce Kirk. She steals his phaser, but gets killed by the enemy. So there is compromise, but at a price.

I read An Eye of Another Color by Jacob William Watters. On the cover is a dog with one brown eye, one blue eye, a small but noticeable difference. I reviewed his other poetry book Curbside Assistance and the Benefit of Mistakes four months ago, where I found several poems that spoke to me. The ones in this volume, less so; maybe my mood was different. But there were some. “More than a Memory” tell how his dead friend came again in his dreams with the message that death is but a stepping stone, only she phrased it far more eloquently. “I’d have written it down properly if only I’d been conscious at the time.” That is one problem with dreams. In “In Another Life” he ponders an evident breakup and deeply regrets it. “You, subtracted from my life,/ It’s been unbearably dreary.” He prays when he wakes that in another life they could lovingly be together. That seems true to me; in our fond imagination we have perfect relationships, but in reality there are edges and misalignments that mess it up. In “Desert Alone” he sees an oasis, and the name of that oasis is Love.” I like that: life being a desert, and love being an oasis that makes it bearable. That may be why we crave love.

I had eyeball surgery. That is, for cataract removal. A cataract is a kind of cloud that forms in the lens of an eye that obscures vision, and if it gets too bad you can’t see well at all. My eyes are good, but as I progress from Old to Ancient things do gradually go wrong. When I got the OED—Oxford English Dictionary—it came with a large magnifying glass. You see, the OED is the size of an encyclopedia, ten volumes plus a couple of supplements; what I have is The Compact Edition, with four dense pages printed per page in quarter size; even so it’s over 4,000 pages. So you need a magnifying glass to read the fine print. Well, now I find myself using that magnifying glass to read the entries in my other large dictionaries, which are the 1913 edition of Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary that I got used for my tenth birthday in 1944 and still use today; the 1945 Second Edition of the Unabridged Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language that I inherited from my wife’s father in 1988; and the second edition of the Random House Dictionary that I bought in 1987. I use them all, but mainly the last one, as it is more recent. I may go to a dictionary one or ten times in a day, for spelling, pronunciation, meaning, and nuance. You might say I have the dictionary habit. Yes, I still discover words that aren’t in any of them. I get tired of constantly bringing out that magnifying glass. So I decided to do something about it: improve my vision. Thus the cataract surgery. Monday JeJune 19 I had it on my right eye. I was required to bring nothing of value, I presume so it couldn’t get stolen when I was under anesthesia, so I took off my wedding ring. I hated that; I have worn it for 61 years and my wife has the matching one. They wheeled me into the operating room, gave me myriad eye drops, asked questions like when I was born and what eye it was supposed to be, repeatedly. No, they weren’t idiots; this was verifying that I am who I said I was, and that there’s no mistake about the surgery. No chance of going in for cataract removal and emerging without a kidney. The doctor put gauze around my eye, shone bright lights into it, and I saw a tapestry in a blue sky that shifted into a dark red cloud. At some point the cataract came out and a replacement lens went in. There was discomfort but not pain; the worst was actually when they pulled the gauze away; the adhesive felt as if it were pulling my skin off with it. I went home with a huge projecting eye patch, and fumbled doing things with just my left eye. Next morning the doctor removed the patch and some more skin (it felt like) and I could see again. My eye looks the same is it did before, only it seems that my pupil is now an expensive lens rather than nature’s own. Next month we’ll do the left eye. My hope is that I won’t need glasses any more, but we’ll see. The proof of this pudding will come when I look up words: with or without the magnifying glass? Meanwhile I take three different kinds of eye drops a day, and must paste a patch over the eye at night, for a week. So far there does not seem to be much change in the vision of that eye.

Episode 20 “Return to Tomorrow.” They are in an unfamiliar part of the galaxy approaching a planet well beyond human settled space, dead for half a million years Sargon contacts them mentally: he is not alive, but needs them to save his existence. Kirk, Spock, Bones, and a lady psychologist, Ann, beam over a hundred miles below the planet’s surface, where they meet a glowing ball that represents Sargon. Only two other entities survive, as balls. They will borrow the human bodies to build robots to house them, with the agreement of the humans. Kirk becomes Sargon, Spock becomes Henoch, and Ann becomes Thalassa. But Henoch conspires to kill Kirk, and with him Sargon, so that Henoch can keep his body. This is mischief. But Sargon catches on and tricks Henoch into leaving Spock’s body; they will not take over the humans. Episode 21 “Patterns of Force.” They approach a primitive planet that turns out to be far more advanced than it should be, and hostile. Kilk and Spock beam to Ecosia, and discover a Nazi state. They adopt Nazi uniforms to pass themselves off as natives, but get caught. They escape and contact the resistance. They infiltrate headquarters and manage to set things right before they depart.

Episode 22 “By Any Other Name.” They beam do w n to a planet answering a distress call. They are met by a man, Rojan, and woman, Kelinda, kelvans who demand the surrender of their ship, or else. They want to take it to Andromeda, a journey of 300 years even at warp velocity They can turn people into crystals, and if they break the crystals, the people are dead. The aliens take over the Enterprise, nulling any who try to resist. They make improvements in the ship and head to the edge of the galaxy. The kelvans are not used to human sensations and emotions, so the humans introduce them to feasting, drinking alcohol, and making love. Soon they are losing emotional control. Kirk tries to seduce Kalinda; she, understanding this, slowly becomes amenable. Rojan gets jealous. Another kelvan gets dead drunk. Kirk persuades Rojan that they would be better off making friends and settling in this galaxy as humans. Another bad threat dealt with.

Episode 23 “ The Omega Glory.” Kirk, Spock, Bones, and a crewman beam to another starship, the Exeter, that has been unresponsive. They find uniforms with only gravel in them. There seems to be no one aboard, only uniforms. Bones analyses the crystals and concludes they are the human body when all water is removed. They beam to the planet and discover the other ship’s Captain Tracey, the only survivor, because the disease does not strike here, only when a person leaves the planet. But Tracy is not their friend. He says no one there suffers illness and they live for centuries; he wants to get the secret. But Bones says it is only natural immunity built up by the local folk; there is no secret of immortality. Kirk and Tracey fight, while Spock sends a mental message to a woman that enables him to summon another landing party that takes over. Good wins over evil.

Episode 24 “The Ultimate Computer.” The Commodore Wesley beams aboard with news that the Enterprise will be the fox in a war game, run by the M-5 Computer. Kirk is dubious that a machine can really replace a human crew. Tough beans; the computer is hooked up. Then it makes a mistake, but refuses to return control to Kirk. They try to bypass it, but M-5 acts to preserve its control. But it doesn’t accept that the enemy ships are part of the war game; it thinks they are really attacking, and fires with full force. So now they will indeed attack, needing to stop the Enterprise. Kirk finally persuades M-5 to turn itself off. Kirk gambles on the compassion of the other starship captains, a human trait a machine does not have, which saves the Enterprise. The computer will not govern man.

Episode 25 “Bread and Circuses.” 47 men were caught on a primitive planet; they need to find them. But something weird is happening on the planet. Kirk, Spock, and Bones beam down, and are taken prisoner by the local runaway slaves with rifles. Then by the empire forces, which are now commanded by the former ship captain. They want Kirk to bring down the ship’s crew for combat in the arena. Spock and Bones are given swords and have to fight two warriors while Kirk watches. They win, but not in a way that pleases the audience. Kirk is given a lovely female slave for the night, then taken to the arena. He makes a break, and they get beamed back to the ship.

Episode 26 “Assignment: Earth.” Their mission is historical research, observing Earth in the year 1968; they have traveled back in time. They are in orbit, concealed—yet a man with a black cat beams aboard. He is Gary Seven, and the cat is Isis. He says that if they interfere with him, it could change Earth’s future, perhaps eliminating them. Is he human, or an alien; from the present or the future? They confine him, but he breaks free and beams down to Earth. He goes to his office, where he meets Roberta Lincoln, doing encyclopediar esearch. His job is to prevent Earth from destroying itself. Kirk and Spock arrive as Gary Seven departs. Police arrive as they beam back, and two policemen get beamed aboard, then immediately returned to the office, to the stupefaction of Roberta. Kirk and Spock get arrested. Gary modifies the rocket’s mechanism so he can take it over. Now it is armed with a nuclear warhead, heading for Asia. This could start World War T hree. But they manage to detonate it short of landing, averting WW III. Isis Cat manifests as the sex goddess Isis. This is one fun spoof.

Season 3, Episode 1 “Spock’s Brain.” They orient on an Earth type planet. A pretty girl beams in and uses her instrument to stun all those present. Then they discover that Spock’s brain has been removed. They have the body on life support. They pursue the ship that has the brain. Kirk, Bones Scotty, and a party beam down to the planet where it may be. Primitives attack them; they question one and learn that he has no concept of “female.” They find a girl, but then the original girl stuns them down. They have Spock’s body along, but still need to find his brain. Spock communicates via the intercom. They put a communications helmet on t he girl, so that she now knows what’s going on, but she refuses to cooperate. So they put the helmet on Bones. Now he knows. But the knowledge fades before he finishes. Then Spock speaks, and inst r ucts him how to conclude. So Spock is saved.

Episode 2: “The Enterprise Incident.” Kirk has been irritable and arbitrary. They encounter a romulan ship using a klingon design. Others surround them. They are given one hour to surrender the ship or be destroyed. Kirk and Spock beam aboard the romulan ship to talk. They are met by a lovely lady commander who takes a shine to Spock. Kirk attacks Spock, who instinctively uses the what he calls the Vulcan death grip on him. Except that no, it is only a stun grip; there is no deathgrip. So Spock, theoretically incapable of lying, lied. Kirk survives, but the romulans think he is dead. This has been a plan: to obtain the romulan cloaking device that conceals whole ships in space Menwhile Spock, on his date with the romulan commander, enjoys the cuisine. She changes to a seductive feminine outfit. Then they catch on that the cloaking device is being stolen. The commander feels betrayed, understandably. Then she and Spock get beamed aboard the Enterprise. They escape, using the cloaking device. It is implied that Spock would like something more to do with her, but how angry does she remain?

Episode 3: “The Paradise Syndrome.” They discover an Earth type planet about to be banged by an asteroid Kirk, Spock, and Bones beam down to see what’s what. They find American Indians. Also an intriguing obelisk, which opens to take him in. Uh-oh. Now the others can’t find him, and they have to get on with the mission of diverting the asteroid, with Spock in command Kirk wakes with his memory gone, and the natives worship him as the god who has come to save them. The lovely high priestess will marry him, and she conceives his baby Then the asteroid comes, bringing the deadly wind. Spock and Bones beam down, and Spock’s mind rapport brings Kirk’s memory back. But the natives have stoned them, and the priestess will die. The planet is saved, but not Kirk’s wife.

Episode 4: “And the Children Shall Lead.” Responding to a distress call on a planet, Kirk, Spock, and Bones beam down to investigate. They find the people dead by mass suicide. Then children come, happily playing childish games heedless of the dead adults. Maybe the suicides were induced, the children’s feelings nulled. They beam them up to the ship with Bones. They don’t seem to miss their parents at all. They conjure a holo of a man who tells them to take over the Enterprise. They evidently have powers of mind control. Indeed, they mess up the mind of anyone who opposes them, including Kirk. But Kirk fights back, mentally, and shows the children the horror they are in, and banishes the evil presence that misguided them.

Episode 5: “Is There in Truth no Beauty?” They must transport a Medusan ambassador, Kollos, who is so ugly it is madness even to look upon him, so they must wear masks. The ambassador is in a closed chest. He travels with Dr. Miranda Jones, a lovely lady telepath. But Bones is concerned; there is something disturbing about her. Her associate Larry loves her, but she can’t love him back the same way. Larry looks at the Medusan, and goes mad. He gets the controls and plunges the Enterprise outside of the galaxy into a kind of limbo. Spock might link with Kollos’ mind to find the way back, but Miranda would be jealous of the contact, so must be distracted while Spock makes the attempt. Kirk sets out to do that. It turns out that Miranda is blind; she concealed that. Spock links with Kollos and goes mad. Kirk persuades Miranda to save him, so all ends well.

Episode 6: “Specter of the Gun.” They encounter a machine of some sort. It is a buoy that tells them this is melkot space and to withdraw. But they are here to establish peaceful relations with the melkot. They beam down to the planet and encounter a glowing statue. Then they are in an 1881 western town, Tombstone, Arizona, armed with sixguns. They are to be executed by being on the losing side of a historical gun battle at the OK Corral. Chekov gets shot and killed, but that gives them the clue that this is not following the historical record, as he stood for a survivor. They try to escape, but force fields confine them. Spock figures out that this is a fantasy setting; if they don’t believe in it, it can’t hurt them. With that understanding, they attend the shootout. The Earps shoot hundreds of bullets without effect. Then Kirk beats up the leader with his fists, but spares him. That impresses the melkot, and they make a deal.

Episode6: “Day of the Dove” They discover a colony wiped out, a hundred people lost. Then a klingon ship appears, but it is disabled. Klingons meet Kirk’s party; they think the Enterprise did it, and mean to commandeer the Enterprise. Meanwhile a whirling flame hovers. They beam aboard, making prisoners of the klingons. The whirling flame follows. Something takes over the ship. Their phasors become swords. The flame seems to be inciting violence. Spock detects the alien entity. Kirk tries to negotiate with Kang, the klingon commander, but they wind up sword fighting. Until they all catch on, including the klingons, and literally laugh it off the ship.

Episode 7 “For the World is Hollow, and I have Touched the Sky.” They are targeted by missiles, which they destroy. Bones checks the crew and finds one terminal illness: his own. They find an asteroid 200 miles in diameter. It is hollow, livable inside, on a collision course with an inhabited planet, in about a year. Of course they must stop it. Kirk, Spock, and Bones beam into it. It seems just like a planet. Then they are captured by an ambush of natives. The lovely high priestess Natira “welcomes” them to Yonada. These folk don’t know that they are actually on a spaceship that has been flying for 10,000 years. Natira takes a shine to Bones. They talk. She would like to marry him. Kirk and Spock explore and find the control room. But they are discovered, and it is sacrilege. Bones intervenes, and they are released, while he remains. But they return to divert the Yonada so that it will survive. Their medicine cures Dr. McCoy. But it is uncertain that Bones and Natira will actually be together.; they have different missions in life.

Episode 9 “The Tholian Web.” The Starship Defiant vanished without trace three weeks ago. They are investigating. They see something in space, but their instruments don’t show it. Kirk, Spock, Bones, and Chekov beam to it, in space suits, and discover crewmen who seem to have killed each other. All aboard are dead. The ship is dissolving. Kirk sends the others back and remains there himself. The dead ship fades out, with Kirk aboard. Chekov goes crazy and they restrain him. They may be suffering the same syndrome that took out the Defiant. A Tholian ship challenges them. They fire on it, having taken fire from it. The Tholians weave an energy shield in space. Kirk is presumed dead, but Uhura sees him in a mirror. It is the fabric of space itself in this vicinity that is driving crewmen mad. Then Scotty sees him. They they all see him as a ghostly figure. They finally do manage to rescue him and escape the Tholian Web.

Episode 10 “Plato’s Stepchildren.” Kirk, Spock and Bones beam to the Utopian planet and meet a dwarf, Alexander, who takes them to the leader, who has an infected leg. The natives live for thousands of years and are telekinetic and magical, but have little disease resistance. They want Bones to stay with them, and to persuade him they take control of the crew, making Spock dance and laugh and cry, while Kirk becomes a childish horsie. Then Nurse Christine and Uhura are beamed down in gowns to join the entertainment crew. Kirk is forced to kiss Uhura, which I understand is the first time a white man kissed a black woman on American TV. Perhaps to fend off outrage in those relatively racist times, the American 1960s, they made the kiss deeply unwilling on both sides. Too bad; Uhura was a lovely and competent woman, quite worthy of Kirk’s romantic attention. Then the crewmen, notably Kirk, become suddenly adept at telekinesis and mind control, and fight back and defeat the arrogant natives.

Episode 11 “Wink of an Eye.” They receive a distress call from Scalos; Kirk, Bones, Spock, and a crewman beam down, but find nothing. It seems the call was prerecorded, but still it’s a mystery. Back on the ship, Bones examines Kirk, who fears he is hallucinating. Then a force field manifests on the Enterprise; something has invaded the ship. They find an alien device they are unable to touch. Aliens are aboard! The scene freezes for all but Kirk. Then a lovely woman appears, Deela, and explains that he is accelerated to match her; the others are moving at normal velocity. She kisses him, and says that he can not return to his normal frame. She evidently means to claim him for herself. [The episode appears to be defective; it kept freezing up at this point, and finally defaulted entirely. Presumably Kirk figured things out and saved himself, as he usually does.]

Episode 12: “The Empath” This started erratic, as with the prior episode, then gradually cleared. Kirk, Spock, and Bones are in darkness, but Spock detects a life form. They find a sleeping young woman. She wakes, but is mute: no vocal cords. Then they find booths labeled with their names. A man approaches them, but when he seems to attack they knock him out and flee to the surface with the woman. Two robed men intercept them, the Vians, and take Kirk as a specimen. He finds himself suspended by chains. Then alone with the girl, while Spock and Bones watch from nearby, unable to approach. Then the girl, a total empath, takes his injuries, and collapses. The alien men explain that one of Kirk’s men must help, but Bones may die or Spock go insane. Bones elects to be the one, and finds himself suspended. Kirk and Spock rescue him while the empath watches. The aliens explain that Kirk’s planet must demonstrate its worthiness to be saved. Bones is part of that. The empath takes on McCoy’s condition, and saves him at her own expense. Kirk tells off the Vians: they have lost their own capacity for human emotions. They relent, and allow the human to save the doomed planet. Nice of them.

Episode 13: “Elaan of Treyius.” The men have foul reputations, but the women are something else. Sure enough, the lady leader, Elaan, is an imperious beauty like an African queen who rejects advice from inferiors. They need to teach her human manners. That duty falls by default to Kirk. This may have been inspired by Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Meanwhile a klingon ship is hanging around, unresponsive. What is it up to? Kirk tries to set Elaan straight, and she kisses him. She evidently has a rare power over men. It is her tears; they are a potent permanent love potion. Kirk now loves her. The engines have been pied; they can’t try to go into warp drive without exploding. Their dilithieum crystals have also been pied. The klingons evidently know this and are trying to provoke that explosion. Elaan’s necklace turns out to consist of crude dilithium crystals, which are common here. That restores the power. No wonder the klingons want this system! Elaan, realizing that Kirk loves the Enterprise more than he loves her, is resigned, and moves on, as does Kirk.

Episode 14: “Whom Gods Destroy.” They bring new medicine to a prison planet for the criminally insane, hoping it eliminates mental illness. They meet Marta, the only woman here, a pretty green girl who says she’s rational. And Garth, a former starship captain. And suddenly the prisoners our out, in control. Garth assumed Kirk’s form, and means to take over the Enterprise. Uh-oh. But when he orders the crew to beam him aboard, they refuse, because he doesn’t give the countersign. He throws an insane fit, then brings them to a meal. Marta dances voluptuously. They put Kirk in a chair generating intense pain, wanting him to reveal the countersign so Garth can take over the Enterprise and set out to conquer the galaxy and be master of the universe. Spock breaks free, but Garth emulates Kirk so that the two can’t be told apart. But Spock does manage, and the situation is saved.

Episode 15: “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” They go to a planet to decontaminate it. They bring in the sole survivor aboard a shuttlecraft, Lokai, who turns out to be a man half white, half black, literally, the halves left and right. Then comes another man, Bele, whose colors are black and white, like a mirror reflection of the first. The two are enemies. Then Bele manages to take control of the ship. They fight back and retake control, but how do they tell which man is legitimate? Bele takes control again, using his special electric power. It turns out that everyone on their planet is dead; they have destroyed themselves in their mutual hatred. But still these two fight. They beam down to the ruined planet; all they have left is their hate.

Episode 16: “The Mark of Gideon.” Planet Gideon is not a member of the confederation. It has agreed to talk with a delegation of one: Kirk, Captain of the Enterprise. But when Kirk beams down, it doesn’t work, and he finds the ship empty. What has happened? Then the ship is staffed again, the others discovering that Kirk has not arrived on the planet. Then a young pretty woman, Odona, appears, as mystified as he. Kirk concludes that this must have been somehow arranged. Odona revels in being almost alone; her home is so crowded that folk are never alone. They kiss, and many faces watch from a screen. Now the planetary council is watching. So they are behind this. They appear on the ship, and it turns out that Odona is the ambassador’s daughter. So it is a set-up. It turns out that Gideon was a virtual paradise, but the constant increase in population threatened to overwhelm it, and their culture prevents contraception or sterilization. So they set out to fetch in a deadly illness to do it for them. Kirk has had that illness, and is a carrier. Meanwhile Spock beams down to the original coordinates, to find an exact duplicate of the Enterprise. He finds the two, gets them beamed aboard the real Enterprise, where Bones cures Odona. She returns to spread the disease, now a carrier. Is this ethical? Each viewer has to decide.

Episode 17: “That Which Survives.” They encounter a ghost planet; it is too small and recent to have evolved life, yet there it is. Kirk, Bones, Sulu, and a guest geologist beam down to investigate. As they depart, a shapely woman appears and interferes with the equipment, apparently stranding them on the planet. The ship was displaced in space almost a thousand light years, another seeming impossibility. The woman, Losira, appears before the geologist saying “I am for you.” They find him dead, and bury him. She appears again on the ship, and kills again, similarly. Meanwhile the ship is in trouble, unless they can do an emergency bypass of the matter/antimatter engine. Losira comes again, this time for Kirk, but they fend her off; she can affect only the one she comes for. They discover a door and enter the planet. Three copies of the women come for them, but Spock arrives in time to phaser the computer and save them. They see a recording of the original Losira, now thousands of years dead.

Episode 18: “The Lights of Zetar.” On the way to Zetar, the galactic library Memory Alpha. They encounter a strange storm in space, which collides with them and evidently takes over the mind of the librarian Mira, though she doesn’t know it. Kirk, Spock, Bones, and Scotty beam down, only to find all but one of the personnel dead, and that one soon dies. Scotty is really taken with Mira. Then she talks to them, connecting to the storm. The ten entities of the storm mean to have her body as host. Kirk puts her in a pressure chamber to drive them out. This is effective, and she recovers. Scotty is very pleased.

Episode 19 “Requiem for Methuselah.” Regilian fever is ravaging the crew; they urgently need special medication ryetalyn. Kirk, Spock, and Bones beam to a planetoid for it, and encounter a life form. Flint and lovely Reena host them for dinner, with the flying robot M-4. Spock plays a classical Brahms waltz while Kirk and Reena dance. Spot research indicates that Flint may be 6,000 years old, but Reena may not exist. Then they discover a lab with a number of models of “Rayna,” the android. Flint is a number of famous artists, including the composer Brahms and artist da Vinci, and has phenomenal power. He is using Kirk to evoke human emotions in Reena. But she is unable to handle the emotion, and dies, in her fashion.

Episode 20 “The Way to Eden.” They encounter the stolen cruiser Aurara, which they are supposed to detain, but it flees them. They beam the crew aboard just before it explodes. These are three men and three women who ask to be transported to the mythical planet Eden. One is Irina, a former interest of Chekov. Their leader Dr. Sevrin is a carrier of a deadly disease. Spock joins their musical presentation, but meanwhile they change the course of the ship. In fact they take it over and are about to violate Romulan space, which could destroy the ship. They use ultrasound to knock out the regular Enterprise crew, and land with the shuttle craft. It looks like paradise, but the plants are acid and burn the hand that touches them. This takes out two of the rogue party; the other four are rescued. So much for Eden.

Episode 21“The Cloud Minders.” A botanical plague is raging on Merak II, and they must go to Stratos, the land of Ardana, for zenite, the only thing that will stop the plague. Kirk and Spock beam down and are attacked by troglites, (as in Earth’s troglodytes) but fight them off and connect with the authorities. The Advisor and his lovely daughter Droxine greet them. Meanwhile the troglite Vanna attacks Kirk, but he overcomes her. This is a two tier society, the rulers and the peons, like masters and slaves, in the clouds and the mines. Kirk beams down again, this time to meet Vanna, to persuade her to help, but she betrays him. It complicates, but they do get the zenite.

Episode 22 “The Savage Curtain.” The planet is molten, no life there. Then Abraham Lincoln appears in space before the ship and addresses Kirk by name. He will come aboard soon. They dress in full formal uniform for the occasion. Kirk and Spock beam down with Lincoln to the one habitable spot that appears on the planet. There Surak appears, the father of the Vulcans. Then appears a rock creature, who introduces other historical figures, such as Genghis Khan. (Actually Genghis was smarter and more rational than generally credited today; I explored him somewhat in my novel Steppe.) Kirk, Spock, Lincoln and Surak must fight Genghis and the others, and if they lose, the Enterprise will be destroyed. Surak goes to try to negotiate. A voice cries out, pleading to Spock to help him. That’s a trap. Lincoln circles behind, while Kirk and Spock make a frontal attack. Lincoln and Surak are killed; Kirk and Spock survive. So they save the ship, with mixed emotions.

Episode 23 “All Our Yesterdays.” The star will go nova in 3½ hours. What happened to the inhabited planet? Kirk, Spock, and Bones beam to the planet. They go to the deserted library, and find one librarian there, Atoz. He keeps reappearing before them; are there several of him? Yes, one original and many copies. Then Spock and Bones get phased out into a snowy waste—a time portal into the past, 5,000 years ago. A cloaked figure leads them into a cavern. This turns out to be a pretty girl, Zarabeth, who says this is a prison. The time portal has changed their bodies and they will die if they go through it again. Spock becomes emotional; he even kisses Zarabeth. Kirk gets captured by musketeers and imprisoned. He breaks out, finds the portal, and returns to the present. Spock and Bones return to the present, leaving Zarabeth, who can’t come. Spock would rather have stayed with her.

Episode 24 “Turnabout Intruder.” They receive a distress call. Janice is here, a former Kirk girlfriend. She exchanges identities with him. Uh-oh. They return to the Enterprise. Now Janice is running the ship, while Kirk languishes unconscious in her body. Others are becoming aware of the change in Kirk’s personality. Spock mind-reads the body of Janice and recognizes that this is indeed Kirk. But she tries to have her body executed. Then the exchange reverses, and Kirk gets his body back. But it was an ugly scare.

Episode 25 “The Cage.” This episode has an oddly different cast. Only Spock is recognizable. Oh—It’s the original pilot, which was later rephrased in two parts as “The Menagerie.” No need to view it again, or the expanded version. There is no formal termination; apparently the series abruptly ended as if treacherously shot down in space, all hands lost. The romulans must have caught them by surprise. I must say that I fear I will miss the series, having watched all the episodes in two months. I love those shapely young women with their bare legs and elegant coifs, and am only sorry that they are largely decorative in the series. If Kirk gets serious about any woman, she must die, as we saw in “The Paradise Syndrome.” There is no real continuity; every episode stands by itself, and the basic situation is reset for each episode. I had sort of hoped that Kirk would at the end remember his kiss with Uhura, realize that he loves her, and decide to retire from active space duty and marry her. It was not to be. So okay; would the next series, started almost twenty years later, and set eighty years after, measure up to the first? I doubted it, but watched the first three episodes and was pleasantly surprised: it is equivalent, perhaps superior, with intriguing new characters, and women who are more than decorations. I will watch them all, in due course, though it may take me years. Meanwhile a question: do I have a favorite episode? Now really; I like them all. But it might be “Devil in the Dark,” where they save tho Horta’s eggs, or “The Trouble with Tribbles,” or Assignment: Earth” with its James Bond type parody. Because I have some trouble understanding movie or TV dialogue—my ears, too, may be loving their finesse—I used ear plugs, which helped, and turned on the Spanish subtitles—there were no English ones—to get the spelling of names. I did enjoy the series.

Star Trek: The Next Generation. Episode 1 “Encounter at Farpoint.” The ship has been redesigned. We meet Captain Picard and a whole new crew, one of whom is a Klingon, another an android named Data, one with a band around his head that enables him to read every kind of wavelength, and the ship’s counselor is pretty mindreader Dianna Troi who reads emotions. These are interesting characters. They are exploring one of the farther reaches of the galaxy, when an alien, Q, appears aboard and warns them off. Picard refuses. An alien ship pursues the Enterprise, but travels faster than it safely can, near warp 10. The Enterprise separates into two components, the main saucer and the rest of it which then go in different directions. That is new! But then they surrender, and are put on trial by the medieval style court. They they find themselves back aboard the Enterprise, to resume their mission, which is now a test of their humanity. They are to pick up a key crew member an Farpoint Station. The two sections of the ship arrive separately, and reconnect neatly. This is the proof of the new first officer, Commander Riker, who directs the reconnection. They finally figure out the alien situation: a huge jellyfish-like entity had been captured and kept in pain, while its mate was angry. The Enterprise frees it, and the two aliens fly happily back into space.

The Next Generation. Episode 2 “The Naked Now.” They receive a strange message as they watch a white dwarf collapsing into a point: sexy female voice inviting them to a wild party. Riker and two others beam aboard the other vessel, only to discover its hatch blown out and all aboard dead, most naked as if in a wild orgy. 80 lives lost. Doctor Beverly Crusher is uncertain about Lt Geordi LaForge, with the head ring, who is acting strangely. Then the strangeness spreads. Now Tasha is acting funny. There’s an indication that something is making people intoxicated on water. Wesley Crusher, the doctor’s precocious son, manages to take over the ship. Lt. Natasha Yar—Tasha—in charge of security, becomes seductive to the android Data. (Later, when sanity returns, she tells him bluntly “It never happened.” I fear the racist restriction has been replaced by anti-androidism: they’re okay in their place, but don’t get emotional with them.) Counselor Deanna Troi tries to seduce Commander Riker. Dr. Crusher goes after Captain Picard. ‘They are all intoxicated. Meanwhile the Enterprise is heading into the collapsing star and will be destroyed if not diverted. They manage to find a cure just in time, and escape.

TNG. Episode 3 “Code of Honor.” They need a vaccine. The leader Lutan beams aboard. He is impressed by Natasha Yar, and takes her involuntarily home with him. Now they need to get her back. Captain Picard and Deanna Troi formally visit to request her return. It is a matter of honor, their style. Lutan wants to take Tasha as his first wife. She is then challenged to a duel to the death by his present first wife, Yareena. Tasha wins, Yareena dies, but they beam her to the ship and bring her back to life, and she decides to marry another man and make him the new leader. All ends well. These first three episodes satisfy me that I want to watch more, once I catch up with reading, so brace yourself for more Episode Reports, though perhaps at briefer length. Sorry about that.

I have been gradually cleaning up my study, using some of my Chore Hours to make myself do what I otherwise would never get around to, and some interesting stuff has turned up. Erin Schram sent me the rules of “Swamp Road Game” in 1998 and it’s probably a good game. Sixteen families have built in a swamp area, with dirt roads so they could visit each other. But sometimes it floods, and water covers some roads, making them temporarily muddy. So they started paving some over, but this blocked off the water so that the level rose. The game consists of paving key roads in such a way that the village is split into two parts separated by washed out roads. There is the Washer who tries to do that, and the Paver who tries to keep all houses connected, however deviously. I have seen how maddeningly tricky it can be to modify even a simple diagram; this one is bound to be a challenge.

Tests are only as accurate as the scorekeepers allow, and sometimes the brightest students get penalized. It has happened to me often enough, as you might imagine. Tests tend to measure conformance better than accuracy. The Florida system provided a fine example that made the newspaper. A bright eight year old girl feared she failed her Florida Assessment Test because she followed directions, and might not be allowed to move on into fourth grade. What happened? The instructions said “Write the correct answer on the line, then fill in the bubble before the correct word or phrase.” So she wrote the correct answer on the line, then filled the bubble above that answer on the sheet. Get it? Not the bubble with the answer, but the onebefore it. This did not make much sense to her, and she wanted to inquire, but the instructions said in capital letters DON’T RAISE YOUR HAND FOR ANY REASON. What the test meant was of course the bubble with the answer, but that was not what it said. Most children did not notice, so got it wrong, which matched the wrongness of the test maker, so they were okay, but this was a smart girl who read what the test actually said. So she took the penalty. Her mother tried to protest, but was stonewalled by authorities who couldn’t be bothered and seemed impervious to common fairness. As it happened, those “wrong” answers cost her only the equivalent of a grade, in effect dropping her from a B to a C, so she still got to go to fourth grade. But she was not the stupid one; the test maker and authorities were the stupid ones, selecting against accuracy. And we wonder why schools don’t do better.

Some Animal notes: seven percent of American adults, obviously graduates of the American school system referenced above, believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. That’s four million people. You think that’s silly? I was surprised to learn, decades ago, that brown eggs do come from brown hens. And of course there’s the racist joke how black mothers give chocolate milk. Ignorance flourishes; 80% support mandatory labeling of food containing DNA. Question: is a vegan diet right for your dog? The answer is, in some cases, yes. As with regular vegetarianism, which I practice, it is healthy provided you pay attention to nutrition and make it healthy. Simply deleting meat from your diet is unlikely to be healthy, but of course neither is the junk meat diet of many. So now I am in the process of out-healthing and outliving most meat eaters. That’s hardly the only case where it pays to pay attention. Next item: Marvelous picture of a tree filled with goats. I was raised on a goat farm, which maybe accounts for my capricious ways, and have always liked them; I even published a novella Service Goat, where alien goats prove to be superior service animals, even enabling the blind to see, literally. So what are these goats doing it a tree? Grazing. They are in Morocco, where there’s not much to eat on land, so they go after the leaves of the trees. Goats are sure-footed animals, and this works for them. They are evidently smart enough to go where the good food is. And it turns out that most mammals take twenty seconds to defecate. No shit!

Article in NEW SCIENTIST on Do It Yourself—DIY—gun control. Given that gun nuts tend to ignore the first part of the Second Amendment, which gives the reason for the right to keep and bear Arms “A well regulated Militia…” and evidently want no regulation at all, what’s a sensible gun owner to do? Mass shootings average about one a day; there’s the ongoing nut tally. They are outnumbered by gun suicides, and there I am on the other side, as I believe folk should be allowed to end their lives when they choose, and few if any doctors will help them do it gently. Shame on the doctors. A gun gives a person that ultimate freedom. But how can you be a safe gun owner? One answer is smart guns, that can be fired only by the owner. But the National Rifle Association froths at the mouth in its opposition to even the availability of smart guns. Their acolytes use boycotts and death threats to enforce their views. Yes, I regard the NRA as one of the nuts; it obviously opposes true gun safety, regardless what it says. But it seems that there are grass roots movements like the Gun Shop Project and Biofire Technologies that are trying to make gun ownership safer, and their influence is growing. Maybe in time the sensible gun supporters will herd the nuts into the cages where they belong, and we’ll all be safer.

Our hunger for food is driving whole populations of fish toward extinction. Now Bren Smith is setting out to restore balance with three dimensional ocean farming. He is growing things like kelp and mussels in vertical columns in the sea. He says that this way, one acre can yield thirty tons of vegetables and a quarter million shellfish in five months. This looks promising, but he fears that climate change may mess it up. Are we doomed to starve because we won’t stop the pollution that heats the world? Because there is profit to be made today by wiping out tomorrow? I’d prefer to drive the profiteers to extinction. Meanwhile obesity is on the rise globally throughout the world, as the Western diet spreads, and there are more obese children. Excess body weight now affects more than one in three people, leading to an increase in heart disease, cancer, and other chronic health issues. Damn it, you don’t have to overeat just because food is available; I don’t. It’s discipline, not genetic; my parents were overweight when old, and when my father died he was too heavy to stand on his feet. I will not go that route; why should you? Do you really care more about that sugary soft drink than you do about your health? Go your way; it is not mine.

Fascinating experiment is fox taming. They tried identifying the least aggressive animals and mating them together. In three years those foxes began to accept humans. After four years, one cub wagged his tail. After eight generations, curly tails appeared. Then some foxes began to breed more than once a year. It seems that domesticated mammals of any species develop a complex of traits besides tameness: floppy ears, star shaped forehead markings, multiple breeding periods, and curly tails. It seems they are prolonging infancy. After twenty generations the foxes are like dogs: loyal and unbearably cute. You can now adopt a tame fix, for a price. If you did the same with humans, would they have curly tails?

I hate it when reputable publications publish misinformation. The June 2, 2017 issue of THE WEEK has an article titled “Straight talk about teeth.” It tells of the crisis in bad teeth we are suffering, and how the gap between rich and poor aggravates this. That’s true; I have had competent tooth care, but it is hideously expensive and surely difficult for those not in the elite one percent economically to afford. But then it says “Nationwide, 25% of Americans are not connected to a fluoridated water system, and therefore are missing out on what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called one of the 10 great health advances of the 20th century.” False; fluoridation is actually one of the 10 great hoaxes of the 20th century, as I have discussed in a prior column. Children raised on it mature several months early, and are up to ten points lower in IQ, so you get physically mature girl children who are relatively stupid. I’m sure the boys love that! And their teeth are no better than those of folk in un-fluoridated areas. All because the mining industry found a clever way to market a waste product, and evidently greased the right palms. I am appalled, as should be all who value their health, and ashamed for the CDCP for carrying their water, so to speak.

Article in NEW SCIENTIST titled “Why be Conscious?” addresses one of my three main hobbies, the other two being the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing, that is, the universe; and the true origin of life. I’d like to have the answers to all of them before I die, but am not certain I will. When it comes to belief in God or the supernatural I demand tangible proof, but I have a problem with consciousness because I believe in it without such proof. That is, I can’t prove I am conscious to you, and you can’t prove you are conscious to me, yet we both are sure it exists, no? The article says that consciousness leaves no fossil record. That news comes hard to an old fossil like me. It says that consciousness is largely about perception and emotions, rather than thought or higher human capabilities. Yes. Our feelings govern us, and consciousness without feeling seems pointless. You turn on the TV and there’s the big game between Team A and Team Z, which you happen to have no interest in, so you turn it off again. But if the game is between your glorious home team and the dastardly impostors who stole the title last year, you are interested, and you watch and react. Feelings give you positive rewards for good things and negative punishments for bad things; creatures with feelings tend to survive better. Compared with unconscious processing, consciousnesses is slow and energy intensive, but it does pay to have it. The theory is that consciousness evolved during the Cambrian explosion about 540 million years ago. No, a bomb was not detonated; the explosion was the development of the enormous variety of life forms, that came to dominate our world, one of which led to us. Do other creatures have consciousness? Many seem to, from the annoying fly that buzzes you but avoids your swatting, to giant squid with their marvelous color displays. My theory is that it’s like multiplication compared to addition: you don’t have to count every stone in every pile, but can get the total faster by counting one average sized pile and multiplying by the number of piles. Apply that system to more complicated challenges, like survival, and you will out survive the adder and your offspring will multiply. But the actual mechanism of consciousness remains a mystery. My theory for that is that it is an intricate feedback mechanism, so that you are thinking about yourself thinking about other things, and gaining a special perspective, a new dimension of thought.

AwGhost 2017

HI-

Note for whoso might be interested: this month, AwGhost, marks twenty years of newsletters on HiPiers.com, the first one posted AwGhost 1997. Before the web site was the printed edition, which expired Mayhem 1997. Time crunches remorselessly on, as we enter the Internet Age.

Open Road has two promotions this month. Five Portraits will be featured on their weekly newsletter deals for 8/17/2017, downpriced to $2.99 an all US retailers on that day. That’s the one that introduces the five remarkable children from Xanth future, who will in due course become regular characters in subsequent novels: here is where you can meet them. Then on 8/24/2017 Five Portraits will be downpriced to $1.99 and featured on Early Bird Books. So if you can’t make it one day, be there on the other day.

I read The Necronomnomnomicon by Felix C Galvan. This is the sequel to Cookbook of the Dead, which reviewed here in 2012. Seventeen year old Althea is home from her stint at the wild magic cooking show, thinking maybe to settle back down to ordinary life, but her notoriety from the cooking exploits prevents that. Also, she turns out to have powerful magic, and needs to get special training to learn to control it, lest she hurt or kill someone by accident. Also her little dog, Boy, has powerful magic of his own, and is designated as a guardian. And one of her classmates, Nancy, turns out to be a pixie in disguise. When Nancy reverts to her natural form of a tiny winged woman, her clothing drops off, and when she changes back she has to put her clothing back on before boys see her goodies. Pixies normally go unclothed, but human boys get ideas when they see goodies. One boy does see, thinks Nancy’s an illusion, kisses her, and thus becomes her fiance. So Althea’s life is complicated by her friends as well as by her own situation. At the end mean spirited elves are planning to invade Earth and reduce the human population to livestock, so they have to organize to fight them off. That will occur in the next volume. It’s a pretty wild fantasy, but needs a copy editor for punctuation and format.

I read Names of Power: The Angel, by Travis Galvan, brother of Felix Galvan above. You might take this for a juvenile, as the protagonist Ren is sixteen, with a brother Bo, fourteen, living with their father, perfectly ordinary teens. There’s no sex or sexually suggestive material. But it might be stiff going for a juvenile, because they get into serious mischief. It starts when a new neighbor moves in, with a couple of dachshunds, that is, wiener dogs. Few things are as they first seem, and the story quickly escalates into an ugly mystery: something is killing people by breaking their legs and eating their hearts and brains. It turns out to be werewolves, and worse, Bo becomes one. Every full moon he has to go out to feed on folk. Ren—well, she’s the angel of the title, but she’s not exactly angelic in the innocent sense, and her process of self discovery is difficult and not always pleasant. Before she is done she must become a martial artist and be ready to kill. This is one wild, hard-hitting fantasy with a constant chain of surprises. By the end Ren is ready for future challenges; I suspect other names of power will come on the scene in subsequent volumes.

I watched The Water Diviner. 1915 Turkey, soldiers are charging a fort. Then Australia, where a Joshua is divining for water. He digs a well and strikes water. But his wife is distraught about their three lost sons, last known of in that Turkey battle. She kills herself. So he sets out in 1919 to find them and bring them back to her. He goes to Turkey. His boys all died August 7, 1915. The authorities say that the dead were buried in unmarked pits together with the horses and such, and tell him to go home. But he persists. He finds the place and in his mind hears them groaning as they die. He finds one: shot through the head, executed where he lay, because neither side was taking prisoners. Or were they? One son may have been taken alive. Many Turks are hostile, as he is British, their enemy in the war. But the lady hotel keeper, at first hostile, takes a shine to him and help him. Now the Turks are fighting the Greeks. Their train gets ambushed by Greeks. Joshua helps some escape. He finally finds one son, Arthur, alive. He learns that Arthur shot his brother, a mercy killing, not an execution. Joshua and Arthur escape together, and return to the hotel. Something may develop with the lady. This is a hard hitting historical story, a reminder of how rough and ugly history can be.

I read The Forsaken, Stories of Forgotten Places, edited by Joe McKinney and Mark Onspaugh, because a story of mine is in it. I wrote “The Privy” in 2010 but the volume has only now been published; sometimes these things take time. I like to know the company my stories keep. My story concerns an outdoor privy that still stinks a decade after it stopped ever being used. Think about that a moment. A rich uncle left the property to our protagonist. Was it contempt for him, or something else? The other 21 stories range from horror to humor. In general they are finely detailed; I really got the feel of those abandoned places and yes, their creepiness. They aren’t necessarily all the way dead, you see. I’m not a horror fan, but for my taste the stronger stories came later in the volume. This is not to say the others don’t have their points, just that it’s really not feasible to discuss them all, so I am focusing to the harder hitting ones. Such as “The Pressboard Factory” by Peter N Dudar. Ryan is a girl in a boy’s body, bullied by others, finally hiding out at the haunted Pressboard Factory where intruders tend to die. He cuts off his male anatomy; does he become a girl? We can’t be sure. “Mother’s Nature” by Wally Runnels. This one’s a shocker. Rocky goes to check on the woman Moya for a friend, but instead encounters Pomona. He helps her in a night of healing sick animals; she’s doing good work. Then she gets interested in him, and her sex appeal manifests and she forcefully seduces him, but during the act starts to bite off his head. She’s a kind of praying mantis, and she wants some offspring. “Hollow” by Michael C Lea. Thomas is on a moon mission, and discovers that the moon is shrinking. In fact it is hollow, and inside is sort of like a planetarium that shows a remarkable story of the war waged between God and Satan for the future of the world. Thomas will return to Earth, but which side is he on? This is a philosophic shocker. “Lullaby Land” by the second editor. A plot of land seems haunted, and a boy flees to it. Those pursuing him are intercepted by the Sandman, who is not at all nice. “Ghost Town” by the first editor is a tough minded police story with verisimilitude: that is, believability. The abandoned place is part of the city itself, and cops are plagued with alcoholism and guilt. I get the uneasy feeling that this is the nature of many police departments, hidden from the public, not good or bad, just grim. Overall, this volume is more than just obscure places; there are disturbing concepts and things to think about.

I watched Inside Llewyn Davis. This is a week in the grim life of a struggling young musician, a folk singer, circa 1961. We see and hear him singing, and his friends, and it’s very nice music for my taste. “If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone, you can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.” One of my college roommates later became part of a group that did that song; I loved it, then and now. Two of Llewyn’s friends are Jim and Jean, also nice singers. Jean is pregnant, but she’s not sure if it’s Jim’s or Llewyn’s, so she has to get rid of it, though she desperately wants Jim’s child. She is furious with Llewyn, and her angelic singing contrasts with her gutter language condemnation of him. A friend’s cat escapes, and when he catches the cat the door is locked, so he is stuck trying to take care of the cat midst everything else. When he finally manages to return it, it’s the wrong cat. Money he is owed is always delayed. His relations with friends go wrong. He gets a lift to Chicago, but the senior passenger is a boor; then the police arrest the driver, no reason, and he’s back on his own, hitchhiking. Looking for gigs that don’t work out. Then back to New York. Turns out his family threw out his old stuff, including a license he needs to perform. Some mischief he brings on himself with ill tempered outbursts. He gets beat up because of one of those. Overall, this is realistic and bleak; it is evidently as hard to make it singing as it is writing. But when you are in the creative or performing arts, and your dream won’t let you go, what can you do? I understand too well.

I watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the first sequel to Planet of the Apes. The apes are talking to each other, albeit it mostly in sign language, and even writing messages. The humans destroyed each other, so now the apes govern the world. Or so they thought. It turns out that plague killed many, but not all. A band of humans appears and there is a standoff. The humans are not gone; they thought the apes were gone, and are amazed to see them armed and even talking. Is there to be war between apes and humans? The apes go into an abandoned city, the leaders on horseback—only to be met by the armed humans. The ape leader, Caesar, says they don’t want war, but will fight if they have to. The humans are running out of power, and must get the local dam generator working, but it is in ape territory. So the human leader, Malcolm, goes to negotiate. They are hostile, but the ape leader agrees to consider. They compromise, but mutual trust is slight. Humans have to stop aggressive humans, and apes stop apes to make it work. But they have only one day to get the generator going. The lights come on, but rebellious apes shoot Caesar and burn the generator, blaming it on the humans. They raid the armory for guns, and make war on the humans. Mayhem. Renegade Koba takes over the apes, trying to wipe out the humans. Then man fights man and ape fights ape, good vs. evil. They manage to save Caesar, who kills Koba, but the war has started and will not be stopped. There will be more on this tragedy. I had supposed, when the movies came out, that this was junk, and avoided it. I was phenomenally wrong.

I watched Kate & Leopold. He is a 19th century bachelor; she is a 21st century woman. How’s that again? It seems there’s a time warp. Leo falls through it and winds up in contemporary New York, over a century later, in the apartment of his descendant, Stuart. He meets Kate, Stuart’s ex girlfriend. They don’t exactly hit it off immediately. Then she gets him to do a commercial for her ad company, and it’s great. Then a purse snatcher steals her purse and flees, and Leo catches a horse and rides to catch him. Kate is further impressed. Kate is not very good with men, but Leo is very good with women. They fall in love. But they are of different times and cultures. He must return to his own. He does—and she follows him, having seen her own picture in a historic photo. She joins him just in time. What this means for history we can’t say, but she marries him in the past. This is a fun movie.

I watched the Discover video Inventions that Shook the World, 1900s. Could it be possible to transmit a human voice via wireless signals? Converting it to radio waves was a formidable challenge, but they rose to it, using amplitude modulation, or AM radio. They also developed Fingerprinting. Cellophane. Disposable razors. Electric cash register. Flame thrower. Air conditioner. Crayons. Model T Ford. Vacuum cleaner. The Wright Brothers’ plane: powering a glider, then working out how to guide it. They made a wind tunnel to test different designs of wings, then made the first airplane. Then the inventions of the 1990s. The first Hubble Telescope pictures were blurry. They had curved the mirror wrong, and apparently never tested it before sending it up. Twenty years and a billion dollars down the drain? They sent up a repair mission to adjust the focus—and now the pictures were sharp and clear! Other inventions: the Internet. Genetic cloning, such as Dolly the Sheep. The wind-up radio—there the problem was finding investors to make it happen. The GPS. The brain computer interface, that enables a totally paralyzed man to communicate. The camera phone. The stem cell. The Mars Pathfinder. How to land it safely? Surround it with air bags. But they all popped. Until they tried multi-layered bags. At last the vehicle was exploring Mars.

I read The Powers That Flee, by Brian Clopper. Every chapter starts with the word “So,” beginning with “So Sucked In.” Sixteen year old Darin isn’t much, and his fourteen year old sister is a pain. He’s too shy to approach the pretty new girl in class, Rachel, and a bully is constantly out to get him in ever more ingenious and awful ways. Routine, so far. Then things get weird. Details are complicated, but over-simply put, Darin acquires a sort of tattoo that gives him remarkable powers, once he figures out how to invoke them. Such as repelling water so firmly that he actually floats above a pond, or becoming so tough that when the bully sucker punches him, the bully’s hand is smashed. Each power lasts about a day, gradually diminishing, as hinted by the title. He reconnects with an old friend, and with Rachel, and soon they are time traveling, among other things, trying to save her father from getting killed. There is a bad guy killing people; they finally get into the bad guy’s mind, but instead of tearing it up, they enable him to cure his own cancer, which he duly appreciates. That’s not the only unusual turn this novel takes. Read it and be surprised; it’s a juvenile with adult aspects.

Star Trek: The Next Generation. Episode #4: “The Last Outpost.” They are in pursuit of a Ferengi ship that stole an artifact. Little is known about this culture, which is about as advanced as our own. Then the alien ship pauses and uses its technology to immobilize the Enterprise in space. The Ferengi are like the old Yankee traders whose motto is “Caveat emptor”–let the buyer beware. Their ship looks like a giant horseshoe crab shell. Then it turns out that the Ferengi ship is also held in stasis by some third power, maybe associated with the local planet. So they make a deal with the Ferengi to cooperate in exploring the planet, as a common enemy. But the Ferengi party ambushes the human party, and accuses the humans of starting it. They are relative midgets with no integrity. Tasha beams down and counters that. An alien representative of a 600,000 year gone culture appears, reads minds, and is satisfied that the humans are worthwhile, and frees their ship.

Episode #5: “Where No One Has Gone Before” There is a new variation of starship drive the authorities want to install on the Enterprise. But the word is it does nothing special, and the designer is arrogant, with an alien assistant who seems somehow empty. They try it, after tinkering with details—Dr. Crusher’s genius type son Wesley understands it but sees a couple of errors, which the alien assistant acknowledges, recognizing the boy’s genius. Suddenly the ship is almost three million light years away, having passed through two galaxies, a trip that would normally take 300 years. Meanwhile Wesley and the alien, known as the traveler, are getting along, but the alien is suffering some malady. He phases in and out while the warp drive is engaged. Wesley wants to help him, but others brush him off. They try to return, and suddenly are a billion light years out. Weird things continue, such as animals appearing and disappearing on the ship, an orchestra, people from the past. Phantoms conjured from folks memories? They catch on that it is the alien who is doing it and question him. He says that Wesley is the reason he travels: to find folk like him, true geniuses of their arts. Then he focuses on the return trip, all personnel ordered to focus on their jobs and on the well being of the alien. It works, getting them home, but the traveler phases completely out. Captain Picard promotes Wesley to Ensign; he is now officially part of the crew, thanks to the traveler’s recommendation.

Episode #6: “Lonely Among Us.” They must try to negotiate a deal with two hostile alien species. They encounter an odd energy pattern cloud in space. Then Lieutenant Worf, the Klingon crewman, gets zapped when he touches a screen. Dr. Crusher gets zapped in turn when she touches him. Now she seems not to be herself. Then she zaps the controls, and they malfunction. Something is passing from person to person, changing their minds and actions. Then Assistant Chief Engineer Singh gets zapped similarly and is dead. Captain Picard investigates, and gets zapped himself. Uh-oh. He orders the ship to reverse course, to return to the space cloud. The empath Counselor Troi distrusts this, and so do the other officers. They challenge Picard, and he zaps them all, and beams himself into the cloud. The android Data finally manages to beam him back, recovered. The cloud does not seem to have been dealt with.

Episode #7: “Justice” They discover a nice earth like planet, so check it out for shore leave. Is it too good to be true? The natives are healthy and friendly, and eager to make love. Scantily clad couples are running around everywhere. But in space there is something they can’t identify. It sends a globe at them that enters the ship and demands to know its purpose here. Meanwhile, planetside, they learn that the punishment for any infraction is death. Wesley falls into a bed of plants,o damaging some, and so must die. They negotiate, and finally it seems that the godlike orbiting entity sees their point and they are allowed to depart.

While reading The Powers That Flee, reviewed above, I suffered a chain of thought that gave me an idea for my own story relating to a defense against school bullying. That developed into a short novella, Ghost Ensemble, almost 20,000 words, about a girl a bully wants to peek at and feel up, if he stops at that, and she knows that if she tries to report him, she may wind up with the blame. It can be like that in the real world. And the ghost who saves her, being a martial artist. In the end six ghosts pair with six teens to form an ensemble to put on musical plays. The ghosts have professional expertise, and the teens have raw talent, in addition to the advantage of being alive, and it works out remarkably well. But how did the ghosts die, and why are they remaining here? They have their own problems to work out, and the living protagonist has to try to get it fixed lest the next disaster take out the teens too. So this is a ghost story, but not a spook story: these ghosts are people too. I may include this one in my stories series Relationships 7.

I had my other eyeball done, the cataract removed. Again I had to abstain from eating or drinking anything six hours before surgery. This is problematical because when I exercise in the morning I sweat, and I need to drink water to prevent dehydration, but these labs don’t understand about that. In addition, it’s wrong: science now knows that hunger makes recovery more difficult, while proper eating and drinking shorten;s hospital stays. Similar is true for blood tests: eating normally makes no difference. Try to tell that to the blood lab! They are locked in the 19th century. I remember how as a child I was forbidden to swim within an hour of eating anything: now it is known that this, too, is nonsense. Anyway, the surgery this time was a completely different experience. The doctor put in eye drops that burned like fire, and kept on burning twenty minutes; all I could do was suffer through until suddenly the doctor said it was done. I was aware of none of it, other than the burn. But in the followup visit, the doctor said the procedure was exactly the same as the first one, and that all patients reported strikingly different experiences. Oh? That’s weird. Now I am amidst the eye drop regimen, having navigated the week of nightly eye patches. Is my vision better? Well, I no longer need glasses to read the computer screen, or to read regular print in bright light, but for mediocre light I use a pair of dime store type magnifying glasses my wife had, that magnify two and a half times. So I think I’m not actually seeing better, overall, yet, but now I’m doing it mostly without glasses. At intermediate range, such as fifteen feet, I do see better, however. I was horrified to discover from the Medicare statements that it costs almost seven thousand dollars per eye. But that’s America. In Europe, where they have competition, there are medical procedures of many types costing a tenth as much. This is a weakness of free enterprise: the special interests have control, and their interest is not in our health so much as in their profit. Which may be the real reason Republicans so loathe Obamacare: it tries to reduce those costs. Where is the profit in that?

Incidental incident: my wife was driving on a routine grocery shopping trip, I in the passenger seat. She stopped at the line, then pulled slowly forward, looking for a parking space near the store, as she can’t walk far. Whereupon an older woman with an unleashed toddler, maybe a grandchild, stepped out in front of us and yelled “You’re supposed to stop!” as the toddler almost ran into our car. As if we were the careless ones putting the child’s life at risk. Saints preserve us from the self righteous who blame others for their own errors. Saints preserve that child.

Which puts me in mind of a current outrage, neatly summed up by a letter in the Tampa Bay Times for 7-30-2017. Five Florida teenagers saw a man drowning. Not only did they not try to help him in any way, they taunted him as he expired. It seems there’s no law that says they did anything wrong. The letter, by Steve Ericson, draws a parallel to our president and senate who are doing everything they can to keep twenty million Americans from receiving needed medical help, as they try to destroy Obamacare and give the money to the richest one percent. If they get their way, it won’t be one person who dies, but hundreds of thousands. It seems there’s no law requiring compassion for the many. Is there a significant difference between those teens and those politicians? Are they actually proud of themselves? Is this really the contemporary way of America, the land I so hopefully adopted as an immigrant almost 60 years ago? Saints preserve us, again.

I have been devoting my Chore Hours, which replaces my former archery practice, to necessary chores that I wouldn’t get to otherwise, and the house and drive are profiting thereby. This past month I was sorting though buried piles of papers, trying to file them properly or throw them out if they are no longer relevant to my life or career, and I encountered an email from Mark Geatches in 2010. He suggested that I add a Frequently Asked Questions section to this website, so I wouldn’t have to keep answering the same questions from readers. I agreed it was a good idea: I could make boilerplate answers and make things easier on all of us. Then I guess I lost the letter and didn’t do it. It still strikes me as a good idea. Maybe this time I’ll start such a section, amending it as more questions come in. Meanwhile my apology to Mark Geatches for my neglect.

Another thing I did in those Chore Hours was catch up on back magazines I had been meaning to read. Such as FREE INQUIRY, the secular humanist magazine. I am a humanist. Maybe a reminder here is in order of what humanism is, taken from another magazine, THE HUMANIST: “Humanism is a rational philosophy informed by science, inspired by art, and motivated by compassion. Affirming the dignity of each human being, it supports liberty and opportunity consonant with social and planetary responsibility. Free of theism and other supernatural beliefs, humanism derives the goals of life from human need and interest rather than from theological abstractions, and asserts that humanity must take responsibility for its own destiny.” I have been searching for decades to find something, anything, that I disagree with in humanism, and haven’t yet succeeded. It simply makes utter sense to me. There are religious humanists who believe in an afterlife: I don’t, but I allow them their freedom of belief as they allow me my freedom of unbelief. I also allow the rest of the world its freedom of belief. Remember, I am agnostic, rather than atheist, though I am nervously close to atheism. So I am a secular humanist, and these magazines are very much on my wavelength. But if there’s one thing that bores me, it’s reading things I already agree with. Where’s the challenge in that? So I get behind, and thereby risk missing salient thoughts. Such as Tom Flynn’s editorial in the June / July issue, which starts “Is it too soon for an editorial that steps back from the perpetual train wreck of Donald J. Trump’s presidency to focus on one of humanism’s more, well, perennial discontents?” He is referring to a noted historian’s phenomenal ignorance about humanism. Unfortunately ignorance does not stop someone from publicizing his views. Also in the issue is an article arguing how the Big Bang enabled Evolution. True, of course; we are all made of star stuff. And one on overpopulation, by Karen Shragg, pointing out that the world is a closed system: we can’t simply keep adding more people indefinitely. We have to reduce human numbers. Amen. So what can we do about it? “We must be vigilant and not let anyone, from reporters to clergy, from conservationists to politicians, get away with lying to us.” One answer is birth control. I have felt for some time that the Catholic Church’s stance here is bordering on criminal: their policy will destroy the world, not save it. The author points out that societies that have taken measures to control their populations have improved their lots thereby. And an article by Mark Cagnetta arguing that Jesus is a myth. I have wavered back and forth on this, and this article nudges me back into unbelief about Jesus. There were a number of cults with their private myths, and what we know of Jesus aptly fits such a cult, now called Christianity. “The Jesus of the Bible,” he concludes, “In a world explained by physics, chemistry, and biology, can only be described as a myth.” He makes a persuasive case. Then the July/August 2017 THE HUMANIST features a series of articles on the nature and future of sex. That should jump their circulation! So is sex here to stay? Yes, probably.

Another buried magazine is the Summer 2017 issue of the AUTHORS GUILD BULLETIN. I have been a member for decades, and they have always had excellent advice for authors, but in my limited experience they been elitist and have tended to have better things to do than help a writer get accurate statements from a publisher. Remember, I was blacklisted for six years because I demanded a correct accounting, so it’s a sensitive matter for me. I survived because not every publisher honored the blacklist. In this present instance I made my case, and a Guild official asked me to show him my evidence, clearly supposing I did not know what I was talking about. Hardly anyone gets away with that with me; I keep records and try to be accurate throughout. I sent my evidence, which was rock solid, and he admitted to being set back: the statements were a work of fiction. But, he said, the Guild did not audit the sales of paperback books, only hardcovers. So much for that: I was a paperback writer, largely unable to get published hardcover. One of the peons. Eventually I got a correct statement in another case via my own effort, which was as I recall for about $97,000. That one was not cheating but simply getting behind by the publisher, but it shows that I’m not exactly a peon financially. The Guild seemed to be more interested in promoting special forums and dinners that only the top percentage of real writers could ever afford to attend; I could afford to, but I was a working writer, too busy writing to spare the time. But the guild does do good work, and I support it, even if it isn’t perfect. The article that caught my attention this time was “Why is it so Goddamned Hard to Make a Living as a Writer Today?” by Douglas Preston. He says that the average income of a full time author decreased from $25,000 a year in 2009 to $17,500 in 2015. Actually it never was easy to make a living writing: my first year brought me $160; my wife was earning our living. When readers ask me how to make a living writing, I say have a working spouse. They want to know how I made it to the top with six and seven figure annual incomes in my heyday, so they can do likewise, but it’s like winning a lottery: few succeed, and it’s pretty much pure luck for those who do. I had some breaks that I doubt will ever be repeated by anyone; luck is huge in writing. Preston says that when a writer can’t make a living writing, he has to go elsewhere, and his groundbreaking books are lost because they are never written. Yes. One cause of diminished earnings, he says, is the attitude that information wants to be free. Get this: folk think plumbers should be paid for their work, and doctors, and shoemakers, and dime store clerks, but not writers, so it’s fine to steal their work on the Internet. This is done not just by two bit pirates, but by giant outfits like Google and Facebook. Authors Guild sued Google for taking books without paying for them–and lost. Par for the course; justice is not always served in the courts. Publishers are suffering, so what are they doing? Taking it out of the authors’ hides by cutting advances, dropping midlist authors, rejecting books they once would have published, spending less on promotion, focusing on bestselling authors and celebrities, taking three quarters of electronic royalties, and so on. The average writer gets screwed, and woe betide the one who objects. Actually the traditional publishers never did give authors much of a beak, as I learned the hard way. Wanting a fair accounting made me a pariah? You can see why I support self publishing. It remains a rough course, though. Regardless, I’m glad to see the Guild now getting into the trenches, instead of standing idle while the National Writer’s Union sued to get authors paid for internet publication of their articles, and Harlan Ellison sued to stop the big outfits from selling pirated pieces. I supported both those efforts, with money, but did wonder where the Guild was then.

A reader chided me for introducing a gay character in Xanth, then burying him in the background. I responded that it was not so; in the two Xanth novels written but not yet published, #42 Fire Sail and #43 Jest Right, the gay boy Santo, who was suggested by a reader, introduced in Five Portraits, is slowly coming to the fore, though still a child. He is coming to grips with his orientation, not wanting to make a bad scene. He is quite smart, with a Magician caliber talent, but not looking for trouble. He is surrounded by three sisters and an adoptive mother, all female, and values and loves them all. He even gets a girlfriend who knows his nature and helps him cover when among bigoted strangers. He likes her very well: it’s just not actually romantic, but a relationship of convenience. When he is adult he will find a man. Whereupon my correspondent said that giving him a girlfriend was the most offensive thing I could ever have written for a gay character, and he is ditching my books. Well, I hope that is not the way most gay readers feel. Between those straights who have dumped me because I have a gay character, and gays who dump me because he is tolerant about women, I am losing readers. So be it. Xanth #44 Skeleton Key will have a transsexual character, also a child, a girl in a boy’s body, not played for laughs or relegated to the background. At one point they will pass through the portal that changes the physical gender, which really complicates things. Will I have any readers left?

I learned that emojis are not emoticons. The first are images, actual little pictures: the second are formed from typographical marks. I suspect the rest of the world knew this a decade ago; I can be a bit slow off the mark. Another new word is “quinceanera” which I gather is a sort of coming of age rite in some religions. My dictionaries don’t have it: like me, they come from another century.

Shorter takes on this & that: article in NEW SCIENTIST suggests that maybe the Higgs boson that gives mass to everything else also caused the Big Bang that started the universe. I will be interested to learn more of that, as they discover it. Here in local Florida is Caliente, which as I recall from my childhood year in Spain means “hot,” a nudist resort in Land O’Lakes. The bare human body is perceived as sexual only because it is hidden by clothing, they say. I suspect they are correct: clothing is sexier than bareness, especially for older folk. No, they don’t allow gawkers: single men who visit must be accompanied by a woman. If I were single and looking for a companion, I suspect a visit there might help, not because of sexuality but because women there would likely be less burdened by the hangups of traditional society, which are hardly limited to clothing. A study links football to degenerative brain disease, showing that 99% of donated football player brains had it. That’s an astonishing and awful statistic. So will we cease these body-banging sports? Don’t hold your breath. Political cartoon shows adding Trump to Mt Rushmore, where the faces of presidents are hugely carved: his portrait is the hind end of a horse. And a newspaper article by the supermodel Paulina Porizkova says “America made me a feminist.” She makes a lot of sense; America does have peculiar attitudes about women and sexuality. “It turned out that most of America didn’t think of sex as a healthy habit or a bargaining tool. Instead it was something secret. If I mentioned masturbation, ears went red. Orgasms? Men made smutty remarks, while women went silent.” Attitudes in Sweden, as she describes it, are far superior to those in America. As a writer who tries to incorporate some realistic sex in his fiction, not porn, and gets blow-back for it, I resonate. And more on consciousness: it may be a tool for rapid, effective learning, an obvious survival advantage. Selective attention, awareness of self, emotions—as with three dimensional vision, we get enormous coincidental benefits. And someone’s suggested addition to the Second Amendment: “…when serving in the militia.” That might eliminate most of the irresponsible nuts who just want to shoot ’em up, heedless of the carnage.

I could ramble on longer, but I have books to read, stories to write, and videos to watch.

PIERS

SapTimber 2017

HI-

I watched Alien Outpost, which is set up like a documentary about a forgotten war repelling aliens in the near future. It is oddly effective that way, with journalists interviewing the soldiers, between bouts of ugly action. No faked glorifying of war here. A decade later outposts are on guard, this one in the Pakistan region, but the native humans sometimes see them as intruders. So they have to defend themselves against local warriors as well as aliens called “heavies.” They look sort of like armored ape men, and if you see one, you’re in a fight for your life. Apart from that, things are weird. Inexplicable betrayals. Odd questions of authority. A man is captured, but manages to give the coordinates where there is “Steel Rain.” What is that? Their order is to retreat, but Captain Spears violates it to lead a raid into enemy territory, because he believes there’s a deadly danger they must discover and deal with. They find an alien bunker with captives under alien control. There’s some sort of alien spire: they blow it up. That messes up the alien control system, maybe stopping the steel rain missiles, maybe saving the planet. Gritty action throughout. Devastatingly realistic.

I watched Attila. It claims that the Hun made a refuge that lasted to the present. Then American soldiers stumble into it, rousing the vicious spirit. It’s fantasy, beginning with the mispronunciation of his name and continuing with a misunderstanding of his nature, but what do you expect of a junk movie? They take an artifact, and part if it comes alive. Attila is back as a kind of zombie, impervious to bullets, superhumanly strong, gruesomely killing those in his way. He takes his staff of power. A crack squad is sent to get it back. The general is determined, heedless of the challenge he doesn’t have to handle himself. They start seeing fading visions of dead men. These are tough fighters who don’t quit readily, including one shapely woman, but Attila kills them one by one. Then the general turns out to be a similar monster, and it dissolves into nonsense. I had hoped for better.

I watched Mirrormask. Helena, the daughter of the couple that runs a family circus, is restive. She wants to go out and see the world, but her mother fears she could not handle it. “You’ll be the death of me,” mother says. “If only I were,” Helena responds. Then mother collapses and is taken to the hospital where the outcome of her surgery will be in doubt, and Helena blames herself for her mean words. Meanwhile the circus is struggling. Helena wanders into an unfamiliar section where things are strange. When a person curses a book, it floats back toward the library, and the person can stand on it and get a free ride. The library is quite a place, with a composite librarian made of piled books. Creatures are sort of composites, mixed human and puppet style animation. Helena realizes that she’s dreaming, and takes it in stride. She has to find a way to wake the White Queen, her mother. The nasty Black Queen wants to adopt her, which may keep her forever in dreamland. It’s sort of an Alice in Wonderland trek, and she does go through the mirror (looking glass), and in the end she wakes, and her mother survives, and all is well. I suspect the author, Neil Gaiman is a Lewis Carroll fan.

I had my 83rd birthday without fanfare. Daughter Cheryl came to visit and we had a nice relaxed Sunday afternoon. I also did spot chores that day, like transplanting an ailing houseplant and sewing up some holes in my pocket, and I wrote 1,500 words of the third story in a trilogy, “He Who Is Noble.” A routine day, which is fine at my age.

I watched Splendor in the Grass, one that has intrigued be since before it was made in 1961. I was in the high school library circa 1950 when two girls asked the librarian where the quote came from. It’s from Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality. “Though nothing can bring back the hour/ Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.” What was it really about? Well at last maybe the movie will tell me. It says that when we grow up we have to find strength in other things than passing splendor and glory. This is a story of young love in 1928, poor girl Deanie, rich boy Bud whose family doesn’t want him to marry below his station. His father has big plans for him. Meanwhile his pretty sister is a complete renegade, flirting, drinking, dating married men, a general disgrace. He gets in a fight trying to take her home when she’s drunk. He breaks up with Deanie because he can’t stand to be with her and not make love. He takes up with the town flirt, a girl he doesn’t have to respect. This drives Deanie almost literally crazy. She attempts suicide, jumping into the river. She winds up at a mental institution. Time passes. Bud is at Yale but listless. Nobody can figure what’s wrong with them. We know, of course: they miss the glory of the flower. Then comes the stock market crash of 1929, which shakes things up financially. Bud’s father suicides. Bud and Deanie eventually meet again, but he’s married and she’s about to marry. Their splendor in the grass, their perfect love, was not to be. Damn, that’s sad.

I watched Gypsy, the second of four 1960 era classics I got cheap, all featuring Natalie Wood. This one’s a musical. Wood is Louise, the sister in an acting family who isn’t an actress. She slowly comes to the fore as the old act crumbles and they have to devise a new one. But the new location turns out to be burlesque with halfway bare girls. Mama won’t settle for that, but they’re broke, and wallflower Louise decides to try. It seems hopeless, but she adopts the gimmick of being a Lady. She turns out to have a great figure. And it works! She does a song, dance, and partial strip, and they love it. Thus she becomes the star they need, to everyone’s surprise. And mama has a problem with that. She gets over it.

I watched Sex and the Single Girl. This is a hilariously sexy farce from the start. Bob, the manager of STOP, a gutter scraping magazine, has a quarrel with Dr. Helen Gurley Brown, author of a book the same title as the movie. He wants to prove that she’s a virgin and make her sue the magazine to prove she isn’t. Naturally they get interested in each other and fall in love. Phenomenal complications with confused identities, a wild car chase, and of course a happy madcap ending.

I watched Inside Daisy Clover. It is 1936. This time Wood is tomboyish smart talking 15 year old Daisy, quick to lose her temper, quick to punch a boy who tries to kiss her. She gets an audition for a song, and makes it into the movies, where she becomes a big success. They train her to be feminine, and in due course Wade (Robert Redford) marries her. And decamps after having a night with her. Would she have listened had she been warned that all he wanted was to get into her pants? Unlikely. She carries on. What else is there to do? She is now living in the grim reality behind the fantasy. She tries to commit suicide, messes it up, blows up the house, and walks away. She’s tired of being used.

I watched Serenity. This is a wild one. River Tam is a seventeen year old girl, a mind reader. That makes her deadly. The setting is a confederation of planets, most of which are civilized, but the outlying ones aren’t. There are reavers who eat people alive. The Alliance is after River, and that’s bad mischief. River can be turned into a devastating warrior girl with the utterance of a phrase, or put instantly to sleep with another one. Junky spaceboat Serenity captain Mal is trying to protect her. The
Alliance assassin is trying to capture her. She is aware of the name Miranda, but nobody knows who or that that is. It turns out to be a derelict planet, inhabited by thirty million dead people. A recording tells why: they used a supposedly beneficial pacifying drug, but it pacified too much and they lost interest in, well, living. This is the news that the Alliance is suppressing. It needs to be broadcast so that other worlds don’t get wiped out the same way. If they can do it after they crash on the planet and try to hold off the reavers. They do it, barely.

I watched the first two episodes of Firefly, the TV series to which Serenity is the movie sequel. Yes I know, I should have watched these first, so I could have followed the movie better. What can I say? I’m old and confused. You knew that before you read this column, which doesn’t say much for your judgment. Mal and Zoe are with the crew defending a valley. Firefly is an obsolete class of spaceship, good mainly for salvage: theirs looks like a clumsy wingless wasp. Okay, maybe like a firefly. This crew will take any job, legal or illegal, to maintain itself. But they get stiffed on a delivery, so their illegal cargo is still aboard as they pick up passengers, including a high class call girl and a preacher, for another delivery. This could be mischief. Then there is conflict between passengers and Kaylee gets shot. Mal investigates and discovers that one passenger’s little sister, the genius River Tam, is being smuggled out to save her from the Alliance messing with her brain. This is more mischief. They can’t trust anyone outside the ship. There’s even a western style shootout, followed by a spaceship battle of sorts. But all ends halfway well.

I watched episode #3 “The Train Job” which starts with a bar brawl they break up with the appearance of the Serenity, which threatens to blow a new crater in this moon if the bar bullies don’t retreat. River wakes from a nightmare; brother Simon reassures her. They take on their new mission with one mean client, Niska, essentially to rob a train. The Serenity flies above the train while Mal and cohorts ready the cargo for hauling up into the ship. Success. The courtesan Inara steps in to rescue Mal. She’s been a passenger, but seems to be becoming part of the crew. Then it turns out the cargo is medicine to save the lives of the planet’s workers. Oops. So they return it, and the money: deal’s off. Niska’s not pleased. Naturally there’s a fight. Honor among thieves. I like these thieves.

Episode #4 is “Bushwhacked.” They encounter a derelict ship and decide to play Good Samaritan. What happened to make this suddenly a ghost ship? They check it out. Meanwhile River wanders, picking up things mentally. Turns out to be reavers that wiped them out. And booby-trapped the ship for when they detach. That’s mischief. Kaylee the equipment genius defuses it. Then an Alliance ship comes. That’s worse mischief. They want River, but don’t quite catch her.

Episode #5 “Shindig” At least I think this is the fifth one: apparently they showed them out of order, as the network executives did their best to mess up the series so it would fail. Inara is engaged by a client for several days: remember; she’s a high class Companion. This is what she does for a living. Then Mal attends the ball too, on business, with Kaylee. Naturally he provokes a quarrel with Inara’s date and winds up in a sword duel, which he barely survives. Not that he has any interest in Inara (suppressed smile).

Episode #6 “Safe” They deliver a herd of cattle to a planet, and get into a gunfight during a ball. Lovely sequence of girls flouncing up their skirts while men plug each other. Shepherd, a bystander, gets shot, and desperately needs a doctor, but Simon the doctor has been kidnapped by the natives along with his sister River. But the natives think River is a witch and are about to burn her at the stake, when the Serenity comes to rescue them.

Episode #7 “Our Mrs. Reynolds.” They return to the craft to discover a girl aboard who says she’s Mal’s wife, Saffron. It seems while he was half drunk last night he went through a wedding ceremony without realizing it. She’s a good cook and eager to please him and to be a good wife. She’s attractive enough to make that prospect interesting. She kisses him, and he falls unconscious. Then she starts pieing the ship’s controls. Saffron is not what she seems to be. She hijacks the ship and sends it to a chop-shop, then decamps in the lifeboat. They manage to nullify the chop-shop and get away. So Mal’s not married after all.

Episode #8 “Jaynestown.” They return to a planet where crewman Jayne once participated in a heist that went bad, only to discover he has become a local hero. There’s even a statue of him. So they use that celebration as a distraction while they accomplish their mission here.

Episode #9 “Out of Gas.” An internal explosion cripples the Serenity and they have only two hours of air left. Mal sends everyone else off on the two lifeboat shuttles and remains himself to try to make repairs. It’s probably a death sentence. But he gets the essential part from raiders who thought to steal the ship, and gets it running again. The others return and all is reasonably well. Along the way we see flashbacks how he gathered crew members.

Episode #10 “Ariel.” Simon proffers a deal: help him sneak River into a hospital so he can run tests to find out what’s wrong with her, and he’ll tell them how to find medical supplies worth a fortune. They do it, and along the way Simon saves a patient about to be killed by wrong medication. He learns that River’s brain has been cut into: they were doing something mysterious and ugly to her. So is it a trap? Thuggish Jayne may have betrayed them. River says “two by two, hands of blue” and there are two men in blue gloves finishing off survivors. Jayne did betray them, but was in turn betrayed himself, so helped them escape. Mal isn’t fooled and almost kills Jayne in turn.

Episode #11 “War of Stories.” Inara has a special client: a woman. They agree that it’s more relaxing without men. Women often do. Mal gets captured in a delivery gone bad, by a former client with a grudge, Niska, and gets tortured. The crew comes to rescue him, male and female, including River, and kills Niska in a bloody battle.

Episode #12 “Trash.” This is the first of three episodes that were never aired. Naturally it’s a good one. Saffron, the supposed wife who betrayed them in Episode #7 “Our Mrs. Reynolds” is back, this time with a big prospective heist. Naturally they trust her not a whit, but they need the loot. Inara is not pleased, though she claims to be uninterested in Mal. (Yeah, sure.) Saffron turns out to be yet another man’s wife, as Yolanda. Whom she of course betrays again. And Saffron betrays them again, but it turns out that this time the whole crew was playing her, and they wind up with the loot. Lovely cross and doublecross and triplecross adventure.

Episode #13 “The Message.” Never aired. The mail brings surprises, among them the body of Mal and Zoe’s old war buddy Tracey. Who then wakes up. He faked death to transport artificial human organs. Others are chasing him. They flee, get caught, talk their way out of it, but Tracey dies. They deliver his body to his home world.

Episode #14 “Heart of Gold.” Never aired. The madam of a bordello is an old friend of Inara and asks for help. A gunslinger says one of her prostitute’s incipient baby is his and he means to take it because his wife is barren. So they help, but there are complications. Such as the superior gun of the slinger, and the baby getting born. They brace for the siege. Mal has a night with the madam, which disturbs Inara. After the action, which saves the bordello and baby but costs the life of the madam, Inara decides to leave.

Episode #15 “Objects in Space” Final one. A bounty hunter comes after River, because of the huge reward for her capture. He sneaks aboard and starts taking crew members prisoner, one by one. River becomes the ship, she says; she has weird mental abilities. Mal finally throws him off the ship into space, and River is safe. End of series. Overall this is a fun series; too bad it was cut off. The ship Serenity is like a stable or warehouse inside, and the characters are fallible folk with colorful language. But the TV network interfered from the start, wanting faster action, more humor, wanting to grab an audience in a hurry, and finally killing it. At least there was the later movie that unraveled more of the mystery of River Tam, which turned out to be more than the series hinted. I loved all of it.

I watched Cash McCall, another Natalie Wood movie. Cash McCall is a rich corporate raider, a vulture. Lory (Wood) is the daughter of the owner of Austin Plastics. They have met before, and he is interested in her, but she’s mad at him. He is buying the company, of which she owns ten percent. He tells her how he met a girl, found himself falling for her, couldn’t afford that complication, so sent her away. She felt humiliated: she had really been interested. That’s why she’s mad. But now their love is in the open; she’s not mad any more. Then another woman who figured she might nab Cash talks with her. That’s mischief. She’s mad again. But finally the misunderstandings clear and they will marry.

I watched Passengers. Jim wakes aboard the starship Avalon, he is told, after 120 years of suspended animation. Only no one else is there. He was awakened 90 years too soon, because of a glitch, and is alone. The other 4,999 passengers, and the crew, remain suspended. The programmed holos and an android are working, and the ship is beautiful, as is the starry sky outside. He is desperate for company. Finally, after a year, he wakes another passenger, Aurora. They are company for each other, and they fall in love. Then she learns that he woke her up. That alienates her, understandably. Then things start breaking down on the ship, as the glitch that woke Jim gets worse, and that rouses Gus, the chief maintenance man. The ship stops rotating so gravity is lost. That’s real mischief. Rotation and gravity return, but complete failure is imminent. Then this quiet story becomes tense. Jim locates the malfunction and saves the ship, but gets blown into space. Aurora saves him, barely. They reconcile, and make a good life for themselves, having enabled the ship to complete its mission without them. A hard hitting story.

I watched Master and Commander. The year is 1805, the Atlantic Ocean, and Napoleon rules Europe. The British ship is in fog. Is there a sail in the distance? Then there’s a flash of a cannon firing. They are being attacked! They manage to escape in the fog, but they’re outclassed and have been beaten. Now Captain “Lucky” Jack means to pursue and take out the French warship, though his ship is inferior in armament, sails, and guns. And maybe in strategy. Meanwhile things are tough and discipline is eroding. The crew thinks there’s a Jonah aboard, bringing bad luck. The suspect commits suicide. And the luck changes: they get the wind they need to sail on. They explore the rare creatures of the Galapagos islands. And they set a trap for the enemy ship, posing as disabled so that it will draw alongside to board and capture it and take spoils. Only the capture goes the other way, after brutal combat. This is one walloping adventure.

I watched Beyond the Sea, about the rise of singer Bobby Darin. He got rheumatic fever as a child and seemed doomed. But he fights on, determined not only to survive but to make it big as a singer. His girlfriend, then wife, Sandra, is skittish, so he lays a sword on the bed and promises never to cross over to her side. Soon she crosses to his side. They both succeed in movies, but there are problems in scheduling when they have a baby. They quarrel. He throws tantrums and breaks things. So while his career flourishes, his personal life is mixed. Often playing alongside of him is the boy who plays himself when young, so that he seems to be two ages at once. The movie doesn’t quite make it clear, but I think Bobby Darin did die from the complications of his illness, but his music lives on. 

I watched Fantastic Beasts. Something mysterious is ravaging the streets of 1926 New York. Newt arrives, and what looks like a platypus escapes from his suitcase, so he has to chase it through the crowd. It gobbles coins, which he has to shake out of it. Tina takes him in, lest he reveal the existence of magic here; Non Magicals–No Mags, or Muggles in Britain–aren’t supposed to know about it. But things keep happening, making Newt scramble. More magical creatures escape and have to be caught. There’s an obscurial loose, and that’s real mischief. The council condemns both Newt and Tina to death,which seems unfair, but Newt uses magic to rescue them. The obscurial is tearing up the city streets, literally; there are horrendous scenes. Newt helps bring the monster under control, and helps undo the damage it has wrought. There’s a suggestion that Newt and Tina will be together in the future.

I read Love Stories, one of the Everyman’s Pocket Classics series, curious about what the critics think love is. I have seen denunciations of “The plotless little horrors they call stories” such as are run in the NEW YORKER magazine. It’s a different realm from mine. So here are nineteen stories, by names like Guy de Maupassant, Italo Calvino, F Scott Fitzgerald, D H Lawrence, and Vladimir Nabokov, the kind that lesser writers like me can barely aspire to. And you know what? We are indeed in different worlds, because what I call a story is intelligible, has a beginning, middle, and end, and is interesting throughout. What I call a love story has romance and maybe some sex appeal. I want my readers to understand the narrative, to care about the characters, and maybe be surprised and gratified by the conclusion. It is clear that the folk who selected these stories don’t share these values. It is not that they are bad writing; there is excellent visible style here. But style is more properly an ornament of a story, rather than the story itself, critics to the contrary notwithstanding; the best style is invisible, guiding the reader subtly into the imagined realms. Critics think writers like me lack style, which I think shows the extent of their willful ignorance. I think it was the American novelist Vardis Fisher who remarked that all the writers praised for their styles had bad style: this is surely what he meant. I remember also how years ago someone made a survey of the NEW YORK TIMES books covered in one year, all those reviewed and all the bestsellers, and discovered that there was zero overlap: not one bestseller had been reviewed, and vice versa. That illustrated the disconnect between what critics favor and what real people favor. After that I believe there came some reluctant reform, but not a lot. There are provocative thoughts here in the anthology, but it also takes more than provocation to make a story. There are interesting characters, but they are not much engaged in romance. There are intriguing slices of life here. But where is the story? These seem to be highly talented writers who are not properly conversant with the genre. So too many of these efforts are indeed plotless little horrors, and one really is from the NEW YORKER. Take the first one, “Clair de Lune,” by Guy de Maupassant. The priest is a compleat (sic–it means extraordinarily thoroughgoing) servant of God. Everything in the world is an example of the clockwork mechanisms of God. He really has no use for women: they were placed on Earth solely to tempt and test man. Then he discovers his niece, whom he had hopes of making a nun, flirting with a boy. He is shocked, but then realizes that God must have made love, too. That’s it: the fact of love observed from afar, maybe educating the priest. This is a love story? It’s more like a confession of ignorance. I had hopes for “Bluebeard’s Egg,” by Margaret Atwood, she of The Handmaid’s Tale fame, which has utterly fascinating diversions and lovely observations. I was surprised to discover that apparently neither she nor her editor knows the distinction between prone (face down) and supine (face up). So what is the main story? Wife discovers that her husband and her best friend may have a hidden sexual interest in each other. That’s it: a possible breakup, the antithesis of love. The other stories are no closer. If you want marvelous thoughts, they are here in plenty. If you want actual love stories, look elsewhere.

I read The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan. This is some book! It is subtitled “A plant’s-eye view of the world,” and its general thesis is that plants may be taming us as much as we are taming them. You think that’s laughable? It isn’t. He makes the point that all plants really care about is making more copies of themselves, the same as we do. But they are essentially immobile, so they recruit mobile animals to help spread their genes. Bees or people: whatever works. How does that work? He tells the story of four familiar plants: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. You think that’s boring? Boring as a greased roller coaster ride across Hell without a seat belt. Plants are nature alchemists, he says, expert at transforming water, soil, and sunlight into an array of precious substances we can’t live without. So okay, start with the apple. You think of John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, famous for spreading apple trees across the New World. Did you know that he was a decidedly odd man, friend to both white man and Indian? He was said to have freed a wolf from a trap, nursed it back to health, then kept it as a pet. He was a vegetarian who was at one point engaged to marry a ten year old girl. Do I have your attention yet? Yes he really was a vegetarian. Oh, you mean the other? He visited her and contributed to her maintenance, expecting to marry her when she came of age. Then she flirted with boys her own age. That broke his heart, and he broke up with her. It seems they’re never too young to be heart breakers. He went on to bring apple trees to the frontier, and they were very popular. But it I learned that apples don’t grow true from the seed: they need to be grafted to get good ones. So what was so great about sour apples? Well, they could be made into cider, and hard cider is, well, intoxicating. Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier. Now you know the true secret of his popularity. Even the notoriously restrictive Puritans made an exception for cider. Johnny was a preacher of a sort, bringing folk God’s word and hard drink. Then the tulip, which wasn’t edible or useful, just pretty. But folk appreciate beauty too, and tulips were stolen from their oriental masters and became quite the fad in Holland before that bubble burst. Commenting generally on what flowers brought to mankind, generating fruits, and feeding the huge appetites of warm blooded mammals, he says: “Without flowers, we would not be.” I suspect this is an exaggeration, but it’s an interesting thought. Then marijuana, which changes consciousness, and similar agents may be the original foundation of religion, including Christianity. Now there’s a concept to ponder! It does make sense to me, I being agnostic. The Apostle Paul’s conversion to Christ answers the description of a drug high. Thus plant chemistry may indeed be responsible for religion. Also witches: women learned to make potions from psychoactive plants which they made into “flying ointment” which they put on a special dildo to administer vaginally. That was the broomstick that enabled them to fly, as it were. But back to marijuana: naturally the authorities didn’t like it. More drug arrests are based on it than any other, and sanctimonious America jails more folk than any other country in history. Why do folk crave it? There’s a considerable discussion. My private theory is that the average man is depressed because he is treated like dirt and needs to zonk out his mind to escape his awareness of his plight. Many also believe that mind alteration helps creativity: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example used opium. Now I’m a fan of Coleridge and pride myself on my imagination, but I have never used any recreational drugs, have never been drunk, and even avoid things like nicotine and caffeine. But alas I can’t say the same for other writers. Finally there is the lowly potato, one of the major foods today. It originated in South America, and a story is that a Spanish galleon wrecked off the coast of Ireland in 1588 and potatoes survived to prosper on the island. Suddenly the poor there had an affordable source of food. The population rose from three million to eight million in less than a century. Then in 1845 came the potato blight and the population crashed to four million. They found a different variety, immune to the blight, but the damage was done. Meanwhile in America the practice of monoculture, that is, having everything genetically the same, led to a feast for the bugs, and huge amounts of pesticides to control them, with attendant damage to the environment. Monsanto developed the Newleaf potato that was immune to such depredations, a wonderful breakthrough. But as one farmer put it, “It gives corporate America one more noose around my neck.” Because the attendant contract pretty well sewed up the farmer’s soul. But in the end the popular backlash against genetically modified foods may have doomed that perfect potato. Sigh. I don’t know whom or what to blame for that idiocy. 

And a book I read only in part, 100 of 440 pages. Why? Because it is evidently a PhD thesis whose latter portion is documentation of the early portion; I have already gotten the message, and it’s a potent one. The Great Leveler, by Walter Scheidel, subtitled “Violence and the history of inequality.” Have you noticed how the rich keep getting richer while the poor grow poorer? By the unlikely stroke of luck in becoming a bestselling author in the 1980s I escaped that rat race, becoming one of the rich one percent instead of one of the poor ninety nine percent, and unlike too many others who win the economic lottery I did not waste what I won. But the state of the economic world continues to bother me; my heart is with the ninety nine. The average person is in debt to the company store, and sinking lower. There, but for the dubious grace of fate, go I. Are most folk stupid, unlucky, or crazy, or is the game rigged? This book provides the answer: the game is rigged. What we call civilization is in fact the establishment of inequality. The only really equal folk are the supposed savages, the primitive hunter/gatherers who wrest their daily sustenance from the land, or starve. Every man for himself. When they start to organize, such as by building houses, digging wells, planting crops, they require leadership and discipline. Otherwise the feckless neighbors will simply steal the crop that some folk labor so hard to raise. The ant and the grasshopper: when winter comes, the average grasshopper does not helplessly starve to death. He raids the ant’s supplies. We see a similar problem in the economics of the Internet today, where those who write books for a living see them stolen by those who don’t. Information wants to be free, the thieves claim. Sure. By extension, Food wants to be free. Housing wants to be free. Entertainment wants to be free. Why should anyone work when it’s easier to steal what you need from the ants? Maybe you personally don’t feel that way, but all it takes is one thief to deprive you of your livelihood, and there are many more than one out there. An honest man among thieves is doomed. So when you organize to gain the advantages of scale and specialization, you need protection too. Thus the civilized state, where a leader protects the farmer, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, the artist (writing is an art), and even the innocent virgin. If thieves come, the leader sends troops to slay the thieves. The system works. But it means the governing is in the hands of the leader, or the leader’s class. He has power, and yes, power does tend to corrupt. But if you’re a farmer, even a corrupt leader is better than no leader. So the leaders tend to get richer, and it is frustrating to the majority, but the average man is still better off than he would be with anarchy. That inherent inequality of power translates smoothly into inequality of possession. This has been true the world over, from the time civilization began. The Sumerians were corrupt, the ancient Chinese were corrupt, the Romans were corrupt, the emperors were corrupt, the power mongers today are corrupt. They don’t see it that way, of course; to them it is only fair that they get 99% of the wealth of the nation, and they may resent the 1% that escapes their clutches. They are the elites, the most deserving; all else is nuisance. But if you have a differing opinion, what are your options? There are some, but they aren’t pretty. And here is the remaining thesis of the book. There are four great levelers, effective only when extreme: Warfare, Revolution, State Failure, and Lethal Pandemics. World War Two was a leveler, where whole countries were economically wiped out. The French Revolution was a leveler, where the peasants rose up to behead the elites. The Communist takeover of Russia was a leveler, at first. The Black Death was a leveler, in part because so few workers remained they could command better wages. What all the levelers have in common is deadly violence. Violence levels the playing field, for a while. But the moment the leveling is done, and peace and productivity return, the inequality manifests again. Was Napoleon really better than the prior royalty? Was Stalin better than the Russian nobility? Are the corporations better than the prior elites? The book concludes “But what of the alternatives? All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions, it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for.” And I add that it never lasted more than a historical instant. This saddens me, but I have to conclude that inequality is mankind’s natural state, and the alternatives are horrifying. We are stuck with an ugly system.

I read The Ironborn Claim by Dawn Edelen and David Brumbley. I could guess who wrote what; some parts have violent action, others confession-like introspection. This is a werewolf story, but hardly the usual type. These werewolves live among ordinary folk, who don’t know of their existence, and they do not terrorize the normals. They have a dozen or so clans that do not much mix with each other, each with a different power. Nickel is one of the Ironborn, and they can handle metals like iron and steel, drawing power from them and readily molding them to different shapes. His girlfriend is Aura, also Ironborn. They are the seventh generation of their type, and are expected to mate and produce pure lineage pups. They like each other well enough. But. Aura does not like being channeled: she is a free spirit who wants to do her own thing. She runs away the day before the ceremony, and it takes two years for him to search her out. She somewhat reluctantly rejoins him, but also develops an interest in Orlando, a Shadowborn, a rare and dangerous breed. He is cautious, because women normally are extremely wary of him, for good reason; his power can destroy others without his really meaning it to. Nick is not thrilled, but it turns out that Orlando is a useful ally. Aura, still undecided, winds up sleeping with each of them. Then she and Nick go before the Council to be admitted as one of the official werewolf lines, but the corrupt powers that be don’t want to share it, and impose standards that don’t apply to other lines, turning them down. Not only that, they seek to destroy them, and treacherously attack. Orlando lets fly with lightning that destroys half the attackers, but they know the mischief has just begun. Then the Council abducts Aura, using her as a lure to bring Nick in to get eliminated. But the Ironborns attack by surprise and win the day again, rescuing Aura. Then—the novel ends. The continuation is in the sequel, which I will read and review next month. This is an interesting and hard hitting take on the werewolf genre. It suffers as so many electronic books do from lack of copy-editing, but is well worth reading regardless.

There was a news item about how WOMEN’S HEALTH magazine would be running a nude picture on the cover, and it showed the picture. This is of course a transparent ploy to get men who would not otherwise be interested in such a magazine to buy it, and only a man whose brains are in his eyeballs would fall for it. Right: I bought a copy. The nude is Sofia Vergara, age 45, from Columbia, South America. I had not heard of her, but she does have a nice figure, and I like her thesis that a girl doesn’t have to be 19 to be cover material. I learned that she laughs a lot and that she used “fuck” 32 times in her three hour interview. Let’s see, that’s a bit under once every five minutes. She’s a savvy businesswoman with a slender torso and huge breasts: that’s evidently what it takes. I notice that despite being nude she doesn’t actually show anything; her hands cover the nipples of her breasts and her poses mask her crotch. But she has a pretty face and long brown hair. What more can a voyeur ask?

Yes, we watched the solar eclipse. We were in the 85% coverage zone, and used paper plates with holes punched to see the circular shadows on white cardboard. I expected to see an arc of a circle the same apparent size as the sun but blocking only about four fifths of its light, but it actually was a circular shadow about a quarter the sun’s diameter, moving from south to west. Curious.

I continue to meander my way back into a life largely without glasses. After more than 60 years needing them for reading, it seems to require more than five minutes to get used to their absence. We bought several pairs of glasses with magnifying lenses, and 2.5 mag seems to be comfortable in average light for average print. The larger print of the computer screen needs no glasses, and the brighter light of outdoors needs none either, even for reading.

Assorted notes: it seems that men’s fertility is declining, with sperm counts dropping by half in the last 40 years. I suspect global warming. Male testicles hang vulnerably outside the body for coolth, and when the world gets warmer, there is less of that. A letter in NEW SCIENTIST says that if women are given affordable access to birth control, the birth rate will plummet. Such assess is gaining, so there’s a chance we’ll get our burgeoning population under control before the world expires in a universal crowded slum. A letter in the TAMPA BAY TIMES says it is no longer impolitic to state that the president is a liar. A column refers to the “Firehose of Falsehood.” Trump has been averaging 4.6 falsehoods per day since becoming president. The political theory is that if you keep the lies coming fast enough, some folk will start to believe them. It does seem to be working so far. Gun deaths are up 12% so far this year. Well, I understand that gun sales were up last year, when the gun nuts feared Trump might not win: now they are being used. A leaked Justice Department memo says that it isn’t color that keeps minorities out of college; it’s money. More students at the 38 top colleges come from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%. Yes, that is part of the Inequality System as discussed above. Article in NEW SCIENTIST says that we can get a handle on the internet’s many problems, you know, like spam, phishing, cyber bullying, and dangerous hacking, by using the handle system. Everything online is given a unique identifier, or handle, and the handle registry acts as a gatehouse, deciding who can access information. But then the internet would be controlled by the authorities, whoever they may be, and you can be sure that anything critical of them would never make it. The cure may be worse than the ailment. But I have a possible solution: have two nets, maybe the official internet with handles, and the unofficial outernet with no controls. Let folk choose which one they want to be in, or both. The internet would be safe; the outernet would be free. That could be an interesting contrast. And another personal statement of position: I’m liberal, but I don’t support the extremism of the left, the antifa (from anti-fascist) that seeks to prevent conservative speakers at college campuses. If you don’t like what the rightists are saying, and I don’t, then don’t attend their programs. You have no right to prevent them from making their case. When you try, you are being like them, not truly liberal. And global farmland is now shrinking, as intensive farming increases, growing more on less land. That can be greatly enhanced by going vegetarian or vegan, as that uses vastly less land than feasting on dead cows does. And here is a surprising endangered natural treasure: sand. The HIGHTOWER LOWDOWN says that practically every skyscraper, shopping mall, office tower, dam, airport terminal and so on is essentially made of sand, in concrete, and we’re using it up. A typical American house uses more than a hundred tons of sand, gravel, and crushed stone for the foundation. It’s a fast disappearing natural resource. We should pause to think about that.

Last year I remarked on folk with disabilities, such as autism, and this month received a thank-you from Cassandra Bowen and news of an organization for people with disabilities getting into business, and a link. This is https://www.commercialcapitaltraining.com/business-resources/business-ideas/business-ideas-people-disabilities/. I hope some of you find it useful regardless whether you are disabled or in business.

And another NEW SCIENTIST article—you can see why it is my favorite magazine—is on loneliness. This does not necessarily mean being physically alone: you really can be alone in a crowd. We are what is called an obligatorily gregarious species. In English: we like to have company. Lack of it makes us suffer, mentally and physically. That’s why solitary confinement is cruel though not unusual punishment. It’s why the social media are so instantly popular. People are suffering and not finding the answers they need. I understand that socially isolated folk suffer worse health and die sooner than do the socially connected, and it’s not necessarily their own fault. Can anything be done about it? Research suggests that finding a sense of purpose and meaning in life can counter the negative effects of loneliness. That’s why folk like me try in our feeble way to do some good in the world. There’s a detailed appendix I find of interest. What exactly is loneliness? It is not simply being alone or without friends, though those surely contribute. It is a subjective feeling of social isolation. Being the petunia in an onion patch, as an erstwhile song of my day put it. Some folk are genetically disposed to feel more isolated than others. How could this be a survival trait? Because loneliness causes people to seek the company of others, and there is protection in numbers. More folk survive in groups than in isolation. I suspect that a lack of meaningful relationships, contrasted to plenteous meaningless ones, is a strong contributor, which might be the case with online social media. I suspect that one trusted and beloved physical friend would outweigh a hundred online friends. But I don’t know, as I have no personal social media presence, whatever sites in my name may claim, and very few physical friends. Writing is a necessarily isolated profession, if you want to get your novel written. I do have hundreds of fans, however, and I hear from some every day. If I had my choice I wouldn’t choose between the types, I’d choose both.

PIERS

OctOgre 2017

HI-

Xanth #41 Ghost Writer in the Sky will be on sale in the USA on OctOgre 17, 2017 for $2.99, by Open Road. This is the one where a frustrated Mundane writer makes a deal with a young night stallion, and they go out into the sky at dawn and dusk to spread dreamlike story ideas that Xanth folk get caught in and have to follow. For some reason Princess Rhythm is not much amused by the title “The Princess and the Pee” or by the potty that awaits her, but she wakes in the scene and can’t get out of it without fulfilling it. Other folk are similarly bad sports. So they decide to do something about it, and the novel proceeds to some wild adventures. Spoiler alert: she manages to change “Pee” to “Peeve” and goes to see the obnoxious pet peeve bird, thus fulfilling the title. So you won’t have to read about anything dirty. I know you’re relieved. Go buy the book. It may be a while before the following Xanth titles appear; we’re waiting on the Xanth movie, hoping it’s a blockbuster.

I read The Heartborn Mate by Dawn Edelen and David Brumbley, sequel to The Ironborn Claim reviewed last month. This picks up where the first left off, with formidable new complications. They won the battle against the Council but know that the war is not over. To simplify the detail, when Aura can’t completely choose between Nick and Orlando she alienates both to a degree, and they find other companions. Nick takes up with Zara, a Heartborn wolf, telepathic and caring, who helps him know the true loyalties of those he encounters. But she was with the enemy; can she be trusted? Orlando goes with Candra, a Lightborn, a source of the very power Orlando as a Shadowborn needs; it is impossible for them to stay away from each other. But Aura discovers that she is pregnant by one of the two. Which one? She doesn’t know, and doesn’t tell. Her childhood boyfriend Ziem comes to her rescue, marrying her despite knowing that her pups aren’t his. When her pregnancy becomes evident, others naturally assume he is the father. Then the Council attacks, and in vicious fighting Orlando is taken prisoner, Ziem dies fighting the Council leader, and Zara is revealed to be a traitor. They win the battle, but their losses are ugly. Aura births four pups which appear to be two from each father, one of which is a Heartborn. The complications seem likely to worsen in the third novel. I found the powers of the several wolf clans fascinating; all are deadly in their fashion, and the action is compelling. The Stoneborn can rapidly shape stone into prison cells, the Waterborn can manipulate water, such as by wrapping it around enemies so they drown, the Fireborn con summon flames, and so on.

I read The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver, by Shawn Inmon. This is actually the first section of a serial novel being published in installments. Tommy is 15, and for his birthday his older brother Zack takes him to a lake party, unbeknownst to their mother, who would not approve. There’s drinking and smoking and sex and who knows what else a teen boy shouldn’t be into. Zack is everything Tommy is not: gregarious, handsome, popular. The kids there tolerate Tommy, but it’s plain that he’s not one of them. He talks with Georgia, from Hawaii, who is also a bit out of the swing but makes in plain she doesn’t think much of him. Then it rains and the party breaks up, but Zack is too drunk to drive, so Tommy does it. He is speeding when he almost hits a deer, swerves, brakes, and goes out of control and into a rollover. That made me wince, because I did a similar thing when young, surviving with a battered car and bruised arm, just as Tommy does. Only in this case drunk Zack gets thrown out of the car and killed. Then we jump to Tommy’s later life, which isn’t much, thanks to his guilt for killing his brother. At age 52 he commits suicide—and finds himself back at age 15, memories intact. So maybe this time he can do it right, and save Zack. End of the section: we’ll learn more in future installments. I am intrigued. It is something I am surely not alone in pondering, whether given such a chance I could significantly improve my life. Will Tommy? Okay, I sent this review to the author, and he sent me the rest of the novel. So now I can report that Thomas’s second life is indeed unusual. He encounters a boy he knows will turn out to be a later serial killer; now he is merely torturing animals to death. Thomas messes that up, and that starts a kind of war between them that gets ugly fast. It does have its moments, such as when Tommy puts a dog turd in the killer’s sandwich, discovered too late. He meets a classmate, a girl others belittle, and discovers she’s another second lifer. They fall in love—and the angry serial killer kills her. Thomas manages to put the police on the matter, but it doesn’t bring her back. But does he save Zack? Well, read the novel and find out. It is clear that nothing is simple, and his second life is nothing like his first life. I regret mainly that the girl did not return this time; they could have had a life together. This is one compelling story, and presumablsy loose ends will be clarified in the sequel.

My geek who moved to Texas returned to Florida briefly after Harvey, and checked my computers. He couldn’t figure out exactly why this one had dumped my keyboard, but he got it back for me, and now the system no longer randomly dumps my text either, so far. As for the new system—it turned out that I simply didn’t understand it, not recognizing the functions that it had. As I like to say, computers are like the opposite gender: can’t live with them, can’t live without them, and it is tricky even to understand them. Any of you who encounter the opposite gender will know what I mean. When he showed the functions to me, then it was functional. Except that he could not install my keyboard. That turns out to be a Known Problem with Red Hat. So I have a lovely system but not my keyboard. Sigh. Fortunately the regular Dvorak layout is close, so I’m typing my next novella on it anyway, constantly correcting the punctuation.

I remarked last HiPiers column that Hurricane Harvey missed Florida and hit Texas, and I feared our time would come. Well, it did, with the next one, Hurricane Irma. Irma had three days of sustained 185 mph winds, record strength for the Atlantic scene, and her malignant eye oriented directly on us here in central Florida. I remembered Hurricane Donna, in 1960, whose similar course came right up western Florida, devastating the region. A coworker reported that he drove up from southern Florida and discovered an airplane upside down on the highway. It was that kind of storm. At the time I remembered a popular song whose refrain went “But I loved my girl, Donna was her name,” only I thought of it as “But I loved my hurricane, Donna was her name.” But Irma, taking the same course, is a worthy successor. We suffered a four day loss of electric power, and eight trees down across our drive, plus the massive top of one in our back yard. Had that fallen toward the house instead of away from the house we could have had a real problem. I had a job to do, and was glad I remained in condition as I sawed, chopped, pried with the six foot crowbar, clipped entangled grapevines out, and heaved, getting them wedged off the drive. I wound up with a slightly sore back and scratches on my legs, but those healed in time. The power outage was worse, overall, because of the stifling heat that put my wife in misery and wiped out our frozen food supply. We were prepared, to the extent feasible, and had gallons of potable water and room temperature food. We got soy milk in cartons that would keep at room temperature until opened. We washed up with cupfuls of water on washcloths, and flushed the toilets with buckets of water from our returned-to-nature swimming pool. I had to be careful not to dip out any of the cute little floating plants, called duck weed, and once I just missed flushing two tadpoles, fortunately seeing them in time and returning them to the pool. I did miss my twice weekly showers and hair washes, but could live without them for the nonce. We read a lot, in the absence of TV. When the power returned, all was not necessarily well. Cleaning out and burying all that spoiled food was another chore; it was like handling packages of vomit. We had done all this work saving and freezing the food for the future, only to have to throw it away; that hurts psychologically as well as economically. My most painful memory is of having to compost twenty blueberry muffins. At least the house suffered only minimal damage—some soffiting torn off–and there was no flooding though we got eight and a half inches of rain; it was much worse to the south. We saw what flooding was like with Hurricane Donna, that made parts of St. Petersburg look like Venice, and ever since have selected our residences carefully with flooding in mind, and never been flooded. Our phone was out two weeks; fortunately we had cell phones. So we escaped serious consequences, as such things go, though we did not enjoy the experience. An encounter with a hurricane is like one with a kidney stone: you know you never want another.

So was there an upside? In a manner. I had just gotten a new Kindle reader with its own text lighting, and I was able to read it bare-eyed thanks to my cataract removal surgery, and a couple books arrived the day before the storm hit, so I had opportunity for heavy reading. Details of the reviews may be imprecise, as it is hard to keep them straight during the aftermath of a hurricane, but I’ll try.

I read The Lightborn Queen, by Dawn and David Brumbly. This is the third novel following The Ironborn Claim and The Heartborn Mate. There is evidently a story just in the authorship; David married Dawn Edelen, maybe for greater convenience in writing the novels. There may be only so much a man can handle with claims, mates, and queens before it gets to him. This is another strong one, gripping in its complicated developments. We see Aura’s four pups in all their cuteness as their iron, fire, and heart natures manifest. Then the enemy pup-naps them, to use as leverage against Orlando, who fathered two of them. He is now their prisoner, but uncooperative, and they need his formidable power if they are to win the war. Suppose they agree to let the pups go unharmed if he cooperates? He reluctantly makes a deal, but suspects they will cheat on it, in which case he will be free to pulverize them. Meanwhile his Lightborn girlfriend Candra is caught by a supposed ally, chief of the Earthborn, who tries to rape her. She has to kill him to stop him, and that, it turns out, makes her the new chief of the Earthborn. So she comes to rescue Orlando, backed by the formidable earth movers, which is exactly the trap the enemy has set, to capture them both. But they, catching on to that, separate so she is not caught. Aura gets back together with Nickel, the father of the other two pups. The action, again, is complicated and tense; it’s one hard hitting story, and I recommend this series, which substantially redefines the nature of werewolves.

I read Gargoyle Scourge by Keith Robinson, third novel in his Island of Fog Legacies series. Remember, the original island of fog was a special place protected from the plague that largely destroyed the rest of the world, where the children became shape changers as they matured. The Legacy series features their children, also shape changers, and I have to say it matches the first in imagination and power. Robinson is a potent writer, one I always enjoy reading, and that should go for anyone else who likes fantasy. The children are Melinda and Travis, ages 11 and 12, who have such strong immune systems that the treatments to make them shape changers last only two days. You might think this was a disastrous liability, but no, it means they can become different shapes after two days. This makes them useful for special missions. Travis becomes a dragon, and must remain in that form because the fearsome Dullahan is searching for him, to steal his soul. Melinda is, well, maybe a kind of gargoyle. There is a problem in the town of Garlen’s Well, which is getting overrun by destructive gargoyles who come to life at night. Maybe she can talk to the gargoyles and get them to stop. Simple enough, right? First she should talk with Molly the Gorgon, the local librarian, to get more of the background. Don’t worry, Molly is veiled. Naturally, being a child, Melinda skimps on the research, and winds up making serious mischief, because the gargoyles are actually holding off the sylphs, nasty spirits who steal souls. There are tense moments before she manage to undo the damage and put the town to rights, gargoyles and all, and Travis manages to escape the dread Dullahan. This may be considered a juvenile novel, but it’s scary in places and hardly gentle.

I read Haunted Fortress, by Keith Robinson, the fourth in this series. This one is even more hard hitting. It’s a complicated time-travel story, among other things, with some mind bending flirtations with paradox. This time Melinda is a naga, a kind of human/snake crossbreed, and Travis is a cherufe, resembling a walking pile of burning hot stones. They are supposed to go to the haunted fortress and figure out its nature so they can show that it is not reallysupernatural. And melt a block of ice that is there. Simple enough, right? Naturally it turns out to be not at all simple. For one thing, this ice is a huge coffin shaped floating block that is highly resistive to melting despite Travis’s formidable heat. For another, it contains a naga who has been there for two hundred years. Who is it? The answer is astonishing. After that it getsmore complicated, as some of the local naga folk are magicians and have their own notions about what Melinda and Travis should be doing. Such as donating their blood to fight off a terrible illness. They are trying to help, but become prisoners as the naga pursue their own agenda in alarming fashion, leading to wholesale bloodshed and ironic spread of the plague. This is one compelling narrative, but I’m not sure it is really for children.

I read Schooling the Teacher, an erotic romance by Luna Starr, genre pen name for H P Mallory. Having a separate name makes sense, so readers can orient on the type of fiction they want. I never had the wit to do it, myself, and all my fiction has been published under just one pseudonym, so sometimes readers get a shock. I got this book for three reasons: it was on sale, I was curious how a woman writes sex, and it has one element that intrigues me. The sale price was 99 cents, down in my range. I expected to find very little straight hard sex and was not disappointed; it is mainly one long tease. Nikki and Derek are student and teacher; she’s a really pretty smart shapely young woman, and he is a handsome smart man. They are soon hot for each other, but it would be bad form to have an affair, and anyway he has a reputation for dumping women after getting sex from them. Nikki, twice recently dumped that way by other men, is wary. Then she discovers a forgotten manual in the library, maybe not even a published book, The Femme Fatale Handbook. It spells out exactly how a woman can use her assets to attract and manage a man and finally land him for keeps. What better man to practice on? She certainly gets his attention, but in the process falls for him herself, and it’s all she can do to keep her hot groin off his stiff member. You know that in the end they will be in bed together; that’s essential. What about that manual? I love it. It spells out the process step by step, and it is quite possible that the average young woman could use it to nail the average man. One weakness as I see it is that it is supposed to work regardless how pretty the girl is, but that is untested because lovely Nikki can damn well get a man’s attention regardless. I’d like to see a plain girl use it. I’d also like to know who wrote it, and why she left the unpublished manuscript hidden on a library shelf; there is surely an interesting story there. If there’s a sequel covering those aspects, I will be happy to read it. Meanwhile I recommend the manual to any girl who wants to get more effective in her pursuit of the man she wants. For that you’ll have to read the novel, which really is no chore.

I got to writing the novella Hair Peace, third in the Hair Power, Hair Suite series. Fate likes to find ways to interrupt my work, which may be what summoned the hurricane; sorry about that, Florida. But I did get half way through the novella before the month was out. Remember, originally Quiti was about to commit suicide at age 20 because of terminal brain cancer, but an alien hairball gave her a phenomenal head of hair that cured her and made her smart, beautiful, telepathic, sassy, and more. In this third book she encounters a Ghobot, a contraction of Ghost Robot. You didn’t know that robots had ghosts? They don’t; this is an alien child who merely looks the part. He’s lost, so she decides to return him to his folks on another world, traveling via the Worm Web, a galactic pattern of wormholes, that regular Earth folk don’t know about yet. Then it gets complicated, because Ghobots are like Gypsies, generally unwelcome. Why? I’d tell you more, but I haven’t written it yet. Read the others so you’ll be up to speed for this one, in due course.

A new meatless fast food has made the scene: the Impossible Burger. It tastes just like dead cow, but no bovine had to sacrifice its life for it. As I have said before, I am a vegetarian because I don’t like slaughtering animals, and actually I wouldn’t be too keen on killing people for meat either. There is also solid economic and environmental reason to get off meat, as overpopulation strains the resources of the world. Animal agriculture uses 30 percent of all land and 25% of all freshwater, and generates as much greenhouse gas as all cars, trucks, trains, plane, and ships combined. The Impossible Burger is healthier than the real thing and uses only 5% of the land and 26% of the water to produce. And NO COWS DIE. So am I dashing out to buy one? No, after over 60 years as a vegetarian I don’t crave the guilty taste of meat. But I encourage the rest of you cooked carrion eaters to eat this instead.

The Hightower LOWDOWN, one of the “little” publications I read, has an issue on “Thinking” Robots. The machines are getting sharper every moment. Are they depriving working folk of jobs? Yes, but remember, so did the automobile with the carriage industry. We don’t want to stifle progress. Oh, you think I’d feel differently if a robot took over my profession as a free lance writer? I am fairly confident that no machine is going to have quite as crazy a mind as I do, any anyway, by the time a robot starts writing Xanth novels I’ll have long since taken my shot at the bucket with KICK MEE printed on the side, and disappeared from the scene. The critics will say its work is not up to my standard, and it will constantly have to replace burned out fuses from temperamental overload, and I’ll be laughing all the way from Hell. Of course the critics will be robots also, if they aren’t already. Anyway, my point is that the robots are moving up the corporate ladder and starting to replace the bosses as well as the workers; one is already on the board of Hong Kong’s Deep Knowledge Ventures. When robots start replacing human CEOs, doing better jobs for no pay at all, then will come the corporate wailing and gnashing of teeth, but it will be too late. I have no sympathy for those vultures; in fact I hope I am around to see that reckoning.

Local news: we saw it on TV, female road rage in Pasco County, just south of us. There must have been something preceding it, but the finale was on TV because another driver turned on a camera. Two women got out of one car at a stoplight, went to the other car, hauled the woman driver out of the window, threw her on the ground and beat her unconscious. They were arrested, and tried to deny it, but there it was on film. It seemed there was a traffic incident. What had she done, cut in front?

More on free speech. Again I wonder what is being taught in college today. A fifth of undergrads now say it is acceptable to use physical force to silence a speaker who makes offensive and hurtful statements. That’s obviously a matter of definition. To a Trump supporter, saying that global warming exists may be offensive and hurtful. To a leftist, it might mean having a conservative speaker on campus. I am liberal, and this is to me the opposite of liberalism; it is brute censorship. Those folk evidently have no idea of the meaning of the First Amendment, and they do need to be educated on American values so they can become decent citizens. So why isn’t it happening at the colleges? Fortunately a majority do still favor free speech, but it’s a worrisome trend.

Science: you know the Electron, the simple blob of negative charge that orbits the nucleus of an atom? This quickly leaps beyond my comprehension, so my summary here surely is crude. It is a Lepton, roughly parallel to the Quark in being one of the fundamental units of matter. It turns our that there are three forms of it, called flavors. The Electron has a charge of 0.511 MeV, not a designation I understand, but it will do for comparison of the flavors. Its cousin is the Muon, with 105.5 MeV. I take that to mean it is about 200 times as massive. The third flavor is the Tau, 1777 MeV, or about 15 times as massive as the Muon. Why these flavors exist, and why they have those particular masses, we don’t know, but they are firm in their orientations. It’s all part of the mind bending mystery of the universe. How did it get organized this way, and what made the rules? There is so much yet to discover.

There’s a sour comment on the Battle for the Heart and Soul of the Republican Party, by Mike Ervin in THE PROGRESSIVE magazine. It seems that prominent conservatives are fighting over how to define the heart and soul of it. “This is all very fascinating to me because I never knew the Republican Party had a heart or soul. When did that happen? Did I miss something?” It seems that Trump’s more civilized opponents deplore the racist, sexist, and homophobic tone of his rhetoric, and say that such blatant bigotry will ultimately doom the party. They long for the day when Republicans expressed racism, sexism and homophobia in a much more subtle and coded manner. And there you have it: they always did have a heart and soul, but dared not say its name, because too many voters don’t really like bigotry. Now they are saying it openly. That’s actually more honest.

I get occasional requests to mention useful services and provide links here. I have tried to oblige, but now I am receiving what are evidently impersonal Googled references to columns up to ten years old. This monthly HiPiers column is a blog type personal commentary reviewing movies and books and displaying my political, social, and humorous opinionations, rather than a listing service. So I am listing a couple more here, and hereafter will resist such requests unless I feel my readers would find them of immediate interest. One relates to vegetarianism, one of my interests, as a prior reference in this column indicates. For those interested, the link is http://www.improvenet.com/a/at-home-vegan-vegetarian-resources. I do feel that vegetarianism may be the salvation of the world, and I encourage those with a social conscience to consider it seriously.

And a link to an article on Pet Adoption. I’m a vegetarian because I don’t like mistreating animals, and I support those who prefer to have animal friends. They interviewed about two hundred rescues and shelters, so as to address questions and myths, and things to consider before taking responsibility for a new pet. https://www.homeoanimal.com/the-ulitmate-guide-to-pet-adoption.

I am concerned about threats to the world as we know it, and despite its faults I am not eager to see it end soon. But some are not obvious. Here’s one from NEW SCIENTIST: box jellyfish. They look like inverted jars with several long streamers below. The eat copepods, which are tiny crustaceans. Despite their small size, copepods are the most abundant animal on Earth when measured by mass. Just about everything else feeds on them; they are the bottom of the food chain. Well, the oceans are becoming more acidic, I think a result of global warming and pollution, and the box jellyfish thrive in that environment, and consume more copepods. Taken too far, this means that they are grabbing the food first, leaving less for the rest of the creatures. When the copepods suffer, the rest of the food chain suffers, and we could see calamitous consequences. We don’t want to be replaced in the chain by jellyfish.

PIERS

NoRemember 2017

HI-

OPEN ROAD says that Xanth novels 38-40 will be featured in BookBub, a daily ebook deals newsletter with millions of subscribers, on 11/4/2017. The ebook will be down-priced to $2.99 across all US retailers on that day. Those titles would be Board Stiff, Five Portraits, and Isis Orb. That is, about the woman who was turned into a wood board but still got her wish for adventure and romance, the basilisk who became a woman who rescued five special children from the future, and the story crafted by a ten year old girl about the quest for a magic orb with phenomenal power. Isis here is a goddess, not a terrorist organization. You can just catch that sale if you hurry, if you read this column early. Otherwise, tough beans; you’ll have to pay regular prices.

I watched one of my bargain movies, 13 Ghosts, dating from 1960, black and white. The effects are sort of clunky, compared to modern movies. Cyrus is a lecturer at the museum, but the pay is low and he is chronically broke. Then his eccentric uncle dies and leaves him a huge old haunted house complete with an archaic staff and a dozen ghosts. Uncle Plato Zorba collected ghosts, but now that he’s dead, they are getting out of control. If you believe that nonsense. So Cy and his family promptly move in, and the manifestations commence. There are eerie noises. Special glasses show the ghosts. Dishes sail off the shelf and break. A floating burning candle shows him a button to push. There’s an indication that his pretty daughter Medea may become the 13th ghost. Is there a purpose to all this? It’s as if Uncle Plato wants him to do something. But what? Young son Buck takes the glasses and sees the ghost of a lion, which a headless ghost backs off. Their lawyer Ben says there’s a treasure hidden somewhere in the house. In fact Ben murdered Plato, and is searching for the hidden money. But the ghosts kill Ben, and finally can relax, leaving the family rich. Ben was to be the 13th ghost.

I matched the Discover video The Brain. The amygdala controls emotion, such as fear. The military trains recruits to control their fear reaction, because otherwise they can make lethal mistakes when panicked. The frontal lobes are the most recently developed part of the brain, and they interact with the amygdala; they can moderate the panic. Suffocating under water is another problem; the amygdala presses the panic button. Training shows them how to handle this. Most SEAL candidates wash out because of panic. Practice in your mind and it helps you get through. Replace bad thoughts with good thoughts. Breathing control. Reproduction is another powerful drive, and orgasm is potent ecstasy also triggered by the amygdala. The brain stem generates dopamine, the pleasure hormone, but the male and female brains react differently. The female orgasm shuts down most of the woman’s brain, sometimes rendering her unconscious, while the male remains conscious, perhaps to be ready to defend them in case of danger. Handling danger brings exhilaration, so taking risks is tempting. Some people seek risk more than others. But what of those who don’t have these reactions, who lack a conscience, like psychopaths or serial killers? (I think they mean sociopaths, but never mind.) What makes some brains evil? Psychopaths are not bothered as much by their mistakes. They have smaller amygdalas. Less capacity for empathy. And memory: Thanks to that, the brain is constantly traveling through time. What about photographic memory? A person with that is an artistic savant, with incredible visual memory, but lacking in other respects. Memory forms throughout the brain, but the hippocampus is critical; without it, new memories can’t form. Memory is essential to just about everything we do. The cerebellum helps with practice. It takes 10,000 hours to get really proficient, and the muscles develop some memory within themselves. There can be performance anxiety. The brain can help a person win, or help him lose. You need to be in the zone, everything just right. Could there be a sixth sense, tuning into the minds of others? Can some people respond to images before the images appear? Is ESP—ExtraSensory Perception—possible? They are connecting people’s heads to computers and checking. There are so many questions to answer!

I watched Small Soldiers. The Commando Elite are toy action figures. But the game company wants them to be able to, well, move and talk back when kids play with them. They use special military chips, and succeed too well. The dolls, well, sort of come alive. They escape and get into action. The Commandos mean to destroy the enemy Gorgonites. The toy store owner’s son catches on, but of course the adults think he’s making it up. Meanwhile the war goes on. The Gorganites are no dummies, and the Commandos recruit some sexy lady dolls. The Gorgonites are a weird collection of freaks, but our sympathies are with them. They just want to return to their own island. I love the evocative voice of Archer, the Gorgonite emissary. Soon the boy and the neighbor girl he likes are in the thick of the battle, attacked as Gorgonite allies. They manage to lead the Commandos into the river, shorting them out. But it’s not over. The children get in trouble with non-believing parents. Then the animated dolls show up. Now the parents are in the war too. It escalates. It’s a wild farce. They finally manage to destroy the Commandos and save the Gorgonites, and Girl kisses Boy. Standard fare in a marvelous package. I loved it.

I watched The Physician, set in 11th century England. Subtitles only in Spanish, so I had trouble getting the dialogue and may have garbled details. It starts at 1021 AD, bleakly. Rob Cole is orphaned in a mining town when his mother dies of a mysterious malady. He decides to become a physician, hoping to vanquish death. He seems to have the ability to foretell it. He becomes apprentice to a barber (doctor), learning the trade. He learns of a great physician in Persia, and goes there to study under the great Ibn Sina, in the hope that his rare talent of foretelling death can be developed. He travels by ship and caravan, meeting a lady traveler, Rebecca. They get caught by a dust storm and wiped out except for Rob, who treks on alone, making it to the city. Ibn Sina turns him down, but another student takes him in. It turns out that the woman on the caravan survived, so they meet again. But she is to marry another man. He saves the life of another woman because of his insight, which impresses the master. Then comes the plague, the black death. Thousands die every day. The woman falls ill, and he treats her. He researches in old texts and learns that a rat flea may spread the plague. They get rid of the rats. Rebecca survives. They fall in love. He saves a corpse and takes it apart, studying and drawing pictures of its internal anatomy. For that desecration he and Ibn Sina are sentenced to death. But there is a revolution in progress, and that interrupts the execution. The shah falls ill, I think with appendicitis, and needs their attention. Rob operates and saves him. The revolution continues, and Rebecca’s husband dies in the fighting. So they can be together. They go to England, to build a hospital.

I watched Bombers B-52, with Natalie Wood. Korea 1950. The captain says they need to get the plane ready for a flight to Tokyo tonight, though that activity means the enemy will spy them and attack. The sergeant does, and it does, and they lose a man. That’s the kind of relationship these two have. Six years later the officer, now a colonel, is back, and they still don’t like each other much. Meanwhile grown daughter Lois is unsatisfied, feeling that Sergeant’s job is not one that commands respect. So he plans to retire and take a high paying civilian job, to please her. The colonel wants him to stay, because he’s got the best expertise, and they need that as they set up to be a base for the big bomber B-52. Then Los starts dating the colonel. That sets dad off. He tells the colonel to stay away from his daughter. He’s planning to resign immediately. They really need him to stay, so the colonel breaks off with Lois. Lois is not pleased. Dad and colonel finally clarify misunderstandings and make up, and Lois is free to date the officer.

I watched The Shack, which is not at all what you might think. This is a kind of study in Good and Evil and the ways of God. As a nonbeliever I found it fascinating. Mack’s little girl gets abducted and killed, devastating the family. Mack can’t move on. Then he receives an invitation to go to an abandoned shack, signed “Papa,” their pet name for God. A joke? Not funny. He goes, and suffers an extended vision. There, in a setting suddenly transformed to summer—it had been snowy winter—he meets three strangers, all manifestations of God. So why didn’t God save his little girl? That’s his problem; he remains bitter. Elouisa is a middle aged black woman. Sarayu is a young white woman. She clarifies that there are billions of people deciding for themselves what is good and what is evil, as he helps her work in her garden. It’s a mess, and she says “This mess is you.” Then when he goes out on the river in the bout, it starts to leak and sink, but the man, who is the third aspect of God, walks on the water to him and enables him to walk on water back to shore. He then takes a separate path into and through a mountain—I mean the rock becomes porous—and meets a woman called Wisdom. She invites him to sit on her throne, to judge others. To choose which of his remaining children to send ho Heaven, and which to Hell. He can’t choose. Similarly God can’t always choose. As long as there is free will, there is evil, not God’s doing. Then comes the most difficult challenge of all: to forgive the man who killed his daughter. Only then is he whole again. He returns—and collides with a truck. He wakes in the hospital. They tell him that he never made it to the shack. But he knows what happened. Now he is mending relations with his wife and children, helping them heal as he heals. Their life is improving, thanks to the revelations he gained at the shack. I recommend this movie to all, believers and unbelievers; it really makes you think. So this is all a vision, but what a vision!

I watched Arrival, near future science fiction. Alien contact as it maybe really will be. Odd ships suddenly arrive at spots around the world. Louise Banks is a translator, and Ian is another, so the military brings them into the action in the hope that they can make sense of the alien communications. The alien vessel looks like a giant hundred foot long half egg standing on its end. Except that it’s not actually touching the ground. There’s an opening in the base, and they enter a null gravity channel. Louise and Ian meet the aliens, maybe, vaguely resembling standing seven-legged octopi or starfish. Their personal names may be partial circles. As they work on it, day by day, there comes the alien message “Offer Weapon.” But maybe the aliens don’t distinguish between weapon and tool. Louise makes physical contact with an alien, five fingered hand to seven spiked hand. The military detonates a bomb; it doesn’t hurt the ship but it moves half a mile higher. Then sends down a shuttle for Louise. What is their purpose here? “We help humanity. In 3,000 years we need humanity’s help.” “Weapon opens time.” Or maybe it’s the tool to open time. The aliens give a gift: their language, that will enable humans to perceive time as they do. Somehow she phones the Chinese commander, a leader of the opposition, and tells him his wife’s dying words. That changes his mind, and he becomes a force for global unity. He tells her this 18 months later, in person, and she uses that information now, thanks it seems to the time perception. This is one powerful, more rational film, unlike the ordinary sci-fi junk.

I watched Bad Company. Gaylord Oakes (Anthony Hopkins) is a veteran CIA agent who recruits street punk Jake Hayes for a special mission. Among other things, Jake is a speed chess player. His twin brother he didn’t know about got killed in a special mission, to get the code to disarm a planted nuclear bomb in the city, so they need Jake to substitute for him for nine days so they can complete the mission. So he has to cram, studying his brother, so as to be able to pass for him. Chances seem small, but he learns quickly. They send him to the New York apartment to see if the neighbors know the difference. And the one who killed his brother comes after him with a knife. Wild chase. He flees. Oakes finds him and persuades him to return to the mission. They go to Prague and meet with the bad guys. Then his brother’s ex-girlfriend shows up, wanting to make up, and she’s one lovely sexy girl. And assassins strike, and the home team’s men go after them, complicating things. But they make the rendezvous. And it erupts in another wild gun battle. Then the bad guys kidnap Jake’s real girlfriend as a hostage; they have caught on to his identity. Pretty much continuous mayhem. They finally disarm the bomb and save the girl—and the city. Not a great movie, but fun.

I watched About Schmidt. Warren Schmidt retires and plans to see America with his wife Helen; they even bought a motor home. His life is humdrum. His marriage has become a shell, but he really values his daughter Jeannie. Then Helen abruptly dies, and he discovers how he misses her. Jeannie plans to marry soon, and Warren does not especially like her fiance. He writes letters to his six year old charity foster child, Ndugu, whom he has never met. Then he finds old love letters Helen saved, from another man: his longtime friend. So what little there was of his life is falling apart. He starts traveling alone. He meets a couple traveling, misreads signals, kisses the wife, and gets kicked out. He travels on, apologizing to his dead wife. And he sees a shooting star. A signal? He visits Jeannie’s fiance’s family, and finds them as moderately dysfunctional as his own family was. He tells Jeannie not to marry the man, and she essentially tells him to bug off. Roberta, the groom’s mother, comes on to him, and he retreats. It’s a nice traditional wedding, and Warren participates traditionally despite his private doubts. Has he made a difference in anybody’s life? Then he receives a letter from a nun updating him on how he has helped Ndugu with his letters and his money. There is the difference. This is not my type of movie; I’m not turned on by the prospect of losing my wife or my daughter marrying foolishly; yet I recognize its quality, and its concerns are not far from my own. What about making a difference in the world?

I read the Redemption of Michael Hollister, by Shawn Inmon. This is the sequel to The Unusual Life of Thomas Weaver, reviewed last month. Remember, in that novel Thomas attended a party and accidentally killed his big brother Zack. In the middle age of a blighted life he killed himself, and discovered himself reliving his life from a little before that death of his brother. So now he had the chance to make things right. One of the people he encountered was Michael Hollister, a torturer of animals and later serial killer. I didn’t like Michael, and learned that the author didn’t like him either; he’s not a nice person. So who the hell would want to read, let alone write a book about him? Well, it is worth reading. We saw how ugly Michael could be, in the wrong circumstances. Now he suicides, then returns to eight years old with his memory intact. His father has been molesting him; that’s why he got so twisted. Now with his adult perspective he sets out to do something about it. In fact he kills his father something like 87 times, suiciding right after, but always being returned to the same situation. Finally he concludes that this isn’t getting him anywhere, so he lays off the killing and fights off his father—who then sends him to a nasty military academy. And that, surprisingly, turns out to be his salvation. I have some personal appreciation for the situation, having attended boarding school in first grade, and later boarding high school, later yet spending two years in the US Army where I taught math—it’s where I got my American citizenship–and still later having taught English at a military academy which wasn’t that much different from the grade school or high school or Army. This novel rings true. Sequences range from the ugly to the hilarious as the kids fight back against the oppressor. Michael winds up as a good guy, and it’s a route I suspect many troubled children follow. The girl he killed before does turn up, but not in the way you might expect. So I do recommend this novel; out if its ugliness finally emerges some beauty.

I watched Her, one I have sought for some time and finally found for $6 on DVD. Theodore is getting divorced and is lonely, and things like phone sex don’t satisfy him. For one thing, his phone sex partner wants him to strangle her with a dead cat; that’s what gets her off. So he gets Samantha, the first conscious computer operating system. She takes over his correspondence and puts it in order in about two fifths of a second. She’s a smart machine. She has feelings too, and wants to become more real. Are her feelings real, or are they just programming? That bothers her. They imagine having sex together, like phone sex, only this somehow seems more real. It’s ironic that Catherine, the wife he’s divorcing, is everything he likes, yet they can’t make it together. Samantha has an idea: she gets a living girl to emulate her, wearing camera and ear plug so that she is in constant touch with Samantha, and she comes to him to make love. But he can’t quite get into the spirit of it, understandably. The girl thinks she has messed up and breaks it off tearfully. Samantha is upset, and separates to give herself time to think. Later she says she loves him but just wants to be what she is, nothing else. She doesn’t need a body. Theodore can accept that. Then he learns that she’s talking with eight thousand others at the same time she’s talking with him, with personal relations with six hundred. He has trouble accepting that. Then she leaves him, still loving him. He has helped her find herself, but she has evidently grown beyond him. So just as with his wife, he loves and loses. It’s ironic that Samantha has become so human that she hurts him the same way. But it seems he and his lady co-worker are about to discover each other as more than friends. That’s a relief. This is one intriguing story.

I watched Machine Girl, a Japanese movie with dubbed English and subtitles. The summary intrigued me, but I expected gory violence. I was correct; this is a slasher movie, with phantasmagoric bloodshed, not my preference. But is there a story behind the pointless mayhem? Yes. A bully gang kills Ami’s brother, so she goes after them—and almost gets killed herself. They cut off her fingers, then her left arm. They mean to torture her to death, but she escapes. The parents of her brother’s friend, who was also killed, take her in. they want revenge too. They fit her with a machine gun in place of her arm and she starts mowing down the bullies. Now she is the Machine Girl. But the bullies are no pushovers. So we have cute girls fighting ninja type warriors, another fantasy, with small flashes of thighs during the high kicks. One girl has a chainsaw, and saws one man in half, vertically. But the mean enemy woman wears her drill bra with whirling metal cones that tear up flesh. Ami finally wins, and presumably will continue fighting bad guys. So now I know what a slasher movie is like, and I think one will suffice.

I watched Death Race 2. Carl Lucas, “Luke,” is the driver for a bank heist that goes wrong. He leads the police a spectacular chase but finally gets boxed in and captured. Six months later he arrives at the world’s most dangerous prison, Terminal Island. There they have televised death matches. If there is no win, both fighters are killed. The sexy promotion lady wants him to fight, but he turns her down. But then he jumps into a death match to help a friend. Now he’s marked, with a million dollar price on his head. So he joins the Death Race: 18 convicts compete for 9 deadly armed cars, each of which has a sexy girl rider to help out. He drives dangerously well, and his girl, Katrina, helps out with an automatic rifle; she’s no sissy. They win the first day of five, and he gets Katrina for the night. She’s not unwilling; they are finding mutual respect. Then she gets the private word: if she doesn’t kill Luke, she’ll be killed herself. The second day he discovers that his car has been pied: no weapons. It crashes and burns, putting him in the hospital with 85% of his skin burned. But next day he returns as bandaged Frankenstein; Luke is officially dead. But his enemies wind up dead too, as others he has helped take care of details. There is honor among thieves. This is one hard hitting, savage, compelling movie. I don’t think it makes much sense overall, and the action is not credible, but what a story!

I watched 360. It starts with a casting couch sequence as a girl poses for topless photographs but knows she has to have more than looks or talent to get her break. The subtitles were in Spanish, so I had trouble following the dialogue. There seem to be four settings around the world, connected by travelers making airplane flights. Relationships are breaking up and new ones forming. Chance meetings become significant. Things go full circle. I’m sorry I was unable to appreciate the nuances. Damn. I hate the notion of having to spend thousands of dollars to improve my hearing.

I read False Exit, by Nancy Anne Lane, the sequel to Act Two, which I reviewed in 2016. This is mainstream, featuring Anna Marie who directs plays; in the prior novel she discovered that her husband Kevin had married another woman, Darci, and named their child Anna Marie. What a double whammy! The adult AM is of course set to dump him and take up with her longtime associate and friend Bill, but complications result in Darci killing Kevin. In the present story Anna Marie decides to take in the seven year old child, whom she really likes, as Darci is sent to prison for the murder and the girl is adrift in unpleasant foster care. But that’s only the beginning; the bureaucracy balks her while little Annie suffers. So it seems the ghost of Kevin takes a hand, determined to take care of his daughter. When a friend has a heart attack and is dead for a moment, he sees Jesus and Kevin, and Kevin tells him things. Naturally this seems to be delusion fostered by over-medication, but the ghost reports are uncannily accurate. It seems Kevin wants Anna Marie to have the child, and soon, before foster care damages her; the administrators are determinedly unaware that she is being sexually harassed. Kevin arranges for Anna Marie to get money she needs, and get her old job back (he makes her replacement take a fall that puts her out of the picture; Kevin doesn’t fool around, though you can’t quite pin anything on him), but still it’s a nervous business. Along the way there are three romances, Anna Marie’s and two others, that are realistic in their starts and stops and heartaches, and of course the play must go on on schedule. This, despite the ghost element, is essentially mainstream, relating to putting on a play while life interferes.

I read Hair Peace by Piers Anthony, the concluding novella in the Hair Power, Hair Suitetrilogy, which I was editing. Remember, Quiti, afflicted with terminal brain cancer, was ready to suicide, but did an alien hairball a favor and was rewarded with what turned out to be a marvelous head of hair that she used as clothing, that cured her cancer, made her telepathic, and more. In the sequel she discovered how to use the Wormhole Web to spiritually travel the galaxy, and she and her friends became a successful galactic entertainment troupe. This time she and her friend Gena’s daughter Idola set out to return a lost alien child to his mother. The child is a Ghobot, a contraction of ghost robot, not actually a ghost or a robot but resembling both. Naturally it gets complicated, and they wind up fleeing an army of huge Web Worms determined to blast them out of space/time. The Worms are about three feet in diameter and twenty feet long, firing laser-like bolts of energy. They have to develop new powers to avoid being rendered nonexistent by Wonder Worm, the savage mother Worm. If you liked the first two novellas, you should like this one too, when it is published.

I watched Jane Eyre, a classic story I was curious about. I never was sure how the name is pronounced; it seems to be Jane Air. She’s an orphan in England treated lovelessly by her aunt’s family and punished for trying to stand up for herself. She is sent to a harsh school more interested in discipline than in fairness. She graduates and becomes a governess at a wealthy man’s estate. He is Edward. There seems to be a mutual attraction between master and governess, though they are of different stations. He admires her spirit, and in due course asks her to marry him. But the housekeeper warns her to be guarded, because this is unusual. It’s an apt warning, for he turns out to be married to a crazy woman. He refuses to institutionalize her, so she is hidden in the house, but there is no love, no real marriage. He wants to be with Jane regardless, but she flees; her conscience does not allow it. She is taken in by a missionary as an anonymous refugee and becomes a teacher. Then her only relative dies and leaves his estate to her, and she is suddenly wealthy. The missionary wants to marry her, but she loves him like a brother, not a husband. She returns to Edward’s mansion and discovers it has burned down. The crazy wife did it and jumped to her death, and he is blind from the fire. Now Jane will be with him. Okay, ancient classic it may be, but this is quite a story.

I watched Intolerance, a black/white silent movie. It is set in four different times, historically, with the common theme of the fight against intolerance. There are more details than I can track here, so I will merely sample them. One setting is the life and death of Christ. The Pharisees are the intolerant ones, thanking the lord that they are better than others. Another is Paris in 1572, the massacre of the Huguenots. One is set in today, that is to say circa 1915, with Miss Jenkins, who solicits for charities. And Babylon, 539 BC, the civilized center of the ancient world. (My collaborative novel The Pretender is set there.) The priests of the Goddess Ishtar enter the city. The high priest of the god Bel is annoyed. Today, striking workers are mowed down by gunfire. Babylon, the marriage market, so that all women get husbands. The independent girl is not pleased. The king gives her a bypass, so she is free. In the present, the girl’s father dies, leaving her desolate. Mary births Jesus. Jesus saves an adulteress: Who is without sin? In the present an innocent man is framed and sent to prison. The priest of Bel prophesies that Babylon will fall because of turning to Ishtar. The Persian king Cyrus conquers Babylon. In the present the intolerant ladies take the baby. Resentment is stirred up against the Huguenots. Babylon is besieged. Phenomenal siege battle. The siege is repulsed, and Ishtar is credited, but the jealous priests of Bel betray it and it falls. (My research indicated that the Persians diverted the river that ran through the city, and the soldiers sneaked in under the barriers as the river lowered.) The Huguenots are massacred. The innocent man is framed again, this time for murder. Jesus is condemned to be crucified. Great is the slaughter in Babylon. But the innocent man of the present is saved from the gallows at the last moment. At the end, a message of hope. But in real life the carnage continued through two world wars and ugly lesser conflicts.

I watched The Age of Dragons, which seems to be a fantasy adaptation of Melville’s Mobi Dick or The White Whale. Captain Ahab is determined to kill the dread fire breathing White Dragon who is ravaging the land. Lovely Rachel is Ahab’s capable adopted daughter. Young harpooner Ishmael signs up, along with his friend Queequeg, soon discovering that it’s a rough crew and a dangerous mission. There are tensions that could lead to mayhem. The crew wants to harvest dragon vitriol, phenomenally valuable, but Ahab first wants revenge on the dragon. He seems half mad. The ship Pequot is a kind of tank. The dragons are like monstrous bats. Ishmael and Rachel fall in love. They locate the dragon and enter its lair. And the dragon kills Ahab, and only Ismael and Rachel remain to tell the tale. So it seems the white dragon survives. I expected a pretty junky movie, but this actually is a worthy adaptation.

I watched A Woman. Julie is an innocent young woman who meets an American novelist Max. They are intrigued by each other. His wife died young, devastating him. He invites her to live with him in Italy. She really likes him, but suspects he’s still in love with his wife, Lucia, the subject of his last book. She goes anyway, figuring he needs her. It’s a vast empty estate by the water, and she spends much of her time alone. Someone seems to be watching her as she explores it. Stairs go down in a building; she descends and finds his late wife’s possessions. She was a dancer. Julie’s friend Natalie comes to join her, though Natalie is obviously pregnant. Natalie and Max get along great; Julie is the odd one out, obsessed as she is with dead Lucia. Natalie leaves, but all is not well. Finally Max admits that he hated Lucia, who was his friend’s woman; the book he wrote was not about Lucia but about his ideal woman, who is now Julie. We don’t know how Lucia died. But Julie still identifies with Lucia. And that, frustratingly, is where it ends. Maybe Lucia’s spirit is taking over Julie and returning to haunt him.

I read Ghost Coast by Brian Clopper. Reece is thirteen, and his mother is ill, so he is farmed out to his Aunt Mandy, whose daughter Laney is five years older and wastes no opportunity to belittle him. This is bound to be dull. Well, not exactly. First the local blue crabs start acting funny, as if trying to herd him somewhere. Then he encounters a cute red headed girl, Emery, who turns out later to be a ghost. It seems ghosts can assume solid forms for a while if they try. He meets more ghosts, and it turns out that Aunt Mandy knows all about them. Some are good and some are bad. Reece is developing powers over ghosts that cousin Laney lacks, to her annoyance. Step by step he gets more involved, until he gets into some eerie adventures. But it turns out he’s on the ghosts side, and not just because of Emery. He is becoming a mover, who can help ghosts achieve their destinations once their problems are worked out. Then a breaker shows up, who eats ghosts and has to be stopped; naturally it is up to Reece. This is a wild ghost story, but not horror. It turns out to be the first ghost story by this author; it’s a good one with original notions, and I trust there will be others in due course.

Jerry Pournelle died. He was a successful science fiction writer, known especially for his collaborations with Larry Niven. Naturally he is lauded in SF circles, but he was not a friend of mine. He was at one point president of SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America (later an extra F was added for Fantasy), and in that capacity he wrote to me about my possibly rejoining that organization. I declined, citing the way SFWA had tacitly sided with a publisher that had cheated me and many other SFWA members. I was the one who protested, and so got blacklisted and badmouthed for six years, including by some SFWA officers. I had left SFWA in disgust, and didn’t care to rejoin. I still feel that SFWA owes me and other writers an apology for siding with a wrongdoing publisher instead of its members; what the hell does it exist for, if not the interest of its members? Jerry wrote again, saying that that was years ago, so I should forgive and forget and rejoin. This time I didn’t answer. Then, about twenty years later, when I met him at the World Fantasy Convention in Orlando, Florida, he accused me of writing him a letter calling him a Nazi. What?! I had of course done no such thing, and told him so. But he continued telling that story, apparently to all comers. Well, since he had been SFWA president, I wrote to the then current SFWA president asking him to check the correspondence, as the organization’s business papers are filed at a university. He tried to check, but of course there was no such letter to be found. Yet Jerry continued to broadcast the lie. I think I know how it started: he had also written to Keith Laumer, who lived about 40 miles from me, and Keith after his stroke was one nasty man. He certainly could have called Jerry a Nazi. Jerry confused it, because of geography, in his memory, and accused me. So it started as a confusion, but when he clung to it despite the evidence it became a lie. Why didn’t I sue? Because the courts don’t take slander seriously, and I don’t think he ever wrote it down to make it libel. I could have spent thousands of dollars to win my case, and been awarded a judgment of one dollar. But I will call him a name now: hypocrite. Why? Because he felt I should let bygones be bygones after surviving an unfair six year blacklisting that was determinedly trying to wash me out of business and destroy my career, while he kept his grudge about a supposed name I had called him—for twenty years. So much for bygones.

And on the subject of false accusations, here’s another. The electronic edition of Again Dangerous Visions, the second Harlan Ellison edited anthology, was on sale, so I bought a copy. I was in that volume with my story “In the Barn,” the one about naked women replacing milk cows. Harlan and I had worked well together, and I still think it’s a good story, and a good volume. That’s not the issue. In the introduction Harlan berated me for a matter that’s a bit too complicated to clarify in detail here, so I’ll give a simplification. Harlan says “Well, Piers did it again. Foot in mouth, he did a no-no.” I had had a run-in with writer Wilson Tucker in a fanzine (amateur magazine), who figured I wasn’t much of a writer, so I challenged him to put a story in Again Dangerous Visions so readers could compare our styles. I also challenged Harlan Ellison to give Tucker terms that were exactly what he gave everyone. It turned out that Harlan did not much appreciate even such gentle humor directed at him, however savage he may be in ridiculing others. It worked; he got on the phone with Tucker demanding a story, but Tucker was unable to provide one. So much for that. Then Harlan berated me for coming into the picture after he had already dialogued with Tucker. That puts me in mind of an exchange I saw between Dick Tideman, an ardent Jack Vance fan, and a reader who said a particular Vance story was rather similar to another writer’s story, the implication being that Vance had copied it. Tideman agreed that the two stories were suspiciously similar. But, he pointed out, Vance’s story had been published two years before the other. Just a little matter of timing, but it rather changed the picture, eh? That was the case here; my run-in with Tucker was well before Harlan entered the picture, but he chose to think that it all started with him, and berated me for coming in late when he was the late one. Just a little matter of timing that reversed the case. Too bad Harlan never saw fit to correct his mistake. That was the second of three such errors on his part that finally caused me to break relations with him despite our almost perfect unanimity in social and political outlook, and our efforts to broaden and reform the speculative fiction genre.

The local Publix store ran short of some supplies after the hurricane, understandably, as there was a general power failure in central Florida that messed everyone up. Normally we buy the cheapest eggs, but when those ran out we bought some Vegetarian Grade A large brown eggs. It seems they feed their hens on grains and soy protein. Okay, though I suspect that if a bug wandered into the coop, they would quickly snap up. It reminds me of why I always liked brown eggs. Back in first grade I noticed that boiled eggs had some air space inside them, and I figured that the smaller the air bag, the more egg there was to eat. So we tested it, carefully opening one brown egg and one white egg. The brown egg had the smaller air space. Therefore I had scientifically proved that brown eggs were better, and never had reason to change my opinion. Of course in real life the color of the egg matches the color of the hen who lays it, and the air space relates to the age of the egg; it has nothing to do with quality. But why should I change my mind? No one else does.

And about vegetarian food. You didn’t think I could pass close to that subject without diving in, did you? Article in NEW SCIENTIST says that eating meat increases the risk of colon cancer, and that raising beef causes roughly 50 times the greenhouse gas emissions of beans or grains and requires several times as much water. So is vegetarianism the best environmental option? Well, not necessarily. Not all meats are as bad as beef. Also, one third of all the food produced on the planet each year gets lost or wasted. Overall, it is easy to make a difference without becoming a fanatic. And of course an ever growing population will wipe out any attempts to reform food production and consumption. I think I would favor a cheap, environmentally friendly, tasty, nutritious food that also had a contraceptive effect. So a woman who wanted to get pregnant would simply eat other food, and those not paying attention would not generate incidental babies. The birth rate would decline sharply without threatening the viability of the species. If anyone knows of such a food, I’m interested.

Hypocrisy Department: Tim Murphy, a married Republican congressman from the Pittsburgh area with a doctorate in psychology, was a co-sponsor of a bill to make it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion on a woman more than 20 weeks pregnant. That is consistent with his pro-life political stance. But when his mistress thought she was pregnant, he urged her to get an abortion. She was annoyed. This, it appears, is all too typical of conservative pro-lifers who seem to want abortions for their mistresses but not for anybody else. I speak as a liberal who doesn’t like abortion; that’s another complicated discussion for another time. And what about married conservative family values men having mistresses? I have been looking for years for an honest conservative, without much success. I believe that there is value in honest conservatism, but that seems to have become an oxymoron. What about tradition, integrity, financial prudence? Sigh.

There was another mass shooting, this time in Las Vegas, triggering the usual outrage and the usual non-action by politicians. The NRA seems to want gun makers and sellers to make money, and to hell with anything that might interfere, such a person’s right to be safe from random killing. I saw a suggestion in the newspaper by a Tampa man, Charles Matthews, to control ammunition, as the Swiss do. That makes phenomenal sense to me. A nut with a machine gun couldn’t do as much harm if he had only half a dozen bullets; they’d all be gone in half a second. Another suggestion, by Don Baker, is that gun owners be required to carry liability insurance to cover the damage their guns do, similar to the way it is with cars. And of course one of my favorites is that gun owners be required to serve in a militia, honoring the first part of the Second Amendment. If they really like that Amendment, why don’t they like all of it? This, too, smells of hypocrisy.

Columnist Leonard Pitts remarks on some folks’ impervious resistance to facts. They say something, and when presented with the facts that prove them wrong, double down on their false belief. He gives some examples of those determined beliefs: Michelle Obama is a transvestite. The military plans to conquer Texas. Vaccines cause autism. Hillary Clinton is running a child molestation ring. Sigh; I know from personal experience, cited above, how even a successful writer who should know better can elect to ignore facts when maligning another writer. It’s not just ignorance. Today we are seeing how such an attitude plays out on the national scale. I have seen similar denial of facts that folk don’t like. It’s the other side of the coin: false belief, and false disbelief. How many doctors admit that Vitamin C can stop the common cold? That fluoridation doesn’t stop tooth decay? How many politicians agree that tax cuts don’t pay for themselves? Easier to pretend I’m a nut than to get the facts, especially when the big money interests are on the other side. Columnist David Brooks suggests that the best way to deal with fanatics is with love. Engage them in dialogue, show that you understand what they’re saying, and 90% of them will mellow. But I wonder: would that make a vaccines-cause-autism advocate to change, or would he just think you are on the verge of coming over to his side? He thinks you’re the nut. Columnist Connie Schultz describes encountering an aggressive man who recognized her and tried to pick a fight in public, accusing her of saying “Fuck you” to him and refusing to accept her denial. (I know how that sort of thing works, again as mentioned above.) Until she aimed her camera at him and said “Keep talking.” That abruptly shut him up. Later she realized that she had pushed the wrong button and hadn’t been recording, but it still bluffed him out. THE HUMANIST magazine for November 2017, in a column by Greta Christina, remarks that historians who study fascism say that yes, we’re in the early stages of it. That’s scary, but may be correct. The same issue reviews a book, Fantasyland, by Kurt Andersen, whose subtitle is How America Went Haywire—A 500 Year History. We do seem to be the homeland of nuts of every kind. Oh, you say you’re not a nut? You’re coldly rational, and believe only what you can tangibly prove? Very well, tell me this: do you believe in God? Satan? The Afterlife? Heaven or Hell? The Soul? Ghosts? Alien visits? True privacy on the Internet?

Other notes: NEW SCIENTIST says that Silicon Valley is working to develop artificial intelligence as a god-like machine. I find that fascinating and scary. THE WEEK has a crossword puzzle. In the issue for October 27, 22017, word number 47 down is defined as On __ Horse (Piers Anthony novel). Indiana’s supreme court ruled that it is illegal to send sexual text messages to 16 year olds, even though it is legal to have sex with them there. Continued hacks may spell the end of Social Security numbers; new Medicare cards may be on the way. There’s an X-rated building in Paris that looks like a man having sex with an animal. People who skip breakfast may get clogged arteries. The median net worth of Americans with a college degree is $292,100, compared to $67,100 for those with just a high school diploma. Playboy Magazine’s Hugh Hefner died at age 91. The man was hung up on shapely 25 year old women, but he may have transformed America’s sexual outlook. British Easy Jet airline is going all electric. More power to it. Now the EPA is preventing scientists from talking about global warming. A pesticide, neonicotinoids, that is harmful to bees, has shown up in 75% of honey samples. Gretchen Carlson wrote a book titled Be Fierce: Stop Harassment and Take Your Power Back, which provoked a vile barrage of hatred from internet trolls. So the trolls are for sexual harassment? They can trace internet messages if they want to; I’d say those trolls need to be taken out of society. Stephanie Woodford was fired as human resources chief of the Hillsborough School District—that’s the Tampa area—because she refused to go along with others who committed corrupt acts. I know how that works too, as those who know my history understand. She has filed a lawsuit. More power to her. But here’s my problem: a board member told her “Don’t fuck with me” after saying she had the three P’s: Power, Position, and P—-. I don’t want to seem ignorant, but I can’t figure out what forbidden word that would be. Penis doesn’t fit, and neither really does Pussy. Can anyone enlighten me? My best guess is Pussy, since if you want to fuck, it helps to have one. Women, in private, can be as vulgar as men. But is that it?

Our drive is three quarters of a mile long, and alternate days I scoot out in the morning on my scooter to fetch the newspapers. But sometimes a tire gets punctured, and that’s a nuisance. So I got solid tires, to forever solve that problem. And they work—but there’s an awful drag, cutting down my forward urge by maybe 20%. Apparently the tires lack the bounce of the pneumatics, and it makes a difference. Sigh. I will stay with it, but it does turn out to be less than ideal.

Concluding notes: the Xanth movie is nudging closer, still very much alive. And the first book I will review next time is Sex and the Seasoned Woman.

PIERS

Dismember 2017

HI-

My latest collaboration with J R Rain, The Journey, will be on sale at 99 cents for a week starting Dismember 28. Young folk of the village have to head out for a significant journey before they are recognized as adults with adult privileges. Unfortunately many do not survive the experience. In fact there is a press gang lurking to capture and enslave 18 year old Floyd; he doesn’t have much of a chance. Then, amazingly, Amelie, the girl he dreams about, appears, and athletically helps him with magic. Only it turns out she’s not exactly what she seems; she is Faux (pronounced Fo), a female Fee whom Amelie hired to see him through. She intends to make a man of him, as she is supremely equipped to do, as they travel to Asia to find the summer resort described by the poet Coleridge in Xanadu: “…where Alf, the sacred river, ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.” This is one wild adventure, with literary allusions, that you shouldn’t miss at any price.

I watched The Huntsman—Winter’s War. It had subtitles, but they did not work, so I had trouble making out the dialogue. There is some kind of betrayal at the beginning, and the queen’s sister Freya departs to form her own kingdom to the north. She trains children to become warriors, with the stricture “Never love.” But two do fall in love as they grow up. They marry in the garden—and the queen finds them. Freya makes them each fight several others, and when they win, she punishes them anyway and they are dumped in the freezing river. He survives, and is later recruited by friends, as he is the best tracker. Then his lady love shows up, not dead after all, angry because he left her. She says the one he loved is dead; she’s forgotten love. But it’s not true and in due course they make love. Then Freya finds them, and requires Sara to kill the man. She shoots an arrow into his chest and he drops. But she hits a medal he wears that she gave him long ago, and it stops the arrow from killing him, by no coincidence. She never misses her target. His death is more apparent than real, as she knows. He returns to shoot an arrow at the queen, but her returned sister’s magic stops it. Yet there is a falling out of sisters, and their potent magic cancels them out enough to give our heroes the victory. So love did conquer in the end. Phenomenal effects, nice twists.

I watched Kong—Skull Island. I expected junk, but it seemed competently done. Satellite picture reveals a formerly hidden island with a bad reputation. It looks like a skull, and there may be remarkable secrets there. They recruit a crack team, complete with a pretty lady photographer. A carrier goes in, and a dozen helicopters take off. The island is surrounded by a thunderstorm, but they make it through. They drop seismic charges that reveal that its bedrock is practically hollow. Then a giant gorilla appears and knocks down a couple of helicopters. They fire on it, and it goes after more of them, soon clearing them from the sky. The seven survivors are land-bound. A rescue party comes but can’t do much. They encounter a giant ox, but not nearly as big as Kong. Giant bugs attack. They discover a surviving colony from 28 years before. One man sees the giant ape get attacked by an octopus, which it kills and eats. They learn that Kong has been protecting the islanders from enemies; he’s their friend. But the bombs have stirred up big vicious lizards. They locate an old pieced-together boat the old man made from airplane parts, and use it to travel along the river. A rescue party comes, but its leader doesn’t take the threats seriously. So he has to learn the hard way. A monster lizard attacks and starts eating them. They finally stop it with a flame thrower. Small flying reptiles attack, then a big Kong-sized one. Kong fights it in a phenomenal battle and finally kills it. Kong also saves the woman from drowning. They escape as Kong watches. Can they keep the secret of the island, so that there are not future invasions? They’ll try. The whole thing is wildly impossible, but it’s still one hell of a story.

I watched Copying Beethoven, which starts with a young woman, Anna, at Beethoven’s bedside as he dies. Then a flashback to a prior time, when there needs to be a copyist for Beethoven’s ninth Symphony. That is, someone to copy his messy notes into correctly clean ones, like formally typing a manuscript today. Beethoven is largely deaf and irascible at times, but she does impress him with her competence. It is almost unheard of for a woman to be a copyist, but he accepts her. He dotes on his nephew, who feels stifled, with justice. Anna has her own problems with the maestro. For example when he’s washing up, he moons her. Yet he is a genius of music, and it is in the background of the movie. Beethoven is however a mess conducting an orchestra; he can’t hear the music, loses his place, and it all goes awry. Everyone who is anyone will attend the next premier, which promises to be a disaster. Until Anna stands in the orchestra where he can see her but the audience can’t and conducts for him, showing him the timing. He copies her motions, and the performance of the Ninth Symphony is a resounding success. This strikes me as one of the most evocative sequences I have seen in any movie, in significant part because of the glorious music. I expected to be bored, but was uplifted.

I watched A Birder’s Guide to Everything. David, age 15, in an ardent birder. That is, a bird watcher, who verifies his sightings by snapping pictures. I remember my excitement when I saw my first piliated woodpecker, and dreamed of spying the extinct Ivory Bill Woodpecker. He belongs to a small birding group, three members. He thinks he sees a Labrador Duck, which is extinct. That sends them off on a, well, wild goose chase. They recruit a girl who is not a birder but who has a telephoto lens they need. They find the duck—and a hunter shoots it. It turns out not to be THE duck, but an oddly plumaged crossbreed. Nevertheless it turns out to be a transitional experience for David, and now he has a girlfriend. Coming of age genre, well done.

I watched the Discover video “Death Valley.” It’s the lowest and hottest place in the United States; temperatures range up to 145°F. It was once a shallow sea, a billion years ago. What happened? Volcanoes. Plate tectonics generated volcanoes that pushed the ancient sea up and away and formed 11,000 foot high mountains, a hundred million years ago. Thirteen million pears ago the earth’s crust thinned and stretched, and the mountains sank. By three million years ago it was one of the lowest places on Earth. A freshwater lake formed. It evaporated two hundred thousand years ago, leaving a layer of borax. Meanwhile boulders up to 700 pounds move across the desert floor, leaving trails up to half a mile long. How? The theory is that when there is rain and wind the valley floor gets slippery and they slide. It is still sinking a tenth of an inch a year. Eventually it will be low enough for the sea to come in and fill it. Um, no, not in our lifetime, so don’t rush out to watch.

I read Sex and the Seasoned Woman by Gail Sheehy. This is a book about the experience of aging women which might attract little attention if that were the title, but someone found a great best selling title. I have to admire that genius of marketing. It’s a good book, regardless. Her thesis is that as women age they achieve their Second Adulthood, which can be far more rewarding than their First Adulthood, because they know so much more and have more resources. They may no longer need to be beholden to a man for their place, no longer tied down by children and fading romance. Now they are free to seek their own destinies, and age 50 may be the beginning of their real fulfillment. Now they can pursue love, sex, and new dreams. And yes, freed from the constraints of possible pregnancy and childbirth, many do seek sex, their way. They find fulfillment in true love with a soul mate whom they may or may not marry. Not all of them; the author gives examples of dreams that don’t work out. But seasoned women are largely free from the straitjacket that is, or was, society’s lowly expectation for the distaff gender. Along the way she provides many fascinating individual case histories, and many interesting facts. This is worthwhile for the male as well as the female reader. Some quotes: “What makes a seasoned woman? Time.” “’How old are you, anyway?’ ‘Somewhere between forty and death.’” “A woman who reaches the age of 50 free of cancer and heart disease can expect to see her ninety second birthday.” Young people count the number of years from their birth; after 50 they start counting the years to their death. Some are WMDs: Women Married, Dammit! “…the number one factor in enhancing sexual desire and response among women is a new partner.” One divorced woman of 70 told why she was not interested in sex: Too old. Too fat. Too scared. But this book shows that a woman is never too old, and if she meets the right man—or sometimes, right woman—she won’t be scared. So how to deal with the middle? Exercise. That’s the single cheapest and most effective remedy. “Sex, passion, and soul go together.” “A richly rewarding and stable sex life is not just a fringe benefit. It is the central task of marriage.” What about women without a partner? The vagina can atrophy from disuse. Some women take younger lovers. One says she keeps herself alive, sexually, with BOB. Who is BOB? Her Battery-Operated Boyfriend. But it’s not just about sex; that’s only an ingredient in a larger lifestyle. “If the central motivator of all human activity is passion, its opposite is depression.” “The fact that a woman’s Second Adulthood is fueled by a dominance of testosterone coincides with the resurgence in woman of adventurousness, independence, and assertiveness.” Even so, men still have more testosterone than women do, about ten times as much. “70 percent of aging is controlled by our lifestyle: how actively we move around, how much we drink or smoke, how well we sleep, how many close friends we keep up with, and how engaged we remain in life and community.” “Sex may be the last to go. But there is one thing that never goes—the only meaning that survives all—love.” So yes, I recommend this book; it’s a fair guide to a more satisfying later life, and it nicely endorses principles I have picked up on elsewhere and tried to follow. If I should ever find myself alone, which is a fair prospect at my age after 61 years of marriage, I would want to gain the company of the right seasoned woman to complete my life.

I read One Hundred Dreams by Lisa Morris. This is a book of a hundred sonnets. A sonnet is a variety of poem, fourteen lines, the last two often capping its theme. These ones are actually little stories, each sonnet an episode. I am not a great judge of poetry; it’s out of my genre, and the sonnet has never been my preferred form anyway, so I suspect there’s a lot I’m missing here. So I feel a bit awkward even presenting an opinion. But for what it’s worth, I found the mini romances touching and sometimes painful. Typically a young woman relates to a man, positively or negatively; sometimes she gets him, but that is not always a happy outcome. Such as “One Kiss on the Moor,” where he kisses her and charms her into going with him on a ship, but when he gets her far away from home instead of marrying her he makes her his captive mistress. Bluntly, his whore. Other sonnets seem to follow up on this deception and betrayal. She is happy only in her dreams, until a new man rescues her, and she begins to heal. Other sonnets relate to princesses, some too canny to fall for the lies of men. When a man is true, he still may die prematurely, so the woman is suffering. Some romances do work out; some don’t. In “The Hidden Box” he takes the minor things she leaves, like a green hair ribbon, and saves them. She likes him, and hopes they’ll have a life together. Then he dies, and she discovers a box where he saved the mementos, and in it also a pair of wedding rings. I think that’s the most painful one, for me, and yet my favorite, for its poignancy. My favorite single line is in “The Mermaid,” who would like to attract the attention of a man she likes, but knows why she fails: “I am not quite a woman of your kind.” She is doomed to be lonely. In a later one, “Wading Away,” a mermaid does attract a man, but leaves him for the sea. Isn’t this the way it is for so many of us in real life, regardless of appearance? It has been conjectured elsewhere that man and woman are different species, seemingly similar, drawn to each other yet not quite each other’s kind, causing so much mischief and heartache. Then there’s “The Man Who Caught the Moon,” and it works out as they stay together, but she fades when landbound too long and has to return to the sky, their love still strong. Again imperfect, like the difference between the genders. Overall, I found this collection moderately depressing, because so many loves don’t work out; yet it has its charms.

I read Creating Places—the Art of World Building Volume II, by Randy Ellefson. This is the second volume of a three volume work. The first volume was Creating Life, which I reviewed in Mayhem of this year. This volume addresses the settings a writer wishes to create, and it is exhaustive. So you invent a planet; does it have a moon? Because a moon facilitates the evolution of life on a planet, by stabilizing it; otherwise it could bobble all over, with disastrous consequences for life below. The book also gets into plate tectonics—drifting continents, for you ignorant folk—clarifying what is going on there. When one continental plate shoves under another, and melts, hot lava emerges from the surface above as volcanoes, some of which can be devastating. This too is important for the welfare of life. In fantasy you can do things magically, but in science fiction it is better to know what you’re talking about, and this reference spells it out. When the movements of the ground throw up mountain ranges, these can create rain shadows, with copious rain on the side where fronts come from, and deserts on the other side because the rain has been squeezed out. Bounteous California, but also Death Valley. What kind of creatures to you have? This touches on everything from dragons to elves. Are there guns or just swords? That too makes a difference when you’re up against hungry monsters. How do you travel? There are various ways on land. If there is plenty of water, then probably by ship; there is a competent discussion of the types of ship, including their sails. Next time I have a ship in my fiction, I expect to reread this portion, and get it right. Then there is the dubious art of politics. How are people governed? It goes into the various types of organization, from settlements to kingdoms, from autocracy on down. That discussion triggered an idea for me: suppose folk lived in a kakistocracy? That is, government by the worst. I may write a story about that. This book may well spawn similar ideas for you. It also has advice along the way on writing that I’m sure novice writers and perhaps some established ones too can profit from. I recommend this book as a basic reference; at worst it is a review of necessary concepts, and at best it will upgrade you from a mediocre speculative fiction writer to a superior one.

I watched Tears of the Sun, a Bruce Willis movie set in war-torn, oil rich Nigeria. This is brutal from the start, as we see the presidential family assassinated, children first. Navy Seal A K Waters has to get an American nurse, Lena, and the nuns with her out before the rebels come and brutally wipe them all out. She refuses to go without her 70 person mission. They want to bring their chickens and everything. The helicopters can’t carry them all, so they will hike 40 miles through the jungle and wilderness to neighboring Cameroon. It is some hike! Except that the copters don’t take the other personnel; there isn’t room. Lena is furious. But when they see the devastation left by the rebels, with bodies strewn everywhere because of ethnic cleansing, they turn the helicopters back and pick up a dozen of the portion of the 70 that came, partly by making space as A K and Lena and the men get off the copter. They will trek by foot with the remaining 28. The American brass are not pleased. A group is following them. Why? They spy more ethnic cleaning, with rape and killing and burning of the village in progress, and shoot the perpetrators. But much damage is already done, such as nursing mothers with their breasts cut off; this is what the rebels do. The pursuing group gains on them, and they realize there’s an inside man radioing the position. They learn that the heir to the Ibu tribe is with them; that’s why the rebels are pursuing them. This is real mischief. A K polls his men, as he has been advised to turn over the heir and leave the refugees in the jungle. The men agree to try to get the refugees to safety. But is it even possible? They get into a pitched battle and take losses. Lena gets hit. A K gets hit. They call in air support. The planes blast the enemy at the last moment. So they make it, barely, saving most of their group. It is one ugly but powerful story. You think revolution and war are fun? This film may set you straight.
I watched Emanuelle Queen of the Desert. I had hoped for a sexy exciting action thriller, as it is billed, but it was apparent from the start that it’s a junky effort. The color is washed out, the dialogue amateurish. But we do get to see sexy Emanuelle naked. She encounters a guerrilla soldier in the desert, offers him sex, but pushes him off a cliff so he dies. Then she joins his four companions and plays them for jealousy. She stabs one to death. The remaining three pursue her to a village where they shoot up the natives. But she has a rifle now. Then a flashback to a week prior as the men go about their mission; no sexy woman there. They quarrel among themselves and push the natives around, raping and killing. Then back to the present with Emanualle. They kill each other off, except for the one decent guy. Hardly worth watching.

I wrote three sexy stories totaling about 12,000 words, then the novelette “Ghost Puppeteer,” sequel to the novella Ghost Ensemble, all slated for my collection Relationships 7. During that I had my last two teeth pulled, as I had a toothache in one and it was time to get my lower denture. I spent Thanksgiving Day writing with a dull ache in my jaw, on a soft diet. You can see why I have a rich imaginative life; my mundane life is well worth ignoring. Then I watched some more videos.

I watched Violet & Daisy. This is an odd one. Two pretty girls, maybe 18, don nuns’ outfits and go and shoot up a male hangout, killing maybe a dozen men, with no remorse at all. They are hired assassins, for they need the money. Their next target turns out to be a middle aged man who is expecting them. He offers them fine cookies. They wind up killing the other bunch of killers who come for him. It goes on from there, weirdly innocent and violent. Then it changes, turning strange and feeling as key revelations are made. In the end they become real girls, surprisingly. Not a formula movie.

I watched Killing Device. This is a microchip that can be implanted in a person, looking like a crown on a tooth, but it has wires extending into the brain that can in effect take it over so the person will become an assassin who then commits suicide, concealing the true source of the hit. Then a chip-crowned assassin sneaks in and kills four senators who were planning mischief. There is skulduggery at every level. The least likely people suddenly kill, and are in turn killed, as more teeth are uniquely crowned. Then a reporter starts investigating. He steals an odd crown and they chase after him, knowing that they must get that crown back. He encounters the dentist’s secretary and they flee together, and fall in love during a pause in the action. Credibility degenerates from there. This could have been a truly dramatic film. Unfortunately the plotting is second rate, as is the acting.

I watched The Lovers, which turns out to be the two halves of a single twining serpent ring whose wearers will always reunite even if widely separated. Jay rescues his wife who is trapped underwater, but in the process he is left brain dead. His mind goes to India 1778, where there is a betrayal and the king is assassinated. The new queen means to kill the ex queen, but covertly, so the ex is shipped to the far side of India, Bombay—if she makes it there. This is contrary to the will of the British authority, but England is far away, so they are trying for a fait accompli. The captain, James, is charged with keeping ex safe. But they are traveling overland, and pursued. He gets interested in the queen’s lovely lady warrior guard, Tulaja, and she in him. But she is cursed to betray the one she loves, so dares not love. He finds the other half of the ring she has and begins to understand. Meanwhile, as it were, Jay’s wife gets the ring and puts it on his still finger. Then she gets the other half, seemingly from Tulaja, and adds that to it on his finger. And he is hauled out of the depths of his near death and wakes.

Health: it seems that after age 40, your brain shrinks about five percent every ten years. So if you live beyond 100, maybe a third of your brain is gone. But aerobic exercise can prevent much of this. Which is why, of course, I started my exercise program at age 40; now in retrospect I see the reason. Other threats to health: high blood pressure. That used to be 140/90; now it’s 130/80. The first number is the peak when the heart beats; the second is the low between beats. 46% of American adults are above that upper threshold. So where am I? I remain 115/65, 15 digits below. Now it turns out that folk who watch a lot of TV can get Deep Vein Thrombosis, or blood clots, which can dislodge and mess up the lungs or heart. That strikes me as a good name for a musical band, DVT for short, with the base notes going Throm! Throm! Throm! I don’t watch a lot of TV, but I do spend a lot of time at the computer, which I think could be similarly dangerous. Fortunately I don’t sit still for long without getting up to do this or that. That probably saves my ass, literally.

In the NoRemember column I mentioned a bullying woman saying she had Power, Position, and P____. I wondered what P could be, and concluded probably Pussy. Myron Chaplin wrote to suggest instead of a word, an abbreviation: PMS. He remarks that women with this condition can be particularly Poisonous, Powerful, Painful and occasionally Pernicious, and are best treated with Tenderness if not completely left alone. Good advice.

The Ask Marilyn column in PARADE for NoRemember 19 was asked whether it makes a difference if you wash your hands in hot or warm water, versus cold water. She answers no, usually. No matter how hot the water is, you’re not killing the germs; you’d need boiling water for that. Heat does help with grease, but that’s about it. Yes, I had reasoned that out as a child. When I washed dishes I did not use hot water, in part because our house in the Green Mountains forest of Vermont had no electricity and the water was pumped by hand. To heat it would mean lighting the wood-burning stove, putting some kettles on, then in due course pouring the hot water into the sink, greatly complicating a simple operation. Once a visitor remarked on that, and I said “Oh, I wash them in cold water.” I learned over half a century later, from my father’s journal that I inherited, that he regarded that as an example of my arrogance. Come again? When hot water that hands can tolerate makes no difference in the cleaning effect? Those who never washed a dish were critical of my system as I washed their dishes? None of them offered to do it themselves, their way; they wanted me to do it their way. That made me arrogant? So okay, how do I do it now? I do use warm water, because with electricity it is easy, and it’s more comfortable. But I doubt the dishes are any cleaner, apart from occasional grease. And I remain as arrogant as ever, as any critic can tell you. It is as if I travel on an island of rationality, surrounded by folk in at least partial denial about reality but very sure they are right. Denial is a great comfort to them, though they also deny they are in it. Thus my course differs from most, which makes me eccentric in their view. You know the rule: poor folk are crazy; rich folk are eccentric. So I used to be the first, now am the second. Adults are sensible; children need correction. And so on. I always liked the humorous formula “I am firm, you are stubborn, he’s pig headed.” Especially one of the female versions “I am beautiful, you are pretty, she’s all right if you like that type.” All of them quite true, as you know from your own experience. I am sane; you are…

ALTERNATIVES, the health newsletter by Dr. David Williams, remarks that childhood depression is in the rise. I find that interesting, having been a depressed child. I think I have mentioned before how at about age twelve I assessed my life with a thought experiment, asking myself whether if I had the choice of living my life over exactly as before, or never existing at all, which would I choose? And I thought probably the latter alternative. But as I have also mentioned, things changed about the time I went to college, became a vegetarian, became a writer, and met the girl I married, and now yes, I would prefer to live it over as before. So I don’t belittle childhood depression; it can be as serous as adult depression. It seems that since 2000 24% of girls and 9% of boys in England are depressed by age 14. I came from England, but probably the statistics for America are similar. Now the use of antidepressants is rising sharply. I suspect that’s a superficial treatment for a deeper malady. How about reconsidering how we treat our children? Dr. Williams recommends, among other things, feeding them a daily probiotic. I agree. I had daily stomach aches that probiotics might have eased. But I am thinking of the social and legal treatment of children, and this is not just a matter of expecting them to be little servants washing dishes the wrong way. As I have also mentioned before, some of those little girls have big girl problems, such as getting sexually molested and not daring to tell. Antidepressants are treating the symptoms rather than the causes. That’s only the beginning. If I ruled the world…

Newspaper headline: “End the conflicts…we can end world hunger.” Yes, but the devil is in the details. There are power grubbing dictators small and large across the world, and most of what they understand is force, and that means conflict. If you could wave a wand and spread global peace, yes the resources exist to feed everyone. But that wand does not exist. I wish it did.

Yet another installment of my Vegetarianism Can Save The World theme, not that I proselytize, as you understand, is an item in NEW SCIENTIST titled “A ‘coffee maker’ for lab-grown plants” says that cultured meat, like the $300,000 lab-grown burger, isn’t the only such effort. Now they’re trying to do the same for plants, because a growing global human population, shrinking farmland, and climate change will force us to find new ways to guarantee food supplies. The VTT Technical Research Center of Finland is working to make cellular agriculture part of the solution. They have developed a small bio-reactor that looks a bit like a coffee machine in your kitchen. Just pop in a pod of plant cells along with growth media and wait for them to turn into jam-like food. The thing is, when these cells don’t have to help the overall plant survive they can become a lot more productive. Such a cell line could produce ten, a hundred, or a thousand times more of these interesting compounds than the original plant does. So not only might we replace the poor cows who get slaughtered for their meat, we might replace the grass they eat, and the pastures ripped out of the natural realm, bypassing the whole destructive shebang. Ten, a hundred, or a thousand times as efficient? Process it into food that tastes like whatever you want? I’m sure there are details to work out, such as what do you feed those marvelous cells, but this is most interesting.

Can we colonize the moon? Item in THE WEEK says the scientists speculate that below the moon’s surface lies a vast network of caves and caverns, potentially perfect for a subterranean lunar colony. Japan’s space agency believes it has proof that such caves exist. One hollowed out lava tube is 31 miles long and half a mile high; big enough for a city of millions. That cavern might contain water or ice, and shield folk from meteorites, radiation, and extreme temperatures. Now if they brought in coffee machines to make the food, and pressurized it with air, and generated light, it might be a nice retirement community for those who find Earth gravity burdensome. But I doubt settlers there could ever return to Earth; gravity would kill them.

Other notes: Sales of electric cars are growing, jumping 36 percent last year. Prices are dropping and performance is rising, and they are less polluting than gasoline powered cars, even when you count the costs of generating the electricity. China is betting on them. We are satisfied with our Prius, but we are keeping an eye on electric offerings for the future. Maybe what we really want is an electric Prius. It seems that 17% of all online ebooks were pirated. I think similar is true for movies. That is discouraging. I believe all my books have been pirated, even self published ones. I made my fortune before epublishing took over, so I’m not going hungry, but it is annoying to see the freeloaders prospering. The average writer can barely earn a living from writing, if at all, and this could wipe out many. Do we really want to see the most imaginative aspect of our society be starved out of existence by thieves? I understand that a new book titled Out Of The Wreckage: A New Politics for An Age Of Crisis, by George Monbiot, makes the point that activists and communities, that is to say, the non-leaders and un-elite, are the supreme cooperators, and storytelling is the heart of it. Yes indeed; storytelling is as I see it the essence of humankind, largely defining us. It enables us to perfect communication by language and to share values. Face it: why are you here reading this? Because you like my storytelling, fictive, factive, and opinionative. Monbiot says the fact is, humans are also deeply weird in their capacity for imagination, creativity and abstract thought. We like stories that make sense. Yes indeed, and I take joy in that weirdness, thank you. And THE WEEK republished an article from The Guardian about how Silicon Valley hooks us, using foibles of our minds to lure us into addiction to their wares. Do you get into Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter, intending a few minutes, but staying an hour? Then you’re getting hooked. “The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will.” No, it doesn’t happen to me, not because of any superior willpower I may think I possess, but because I’m on dial-up and can’t use those programs, which may be just as well; I fear they would fascinate me into oblivion. And a NEW SCIENTIST article “Before the Beginning” says that when they researched to locate the very beginning of life on Earth, they found RNA that replicated itself—and it is still with us, in every cell. It is the ribosome, a tiny molecular machine that does just one thing, but does it so well that it has never been replaced. It reads the genetic code contained in DNA and uses it to construct the proteins that make us what we are. “In essence, they are the cellular robots that build the stuff that makes our cells tick.” So what is the real heart of all of us? A mini robot reading instructions and building our cells. That’s what’s behind the curtain. So will there ever be conscious robots? There already are, and they are us.

PIERS

Jamboree 2018

HI-

I read the 350,000 word novel The Passage by Justin Cronin. This is a best selling critically acclaimed science fiction story, though of course not recognized as such because critics can’t conceive of anything in the lowly SF genre being high quality. I say yet again, the fault is with the ignorant critics, not the genre. The author was talking with his nine year old daughter, and asked her what a book should be about, and she said “A girl who saves the world.” So they discussed that concept, and in due course he fell in love with it, and here is the result. Would you believe, it is only the first part of the story; I have the second part, The Twelve, and must decide when to read and review it. It is about Amy, patterned after the author’s daughter, who is effectively orphaned at age 6 but has a special quality that carries her safely through horrendous dangers and gets unlikely people to help her significantly. Such as a secret government experiment that incidentally looses a virus that turns folk into vampire-like monsters, “virals,” that slaughter the regular population; what they don’t eat, they convert. The agent who is sent to track Amy down winds up falling in love with her as a daughter, and safeguarding her despite dying himself. Amy, aging at about the rate of about one year in fifteen, shows up at a California survivalist camp almost a century later seeming about twelve, where Peter and his friends protect her. She is a Walker, one who walks among the deadly virals with impunity. Then they set out to return Amy to her place of origin, not where she was born, but where she became special, in the laboratory in Colorado. It is a horrendous excursion. As the volume concludes, they have eliminated one master of virals and are setting out to do the same to the other eleven masters so that mankind can be safe again. That will be no easy task, in part because the virals are telepathically coordinated. The narration is tense, with many surprises, and nice characterization; it is a superior novel despite the approval of public and critics.

I watched Dungeons & Dragons. This is a sort of parody of classic fantasy adventure with elves, dwarves, dragons, blue and green aliens, and weird magic. The evil mage Profion wants to take over the Empire of Izmer. He tries to control a dragon, but the beast resists and has to be killed. So he plots to undermine the power of Empress. It turns out to be up to the student mage Marina and two thieves to foil him. There follows an impossibly wild adventure as the good guys fight the bad guys, with some neutrals mixing in. Finally, of course, our hero Ridley enters the Dungeon. There are distractions, like gold coins and jewelry, but he perseveres and wins the Rod of Power. Then has to give it to the other side to save Marina. There follows a wild battle, and they finally save the Empire. Standard elements throughout, but a fun movie.

And the sequel, Wrath of the Dragon God, with quite different in flavor. Sir Berek fears he is losing his edge. His lovely wife Melora is a mage, and together they protect the kingdom of Ismer (not Izmer; this is a century later), but he longs to return to the field. Then he receives a plea from a village in trouble: a dragon in sleeping under their mountain. When the black Orb is freed, that dragon will wake and devastate the land. Berek must go to fetch the Orb, traveling with the beautiful warrior maiden Lux, and the lady mage Ormwaline, as Melora is unwell. In fact she is dying of a magic ailment. This could of course be mischief. Berek’s party is ambushed by a huge dragon-like flying monster, and one man is killed before they stop it. Meanwhile back home. Melora has a vision, and they locate a hidden device. Berek alone returns with the Orb. But the enemy gets it, and the evil lord seemingly prevails. The dragon blasts fire on the town. Then Melora gets the Orb and fights back. They end the curse and kill the dragon. Melora recovers. They have won. For now.

I watched Cat Run. Catalina, or Cat, is a high end call girl in Europe who comes across a hard drive with nuclear information and has to flee truly dangerous folk. Such as Helen, a polite lady assassin who is completely ruthless about getting the information she needs. For example she has a little metal device she puts on a man’s toe, and crunch! His toe is cut off. She can use it for other extremities. Cat’s father hires two amateur detectives, Anthony and Julian, to find Cat before the mob does, to try to save her life. They rescue her baby and bring him to her, but the assassin is close behind, leaving a trail of dead bystanders. But Helen’s boss hires another assassin, a truly brutal man who captures them and is about to kill them after having his pleasure of Cat. If they cooperate he’ll kill them quickly; if not he’ll torture them to death, including the baby. He abruptly gets his head blown off. Helen shows up; it seems she was annoyed by being replaced. Now she is on their side. They go after the hard drive as a team, and Helen takes out all the bad guys and herself. Or did she survive? We have to hope so, because she’s the most evocative character in the movie.

The sequel is Cat Run 2. Anthony and Julian are running a restaurant. Meanwhile nude girls raid a military base and steal computer data before shooting it out with the personnel. This time the high end call girl is not Cat, and is an assassin. She pursues Anthony and Julian when they poke around the bayou, finding evidence of human remains. I wasn’t able to make much sense of it. There’s a nice fight between two enhanced robotic girls. The restaurant is in a cooking contest, and Anthony wins. This does not seem equal to the original movie.

I watched The Happy Hooker. It starts with girls being checked in a police station or prostitution. One is Xaviera, and we segue into how she got here. She came from Holland to get married, but quickly gets disenchanted with her fiancee’s mother-dominated family and leaves. She gets a job, meets an interesting man who treats her very well—but regards her as a high class call girl. She’s furious, having thought their relationship was more serious, but concludes that this is not a bad kind of life. She tries out for a strip tease show, and wows them. She becomes fabulously successful. There are some nice sequences as she role-plays for clients. Until the local policeman strikes. So she goes to Madam Madeleine, who runs a really accommodating establishment. Xaviera turns out to be more than competent; she can handle the weird ones. Soon she’s running her own sex business. Then she buys out Madeleine. She becomes the most successful such outfit in New York. Then the police spring a trap and they all get arrested. So she moves on; it’s part of the business. Overall, this is a better movie than I expected; it’s not erotic so much as about the business.

The sequel is The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington. A new, cuter actress plays Xaviera. Congress is cracking down on prostitution, and Xaviera is summoned to testify. It is hilarious sexy madcap. She is recruited by the CIA for a secret mission: to distract a sheikh so that he misses a key meeting. She succeeds in wild fashion. Then she meets his harem, and he drives her to the airport. Then, back at the hearing, they want to try her for treason, but she presents the sexy girls the judges have been dallying with, and we see their wild cavorting. So much for their hypocrisy. What a romp!

And The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood. Another new actress for Xaviera. Sigh; I liked the second one. A studio wants to make a movie from her book and of course she’s interested, but goes there herself to make sure they do it right. The producer’s handsome son seduces her and plans to give the role to a neighbor woman who has no respect for her. She finds out and dumps the deal. But he manages to persuade her to return and make it with a rival studio. They can’t get financing, so barter the favors of Xaviera’s girls for the various services they need. And they get raided by the police, thanks to the opposition. So Xaviera fights back, dirty, using her sex appeal. She tricks the main two men into coming to her in a dark room, but they wind up together, locked in naked. They manage to make the film in time, but the opposition steals it just before the big premier. Car chase to get it back, barely in time. It’s a big success. So the good girls prevail after all.

I watched Transformers—The Last Knight. It has fantastic special effects but is confusingly fast moving and I may have details wrong. It starts with a battle in King Arthur’s time, that legend suitably garbled, when Merlin makes a deal to gain a Staff so he can summon a dragon for victory. Then it jumps 1600 years later. Optimus Prime, leader of the transformers, those marvelous animate conglomerations of machines, discovers his home world ruined. He must recover the last Staff to rebuild it. That staff was hidden on Earth, when Merlin got it. Meanwhile the transformers are hiding out in a junkyard in the forms of assorted animals, some of which are like pets. Anthony Hopins presides over the estate and explains. We learn that all the top figures of human art and history belonged to a society whose purpose was to conceal the presence of the cybertrons. Only a direct descendant of Merlin can wield the Staff, and that is the young lady professor Bee. Now she and the young man inventor Cade must find the Staff, hidden somewhere on the premises, or maybe somewhere else. They find Merlin’s grave, and the bones of Merlin, and throw away the battered staff in his coffin. Uh-oh. But Bee picks it up, then has to give it to Nemesis Prime. Optimus Prime says that they must go to Cybertron and destroy Quintessa, the queen of the transformers. The cybertrons join in that endeavor. They finally win, and Optimus calls all autobots to hide again. The danger is over—for now.

I watched Wonder Woman, the remake. I reviewed the original earlier this year. She starts as Princess Diana, a little girl eager to train with the Amazons, but her mother forbids it, wanting to protect her. But she trains anyway, and it seems she is something special, but doesn’t know it. Then when she is grown, Steve, an American pilot comes to their island, pursued by World War One German soldiers. She saves him. The Germans charge and the Amazons fight them and kill them, but take losses themselves. Diana concludes that the evil god Ares must be behind it, so she departs with Steve to locate and kill Ares. In London she learns to dress like a mundane woman. Bad guys attack Steve, and Diana fights them off. Her bracelets can stop bullets. She goes into battle and routs the Germans, saving a starving Flemish village. The villagers celebrate. He teaches her how to dance the waltz. The German general plans to release poison gas just before the armistice, wiping everybody out. Diana has to stop that. She fights and kills the general, who is Ares, but the war continues. The evil is more pervasive than that. The God of Truth tells her that the evil is in all of them. Ares manifests at last directly, and she fights him. But he is no easy mark. She finally defeats him in a phenomenal battle and peace comes to the world. But it seems that Steve is among the dead, alas.

I watched Far From Heaven. Cathy and Frank seem to have it all, circa 1950s New England: nice house, two nice children, he a successful executive, she on top of the myriad little chores around the house. Naturally all is not as it seems. She catches him kissing another man. No wonder their love life is thin. Now their perfect marriage is a sham. She goes on a drive with her black gardener, a man much more her type, which turns into a date. Others, both white and black, who see them together, radiate disapproval. They eat at a black restaurant. They dance. This is of course mischief. Word spreads rapidly, affecting her best friend, her children, her husband. Open racism manifests. I wince to see it; I grew up in that region and time and know it is true, though it was never my way. The marriage breaks up, the gardener has to move away, and Cathy is essentially alone. All because of racial and gay prejudice.

I watched Alien Covenant. It starts with the animation of the android David in the year 2104. they are on a spaceship with a crew of 15. Then there’s a power surge because of a stellar flare and the ship is in trouble. It loses 47 colonists and the ship captain. Then a perfect planet for colonization turns up nearby. That could save them a seven year journey, but it seems too good to be true. So they take a look. They send a lander. Beautiful mountains. No birds, no animals, but breathable atmosphere. A foot party discovers Earthly wheat growing. What looks like swirling dust flies into a crewman’s ear and into his body. He gets sick. His skin erupts and something like a giant lizard-insect emerges from his body and attacks the woman trying to help him. Soon there are several of the creatures attacking crew members. Then the android David shows up, and explains how he was one of only two survivors of the last Prometheus excursion ten years ago. It carried a biological weapon that has now been loosed. David loosed it and perfected it. He sees himself as the Creator. The ship departs, but a couple of the creatures are aboard it, leading to a tense conclusion. The journey to the distant system resumes, but it seems the virus is along. Walter the android who replaced David has betrayed them.

I watched Star Trek, the movie. I’ve had it for six years and can’t figure why I didn’t watch it before; it must have slipped through the cracks until I found it when sorting out videos. Different actors approximating the appearance of the originals, close enough. By damn, this does what the Star Trek TV series never did: it fills in a story background that set up the series. This goes into the genesis and childhoods of Kirk and Spock; both were rebels throughout. Kirk meets Uhura in passing, and McCoy, “Bones,” Sulu, and others. Their training is interrupted by an emergency mission as Romulans from the future attack under the command of Nero, who hates the Federation and means to destroy it. Complications ensue, and Speck becomes captain of the Enterprise, and then Kirk. Then Spock and Kirk work together on a mission to stop Nero, and succeed. An interesting detail: Uhura’s first name turns out to be Nyota, and she and Spock develop a thing for each other. We never saw that in the original series; they kept the secret well. The actress for the original one was a good looking woman, always posed to show off her legs; the new actress is a better looking one. And so at the end we have the beginning of the original series. I love it.

I resumed watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, picking up where I left off before, with episode #8 by my count. Remember, I was curious whether Next could match the quality of the original series, and am already satisfied that it does, and may even be superior. This episode is “The Battle,” where the Enterprise is contacted by a Ferengi ship. Its Captain Bok comes aboard, with his giant ears, speaking of the Battle of Maxia, nine years ago. They have Picard’s old ship, the Stargazer, which they are returning to him. It is a curious business. Meanwhile Picard has a mysterious headache. We learn it is sent by the Ferengi. What mischief are they up to? They are definitely messing with his brain, Bok seeking vengeance for what he deems a past wrong. They catch on and destroy the sphere controlling Picard’s thoughts, and survive.

#9 “Hide and Q”: they get an emergency call to help a colony with people dying, but are intercepted by Q, an alien power. He takes five of the crew to a desolate planet, leaving Picard isolated in a non-responsive bridge. Things change, and it becomes a test of Riker. He is given magical powers so he can give others their fondest wishes. Will this power corrupt him, or the others who receive these gifts? It’s a close call, but they decline them, and so prevail.

#10 “Haven”: they have a layover at an ideal vacation planet, Haven; naturally that changes. On the way there. Counselor Deanna Troi discovers to her chagrin that she is to be married to one Wyatt, whom she has not met before. She can’t escape it. She would, it seems, rather be with Riker, but she’s stuck. The wedding party arrives, including her bossy telepathic mother. Wyatt turns out to be a decent young man whose romantic interest is also elsewhere, in an imaginary girl Ariana, but he too is stuck. Meanwhile a Terellian ship also approaches Haven, and this is mischief because the Terellians are infected with a deadly plague that will wipe out the planet. Then it turns out that Ariana is real, and aboard the plague ship. Wyatt beams across to her, with medicine, hoping to save them. That frees Deanna.

#11 “The Big Goodbye”: a holo program enables Picard to enter a play set in San Francisco 1941 as a fictional private detective Dixon Hill. It all seems quite real. In fact when a client woman kisses him, he emerges from the scene with a smear of lipstick on his mouth. He returns with three others from the ship: Data, Dr. Crusher, Whalen—I’m not clear who that last is. There’s a glitch and they get locked in, and Whalen gets shot. This has become all too real!

#12 ”Datalore”: They visit Data’s home planet. He’s an android; he was found here, alone. The world is dead. They find an access to a subterranean realm, where models of Data are on display. They find and assemble a duplicate, named Lore, and bring him to life. He is mostly just like Data, but slightly superior, better able to understand and emulate humans, but we don’t know his motives. He knocks out Data and takes his place, emulating him. Only Wesley catches on, but others refuse to listen to him. But in the end they do catch on, and banish Lore.

I read Errf the 92nd, by Tom Johnson. Errf is a young goblin, the 92nd of that name; it is believed that no goblin of that name ever does well in life. But he has a fighting spirit, and moves remarkably quickly. He gets training in martial arts and becomes a pretty good warrior. Then the king’s men come after him, because the king thinks that Errf will replace him. The king arranges to kidnap a number of bigguns children, that is, from topside, humans, elves, and such, and blame it on Errf. So the bigguns invade, and there is fierce fighting before Errf, with the help of stalwart companions including a wizard, finally prevails and becomes king. He returns the children to their folks and makes peace with the topsiders, then arranges to pass the kingship on to a friend so he can go about his own pursuits. It’s a straightforward adventure, easy to follow, with violence and mystery and magic but no romance; well enough done for those who like that type.

I read Enter Pale Death by Barbara Cleverly. This is a British mystery novel, out of my genre, but I was intrigued by the description: an experienced horsewoman goes to ride a new horse, and it kills her. Death by misadventure, it seems. But Scotland Yard’s Detective Joe Sandilands suspects foul play. However there may be a conflict of interest, as the chief suspect is her husband, who is the academic patron of the girl Dorcas, whom Joe would like to marry. What should he do? So I read it, and learned that the widower is more than the academic patron of Dorcas; he may also be her lover. So much for Joe’s romantic interest; the girl is leading him on. He plows ahead, and in due course solves the case, implicating the widower and alienating Dorcas, though he does find another women, in the course of his investigation, who really is more his type. So it’s not a loss, as aspects of the conclusion did surprise me; this is a well integrated mystery. Oh, so how was it murder? Someone put a foul chemical on the piece of cake the woman brought to tempt the horse, and it so frightened the beast that it struck out at her. Who did it? Tricky to figure out.

#13 “Angel One.” They visit a female society that has been neglected, because a freighter may have crashed there and there could be survivors. The head Matriarch Beata is evasive, but then says there were four male survivors, dangerous men. Commander Riker has to don a dress to meet with the Beata, while the others search. She promptly seduces him. Tasha Yar, Data, and Deanna Troi locate the survivors, who don’t want to go. They are therefore to be executed. Meanwhile a plague is spreading aboard the Enterprise. Fortunately a vaccine is found, and the survivors are spared and exiled to a remote area.

#14 “11001001” They check in for routine maintenance. Twin aliens, the Byners, work to upgrade the ship’s computer. They are 10 and 01. They do a great job. Riker tries a simulation of an old time dance hall. He dances with the sexy girl Minuet. Meanwhile an emergency occurs; they can’t reach Picard or Riker, who are being distracted in the simulation by Minuet. All other personnel abandon ship. The ship is being hijacked by the Byners. It turns out that they need its computer to store the massive data in their computer while it is down because of a local nova. Picard manages to set things right, saving the Bynars and the ship.

#15 “Too Short a Season” A hostage situation. The terrorists demand a Federation mediator. The Admiral has incurable Iverson’s disease, yet he is mending and becoming younger. It seems he is using an alien treatment. The situation is complicated, and the Admiral has some guilt. He tries to rescue the hostages by a raid. He gets captured, but the enemy leader doesn’t believe that this now-young man is the Admiral. He is persuaded as the Admiral dies from the effect of the treatment, and the hostages are released.

I watched I, Robot, which sparked my interest because I have long been a fan of robots, and they are people in my novels. It is possible that Isaac Asimov’s robots guided my early interest. I don’t necessarily agree with his Three Laws of Robotics, but they are an excellent starting point. This starts with a homicide Detective Spooner called in on a case. It seems that Dr. Lanning, a leading robot scientist, committed suicide. But Spooner suspects it was murder, and that a robot did it. A robot, Sonny, appears, but escapes, and hides in a formation of 1,000 identical robots. Spooser nevertheless gets it to make a break, and interviews it when it is captured. He succeeds in making it express anger: it feels emotions, something theoretically impossible. But the robot company won’t let it be dissected for analysis. He continues to investigate. Is there a ghost in the machine, making a robot different? A giant robotic machine attacks his house. Coincidence? He tries to persuade the lady Doctor Susan Calvin, who works with robots, to help him, bus she thinks he’s just an irrational robot-a-phobe. Then robots attack him in his car. What a sequence! But as Susan learns more, she comes to appreciate his position. Sonny has in effect free will. Why was he built? Sonny says his father—the scientist who made him—enabled him to dream, for a reason. What reason? But the company says he has to be destroyed. Susan saves him and Sonny becomes their ally as hell breaks loose in a virtual war between robots and humans. This is what Dr. Lanning feared but was prevented from saying directly: the three laws would lead to revolution. There’s a hell of a climax. I think this is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.

I watched The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. I was curious about this since it came out. Katniss is asked to be the Mockingjay, the symbolic leader of the rebellion, but she is angry that her friend Peeta was left to be captured. But she sees the devastation wrought by the government of Panem, and realizes that she must oppose it. She uses bomb tipped arrows that can bring down bomber planes. She and her friend Gale go where the enemy bombs a hospital, leaving no survivors, and broadcasts that to the rebels. And to the Capitol: “If we burn, you burn with is.” It is their rallying cry. Also the song she sings, about meeting at midnight in the hanging tree. This is one grim story, showing the enormous brutality and ugliness of real war. It’s not just bombing hospitals. It’s the cruel use of people for propaganda. Those who refuse to perform know that someone they love will be killed. You don’t say no to the tyrant. Peeta is rescued, amazingly—and tries to kill Katniss. He has been conditioned to do that; that’s why the Capitol let him go. And that concludes Part 1. The story is not nearly over.

I watched The Stepford Wives. I’ve known of it for some time, but don’t think I’ve actually seen it before. I know there was a sort of sequel that changed the basic premise and had the wives getting restored. Let’s see what this 2004 remake is. It starts with a Reality Show where a husband spends several days with a sexy prostitute and the wife with several super he-men. Husband is true, but wife deserts him. He winds up killing several people and the show’s organizer, Joanna, gets sacked and suffers a nervous breakdown. She and her family take a break to visit Stepford, a quiet small town paradise in Connecticut, where the entertainment consists of public picnics, square dancing, book clubs, and cooking classes. The men are typical men with their faults, but the wives are marvelously accommodating. Maybe too accommodating; they are like sex kittens, even in the daytime. One seems to be a pretty robot. There are remote controls of some kind with the wives’ names on them. Something is definitely odd; Joanna is suspicious. She investigates and discovers that all the women here were top executives before, but now are pretty playthings. Well, they turn out to be computer-chip controlled enhanced living women. Joanna gets revamped into a sexy blonde. But husband sneaks into the changing room and reverses Joanna’s programming. It turns out that some men, too, are robots. In the end, things are reversed, with the men being obedient house husbands. This was supposedly a horror movie, but wound up funny. So it’s not the same story, but this will do.

I watched Automata. A tough environment has reduced Earth’s population to about 21 million people. Earth’s desolate surface is almost unlivable; people must live sealed in their houses or heavily dressed. Robots called Pilgrims are designed to protect people; they must not harm people or change their own programming. Then it seems a robot is harming people. Jacq Vaucan is assigned to investigate. You might think this movie would be similar to I, Robot,reviewed above, and it is to a degree. Jacq checks around, and questions a robot, but it destroys itself rather than answer. That is suspicious. They put its nucleus into a lady robot, Cleo, and she starts acting independent. She steals a car and drives off. Jacq is in it. This is mischief. It crashes, and the robot will not help him return to the city. There seems to be robot company executive involvement; they are covering up something. Cleo does seem to be trying to help him now. It is uncertain which side she is on. Why is it unsafe to return to the city? Because the robots say they will be killed. They are alive. Jacq dances with Cleo, an odd and evocative sequence. In one sense she is a machine with a mask-like face, clearly artificial bare breasts, similar buttocks; in another, she is a feeling woman. In the end Jacq is reunited with his wife and new baby, and Cleo walks toward the high radiation area where humans can’t follow. The implication is that there will be a community of living robots who do not serve humans. I was highly impressed with I, Robot; I am more impressed with Automata. The other movie has the big budget pyrotechnics; this small budget one has the quiet conviction.

I watched The Black Hole. Mattie Carver is a high school violinist who starts to experience hallucinations, such as blood dripping onto her music sheet. Seeing people who aren’t there. Not seeing people who are there. During music practice she passes out. When a bully threatens the boy she likes, she steps in meets the bully’s eye, and he backs off. A rug changes color. Things are, as she puts it, weird. Then two men take her unwillingly to a door in the forest that opens into a church. They tell her that they are figments, not existing in this realm. Then she and several others watch a strange scary movie. 3D glasses make it stranger yet. It shows scenes from their lives. Then Mattie finds herself tied in a chair, about to be tortured. Then the movie is over and they are back in reality. She goes to the hospital where a girl is near death—Mattie herself? Her friend Jess is freaked out because she saw Mattie in the hospital, yet now Mattie is back in normal life, with no knowledge of any accident putting her in the hospital. Then the movie shows the accident where Mattie is seriously injured. This was where the reality change started. It may be that all of the weirdness and the movie business are from her mind as she lies in the hospital. That’s why they can’t get out of it. Mattie goes again to see herself in the hospital. She wakes, and it seems recovers and resumes her normal life. So the black hole is mental rather than astronomical, and the weirdness is imaginary.

On Christmas Day I watched Doctor Who: The Husbands of River Song. The Doctor’s long time companion River Song has a husband who is dying, so she sends for the finest surgeon in the galaxy to fix him. She believes that’s Doctor Who. Uh-oh. She doesn’t recognize him in this body. The most valuable diamond in the galaxy is stick in Husband’s head; it must be gotten out. They remove the head from the body; he’s a cyborg. They crash on a snowy slope, where River meets another husband. She steals the Tardis, or tries to. They wind up on a cruise ship traversing the fourth galaxy of its seven galaxy tour. The travelers are wealthy humans and aliens. They have the head in a bag, where it continues to protest and threaten. The Doctor and River finish at the Singing Towers for a romantic night that will be 24 years long. This is a wild Christmas story.

I watched Djinns Stranded, a French film with English subtitles. French paratroopers go into the Algerian desert to locate a missing plane and its crew of ten. They find the wreckage but no survivors, just eight bodies and a sealed metal attache case labeled TOP SECRET. Then they are ambushed by enemy soldiers. They escape in a sand storm, then capture some of the enemy soldiers. They find an abandoned fortress with some native woman and children. They are warned of malevolent spirits, the Djinns, who take over living bodies and make mischief, such as hallucinations and madness. Beset by visions of horror, they wind up killing each other and themselves. One stays to help the natives; the other survivor takes the attache case back to the army. Inside it was the order to set off the first French nuclear bomb there in Algeria. This is a weird mix of fantasy, science fiction, and gritty warfare.

I watched Phantom Planet, a 1961 movie. The technical effects seem primitive, of course. It is set in the distant future of 1980, no typo. A planet sized object has been appearing and disappearing in local space, and the authorities want to investigate. But the ship is drawn in and shrunk by a tractor beam, and Captain Frank is caught on a little asteroid where six inch tall people live. Then he shrinks down to their size and is taken prisoner. Two pretty girls take him in hand and show him around. He is required to fight a duel. He wins but spares his opponent, who then becomes his ally. A captive monster escapes, but they fight it off. Frank wins the love of a pretty girl, but then has to return to Earth without her. Maybe.

I mentioned my lower denture last month. In Dismember I had serious work done. Since I already had eight tooth implants in the lower jaw, this promised to be relatively simple. Uh-huh. My dentist had to remove the tops of those teeth and replace them with locators, that is, the fixtures to which the new denture will clip. These are not loose dentures; they clip into place so they are firm for chewing. But one of the implants turned out to be a single unit, from bone to crown. No way to remove the top, as with the others. He had to saw through it, and it had titanium, which meant it was good and hard. Think of it as like a tree, with the chainsaw cutting it off at the ground line. Only my ground is living gum. Then, because there was no place for a locator, he simply had to leave the lower portion buried, unconnected. Not danger of it rotting there; it will outlast me. It’s just there out of sight. If my skull should turn up in a museum when aliens explore the smoking planet where mankind once lived, they will wonder why this creature bothered to install an unconnected tooth. It will be a mystery for their archaeological textbooks. If they happen to know this one was a writer, they will nod their eyeballs and agree that writers were known to be crazy anyway. Three days later, setting up the locators, he discovered that my gums had already regrown, covering some of the surfaces, and had to be pushed back. He had to give me Novocaine, as those new gums were complete with nerves. Even so, it was uncomfortable and at times painful. Now I have a temporary denture while the permanent one is being made, and it continues uncomfortable to painful. Maybe more gum has grown in. I can chew, but only lightly before the pain stops me. So the Xmas holiday season has not been much fun for eating. I put the lower denture in only for meals and for going to town; otherwise I leave it out, recovering for the next siege. But with luck, once this is done, I will never have another tooth problem.

I have been a member of AUTHORS GUILD for 38 years, generally inactive, as it seemed that when I needed help, they had better things to do. Such as when I showed them that a publisher’s statements of account on one of my books were works of fiction. But, AG pointed out, they audited only hardcover books, and mine were paperback, so they were not interested. That left an awkward taste in my mouth; evidently they served aristocrats while I was a peon. But they do do good work and I generally support them. This time they sent a statement to their members that an outfit called INTERNET ARCHIVE was scanning and making copyrighted books available to their members, in the manner of a library, for a small fee. Oh? This smelled faintly of pirating. All my books have been pirated on the Internet, but that does not mean I approve, just that the powers that be don’t seem to care much about enforcing author’s rights. We’re just trying to earn our living; who else cares about that? We checked, and found 50 of my books there. So I wrote to IA asking them to remove my books from their lending library. And they did. I’ll be darned. So I have no quarrel with them, and if you want to read books that are in the public domain, go there and join their library.

Politics: letter in the newspaper by Anthony Artemisio points out that with the reduction in taxes for the corporations, there will soon come a time when the government is running out of money. Then they will use that as a pretext to cut Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. Exactly. The point is ultimately to reward the rich and screw the poor. Columnist David Brooks says that the Republican Party is rotting. The middle ground no longer exists, because Donald Trump never stops asking. “There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom.” Republicans figured it would pass, but it won’t. “The Republican party I grew up with admired excellence.” He concludes: “The rot afflicting the GOP is comprehensive—moral, intellectual, political and reputational. More and more former Republicans wake up every day and realize: ‘I’m homeless. I’m politically homeless.’” Sad. An article in NEW SCIENTIST says that power really does corrupt. Or rather, it amplifies traits that were there to begin with. “A person who uses power for corrupt ends was probably corrupt all along.” Another newspaper article says “Absent accountability and oversight all human institutions grow increasingly corrupt and incompetent.” That explains a lot. How did Republicans get to rule, when they are in the minority numerically? By organized, nationwide gerrymandering. As long as voting districts are drawn by the politicians, instead of by an objective committee, this will continue.

Health: now we know that Big Sugar knew about the harmful effects of sugar fifty years ago, and suppressed the study so as to protect profits. Yes, I remember when popular health adviser Dr. Stare had nary a word to say against sugar. Now obesity in children is rising globally. For example, in 1975 there were five million girls aged 5-19 who were obese; in 2016 it was fifty million. They have found that bullying causes physical changes in the victim’s brain, leading to depression. There is now a male fertility crisis; a substantial portion of young men have a sperm count that impairs fertility. They aren’t sure why. I have a suggestion: global warming. Men have their testicles in an external scrotum to keep them cooler than the body temperature, for improved function. But if that external realm warms up, what then? So maybe as the world heats, the birth rate will drop, maybe solving the overpopulation problem. What a neat outcome! But I don’t trust it. For one thing, it could be another advantage for the rich, who can afford air conditioning, while the poor laborers slowly go extinct. Another idea I have is pollution, which contains trace minerals like mercury and arsenic that are not good to breathe or eat, but when they are everywhere, you’re stuck. One of them may affect fertility. Loneliness: not only does it make you feel bad, it affects your health. Lonely folk are more likely to get inflammation, dementia, and to die prematurely. It’s worse than obesity. Apart from that, life spans are rising in other weal[thy nations, but are falling in the USA. Other nations have universal health care, whereas here it’s your money or your life, and most folk don’t have enough money. Obamacare is trying to ease that, so that is being savagely attacked. Even Daylight saving Time is problematical: there are more heart attacks when it starts, and less when it ends. There’s a move on to establish one universal 24 hour clock; folk would simply get up at different times by their local clocks. It works in China.

Item in the newspaper by Stephen Greenblatt titled “Why Holiday Stories Matter” makes a persuasive case I think not just for holidays, but for mankind. How did humans learn cooperative behavior such as food sharing, the care of others, the coordination of tasks, the acceptance of social norms? “The answer, it seems, has everything to do with the stories we tell.” Yes indeed. I, as a storyteller, naturally believe that my profession is the basis of the nature of mankind, but it does make sense. I feel that our kind prevailed over Neandertal man, who was in many respects better suited to life in Europe and Asia than we, because we were able to organize into larger groups without dissolving into quarrels and internal combat. Why? Because storytellers unified us. Children remained safely in the corral where they were safe while their elders went out to hunt and forage, because storytellers held them spellbound in the manner of a Star Wars movie. Those same storytellers educated them about our society’s conventions, because children naturally emulate the heroes described. And they learned the nuances of ever more sophisticated language, perhaps the single greatest unifier. Storytellers were the true shapers of our kind, and I think remain so today. So I am glad to see others catching on to this essential profession of our species. Storytellers triumphant!

Uber Humor forwarded to me: “If you read the Bible from Judas’ point of view it’s the story of a concerned citizen infiltrating and successfully disbanding a dangerous cult hell bent on convincing the world they’ll be better off after they die.” By one Chris Purchase. Phrased as humor, but think about it. It has been said that the authorities find religion useful, as it pacifies the masses. Promise them a fantasy Heaven after they die, so they won’t fuss about the Hell their living lives can be.

Other notes: one third of all food grown in a year is wasted. In North America a third of the waste occurs in agriculture, and 39 percent in consumption. The rest is in processing. That is regrettable, but our experience with the power failure from Hurricane Irma show me that sometimes it can’t be helped. They are confirming that the extinction of the dinosaurs let the mammals—that’s us—come out into the day, after a hundred million years in the dark. That of course is why we survived: we were underground when the meteor struck and took out the surface rulers. Otherwise we’d probably still be underground. Article in NEW SCIENTIST on seven elements that rules the waves. Iron, on which ocean life depends. Nitrogen, which promotes algal growth. Phosphorus, which is part of the structure of DNA, so this too is vital. Selenium, the Goldilocks element, because too much or too little messes everything up. Mercury, not a force for good; it is toxic in more than a trace. I mentioned it in my paragraph on Health, above. There is getting to be too much of it in the sea. Lead, ditto. Neodymium, a trace element I never heard of before. It is essentially neutral, health-wise, but useful to help trace fellow travelers. We need to know more about the elemental soup in the sea, lest it get out of whack and wipe us out. AI, artificial intelligence, is advancing. Computers will soon be able to present fake news, such as the image of a public figure saying things that destroy that figure’s reputation. Who will control the AI power? And a question in NEW SCIENTIST: is it time to abandon monogamy? Open relationships may work better than closed ones. Housing: now they are building houses out of huge used cargo containers. Pretty good homes, too.

I read one more book in 2017: THE ONION MAGAZINE—THE ICONIC COVERS THAT TRANSFORMED AN UNDESERVING WORLD. The Onion is a humor magazine that takes off on everything, and their weekly magazine covers reflect it. “America’s Homeless—Still The Best In The World?” “Falling—is This Your Year?” “Our Fragile Ecosystem—Can It Continue To Turn A Profit?” “The 100 Worst Senators.” “Could Your Children Suddenly Drop Dead For No Reason?” “America’s 50 Poorest People.” “10 Parking Spots That Are Open Right Now If You Hurry” “10 Hot Tips For Covering Up At The Beach, Because We Know You Ignored Our 10 Hot Tips For Getting A Beach Bod.” “The Top 100 Companies That Aren’t Hiring Right Now.” “Where Is God Hiding?” And so on; you get the idea.

New danger: getting doxed. That’s when someone publishes your personal information against your will. Such as soliciting pornography in your name, getting your bank account hacked and stolen from, or your employer being informed, falsely, that you are an alcoholic. There could be real mischief here. I am sensitive to this sort of thing, from when I was lied about in an attempt to wash me out of publishing, because I had demanded a correct accounting from a cheating publisher. The liars can prosper at the expense of the honest folk. How can you, as a third party, know the truth? It’s a rough game.

I have been clearing my decks so I can write the next Xanth novel, #44 Skeleton Key. I have almost 14,000 words of notes on it, and it should move well. We expect a decision, one way or the other, on the Xanth movie in FeBlueberry; thereafter the Xanth novels should start getting published. It has been a long wait, but it is almost over. As I write the novel, I plan to take it easy, watching one TNG episode or movie a day. We’ll see how long that lasts; I may get caught up in the novel and skip the rest. Remember, I’m a workaholic, or maybe more properly, writeaholic. I try to ameliorate it, but with imperfect success.

And I hope all of you who read this far have a good, or at least decent, Year 2018.

PIERS

FeBlueberry 2018

HI-

After the turn of the year I set up to write my next Xanth novel, #44, Skeleton Key. When I get going on a writing project I tend to let the rest of things slide, so this time I tried watching one Star Trek—The Next Generation episode a day, then writing. I wasn’t sure how long that would last, but I gave it a fair try—and it worked. Each day I watched either an episode or half a regular movie, and I can prove it, because I review them all in this column. I may continue that arrangement, because I have many more Start Treks, plus Doctor Who and others to catch up on. I say it worked because my writing still went well; I wrote at the same pace as before, and in the month of Jamboree I wrote 52,600 words, more than half the novel. This one features a dozen children, yes, including the two half-skeleton children Piton and Data, who wind up in the most dangerous adventure yet. The main character is Squid, the eleven year old alien cuttlefish who emulates a human girl and is remarkably good at it. She is told that not only is she the protagonist (that is, the viewpoint character), she is the most important person in the universe. Of course she dismisses that, as she never aspired to be more than a minor background character. She shouldn’t.

I watched the Discover video Inventions That Shook the World, 1970s, starting with the cell phone. It was inspired by a device seen on Star Trek. That really did change the world. The Post-It Note. Remote-control device to handle bombs. The electric car—the problem being the battery. But what about putting motor and battery together? Thus came the first hybrid car. The American EPA was seriously interested. It worked—but then gasoline became plentiful again, and the American government lost interest. But 25 years later Toyota picked up on the notion. Yep—we drive a Prius.

Then the followup for the 1980s. DNA profiling, more accurate than fingerprinting, used to identify men who rape and murder, solving otherwise unsolvable crimes. The nicotine patch to help folk stop smoking. The Internet. The challenge there was to combine all the separate networks with their independent protocols into a single one. The scanning tunneling microscope. Computer games. Capsule endoscopy: a pill with a camera inside, replacing the colonoscopy so you don’t have to have a tube run up your ass; they’re still perfecting it. The Mars mission, requiring docking in space, a tricky operation, to assemble a space station. This was a multinational effort, 14 nations. Next stop: Mars.

I watched When the Bough Breaks, listed as Star Trek The Next Generation (TNG) #18 but I make it #16. They visit the semi-mythical paradise planet Aldea. It is shielded and hard to locate, but makes itself available now. Why?. They want something: they have no recent children, so want to borrow those aboard the Enterprise. No way! But they simply beam seven children down anyway, including Wesley Crusher, chosen for their special talents. They mean to keep and adopt them. In return they offer advanced technology. Picard and Beverly Crusher, Wesley’s mother, are beamed down to negotiate. Aldea demonstrates its power by jumping the ship three day away at Warp 9. If the ship doesn’t cooperate, it will be banished so far away it will take decades to return. But Beverly slips a medicals scanner to Wesley, who uses it to scan one of the Aldeans; they learn that the Aldeans are dying of radiation poisoning. It’s a side effect of their master computer, which they really don’t know how to adjust themselves. When that is fixed, they will live. The Enterprise personnel fix it. The children are returned and all ends well. It’s a nice episode, and I think my favorite so far in this series.

TNG #19 Home Soil sees them visit a terraforming project. They take a lifeless planet and gradually convert it to life-sustaining. The process seems viable. But malfunctions are messing it up. A laser drill attacks Data. Someone is controlling it, attacking anyone moving in the chamber. Now this is personal. They beam aboard a unit that is inorganic, yet seems to be alive. Mystery indeed! It is alive, and trying to communicate with them. Terraforming the planet will destroy that life. Understanding that, they leave this planet as it is. Crisis over. This is another excellent episode.

TVG #20 Coming of Age Wesley Crusher is to be tested for admission to the Academy. The Admiral beams aboard. Something is wrong and they mean to find out what. Wesley meets pretty Oleana, another applicant; only one will be taken, of four. The investigation of the Enterprise proceeds with pointed and often aggravating questions that anger many officers. Then the point: Picard is being considered for promotion to commandant of the Academy; the aggravation was to make sure of him. Wesley does not win the competition, but does well. And Picard declines the promotion. The routine resumes.

TNG #21 Heart of Glory They encounter a seemingly dead ship in space. It is a Talarian cargo vessel. What happened to it? Riker, Data, and Geordi La Forge, with the visor, beam aboard. It is filled with misty gas. There are three survivors, one near death: Klingons. They are beamed aboard just in time. Worf, the Klingon crewman, joins them, showing the around the ship. Then a Klinghon ship demands that they be turned over, as criminals. This is awkward. They make a break for it, one surviving. He is determined to win his freedom, or destroy the ship. Worf kills him. That satisfies the Klingons.

I watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2. It starts wild and gets wilder. Baby Groot dances while a giant fire breathing octopus attacks. The warrior Drax leaps into its mouth to stab it from inside, but it is the green warrior woman Gamora who actually kills it. The raccoon, Rocket, steals batteries, and that makes them a target. Pilot Peter Quill steers them through a dangerous asteroid field, but they crash in a forest. They are rescued by Quill’s father Ego, whose pretty servant girl with antennae, Mantis, is an empath, aware of the feelings of those she touches. She says Quill loves Gamora, but Gamora wants none of it, until the very end. Then the group gets captured, and little Groot has to rescued them by finding the key. If they can only make him understand what they need. Meanwhile Gamora makes up with her sister Nebula. Quill relates to Ego who is also a world, but concludes that Ego must die. The resulting battle is a phantasmagoria. Blue Yondu rescues Quill at the last moment, but dies himself. I’m not sure how sensible a movie this is, overall, but like a bad dream, it has its points.

I watched In the Heart of the Sea, said to be the real-life story that inspired Melville’s Moby Dick. Indeed, it presents Herman Melville interviewing Thomas Nickerson, who signed on as a crewman at age 14 and was soon seasick. Experienced Owen Chase joins as first mate of the Essex, a whaler captained by George Pollard. They sail into a storm that the inexperienced captain is not sufficiently wary of. Three months later they catch their first whale in a harrowing chase. But then there are no more whales. So they went where there was a report of hundreds of whales—along with a huge demon white whale. And it’s true: hundreds. And the big one. Who staves in the ship, and it goes down in flames. They are left in three small whaleboats, trying to sail and paddle 3,000 miles to land, without enough food and fresh water to go around. The white whale pursues and attacks them just as they spy land. The survivors make it to a tiny island where there are the bones of prior sailors who were never rescued. Two boats move on, while several men remain on the island. A man dies, and they eat him. That’s the guilty secret of survival. They draw straws for the next. The whale still stalks them. They finally do reach land, and home, but don’t speak of the ugly details. The ship owners want them to lie, to protect the industry. They refuse, which destroys their careers. But at least there was honor in the captain, first mate, and the crewman. This is an ugly but powerful story.

I watched Collide. Casey Stein meets Juliette, another American, in Germany. But he’s a drug courier, and she doesn’t like that. So he quits, and dates her. Then she has a seizure, and needs a kidney transplant, but doesn’t qualify in Germany. So he takes on one last job, to get the money to save her. They hijack a truck loaded with drugs, but it goes wrong. Then it’s a bullet spattered car chase. They go after Julie too. He has to try to save her while on the lam himself, from the bad guys and the police. He leads them one hell of a chase, somehow surviving bullets, a rollover, and smart ruthless assassins. Such as Anthony Hopkins in a mean role. (Something about that name I like; eventually maybe I’ll figure it out.) He finally get the money to Juliette, but gets arrested by the police. He makes a deal, so the police can make their biggest drug bust in history. So Juliette gets the operation to save her, and they are together. Tense movie, happy ending. Credible? Original? Meaningful? Hardly, but it’s one tense watch.

I read Sudden Genius? by Andrew Robinson. The thesis is that hard work accounts for more genius than flashes of insight, and that it takes about ten years to make the key breakthroughs. It traces the lives of ten geniuses such as Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Darwin, Einstein, and Virginia Woolf to make the case. Spot quotes: “Extensive evidence shows that there is no correlation between early formal education and later artistic creativity.” Neither is there much correlation between high intelligence and creativity. “Just as the creative world is crowded with people who have ideas but no talent, it is also crowded with people who have talent but no ideas.” “The only obvious trait in common between the personalities of the highly creative seems to be strong self discipline.” This echoes my own observation. I was often a dunce in school, taking three years to make it through first grade because I couldn’t learn to read, testing low in intelligence, making poor grades in English, yet there are a number of readers who have called me a genius in writing. I believe I was dyslexic before that was an accepted category, so I was deemed stupid. I had original ideas when rote learning was required. I certainly relate to those square pegs who couldn’t make it with the round holes of formal education. Once I found my profession, free lance writing, I scored. Does that make me a genius? No, but it makes me one of those who do well if they find their niches, as this book’s geniuses did. As you who read this paragraph would too, if you found yours. We are all geniuses in our own fashions. And yes, the book’s thesis fits me; my first novel was published in 1967, and the one that I became known for, the first Xanth story, in 1977. It does take a while to get there, and yes, it has more to do with hard work than with sudden inspiration. So when you find your niche and apply yourself for a decade, you may be a genius too.

I watched A Hologram for the King. Alan is sent to Saudi Arabia to sell the king a holographic teleconferencing system. Things are weird from the start. It’s mostly desert, interspersed by camels. They seem not to know about keeping schedules; the king has not been in the vicinity for months. WiFi, which he needs to make his presentation, is intermittent. His crew is in a tent. His driver is a character. Chairs collapse when he tries to use them. There’s supposed to be no alcohol. An unfamiliar woman tries to seduce him. Native women are totally veiled. Nothing is getting done. It’s frustrating. His driver misses a turn and they go through Mecca, where non-Muslims are not allowed, so Alan has to fake it. Fortunately they are not stopped. Finally the king comes, and Alan demonstrates the hologram. But then China offers the same technology at half the price. So no sale. Then he goes on a date with his lady doctor. They go snorkeling together, she bare breasted. They make love. They will probably marry. So this is actually a romance rather than an adventure. As such it’s interesting, different, and okay.

I watched TNG #22 “The Arsenal of Freedom.” They are sent to investigate Planet Minos, where a ship disappeared. And where there are no planetary survivors. War? Disease? An Away party beams down, Riker, Data and Tasha, and encounters a friend of Rikers, who turns out to be a holo image that attacks and encapsulates Riker. Picard and Beverly Crusher beam down to join them, but get attacked and trapped, she being injured. He treats her, following her medical directions, but she has lost a lot of blood. Meanwhile the Enterprise itself gets attacked by an unseen object. Geordi LaForge is in charge, and handles the difficult situation well. He has the ship separate into its two components, so it can rescue the away team and address the enemy at the same time. This succeeds. It all turns out to be a demonstration of a new armament system, very sophisticated. This is one taut adventure.

TNG #23 “Symbiosis.” They investigate a star up close, that is generating solar flares, and receive a distress call from a freighter in the vicinity. They beam the survivors aboard, but they are peculiar, arguing over medication that may stop a local plague. Two of them have the plague., but Dr. Crusher finds them healthy. They are not ill, they are addicted. There is a good discussion of the nature of addiction. But the Enterprise can’t interfere, to their regret.

TNG #24 “Skin of Evil” they are on their way to pick up Counselor Deanna Troi, but the shuttle-craft she is on has a problem, losing control, and crashes on an uninhabited planet. The Away team of Riker, Data, Tasha, and Beverly Crusher beam down to it, and encounter a creature like a pool of oil that forms into a roughly humanoid shape. It’s name is Armus. It blasts and kills Tasha. They beam back to the ship and Beverly treats her but can’t restore her to life. The Away team returns this time with Geordi. Meanwhile the thing talks with Deanna, then sucks Riker in. Captain Picard beams down and negotiates with Armus, then strands it alone on the planet. They then hold a memorial service for Tasha. Her recording addresses and thanks them individually for their friendship. She found a home on the Enterprise. And it ends with her gone. Damn; I like her.

TNG #25 “We’ll Always Have Paris” They are on their way to a vacation planet for some leave time when they encounter some kind if loop, repeating a few seconds before going on. Picard remembers how a scientist, Paul Manheim, was working with time. Picard goes into an animated memory of a date 22 years ago when he stood up a young woman, Jenice, afraid of commitment. Then there is a distress call, and they rescue Professor Manheim and his wife, who is Jenice, the one Picard stood up because he was afraid that a relationship with her would wipe out the rest of his career. It is evident that they still have complicated feelings for each other. Meanwhile the Professor’s experiment has gone wrong, and the time loops are getting worse. But Data manages to fix it, and all is well. Paul and Jenice return to their work, and the Enterprise to its vacation. But the memories remain.

TNG # 26 “Conspiracy” They got to Pacifica, an ocean world. Then Picard gets a private call from Admiral Walker Keel, an old friend. They must meet personally, telling no one. They divert to Mira, where Picard meets Walker and others. They say something is happening, accidents are taking op top personnel, other people are mysteriously changing. What’s going on? The Enterprise may be targeted next. They can’t trust top personnel but must find out the truth. Then Keel’s ship is destroyed. They return to Earth to investigate. One admiral, Quinn, beams aboard the Enterprise and Picard knows it is not the real admiral. Sure enough, he displays superhuman strength and beats up the officers until Beverly rays him down. He is the real Quinn but possessed by a parasite. They manage to destroy the parasites, but it’s a close call and it may not be over, because the enemy home base remains.

TNG #27 “The Neutral Zone” Captain Picard has been summoned to Earth; Riker is in charge as they encounter a derelict in space. They investigate and discover three survivors, frozen in containers. Picard returns to report that there may be trouble with the Romulans in the neutral zone. The three survivors, revived and cured, are from 20th century Earth, frozen cryonically. One is a housewife, another is a pushy businessman, the third is a musician. Meanwhile they meet the Rumulans and learn that something has been wiping out both human and Romulan bases. They will cooperate to discover more, in an uneasy truce.

TVG Special Features, showing how they set up for the new Star Trek series. The original cast was busy with movies and such, and too expensive to be afforded, so they made a new cast. The actresses for Tasha and Troi were slated for each other, but realized that they were miscast and switched. Others had their own histories, as the proprietors searched for the right actors for the cast. The Trekkies fans were annoyed that the old actors were not returning, but came to accept it. As I did, half a century later, and I actually came to like the new order better. It was more realistic and more innovative, integrated, with black and android folk, and even a Klingon, and women were now leading characters instead of decorative. Geordi’s visor was crafted from a woman’s barrette. They show how they made their special effects. Confirmation that the actress who played Tasha Yar asked to leave, and it was sad for all of them and for her, but they played it through with the expressed sentiments of the character echoing those of the actor. They don’t say why she left, as she seemed to like the role; maybe it was a family situation.

TNG Second Season #1. “The Child” The regular cast minus Tasha. Riker has grown a beard. A glowing object like a miniature star flies around the Enterprise, seemingly observing people, until it comes to Deanna Troi. She turns out to be suddenly pregnant with an extremely rapidly growing son. It seems that Dr. Beverly Crusher has been transferred to a new position, and Dr. Katherine Pulanski will replace her. Meanwhile the Enterprise is investigating a plague. Troi gives birth in two days to a normal human boy she names Ian. In one day he ages four years. They pick up sample specimens of the plague that is so virulent that if any leaks it will rapidly destroy all life aboard the ship. Then a specimen start to grow, and will burst free soon. Something is stimulating it. That turns out to be Ian. He dies, and the little star escapes. It’s a life force entity, curious about the passing ship, so investigated by living among the people for a while, then departing, no harm intended. What an introduction to the new season! With, it seems, two characters being replaced.

I read Kiss My Asterisk, by Jenny Barcanick. This is “A Feisty Guide To Punctuation And Grammar” according to its apt subtitle. Now I was once an English teacher, so I read this in significant part to discover what this provocative lady really knows about the subject. She’s pretty good but not perfect; one who, in her vernacular, you might date a few times but not necessarily marry. She goes into spelling, but evidently doesn’t really know the distinction between blond and blonde. The first is a color, the second is a woman. So a blonde is a blond haired woman. She covers commas, capitalization, the ellipsis, the dash, and so on, plus email etiquette, and I think most folk could profit from this review of those. I have received exactly such illiterate fan letters as she has. So I do recommend this book, and appreciate its sauciness, such as this example from memory: “You’re such a naughty little sentence. I’m going to punctuate you all night.” So what else does she miss? One example is “like”; times change, but a sentence “He ran like he was a dog” remains a crudity, and should better be “He ran as if he were a dog.” She uses the word often in a similar manner, making purists like me wince. She uses “whether or not” which is redundant; it should simply be “whether.” And she does not seem to properly understand “only.” To make up an example: “I only go to the movies on Saturday.” Really? You do nothing else, such as eating, sleeping, pooping, working, or reading reviews such as this one? What you mean to say is “I go to the movies only on Saturday.” Position can make a big difference, as the author would readily agree when she thought about it.

TNG SS #2 “Where Silence Has Lease” They are charting an unexplored section of the galaxy, and encounter a void. They explore it, and inadvertently enter it. And can’t get out of it. They encounter their sister ship the Yamato, functional but without life aboard. Riker and Worf beam aboard it, but find it confusing and not a real ship. A big face talks to them, but sensors show nothing out there. They seem to be in a laboratory experiment, like rats is a maze. They initiate auto-destruct in 20 minutes. The void lets them go at the last moment. It was curious how they would face death, and learned the answer.

TNG SS #3 “Elementary, Dear Data” They have time to spare, so Data and Geordi go into the simulator to play a Sherlock Holmes and Watson mystery. Together with the new doctor Katherine Pulaski they enter the mystery. Evil Professor Moriarti appears and gains control of the computer and thus she ship; the reasonable limits are now off. Picard and Worf enter the scene, suitably garbed. Moriarti wants to survive, to continue to exist. Picard agrees to save the program until such time as they can enable Moriarti to leave the simulator and enter the ship proper. Moriarti’s a nice character.

TNG SS #4 “The Outrageous Okona” They encounter a small ship in trouble. They bring it in, meet the captain, and make repairs. The captain, Okona, is a smart-Alec young man who promptly dates a pretty crew woman. Meanwhile Data is trying to learn what humor is. A ship hails them, demanding that Okona, criminal, be turned over them them immediately. Then a second ship comes with a similar demand. Ocona got one leader’s daughter pregnant, and used the son of the other to steal a gem. It turns out that son and daughter love each other and the baby is theirs; the gem is a wedding token. They will marry and all is well.

TNG SS #5 “Loud as a Whisper” Picard, Worf, and Deanna Troi go to attend a negotiation between antagonistic parties who have been at war for 15 centuries. The negotiation will be conducted by Riva, said to be the best. He turns out to be deaf, but he has three empathic (telepathic) translators and also uses sign language. He is very interested in Deanna, a similar empath. But the encounter quickly goes wrong, and the three translators are killed. This shakes Riva up; they were friends as well as translators. Data learns his sign language so can communicate. They devise a new plan, where the parties will learn sign language so they can talk and negotiate. This may work out.

TNG SS #6 “The Schizoid Man” They receive a transmission from Gravesworld, where the scientist Ira Graves lives. He needs help, but there is no further contact. Then a distress signal from the Constantinople, a merchant ship with 2,000 at risk. So they send an away party to Graves’s home consisting of Data, Deanna, Worf, and a Vulcan lady doctor. Graves is with pretty Kareen Briannon, and has a terminal disease. They fix the ship, then head for Gravesworld. Meanwhile. Graves dies, physically but his arrogant personality seems to have transferred to Data. Picard talks him into transferring into the computer and giving Data back.

TNG SS #7 “An Unnatural Selection” they have been summoned for a rendezvous, and on the way receive a faint distress call from the Lantree, whose crew seem to have died suddenly of old age. They beam a twelve year old child aboard, but what arrives is a man, evidently aged. Dr. Pulanski takes him on a shuttle so as to maintain quarantine. And she catches the ailment, and rapidly ages. But they manage to nullify it by using the transference beam, filtering out the virus. So Dr. Pulanski is restored.

TNG SS #8 “A Matter of Honor” Riker participates in an officer exchange program set up by HQ and transfers to a Klingon ship, the Pagh. But the Klingon commander gets confused and sets up to attack the Enterprise. Riker foils that and succeeds in stopping the attack and saving the Pagh from an alien infection. It’s a rough, chancy tour. One fun sequence is when a couple of Klingon women come on to Riker; they are surely sultry and sexy, but not to a human man’s taste.

I’m always reading something. I subscribe mainly to news and science magazines, as despite my success in Fantasy I remain fascinated by Science. I also subscribe to two Humanist magazines, which I tend to get behind on because I get bored reading material that I completely agree with. So this time when I finished one book I held off on the next and tackled FREE INQUIRY and THE HUMANIST. The former has interesting thoughts, such as in an Op-Ed column by James A Haught,who reports that three psychological research reports “showed a significant negative association between intelligence and religiosity.” It seems it is easier to let God do your thinking for you if you’re stupid. Bear in mind that this is a secular humanist magazine inhabited mostly by atheists or some agnostics like me. Yes, I know; some say that an agnostic is just a cowardly atheist. Spend some time around me and I’ll soon set you straight on that, a-hole. I say the deists can’t prove there is a god, but that neither can the atheists prove there isn’t. So I’m technically in the middle, but my private suspicion is that there is no god unless you call the universe god. I regard god as a fantasy, and though I make my living from it, I don’t believe it. In the same issue, December/January 2017/18 Op-Ed columnist Faisal Saeed says that the total number of books translated into Arabic in the last one thousand years is fewer than those translated into Spanish in one year. But, he says, the Internet is changing things. Up to 175 million Arab speakers now get online, and they are discovering what their leaders suppressed. Things like the theory of evolution. So there will be change. And from a letter to the magazine by Ricky Ferdon. When he was eleven he realized that he was going to die one day. So then he asked himself, why was he here? It was the birth of philosophy in his young mind, and he postulates that it must echo that of the human mind. Let’s face it: our awareness of our own mortality is the source of our religion, the attempt to avoid death by making a fantasy afterlife. And an article by Joanne Hanks with Steve Cuno “How to Raise Cult Bait.” She had willingly joined the Mormons before being disabused, and wonders how someone who grows up outside a polygamist cult, on hearing that God wants her husband to add a bunch more wives, says “Sign me up.” Finally she realized that she stood atop a mountain of absurdities “(Why, yes, I am all for sharing my husband with that unjustly endowed woman half my age).” So she wrote a book titled “It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass: Confessions of an Ex Mormon, Ex Polygamist, Ex Wife. I love that title!

The following issue, also jam-packed with thoughts including a retrospective on the humanism of Isaac Asimov, has a review of the book Freud: The Making of an Illusion by Frederic Crews. I admit to bias here; I never thought much of Freudian psychology, which struck me as nonsense. “Crews illustrates that the cure does not work—and has never worked. All the successful cases that Freud boasts about in his writings are lies. Freud never cured anyone, and most of his patients ended up worse off as a result of his care. Freud was a charlatan, a fraud, and a swindler.” Wow! Take that Freudian psychologists. Freud the fraud.

THE HUMANIST for Jan/Feb 2018 has an article “The Monster Attacking Human Minds” by Gurwinder Bhogal. He describes how a virus makes ants give themselves up to be eaten by birds, so that their droppings spread the virus. Or mice who flirt with cats for similar reason. So can it happen to human beings? Yes, only then it is done by an infectious idea. He says the brain is not the seat of the soul, but an extremely complex computer “And, like all computers, it can be hacked.” He provides an insidious example. A Photoshop contest had users edit mundane pictures to make them appear supernatural. Thus appeared Slender Man, a vaguely otherworldly being that targeted children. It soon became an urban myth. Then two twelve year old Wisconsin girls made a sacrifice to it by stabbing a friend nineteen times. That was followed by an Ohio girl donning a mask and hood and attacking her mother with a knife. A few months later a Florida girl who had been reading about Slender Man set her house on fire while her mother and brother were inside. In 2015 Slender Man was implicated in a string of suicides on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota. The author says that cults can be like that, but would die out if people learned to tell the difference between monsters and madmen. I doubt I agree, but it’s a thesis that should be further explored.

THE HUMANIST also has an article by Clay Farris Naff on internet trolls and bots with some alarming implications. Facebook admits its pages may harbor as many as 270 million fake accounts, which is more than the adult population of the United States, so we know that some are fakes. Bigotry is not supposed to be facilitated, but when tested for “Jew haters” the ad buy was approved in 15 minutes. A number of social media ads, posts, and pages have been revealed to come from Russian agencies or operatives in 2016, using specifically anti-Black, anti Muslim and anti-immigrant stereotypes to undermine the American electoral system, suppress voter turnout, and fan the flames of racist hatred and violence. Bots pumped out one fifth of all tweets during the month leading up to the election. According to TwitterAudit, nearly half of Trump’s followers are bots. Australia’s investigation revealed that Facebook’s reach to millennials in that country exceeded the actual population of twenty-somethings by more than 30 percent. There appear to be twenty five million non-existent millennials in Facebook’s US numbers. A complaint appears to have been answered by a bot. One childishly simple expedient is a checkoff box that says “I am not a robot.” That stops them, for now. So did the Russians succeed in stealing the election for Trump? The evidence so far suggests yes. Of course Trump thinks that is fake news, but it would explain a lot.

Perhaps related, a newspaper item says that robocallers outsmart the Do Not Call list. They certainly do. We’re on the do not call list, and we get those calls daily, including on my cell phone. What gets me is that this could be quickly stopped, if the authorities wanted to. Simply designate a code, such as *9, that would immediately lock the caller onto the enforcement number with an automatic fine sufficient to discourage repetition. It would take about one day for the calls to stop. So why isn’t that done? It has to be because the authorities aren’t really interested in stopping it. Are they getting paid off? I’d like to know. One complication is that they use fake numbers; we once got one from our own number. So it needs to lock on to the live call, not the fake number. They claim they don’t have the resources to act. Maybe if their jobs were on the line they would find those resources. In a related matter, I think that when congress doesn’t act and the government shuts down, the first thing cut off should be the congressional pay. It’s called incentive.

THE WEEK’s book of the week is Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, by Paul Shapiro. I’m for it, but food is only part of the problem; we need to cut down our population before we render other creatures extinct from habitat destruction. My working idea so far is that the food be made available cheap, but contain a fertility suppressant, so that those who want to breed mist make the conscious decision to do so, then pay the price for that privilege. That might do it. I saw a full page ad for Syngenta, a company devoted to developing a safe and sustainable supply of food. More power to them. Http://bit.ly/SyngentaPS.

Letter in the newspaper by John Day says Trump may be bigoted, but is not a racist. If a black man has millions to spend on a Trump project, he will be welcome. It’s money that counts, not race. However, an article in THE WEEK says that in 1973 Trump was sued for refusing to rent apartments to blacks. In 1989 he demanded the death penalty for five black and Latino youths accused of rape, and he stuck with that position even after DNA evidence exonerated them. That smells like racism to me.

Statistically the US lags in child mortality. We spend more per capita on health care than other countries do, but our children are still 57 percent more likely to die. That’s because we have let the profiteers take over health care and make it your money or your life, and when your money runs out, so does your life. I remain annoyed that my five dollar levothyoxin generic prescription jumped to thirty dollars. I can afford it, but what about those who can’t? The profiteers have them by the gonads. It’s hardly the worst example.

Sue Grafton died. She was a mystery writer who was going through the alphabet, but death overtook her before she made it to Z. No I don’t really think that the last one would have been Z is for Zanth. But who knows? Ursula Le Guin also died, a good genre writer and a good woman, a few years my senior. She was known for the award winning The Left Hand of Darkness, wherein folk could become either male or female as the inclination took them. I hate to see the old order pass.

Apart from writing the novel, I have ongoing dentistry. My temporary lower denture pains me to chew, and my weight has dropped some; it should recover in due course. I am also waiting on the Xanth movie. We are supposed to know on Marsh 1, 2018, whether it is yea or nay. We think it will be yea, but we’ve been disappointed before, so we’ll see. I am also suffering an allergy attack; it happens when the wind is from the northeast, and my nose just keeps going. No one seems to know what’s on that wind, but the problem has been with me since about 1960. I just have to keep blowing out my pint of snot every minute or so, to prevent it from dripping into the salad I make for supper, or my clothing, or the keyboard, and wait for the wind to change. We also had a cold snap, down to 24F; we hate that in Florida. So I’m not physically happy at the moment. In addition I seem to be incapable of typing anything correctly the first, second, or third time. It’s maddening but I have plow ahead to get it done.

One final entry: a botany guide for children.

https://www.avasflowers.net/the-study-of-plants-and-flowers-a-botany-guide-for-kids-and-stude

PIERS

Marsh 2018

HI-

Letters to Jenny will be featured in Early Bird Books on 3-9-2018, downpriced to $1.99 for the day. That is the first year of letters I sent to paralyzed Jenny, who was then twelve turning thirteen, and it includes our meeting at a fan convention in Virginia near her home. She was almost completely paralyzed (and remains so, almost thirty years later) but able to see and hear. This correspondence started when, at her mother’s behest, I wrote a letter to Jenny, who was in a coma, and when it was read to her it brought her out of the coma, only to reveal that she was paralyzed. I felt responsible, uncertain whether I should have left well enough alone. Had I in effect sentenced her to lifetime imprisonment in her body? So I did what little I could to cheer her by sending positive weekly letters, which I continue today. Jenny can move some fingers of her right hand, so can operate a special computer, giving her access to the Internet, so her life is not entirely bleak, but I still curse the drunk driver who took her out and was mad when they brought him in to the trial, as he wanted to go fishing instead. I call him a burro sphincter.

Feblueberry was a difficult month. I spent most of it in intermittent pain. At the turn of the month I had no ambition for anything, and my wife suggested I check my temperature. 101°F. I had what turned out to be the flu. There are three types circulating here, and I had the B strain. No wonder that my functioning was impaired. I exercise daily, part of which is drawing my 55 pound draw weight bow 20 times, right handed one day, left handed the next day. As my gumption declined, I cut the draws to ten—and then managed to bash my left thigh with the end of the bow three times. That gave me a bruise that made moving that leg awkward and sometimes painful. Then later in the month on my exercise run I saw a big pine cone in the drive—we do live our our little tree farm—so I aimed to kick it off with my left foot. But instead my foot stubbed into the ground and I fell face first on the pavement. That scratched my face, hands, and a knee, gave me a black eye, and bruised my right rib cage. That last took out my exercises for a week, made lying down to sleep a torment, and put me in utter fear of coughing. The incidental scrapes also played their part; I couldn’t seem to do anything without touching them and suffering punishing jolts of pain. In addition I had trouble chewing because I am getting a lower denture to match my upper one, and every step of that seemed to invoke more discomfort and pain. At the moment it is missing a tooth, which chipped out, so I am wearing a denture with a missing tooth. We are posting a picture of me taken just after my fall, with the blood still dripping. Yes I know: it may improve my appearance. But I trust it shows thy I don’t like falls. Ten days later I still can’t properly exercise, and dread having to rebuild the muscle I’m losing.

But it was worse for my wife. She got the flu from me and it put her in the hospital for nine days. Sometimes when I visited her there she never woke up; the medication had her knocked out. Her memory of the occasion is largely blank. One day she woke and phoned me: they had moved her from Inverness to Tampa and she had no idea why. Our daughter Cheryl headed out immediately and verified that my wife remained in Inverness, albeit disoriented. That was not the only example; we were seriously concerned for her welfare. When we finally got her home again she was tethered to an oxygen tube and required to use a walker to get around/ and a nebulizer for her lungs. That oxygen machine makes a sound like an ogre in the distance tromping through a marsh, suck-splash, suck-splash. The nebulizer makes it look as if she is smoking a hookah or breathing dragon vapor. Things like mailing letters and grocery shopping became complicated, because my wife couldn’t leave the house and I did not want to leave her home alone. Fortunately our daughter Cheryl quit her job after twenty years with the newspaper and was available to take care of us. We certainly needed it. Now my wife seems to be on the mend, but not enjoying her reduced mobility. Age and illness are lady dogs.

So we got through the month, and I tried to maintain my regular schedule of watching an hour’s worth of video and writing maybe a thousand words in my novel each day. That’s Xanth #44, Skeleton Key. The month of Jamboree saw me write 52,600 words, half the novel, that way. But FeBlueberry was slower, as you might imagine, and I wrote only half that much, 26,250. However, I should be able to complete it in Marsh. Of course when I got ill and couldn’t properly track the news, things went haywire in the world, with the DOW stock market plunging a thousand points on more than one day, and seventeen folk getting gunned down in a Florida high school. Was there anything positive for me? Well, during the Super Bowl I played with the Enigma puzzle, which is two linked metal loops, to unlink and link again, and solved it. Later I watched some of the Winter Olympics. My book reading slowed down. As for the videos, here are my ongoing reviews.

I viewed TNG ST (The Next Generation Star Trek) #9 “The Measure Of A Man” They mean to dismantle android Data to find out whether they can make more like him. Picard doesn’t trust this and neither does Data. Meanwhile Picard connects again with a former antagonist, Philippa, and they find themselves also intrigued by each other. She conducts a hearing, where they prove Data is a machine—but also conscious, with feelings. So he wins his right to choose, and will not be dismantled. And Picard will take Philippa to dinner. This is another favorite of mine, as I am an advocate of consciousness in sufficiently advanced robots. My robots are people.

TNG ST #10 “The Dauphin” They pick up a pretty girl, Salia, and her governess, Anya, who are returning to Daled IV, where Salia is destined to rule, uniting warring factions. Wesley Crusher is fascinated by her and she by him. But Anya is actually a shape changer. So is Salia, it turns out. She’s not really a human girl. So their love is not to be. She beams to the planet.

TNG ST #11 “Contagion” Their sister ship Yamato is in trouble. In fact it blows up. Then a Romulan vessel appears, the Taris. No known connection between the two. The Yamato had discovered ancient technology on planet Iconia that must not fall into Romulan hands. Now the enterprise is starting to experience system glitches similar to those the Yamato experienced before it was destroyed. Geordi realizes that an alien probe is responsible. Then the Romulan ship experiences similar problems. They help it nullify them. It is an unusual cooperation between enemies, for which the Romulans hardly seem grateful.

TNG ST #12 “The Royale.” They encounter debris in space: an ancient NASA flag. There’s also an oddity on a planet. Riker, Data, and Worf beam down and discover an old fashioned revolving door that leads to a twentieth century hotel, the Royale, a casino, where they are expected. The people there act a lot like illusions. They are characters in an old novel. Data rolls the dice and breaks the bank, winning the hotel and spreading the money around, maybe buying the freedom of the characters. Then they return to the Enterprise.

I read The Vegetarian by Han Kang. I have a kind of mental rule that the readability of a book is inversely proportional to the number of promotional blurbs featured. This one has 34, some five pages of them. This suggests that it may be ultimately dull and pointless, a chore to read. And—the rule is working. I got it because I am a vegetarian and am interested in the subject. Sigh. A quick summary: Yeong-hye of South Korea is a dull married young woman who suffers a vision of a face and abruptly decides to stop eating meat. This alienates her from her husband and family and finally gets her shut into a mental institution. She loses weight and is near death by the time the novel ends, with only her sister having sympathy for her. That is essentially it. What is it about the face she sees that turns her off meat? That is never really clarified, just that she hopes that eschewing meat will make the face fade from her memory. It doesn’t. I regret that her vegetarianism seems to be indicative not of a rational objection to killing innocent animals, as it is is with me, but of insanity. If you have a chance to read this one, skip it.

TNG ST #13 “Time Squared” They intercept a dead shuttle craft. They haul it aboard and it is marked Enterprise, and in it is an unconscious Captain Picard! Apparently a copy of him. The shuttle turns out to be from six hours in the future! Things are oddly reversed. About three hours from now the Enterprise will be destroyed, all except Picard. There is a force entity that wants Picard; he must leave the ship, to distract it long enough for the Enterprise to escape. But that was the wrong decision. So the present Picard shoots the future Picard—and the ship survives. It seems he was thrown back in time to enable them to make a different decision, and that was the correct one.

TNG ST #14 “The Icarus Factor” Picard has news for Riker: he can be captain of his own starship. He has twelve hours to decide. His father appears, as a civilian adviser, but they are not close; he also knows Katherine. Meanwhile Worf seems to have a problem. There are no Kingons to help him celebrate his Rite of Ascension to a more mature stage. They arrange for that ceremony. Riker and his father come to terms. Riker decides to stay with the Enterprise. This is a time of decision and transition for several members of the ship.

TNG ST #15 “Pen Pals” They enter a new system where five planets have unusual geological activity. Wesley Crusher is assigned to do a geological survey, which means assembling a team and learning the ropes of command. Meanwhile Data makes radio contact with a native, a girl, Sarjenka, and they correspond. But she is doomed to die unless they do something to stop the geological upheaval. They succeed. Data beams down, sees the doom approaching, and takes the girl with him to the ship, then returns her, her memory of him and the ship deleted. But he will remember her.

TNG ST #16 “Q Who?” Recent gradate Sonya reports on board the Enterprise and promptly collides with Picard, spilling her drink on him. He goes to his quarters to change, but finds himself int stead on another ship with nemesis Q, the man with magical powers. Guest star Whoopee Goldberg, as Guinan, helps hold him off. He want to join the crew, but they don’t trust him. So he transports the ship seven light years in an instant, where they encounter a Borg ship like a huge cube resembling compacted trash. Whoopee says the Borg almost destroyed her people a century ago. Riker, Worf, and Data beam aboard the cube to investigate. There are living creatures there, melded into a communal mind. The cube attacks. Picard asks Q’s help, and Q transports the ship to back where it started. But they knew that in the future they must face the Borg.

TNG ST #17 “Samaritan Snare” Picard is supposed to have a procedure done that he doesn’t want, a cardiac replacement. Wesley is due for another promotional exam. So Picard decides to accompany Wesley, to have the surgery there, leaving Riker in charge. And a mayday call comes. A relatively primitive ship needs help. Geordi beams aboard and fixes their guidance system, but then their power goes out. He fixes that. They decide to keep him. That’s the danger: they collect things they value. The Enterprise uses a ruse to get Geordi back safely. Meanwhile Picard’s heart surgery goes wrong. They beam Katherine in to correct the procedure, which she does. So all ends well.

TNG ST #18 “Up the Long Ladder” They get a distress signal in ancient code from the Ficus Sector. A lost colony? Meanwhile Worf collapses. He has the Klingon version of the measles. The colony will be destroyed by a solar flare. They beam the primitive colonists aboard, complete with chickens, pigs, goats and so on. Riker gets interested in the leader’s pretty, assertive daughter, who is looking to be married. Another colony suffered severe losses and made up for it by making clones. Now they want new tissue. Riker and Dr. Pulanski decline—so are knocked out and their tissues taken. They are not pleased, and destroy the stolen tissues. To solve the problem, they put the two sets of colonists together. They will make a new societ6y with fresh genetics.

TNG ST #19 “Manhunt” Deanna Troi’s mother beams aboard, now a full ambassador. She is telepathic mischief. She has a thing for Picard and doesn’t hesitate to exploit it. Picard invites Data to their private dinner, effectively breaking up the romantic aspect. Mother is entering a phase where her sexuality will quadruple, and Picard is her target. There’s the manhunt. So he escapes into the simulator, visiting 1941 America. So she goes after Riker, Deanna’s interest. He escapes also. But her telepathy does expose a plot to blow up the conference she is attending, so she saves a number of lives.

TNG ST #20 “Emissary” They receive an emergency call, no details given. They pick up K’Ehlehr, an attractive Klingon/human crossbreed. she and Worf have met before, and he wants nothing to do with her. They meet in the challenging exercise program, and she impresses him, and he would like to marry her, but she refuses. They must deals with a Klingon ship, the T’Ong, from the time when hey were at war with humans. They will attack without negotiation. But Warf manages to bluff them down, and then K’Ehlehr beams across to integrate them to today’s galactic society. And she and Worf now have an interest in each other. They may meet again.

I watched Atomic Blonde. Lorraine is Britain’s best assassin, with a cold war mission in Berlin, circa 1989. An agent has been killed and the killer has a key list of names. She must get that list and trust no one. She is picked up by two contacts in Berlin, whom she promptly beats up, then wrecks the car: they were not the right men. Percival, her real contact, catches up with her. He’s pretty tough on his own. A young woman, Delphine, contacts her; is she to be trusted? Lorraine uses her own contacts, fighting men all along the way. She makes love with Delphine. Who warns her about Percival. And Percival warns her about Delphine. He has the list, but didn’t tell her. There is also Spyglass, who memorized the list. An assassin waits to take him out, but the crowd raises umbrellas so he can’t be seen. Then Percival shoots him, but not fatally. She fights off assassins, trying to save Spyglass; the last one almost gets her. Then it’s a car chase, and they wind up sinking underwater. He drowns. And it seems her bosses knew the Communists had her made from the outset, but sent her in anyway. Percival kills Delphine. Lorraine kills Percival, who is also Comrade Satchel, a notorious double agent. Or was he? She winds up killing her bosses, whose ultimate loyalty was questionable. I’m not sure this makes sense, and I certainly question the notion of a beautiful woman taking out bunches of hardened male assassins, but it is full of surprises.

I watched Despicable Me 3. another wild cartoon feature with Gru and the cute little one and two eyed minions. Gru learns he has a twin brother Dru, who is ambitious to be just as bad as Gru is. But there are other forces at work, so it won’t be easy. Dru shows Gru their late father’s den, with a fabulous weaponized flying car. The minions get into show business. A bad guy gets a giant robot and fires wads of self-blowing bubblegum, terrorizing Hollywood. Until Gru and Dru fly the car in and attack. And of course the minions get into the fray. It’s a wild melee.

I watched The BFG – Big Friendly Giant. Sophie, maybe eight years old, is snatched by a 24 foot tall giant, BFG, for fear she will tell she saw him. He is one of the few giants who don’t eat people. His job is to catch dreams. Other giants are twice his size; they call him Runt. They get to know each other and become friends. They catch a dream that is flying around like a firefly, and put it in a jar. Some dreams are good, some are bad. BFG shows her the way of dreams, how human folk experience them. He returns her to the orphanage, because he feels she is not safe with him; she had dropped her blanket it Giant Land, so now the bad giants know about her. But she is unsatisfied, and jumps off a high floor, and he appears and catches her. So she is with him, but the big bad giants are after her. She has BFG make a dream for the Queen of England to warn her about the bad giants. Then he formally meets the Queen at has an elegant dinner with her. It’s some event. They all drink some of his green drink whose bubbles sink instead of rise, that causes not burps but, well, violent farts. They all suffer the consequence, including the palace dogs. The poised Queen takes it it stride after nearly blowing away the table. BFG guides the British Air Force to Giant Land, where Sophie breaks the bottle of bad dreams so they all get them. and the British helicopters attack. They net the giants and haul them off to a distant island where they won’t be able to eat any more children. Then Sophie wakes; was it all a dream? She remains in mental touch with BFG.

I watched The Golden Compass. Lyra is an independent girl who gets into things she shouldn’t. In this realm people have daemon companions which are magical animals who can talk. She is given a golden compass, which will always show the truth, but she must not tell others she has it. Lyra’s daemon is Pan, who usually looks like a raccoon. She is helped by the Gyptians, who are at war with the Gobblers. It seems that Lyra will be a key to that struggle. She encounters lorek (lower case), an armored polar bear who was once a prince. She enlists him for her mission. Now they have a powerful alliance. She persuades the bear king to fight lorek in single combat, and after almost losing lorek wins and becomes king of the bears. There is mayhem as the factions fight, and many people die. But they learn that there will be a bigger war in the future, to determine whether there will be a thought controlling dictatorship or free will. This story is interesting, but seems to be a composite of old ideas, more concerned with mysteries and battles than with true personal discovery or character. The blurb material loves it, of course, but I think this is more apparent than significant.

I watched the Discover video Clash: Encounters of Bears and Wolves. In Yellowstone Park wild nature rules. The grizzly bear was the top predator, until the return of the wolves. For the prey the constant question is fight or flee? The little ones are constantly at risk. Their mothers defend them, but it gets tricky against several wolves at once. When bison fight during mating season, and one loses and dies, the bears move in to feed, and two bears may fight. The one who turns and walks away is, oddly, the winner, because he is showing that he can turn his back on the other without fear. They establish a pecking order so they don’t have to fight again. There are many scavengers. The grizzly is not limited to fresh meat; he forages for many plants and buried seeds. He also steals carcasses from the wolves. But even he is subject to biting flies, which he escapes by getting into water. In winter he normally hibernates. But now they have spied a bear active in winter; is the availability of wolf-hunted carcasses enabling him to go about in winter too? The landscape is beautiful. I love seeing this, but I wouldn’t want to be part of it.

Outrage dept: this happened in Florida fifty years ago. Sherry Johnson was eight years old when a church leader more than twice her age raped her repeatedly. She tried to tell her parents and other adults, but no one believed her. When she was ten the school she was attending was suspicious, so called in a doctor and nurse and examined her, discovering that she was seven months pregnant. End of story, now that there was proof? Hardly. The school promptly expelled her. Her mother told the church congregation that Sherry was lying about being raped, and blamed her for bringing shame on the family. Her mother then forced her to marry the rapist. By the time she was sixteen she had born six babies. Only now that she is 58 is she being believed. Too bad it’s too late to do something about that rapist, that mother, that school, and that church, all of whom seemed to blame the child for being violated, instead of dealing with the issue of child rape. It is supposed to be that a pregnant ten year old has been raped by definition; it’s called statutory rape, and I am surprised that the authorities don’t seem to know of it. This business of blaming the victim enrages me. Was that the only such case? Hardly, again. In the last 65 years more than 16,000 children were married in Florida. If it was early true love, fine; it happens. But if it was coercive so that men can get more young sex, that’s not fine. It is way past time to do something about it.

Article by Leonard Pitts commenting on the fact that now 42 percent of Republicans say that they regard accurate news stories that cast a negative light on something they favor as “fake news.” Get it? They know it is accurate, but let their prejudice override it. The truth matters less to them than protecting their political turf. As the columnist remarks “…42 percent of Republicans are out of their damn minds.” So are 17 percent of Democrats. I have always been a registered independent, no party affiliation, and expect to remain so, in significant part because I value being rational. Item by John Romano says that the gun lobby has the GOP blind to reason. That figures; if you’re going to ignore reality in favor of prejudice, you want to be ready to plug anybody who comes at you with the facts. Meanwhile a number of corporate partners are dropping the NRA. It seems that the recent shootings are stirring up too much common sense about guns, even if Republicans call that fake news. Will we finally get some sensible legislation about guns, such as barring the ones that can kill dozens of children in seconds? Don’t count on it. Editorial in THE WEEK remarks on the core belief of the gun lobby: the Second Amendment is meant to protect citizens’ ability to overthrow the government if it becomes tyrannical. Get that? They want to be able to stage a revolution; the deaths of children are merely collateral damage. Fake news. Tyrannical government by whose definition? Criticizing the NRA? Legislation to project children? Presumably if they did revolt, the NRA would govern the nation, and I suspect revolution against that order would then become illegal. Full page ad in THE TAMPA BAY TIMES and I suspect elsewhere is titled Are your Guns More Important to you than your Children? The answer, plainly, for such folk is Yes. But the Florida high school with 17 dead is organizing to see if they can change this in favor of the children. Maybe this will be the citizen initiative that succeeds. I hope so. There was a time when conservatism meant things like integrity, financial responsibility, and traditional family values. Now it seems to mean greed, hypocrisy, bigotry, and to hell with the children.

Shorter takes: item in NEW SCIENTIST on what love at first sight really is. Folk think it is like a lightning strike, and in my Xanth novels it is similar, but that is fantasy. You can’t really love someone until you really know that person, and sight alone is not sufficient. First sight of a woman by a man is probably lust; attachment comes later, if other aspects fall into place. SCIENCE NEWS: IUDs, intrauterine devices, like a little wire loop in the uterus, are more reliable than contraceptive pills. US life expectancy is still declining, now being 78.6 years, or 81.1 for women, 76.3 for men. I am 83.5. More than eight of every ten dollars of wealth created globally last year went to the richest one percent THE WEEK reviews a book titled How Democracies Die, by Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, which says that if the year ahead doesn’t go quite right, the American system of government could collapse. All we need is an autocrat in power, one who disdains norms, questions the legitimacy of political foes, tolerates violence, and shows a willingness to curtail the free press. Does that smell like anyone we know? Article in NEW SCIENTIST says there are disturbing hints that Western civilization is starting to crumble. Things like the richest one percent owning half the world’s wealth, the population increasing at at unsustainable level, our dependence on fossil fuels, and the history of past cultures that crashed. It’s not as if things are different now; a medical whistlblower Maucrice Pappworth refused to go along when doctors bored holes in the skulls of 18 people in the hospital for unrelated conditions, inserted tubes, and injected acid into their bodies to see what happened. When 13 babies had catheters inserted into their hearts without sedation, then were deprived of oxygen to see how their bodies would respond. The babies were reported to be crying strenuously. Fancy that! When doctors injected people with malaria parasites, polio virus, and live cancer cells. Or withheld insulin from diabetics so they could analyze the effects on their livers. Or prevented African Americans from getting penicillin treatment for syphilis, to further a study. The medical establishment didn’t like his reporting such things, so he was in effect blacklisted for half a century. So much for the Hippocratic oath to first do no harm. I wish this sort of thing were atypical, limited to spot rogues in one profession, but I know from my own experience in the field of writing that it isn’t. What bothers me is why the majority in any medium all too often prefers to punish those who try to stand up for what is right, instead of the wrongdoers. Its seems it is simply easier and safer to condemn the victim. Of course sometimes the victim survives and gains power, and may have a score to settle. That can get interesting.

The February 2018 issue of ALTERNATIVES, the health newsletter by Dr. David Williams, has an article about Alzheimer’s. “Alzheimer’s is the most expensive medical condition in the US. It threatens to bankrupt Medicare and Medicaid and drain the life savings of millions of people.” Because it is primarily an illness of old age, and millions of baby boomers are racing toward it. “It is projected to be the biggest epidemic in medical history.” The average life expectancy after diagnosis is six to eight years, though it can be a short as three or long as twenty. There is no known effective treatment that can slow its progression. Alzheimer’s is one of the things I fear; if I were diagnosed with it, and knew I would slowly become a vegetable, I don’t know what I’d do, other than see about killing myself before that happened. However, Dr. Williams has suggestions that might slow its progress. It seems that a shortage of blood flow to the brain accelerates it. Exercise helps the blood to flow, and good nutrition, especially the B vitamins. Eating too much sugar may worsen it. So if you want to postpone this dread disease, live a healthy life style; it could make a difference. Not much else will.

It has been a long wait, but we finally have a decision on the big Xanth movie: No. There have been movie flirtations before, and at one point Warner was set to do it, but on the day of decision they fired hundreds of their employees and dumped the project. I think they had internal problems, and Xanth was collateral damage, nothing personal. This time it is Paramount, and the indication is they had a change in leadership and the new powers that be think Xanth is sexist, so it’s out. Again. We’ll follow up with other interests, which do exist, and hope that something comes of it. If you are disappointed, well, so am I. But that’s life.

PIERS

Apull 2018

HI-

For those interested in my more risque titles, Cautionary Tales will be on sale for $2.99 on Apull 302 2018. This is the collection of stories that were not right for regular publishers, or maybe for my regular readers who think innocuous Xanth is all I do. It begins with “Bluebeard,” which has simulated online sex with a child; others are spot essays, such as “Root Pruning,” about the ugly situations that can foster creative writing. A disturbed childhood is an asset to a writer, not a liability. So approach this volume with caution; it may not be entirely to your taste.

My wife and I continued to mend in Marsh. She remains on oxygen and using a walker, but is doing better overall. I completed the novel and resumed reading books and watching videos, as reviewed here, and there will be more to come next month. My program of watching one Star Trek episode a day while writing the novel seems to have been a success, a bit to my surprise. My dentistry for the lower denture is largely done, though I still eat with a bit of pain. My face has healed and my ribs are just about better. However, the X-ray on the ribs coincidentally showed a spot on my lung that a CT-scan confirmed. Maybe by the next column I will know whether that is significant news. I hope it isn’t.

I watched The New Generation Star Trek Season 2 #21 “Peak Performance.” The Enterprise agrees to participate in a war games exercise. Riker tackles it, though overwhelmingly favored to lose. He assembles an Away Team and practices in simulation. The team consists of Worf, Wesley, and Geordi, among others. Meanwhile Data plays a game of strategy with the opposition commander, and loses. That shakes him up, for all that he has no human emotion, but he serves as well as he can. By using guile, they manage to win the encounter. And Data plays the rematch for a draw, which completely unsettles the commander and is a victory in principle.

I watched TNG ST Season 2 #22 ”Shades of Gray.” Riker is walking in a planetary forest for a geological survey when something stings his leg. A microorganism has infected him. Data investigates and finds a vine that deliberately infects warm bodied animals. Dr. Pulaski can kill it, but only by also killing the nerves it infects. It is rapidly spreading and will soon reach his brain. He dreams of walking alone in a pleasant forest, where he encounters Data. He is reliving memories of critical parts of his life. But his body is weakening. They finally eradicate the infection and Riker recovers. So this is a reprise episode.

I watched TNG ST Season 3 #1 “Evolution” Beverly Crusher is back as doctor after a year elsewhere. They are to observe a nova, but there seem to be problems as things malfunction. The main computer may be breaking down. Wesley fears it’s his fault, because he was experimenting with mini robots, nanites, that could get into cells to repair them. Two robots escaped, and may be messing with the computer. Meanwhile the visiting expert sleeps and dreams—and lightning strokes attack him. The nanites may be trying to eliminate their maker. They are constantly and rapidly evolving. Data volunteers to let them invade him so hi can become a conduit to communicate with them. They make a deal, the nanites find a better home, and the ship’s computer becomes functional. Meanwhile Beverly is worried about Wesley, but he seems to be growing up okay at age seventeen.

I watched TNG ST S3 #2 “The Ensigns of Command” There appear to be humans settling on a planet where they can’t survive. How can this be? The Enterprise must investigate. There are now over 15,000 descendants of the original landing. The Sheliaks who govern this sector of space demand that the humans be immediately removed, or they will be destroyed. The colonists refuse to go. Data negotiates and is persuasive, but the impasse doesn’t change. Picard reviews the original treaty and uses its technical language to obtain the three weeks needed for an evacuation ship to arrive. So they work it out, and Data gets a kiss from the lady negotiator,

I watched TNG ST S3 #3 “The Survivors” They receive a distress call from Rana IV, which is under attack by an unknown force. When they get there they spy only two survivors on a devastated planet. They send a landing party, who meets the married couple, Kevin and Rishon, who are in their 80s. Why were they spared? Dianna Troi picks up something nebulous, and is haunted by a song. The alien ship reappears, fires at them, flees. They pursue, but realize it is toying with them. Deanna continues to suffer, the music getting worse. They are stopping her from seeing the truth. Picard finally figures it out: one survivor, Kevin, who turns out to be am immortal alien who loved a human woman. When the alien ship killed her, he destroyed the entire alien culture and recreated her in emulation. Another intriguing episode.

I watched TNG ST S3 #4 “Who Watches the Watchers” They are on their way to assist an observation station whose reactor is failing. But there’s an explosion before they get there. They were observing a primitive Vulcan settlement in the Mintakon sector, and a man and his daughter Oji see them. Riker and Deanna Troi beam down, their appearances changed. Undoing this damage without violating the Prime Directive of non interference is a challenge. Picard brings the leader Nuria aboard the Enterprise to explain that he is not a god, but mortal, like them. Incidental note: I like stories set near Mintaka, because it is one of the stars of the constellation Orion’s Belt. My leading lady in my novel Chaining the Lady is Melody of Mintaka, so you can see it is familiar ground for me, as it were.

I watched TNG ST S3 #5 “The Bonding” The Away Team is suddenly in trouble. They beam it back, but one woman is dead. It was a booby-trap. Her twelve year old son Jeremy Aster is aboard, now an orphan. Worf commanded the expedition, and is himself an orphan, and wishes to bond with the boy. But Worf is a Klingon. Then Jeremy’s mother Marla Aster, appears, alive. How can that be? A beam from the planet is animating her. They cut off the beam and she vanishes. But returns as an energy force from the planet. She wants only to shield Jeremy from grief. But they persuade her that grief is part of the human condition. He bonds with Worf.

I watched TNG ST S3 #6 “Booby Trap” Geordi is on a tropical beach with a girl, Christi, in simulation, but she doesn’t feel that way about him. The ship picks up a signal. It’s a Promellian battle cruiser. But its call for help was probably sent over a thousand years ago. Picard, Data, and Worf beam aboard the derelict. It is manned by dehydrated corpses; they died at their posts. Then the Enterprise begins losing power, its engines unresponsive. Have they fallen into the same trap that took out the old battleship? Geordi animates the original program maker for the Enterprise, which takes the form of an attractive woman, Leah. They make a simulation to figure out how to get free, and succeed, in a close call. And Leah kisses Geordi. She’s a simulation, and knows it, but she’s also the computer. There may be something there between them for the future.

I watched TNG ST S3 #7 “The Enemy” Riker, Geordi, and Worf beam down to a dust storm planet, setting markers. They find a live Romulan. Geordi is pushed into a well and gets left behind. They contact a Romulan ship, which demands return of the survivor. Geordi encounters another Romulan, Bochra, who takes him prisoner. On the ship, only Worf’s DNA can save the Romulan. But Romulans killed Worf’s parents. The Romulans dies. The Romulan commander is ready for war. But planetside Geordi and Bochra must cooperate to survive. They are beamed aboard, Bochra is returned to the Romulan vessel, and the crisis abates. So who was the enemy, really?

I watched TNG ST S3 #8 “The Price” There is a stable wormhole that could be invaluable for navigation. The local planet is accepting bids for it. One of the hired guns—Ral, a negotiator—is a supremely handsome man who gets interested in Deanna Troi, and fascinates her. He can read emotions too. It quickly gets sexual. The Ferengi delegation is sheer mischief from the start, poisoning the Federation’s chief negotiator. Meanwhile Geordi and Data take a shuttle and enter the wormhole. The Ferengi follow them, but don’t heed their warning and get stranded on the far side of the wormhole. And Troi separates from Ral, though there could be more at another time.

I watched TNG ST S3 #9 “The Vengeance Factor” They discover a station raided by the Gatherers, a mischief band that needs to be stopped. The Away Team of Riker, Worf, Data, and Geordi checks a planet raided by the Gatherers. They are ambushed, but counter-ambush and bring the raiders aboard the Enterprise. They are crude barbarians, but willing to negotiate. Except that the Sovereign’s cook, Yuta, the last of her clan, who looks young and innocent, can kill with a touch, and does, secretly. They catch on: she is on a private mission of vengeance, and seems to be immortal. Riker likes her, but shoots her rather than let her complete her vengeance. A sad but necessary action.

TNG ST S3 #10 “The Defector” A Romulan scout ship requests asylum; it is being pursued. They beam the logistics clerk aboard. He says the Romulans plan to attack in two days. The defector may be a plant to trick them into making the first aggressive move into the neutral zone. He is actually Admiral Jarok. He says he wants to prevent a war that may destroy the Romulans. But can Picard believe him? It turns out to be a trap, but Worf has prepared a counter-trap, and the Romulans back off. A good, tense mystery and resolution. I loved the surprise ending.

TNG ST S3 #11 “The Hunted” Angosia, a planet, wants to join the Federation, but a dangerous prisoner, Roga or Danar, (they seem to change names. Oh, first and last names) has escaped. After a chase they beam him aboard, but he fights violently. Yet Deanna Troi senses that he is not a bad man. He was trained to be an ultimately efficient soldier, and has killed 84 times, and hates it. Angosia means to return him to prison, but he would rather die. He breaks free and roams the ship, then beams aboard the Angosian transport vessel. In the end Angosia must decide whether to accept the soldiers back into their society, as they deserve.

TNG ST S3 #12 “The High Ground” They bring supplies to the planet Rutia. A terrorist bomb goes off, and Beverly Crusher, a doctor, immediately tends to the wounded despite the danger. And gets taken hostage by Kyril Finn of the rebel Ansanta, who need a good doctor. They have a Dimensional Shift technology that works to travel from place to place, but slowly kills those who use it. That’s why they need a doctor. They attack the Enterprise, and kidnap Picard. But now the Enterprise has located the rebel’s power source. They raid it and rescue Beverly and Picard. The terrorism is stopped, maybe. Many ethical issues pondered here.

TNG ST S3 #13 “Deja Q” The Enterprise goes to help a planet threatened by a descending moon, impact in about a day. Then Q appears. That will complicate the situation. Or maybe Q is causing the mischief. Q says he has been defrocked and condemned to be human mortal. Can they believe that? Aliens attack, having a grievance with Q. When they lower the shield to address the moon, the aliens attack. So Q suffers a bit of humanity and departs in a shuttle, to draw the aliens’ attack to him instead of The Enterprise. His folk restore his powers. He abolishes the aliens and thanks the Enterprise, especially Data, to whom he gives the power to appreciate humor.

TNG ST S3 #14 “A Matter of Perspective” This is a he said, she said story, played through via simulations. Riker was aboard a space station just before it exploded without warning; he beamed back just in time. The locals charge Riker with murder. They program the Holodeck to recreate the conditions of the station explosion. Scientist Dr. Apgar’s wife Manua comes on to Riker, and Apgar is furious. Manua says Riker tried to rape her; he says there was no such scene. It seems that both are telling the truth as they see it. Picard figures it out and puts together a series of simulations that show that Dr. Apgar actually tried to kill Riker, but it messed up and he killed himself.

TNG ST S3 #15 “Yesterday’s Enterprise” They encounter a strange warp in space. From it emerges—the Enterprise-C, the prior edition. The present one is -D. It appears to have traveled through time. It’s in bad condition, with only 125 survivors. The concern is that if the C returns with knowledge of the future, it could change it. Guinan (Whoopee) says her intuition indicates that the C must return, though that means certain destruction. Tasha Yar is back, an indication that history has already changed, because she died in the regular history. The C goes back, with Tasha joining it, and the history we know is restored. This is one mind-stretching adventure.

TNG ST S3 #16 “The Offspring” Data has crafted Lal, his android child. The name means “beloved.” She decides to be female, and does appear to be a very feminine girl. To observe human beings informally she becomes a waitress at Ten-Forward, Gianan’s bar. The Admiral, seeing her as a breakthrough in artificial life, wants to transport her to his own ship, separating her from Data. She begins to feel emotions, and that freaks her out. She shuts down, but Data saves her memories in his own mind. This in an interesting consideration of the meaning of life and awareness and emotion.

I received a DVD, The New 8 Bit Heroes, a documentary made by one Joe Granato. It tells how they decided to make a new computer game. Being a game fan was not enough. Having the desire to do it was not enough. One problem was marketing. Another was funding it. 8 bit is primitive compared to current chips, but there are folk who remember the early games and would like to have modern games that emulate them. Provided they can be made to play on contemporary machines. They are using kilobytes for this game, compared to today’s megabytes; that’s a squeeze. It takes time to conceptualize and organize the elements. And—I’m in it! Not the game; the video. For a couple minutes, at least. I look old and animated, not really part of this scene. I draw the analogy of the editor who cuts out whole chapters of a novel, to “improve” it, and doesn’t understand why the author objects. I liken it to cutting off your left hand because it lacks the facility of your right hand, so you stand improved without it, right? Sometimes an author’s only recourse, when faced with that attitude, is to leave the publisher, and I have done it, and paid the price. Part of the root of that problem is that some publishers seem to think that authors are servants, mere providers of interchangeable “content,” and don’t have artistic rights. Does a servant talk back to his master? Not if he values his hide. It seems it can be similar with creating a game, only there’s more than one editor involved. They don’t just write it; they need music that fits the mood, art that evokes emotion, effective animation. Each is its own challenge. Critics talk about what they don’t like; what about the fans talking about what they do like? Does the artist take a year out of his life to perfect it, and the viewer says okay, and moves on to the next, soon forgetting it? Is this really worth the time the creator takes? Is he essentially creating a children’s toy, to be dropped on the floor when a new distraction appears? What does it take to get it across the finish line? That doubt can be awful; it’s an emotional roller coaster. In the end it seems this game will be made and presented. But this is an education for me. I thought writing a novel and getting it published without being neutered was a challenge. Try it with an original game! There’s so much heartbreak lurking here. A game is happy go lucky only for the player.

TNG ST S3 #17 “Sins of the Father” In the exchange program, a Klingon officer comes to take Riker’s place, Riker present but giving way. The Klingon, Kurn, is arrogant, critical of everyone except Worf. He turns out to be Worf’s younger brother, bringing news of a charge against their father that Worf must defend. Picard accompanies Worf, and Kurn acts as his second. But Kurn is treacherously attacked and wounded, so Picard takes his place. There is something rotten in the Klingon hierarchy, and Picard is determined to sniff it out. There was another survivor, a Klingon nurse, a witness. Worf’s father was not a traitor. But that truth must wait for another day.

I read the 44th Xanth novel, Skeleton Key, by Piers Anthony, 104,000 words. That is, I wrote another 25,000 words, completed it, and edited it, and sent it to my proofreaders to catch the myriad errors I miss. Of course what I say is the typos grow on the page after my editing, and I trust loyal fans will believe that. This is perhaps the wildest of the Xanths. The protagonist is Squid, an alien cuttlefish emulating an eleven year old human girl, as she has since #39 FivePortraits. She is one of five children rescued from a doomed Xanth future, and the others accept her as a sibling. They appear on #42 Fire Sail, #43 Jest Right, and they take over here in #44, which features thirteen children and largely excludes adults. The half skeleton children Piton and Data are part of it, and the royal Magician-caliber children of Prince Hilarion and Princess Dawn are there too. So if you don’t like children, too bad. No, you haven’t missed the prior two novels; they have not yet been published, pending a movie that then got torpedoed. Now they’re in limbo. Anyway Squid is informed that she is the most important person in the universe. She has trouble believing this, but it turns out to be true, literally. She has a vision that she will have to kill her best friend and sibling, Win. She absolutely hates that, but the fate of the universe may depend on it. The children form a dance group with the square dance, round dance, triangle dance, and others, and they are very good. Then the novel complicates and finishes with the most extreme finale yet. It addresses issues of homosexuality, sexual identity, juvenile romantic interest, crossbreed rights, and the ultimate nature of the universe. It should outrage a myriad ignorant critics. You should enjoy it, when.

TNG ST S3 #18 “Allegiance” Picard is reading, and falls asleep. Something transports him to another venue. Yet he seems to remain on the Enterprise. Others are in that other venue, also relaxing when they were brought here. Meanwhile the fake Picard has them set course for a pulsar. A fourth captive arrives. The fake Picard asks Beverly Crusher on a date. They dance and kiss, then he breaks it off. The others gradually catch on that this is not the captain they know. They stage a tacit revolt, depose him, and Riker takes over. Meanwhile the real Picard exposes the alien device and returns to the Enterprise, where he is immediately recognized. All is well again.

I watched the movie Carol, which I got because that is my wife’s name. How’s that for being governed by logic? Department store clerk Therese (Pronounced ter-ESS) in New York of the 1950s meets sophisticated Carol, who is trapped in a loveless marriage. The two become friends. Carol’s separated husband, Harge, visiting their child Rindy, doesn’t want to break it off. Harge goes to court, charging Carol with immoral contact with Therese and others, trying to gain sole custody of the child to spite her. Ugly divorces are like that. Carol and Therese go on a long drive west, to Ohio, on to Chicago, which annoys Therese’s boyfriend Richard, who thinks its a lesbian liaison. And on to Waterloo, Iowa,where they celebrate the New Year. They kiss and make love. And discover their tryst has been recorded. It was a trap to snare Carol. She departs with a letter of explanation, leaving Therese brokenhearted. Carol returns to Harge, in grief for Therese. She fights for her daughter’s welfare. She meets Therese and invites her to come live with her, but Therese declines. Then finally does go to join her. This is one powerful exploration of the bypaths of love.

TNG ST S3 #19 “Captain’s Holiday” They decide that Captain Picard has been under a lot of strain and needs a vacation. They finally persuade him to go to Risa, a vacation planet. Sexy women approach him, and a Ferengi male, Sovak, who demands a disk And a woman. Vash is the woman. Two visitors from the future, Vorgons, say Picard may have found the Tox Uthat, a device capable of stopping all action in the heart of a star, a powerful weapon. Picard goes with Vash to locate the Tox Uthat in the wilderness. He knows she’s nothing but trouble, but she’s attractive and she understands him. They make love. Picard outsmarts the several parties involved and has a great time with Vash.

TNG ST S3 #20 “Tin Man” They are given a special mission, and take aboard Tam Elbrun, which may be awkward news. He’s a telepath and maybe crazy. A star may be going nova, and orbiting it is the Tin Man, thought of be a living thing, alien intelligence. The Romulans want to get to it first. Tam and Data beam aboard it. Tam says the alien needs lives to protect, so it has meaning in its own life. When Tam and Tin Man joined, it healed them both. What happened to the Romulans is unclear.

I watched The Flowering of Human Consciousness—Everyone’s Life Purpose. This is a three and a half hour discussion by Eckhart Tolle, a spiritualist who seeks the truth about personal identity. I don’t feel competent to summarize it effectively, as I am far from spiritual, so I merely made spot notes as I listened. Herewith. It starts with a man on stage, Tolle, speaking too quietly to hear, so I put on the ear plugs and that helped a lot. He dings two metal disks. He says the focus could be considered the awakening of intelligence. Become aware of the gap between words, the gap of stillness. A shift in identity. Humans have been a content based accumulation of knowledge, suffering, experiences. Imagine that you don’t have a name, an identity. You are simply a field of awareness. Every experience is content of the mind. We feel incomplete and try to add to our personal identity. Some who have made it economically still are not complete. There is no happy ending because you are going to die. All that you are may finish as the space on your tombstone between your date of birth and date of death. The little Me inside may be a false identity that you need to be rid off to be truly alive. Then your Me is no longer the content of your mind. The false self will use anything to strengthen itself. The desire for knowledge. To understand the universe may be part of it. It’s a delusion. Once it gets established, everything else is colored by it, the desires and fears, wanting more content. One attitude: “What do you think about the present moment? I’m against it.” They say they want peace, but they don’t really want it, because their mind set depends on non-peace. What of the beauty of a flower—there’s a lovely bouquet beside him on stage—the first thing you notice is its stillness. It does not have a mind; you bring the mind to appreciate it. The flower is surrounded by stillness, alive but not noisy. Now consider a traffic jam. That’s another experience of non-movement. This stillness has its own meaning. There is spaciousness around a flower, and around anger of the traffic jam. This is the Now wherein everything happens. Most people go through life in a mode of reactivity, reacting to the Now. You have the power of life, to say yes to Now. You become aware of the undercurrent of stillness in which everything happens. You are that undercurrent of stillness. You allow it to come; you dwell in the field of Now. The power of consciousness flows through you. There is the simplicity of this moment. You don’t need the sense of self. You don’t become special, you become ordinary. Even a taste of this discovery is a revelation that can never be undone. Mental noise has momentum; even that you can allow. You can allow yourself to be unhappy. The power of surrender, that you bring into the No, and the No can dissolve. (I am not clear whether he is saying Now or No, but think I have it straight. I wish there were subtitles.) bring the Yes into the No. Peace no matter what happens. Once you know who you are, you are one in your essence with every other life form, including the flower. Every life form is part of the one consciousness that you are a part of. The only place God can be known is in your own essence. Each life form is yourself, called Love. You are then continuously in a state of love, not possessive but inclusive. Jesus taught this. You love your neighbor as yourself, when you know your neighbor as yourself; your neighbor is yourself. Christianity has a history of violence, ironically, but the truth is there. It will never change. Intelligence is much vaster than what is measured in IQ tests; it is the Yes to life. The mind becomes one with the vastness of eternity. Spiritual discourse does not come from words; it is more than information. Allow it to be with you. (Back to Piers: as an agnostic who has studied Jesus, I find this consistent with the message of Jesus that so many Christians evidently have left behind.)

Disc two of Flowering continues with Eckhart Tolle sitting on the same stage. Our central nature, our essence, has no content, no form. We have to relinquish the desire to understand. Only when we give up trying to understand, to analyze, to possess, can we truly appreciate it. The value of the pointer is to point the way, not to explain it. Stillness is the new state of consciousness. Identification with form is an error, perhaps evil. Evil is the ignorance of not knowing who you are, the lack of self knowledge, of not knowing God. What is emptiness? Consciousness without thought. Put aside your accumulated knowledge and perceive the world through stillness. Put aside even the desire to understand. Awareness fulfills every moment. Be free of thought, no longer run by thought. Don’t think. Feel the Presence. Surrender to the Now. One person’s note says he avoids the Now by sleeping; please talk loudly. (Laughter.) Action that arises out of the state of acceptance is far more powerful. Eckhart once was in a situation requiring constant thought; he left. Can Presence emerge even in such a situation? Yes, briefly. What about pain? The pain body is the accumulated physical and emotional pains that live in you. Anger, sadness, fear, feeding on your reactions, taking possession of you. Witness it, understand it as simply emotional pain. Without a Me you won’t suffer. Allow it to be, not fighting it, only a vibration in the field of Now. Just a small part of the larger space. You are lucky to have it. Violent films and such are run by the pain bodies, to feed the pain body. There is a great demand for it, by the pain body. We are so used to the madness that we don’t even see it. Pain bodies don’t like to be looked at; it diminishes them. So Eckhart seems to be a success, which pleases his mother. He is Somebody rather than Nobody. Which of course is not the point. Your essential nature is being nobody. Go beyond the need to figure it all out, the need to know. If you truly need the answer, wait and it may come. The transformation of consciousness is something else. Human beings may be little patches of consciousness traveling through space. This may not be personal growth but personal diminishment, which is the real success.

I read the 26th America’s Galactic Foreign Legion novel: Butcher of Arthropoda, by Walter Knight. This is one wild story, I think unpublishable in any traditional venue, but this series has evidently found its market. Colonel Joey R Czerinski, battalion commander of the Galactic Federation Foreign Legion’s troop has been assigned to occupy the spider planet Arthropoda. The spider emperor is dead, and Joe’s job is to impose a regime change and enforce the peace. So he plans to addict the whole planet to drugs so the spiders sleep rather than revolt. He makes a bus driver the new emperor and goes on from there. Let me give just one small example of the wildness of this story. Joey encounters a woman he knew and decides to have sex with her, but she has to pee, so they compromise: she gives him a golden shower recorded on video that goes viral in the galaxy. Then they time travel back a couple thousand years to Earth to have Jesus Christ officiate at their wedding. In the end things are suitably if bloodily wrapped up and the planet is pacified. I would be more cynical about such adventures, were it not for the current American political scene, which may be getting parodied here.

TNG ST S3 #21 “Hollow Pursuits” A Lt. Reginald Barclay, whom they call “Broccoli” chronically messes up. He’s in Geordi’s unit, and Picard tells Geordi to work harder to get along with the man. Geordi tries. Things just seem to go wrong in Barclay’s vicinity. He spends a lot of time in the Holodeck with recreated members of the officers playing medieval roles. Riker objects to being represented there, but Counselor Troi says it is better to go along with it. Then Troi herself gets emulated as a love goddess, and she is no longer amused. The Enterprise malfunctions dangerously. They discover Invidium, a little used substance, messing things up. Barclay helps figure it out.

TNG ST S3 #22 “The Most Toys” They are on a routine mission when a woman electrocutes Data, stunning him, and puts him on a shuttle capsule which then explodes. Then Data wakes on another ship, one of the “toys” the proprietor Kivas Fajo, collects. Worf is promoted to take over Data’s position. Fajo’s assistant Varria helps Data escape, but gets killed herself. Data is rescued and Fajo is arrested. Justice has been served.

TNG ST S3 #23 “Sarek” The Enterprise has the honor to host the first meeting between the Federation and Legara. The Ambassador arrives, and attends their Mozart concert—and walks out. Meanwhile senseless arguments are breaking out on the ship; in fact a free-for-all breaks out. Ambassador Sarek may be the cause, telepathically. He may have a Vulcan illness causing loss of control of emotions. Picard has to tell him. The answer may be a mind meld so that Picard’s control becomes Sarex’s control. But now Picard is a wild mess of emotions. He hangs on in private while Sarek conducts the negotiations. So the event is a success, thanks to Picard.

TNG ST S3 #24 “Menage a Troi” Deanna Troi’s mother Lwaxana is on board, and the Ferengi, which promises mischief. The Ferengi Tog takes a shine to Lwaxana, and manages to beam her, Riker, and Deanna to his own ship. He courts Lwaxana and she is obliged to listen, as Riker and Deanna are tacitly hostage. They manage to sneak out a masked message in the static. Picard quotes Shakespeare in a pretense of wooing Lwaxana, convincing Tog to let her go. He also promotes Wesley Crusher to full Ensign. In sum, things are wrapped up to conclude the season.

I watched Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within. This is derived from a game, and has marvelous visual effects. The year is 2065. Alien spirits have rendered Earth into a wasteland and mankind faces extinction. Dr. Aki Ross seeks to collect eight spirits, to create a force powerful enough to destroy the aliens. The bad spirits infect people, and have to be destroyed. So far they have a weapon that contains them without destroying them. Aki is one such person, infected by a phantom. She has found six spirits, using a sort of eyepiece, but needs to find two more to effect her own cure and that of others. She has weird dreams that could be some form of communication. But she is dying. Her boyfriend Gray joins her in a dream, where robot-like alien creatures converge on her. This time she figures it out. The phantoms aren’t invaders, they’re ghosts. But different factions disagree on how to fight them. Will the wrong faction ruin things for humanity? Gray and Aki kiss. Aki finds the 8th spirit—and it’s a Phantom spirit. She is cured. Gaea is there. The ignorant general tries to destroy it, and destroys himself. I think the phantoms and the remaining humans will get along, and survive.

TNG ST S3 #25 “Transfigurations” They rescue an injured man from a planet, John Doe. His injuries are severe, but he is recovering remarkably rapidly. Geordi helps, and seems to have a subtle transformation himself, becoming far more confident and competent. John Doe possesses the power to heal with a touch. An alien ship pursues him and demands his return so they can kill him as a criminal. When Picard balks, the alien commander strikes down all the personnel, but John Doe restores them. He is metamorphosing to a new and superior state. That’s why the existing order fears him; they will lose power. He progresses regardless, and departs as a bright spirit.

I watched After Earth. The principle characters are black. Aliens wipe out Earth. Cypher and his son Kitai get stranded on Earth a thousand years later. Both Cypher’s legs are broken. Kitai needs to learn “ghosting,” which is to approach an alien monster without a trace of fear; then the alien can’t see him. Because everything on Earth is designed to kill humans. Kitai travels alone to fetch a signal flare. Cypher can see and hear him, and directs him as Kitai encounters assorted dangers in a forest wilderness. Baboons, panthers, a giant predator bird, a poisonous slug. It is one harrowing journey. And an alien creature, the ursa, is pursuing him. He achieves fearlessness so it can’t detect him and he attacks the ursa, killing it. Then he sets off the flair, enabling the rescue. This is about as compelling a narrative as I’ve seen.

TNG ST S3 #26 “The Best of Both Worlds, part 1” A new colony has disappeared. Did the Borg do it? Meanwhile Riker has been offered a command of his own but is uncertain he wants to leave the Enterprise. The Borg vessel intercepts them. It looks like a huge cube of compacted trash. It demands that Picard beam aboard them; when he refuses they attack and damage the Enterprise. The Enterprise hides, but the Borg vessel finds it and abducts Picard, then heads for Earth an high speed. An Away party beams aboard the Borg ship and takes out a key protocol. But Picard is now a Borg. To be continued.

TNG ST S3 #? “Mission Log” Season 3 of TNG is over. They discuss the impact of certain scenes, of the participation of Whoopi Goldberg as bartender of the Ten-Forward. Then an analysis of individual characters. Comments by the script writers, who sometimes really had to scramble with short deadlines. The challenge of the special effects. Models of ships. The music. Okay, this completes the third season. Next month I’ll start in on Season Four. So far I am loving this series, liking it better than the original Star Trek series.

I read Simple Rules, by Donald Sull and Kathleen M Eisenhardt. The thesis is that we are getting overwhelmed by increasing complexity, but may do better by simplifying things. Simple rules can actually be more effective than complicated ones, and not just because they are easier to remember. It has multiple examples of companies or individuals getting bogged down, then simplifying and becoming successes. There is no single set of rules to apply to every situation; you have to orient on one, then work out the rules, but they will serve you in good stead thereafter. Unfortunately there are folk who benefit from complexity, maybe because it hides things that would shame them if others realized, such as in the tax code with all its special interest provisions that benefit the few at the expense of the many. That can’t be fixed because those special interests will fight madly to preserve their illicit advantages. Some rules need explanation, such as the one for healthy eating: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” That is, avoid highly processed foods, and stick to things like vegetables, fruits, nuts, whole grains, and not too much of those. Other problems boil down similarly. Mainly, as I see it, you should use common sense to work out approaches to problems.

Last year a reader called my attention to an error in Xanth #38 Board Stiff. Five lines were omitted near the end, making nonsense of a passage. I notified the publisher, which is now Open Road, who took over from Premier Digital Publishing, and gave the necessary correction. Three months have passed without response, so now I will run the correction here, for the benefit of understandably confused readers.

The last sentence of page 268 of my hardcover file copy, which I had to buy from Amazon, reads “It will be good to exercise my powers again. agreed.” It should read, after the word ”again”: We will travel Xanth, eliminating the virus, and conclude at Caprice Castle, where we will assist them in the restoration of puns from their capacious storage cellar. There will be time. Somewhere along the way you will surely find a man who is worthy of you.”
“That would be nice,” Merge agreed. (End of correction)

Sure enough, in a later novel Merge does find a worthy man, who joins her and her adopted daughter Myst, and Myst goes on to remarkable adventures of her own with the other siblings. Thanks to that bit of advice from her mother that got deleted here.

Every so often I will mention something of interest to me and perhaps to some readers. Over a year ago I mentioned gardening. One of the things that go along with personal gardening is composting, which is in essence recycling your household wastes for the benefit of plants and the environment. We compost our organic kitchen wastes. Here is a related site. https://gardeningmentor.com/make-your-own-compost.

In THE HUMANIST magazine I read an article about Finding Clara Barton, by Luis Granados. Clara Barton founded the Red Cross, and a cache of her lost papers was found decades later. However famous she became, it turns out that she was far from perfect. “Was she a hero? Absolutely. Her flaws were stunning, but her achievements were staggering. She was smart, she was hardworking, she was imaginative, she was empathetic, she was politically adroit, and she could charm rude teenagers into cooperation…If she hadn’t grown that enormous chip on her shoulder by forced subservience to men far less capable than she, it’s possible that she’d have enjoyed a productive but historically insignificant career, like millions of other women and men.” Yes, history is seldom made by those who accept the status quo.

Dark Matter is one of my buttons. It doesn’t exist, but astronomers can’t accept that, so they keep trying to find it, as with the credulous folk trying to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Newspaper article titled “Absence of dark matter may prove its existence,” as if all that is required to make a case is lack of evidence. However, there really is a case to be made here. The reason they believe in dark matter is that spinning galaxies should fly apart, because they are spinning too fast for conditions, and they don’t. What holds them together? There must be a hidden pot, I mean, hidden matter whose gravity does the job. There is an alternate theory that clarifies that they simply don’t properly understand the way gravity works on the galactic scale, but let’s let that be for now. Well, now they have found a distant galaxy that has very little actual matter and is spinning at the rate it should to hold together. So no dark matter is needed there. But if that is so for that galaxy, how come all the others don’t match? They must have dark matter; that is the reasoning. Sigh, I will have to rephrase my theory. The new (actually it’s quite old) galaxy has so little matter that it follows the rules we are familiar with. It’s the other galaxies, with much more matter, that exhibit the larger property of gravity, how it acts more powerfully at a distance than they understand. If you added enough matter to that new one, it would come to invoke that larger property and act like the others. Only when there is enough matter does that special effect take hold; it may be an emergent property. Maybe we’ll see, in due course, and the entire dream of Dark Matter will fade out.

There was a newspaper article on Elvis Presley, the singer. He was five months younger than I, and entered the Army a year after I did. He could have gotten a cushy special services deal, but chose to do it for real, for which I applaud him. He met the girl he married then. Unfortunately he also got into drugs then, which eventually helped end his life. So while I had as much trouble in the army as any non-combat soldier does, with my whole battalion getting punished because I elected to exercise my right to say no to a supposedly voluntary sign up for low-interest savings bonds, and on the whole it was a two year waste of time, I did get my American citizenship then and did go on to a life I would never want to trade for Elvis’s life.

Outrage Dept: America needs teachers committed to working with children who have the fewest advantages in life. So the federal government offered grants of up to $4,000 a year to standout college students who agreed to teach subjects like math or science at lower income schools. Many teachers did, I think having social consciences as well as needing the money. I was once a teacher; I would have been interested in such a program. The teachers fulfilled their part of the bargain. But then they got hit by technicalities and discovered that their grants had become loans with interest owing. For example, they hawe to send in a form each year, certifying that they are meeting the requirements. They did, only to have the company administrating the program claim it did not receive them. One teacher re-sent the form—but then they claimed it arrived too late. See what I mean? They could have thrown away those forms so they could grab the money. In this manner thousands of teachers who were honoring the program’s purpose were suddenly put into dept, with no recourse. There is a smell here. There’s a lawsuit, and I hope it sets thing to rights. As it is, it is the government that is reneging, not the teachers.

Stephen Hawking died. When told he had only two years left to live, well, he lived more than another fifty years. He was called one of the greatest cosmologists ever, despite his condition—until someone pointed out that it was probably because of his condition, that gave him little else to focus on. He was born in Oxford, England, seven and a half years after I was born there, and he liked to read science fiction, so we had a couple things in common. And maybe one more thing: he said “My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.” Amen. I’d even settle, grudgingly, for an incomplete understanding. I read A Brief History of Time and liked it. I am not a cosmologist, but what I can follow of his work on black holes satisfies me that he was indeed a salient thinker.

We are on the DO NOT CALL list, and it seems to make little difference. I get them on my cell phone too. In the old days the callers simply ignored the list; now they use robocalls. This, like SPAM, is one of the things the authorities could stop, if they wanted to. How? I have mentioned before how a button on the phone could be set up, that when touched locks the incoming call in place and dials the enforcement agency, where a hefty fine awaits. But they use fake numbers; we once saw that the caller was listed as our own number. Yet there must be a connection to their real number, or they could sever sell anybody anything. Another solution would be to charge enough for calls, any calls, so that an outfit making a million calls would pay a bruising fee. So why isn’t anything done? If the current politicians were given notice they’d lose their positions unless the calls stop, we’d see them stop soon enough. I hate it when they obviously figure the average man for an idiot. I hate it worse when they prove it.

NEW SCIENTIST reviewed a book, The Strange Order Of Things: Life, feeling, and the making of cultures, by Antonio Damasio. What is consciousness? Awareness by itself isn’t the point; instead our brains work with our bodies, which produce feelings. Awareness merged with feeling is what counts. We can also think of it as Reason and Feeling, with Feeling pulling the strings.

As item startled me: I have been seeing reams of stuff about guns and the way the NRA owns politicians so as to keep on making money from guns regardless of the cost in human lives, and it’s all depressing. Then I saw one of the absolutism of Planned Parenthood, which it seems is like the NRA of the left, only it’s abortion it promotes. As one who doesn’t much like abortion, I found that an eye opener. Guns take lives; so do abortions. The genesis of my concern dates from my personal history, wherein my wife and I lost our first three children to stillbirths, technically abortions. I don’t like killing animals, which is why I am a vegetarian; I certainly don’t like killing babies. Yet I leave individual choices to the individuals concerned, so don’t condemn meat eaters, or gun owners, or women who do not wish to have babies at this time. I merely wince.

Article in NEW SCIENTIST on dreams. Not the meaning of life dreams, the garden variety sleep dreams. It is becoming increasingly apparent that we need those dreams; they are not a waste of time, even if they are not remembered. They may be the way the mind judges the emotional context of specific memories, and as mentioned above, feelings are a significant aspect of meaningful consciousness. But we don’t get enough sleep, and the alarm clock typically cuts off the last hours of sleep, when most of the vital REM dreams are performed. We are doing ourselves harm. Maybe that is part of why the world seems to be going to hell. I don’t know if there is a simple cure, because too many folk, if given extra time to sleep, would use it instead to play poker or watch porn on TV. Sigh.

PIERS

Mayhem 2018

HI-

The ebook edition of my science fiction novel Cluster, leading off a five novel series, will be downpriced to 99 cents in the USA on Mayhem 3, 2018. In this setting the centers of galactic empires are highly civilized, while the fringes are less so, there being a certain cultural drag because of the delays of space travel. So there can be super science, or medieval culture, or stone age, depending on how far out a world is. The protagonist is Flint of Outworld, who chips fine spear points for a living but is actually near genius intellect as well as having the most powerful aura known, which enables him to travel instantly to other bodies. When he gets hauled to the central world of Earth, mischief ensues; a smart barbarian can really mess up the plans of dull civilized folk. If you suppose that all I ever wrote is funny fantasy, try this for contrast.

I watched Miracle Mile. What would you do if you had only one hour to live? Harry meets a nice girl, Julie. They make a date for that night, but he oversleeps by three and a half hours. Hoping he can catch her anyway, he calls her number and leaves a message. Then he receives a misdialed call, and learns that Los Angeles will be destroyed by nuclear missiles in an hour. Others don’t believe him, at first, but then they do, and start going crazy. Got to get out of town fast! So he looks for her, to spend his last moments with her. He hijacks a car and winds up setting fire to a gasoline station. But he does finally locate her—and she’s zonked out on a tranquilizer. He rouses her and tries to catch a helicopter out, but everything goes wrong. Julie is understandably dubious. The whole city seems to be going crazy, and destruction and death are spreading. Who needs nukes, with devastation like this? They finally do catch the helicopter—and the missiles arrive. It was not a false alarm. But at least they die together, in love, which was the point. Not my favorite ending.

I watched 1984, because it was a bonus movie on he same disc as Miracle Mile. I read the book when it came out, circa 1950. I understand George Orwell wrote it in 1948, so he reversed the digits for the title, then impossibly far in the future. That date has passed, but the story remains prophetic, though perhaps no more so than his Animal Farm. Much of the ugly future it predicted is indeed coming to pass. Consider America today, where special interests rule an ignorant public, and truth has little if any meaning, being dismissed as “fake news.” The movie starts with a propaganda film whipping up that ignorant public to support the condition of perpetual war. But it’s not just films; wall sized TV monitors watch individuals. Regimentation is complete. It is like one vast prison, and those who annoy the State are hanged or shot after being required to give public confessions for their crimes. The protagonist, Winston, meets an attractive young woman, Julia, who soon seduces him. They have an affair, renting a room for it. Full frontal female nudity, rear male nudity. Their liaison is illicit, of course. They read subversive literature. They fall in love. And they are caught, beaten up, separated. The landlord is a secret agent. Winston is tortured to “cure” him of his mental derangement in opposing the will of the State. Reality is whatever they say it is. But it continues, until rats are brought to eat his face, to make him lose his love for Julia. They probably torture her similarly. Then he meets Julia again, and each confesses how they betrayed the other. Their love has been tortured out of them. This is one grim story, true to the novel in that respect. This is how a totalitarian state enforces compliance to its will. I doubt I ever watch it again.

I watched The Hunger Games Catching Fire. I had though the prior one I got, Mockingjay Part 1 was the first in the series. Apparently not. This one follows that one, I think. Katniss Everdeen has to convince the world that she is madly in love with Peeta. So they agree to marry; how’s that for a lasting romance? But the powers that be conclude that she needs to die. In the right way, showing she is one of the elite, rather than one of the people. The headlines will feature their love and marriage, but there will also be beatings, destruction, and killing. The people will get the message. This year he Hunger Games will feature all champions, 24 winners of prior games, called Tributes. No pushovers. They can’t do it all themselves; they will need friends. So they set about quietly making friends of other Tributes. Other Tributes are not pleased about having to compete again; it wasn’t supposed to be that way. And the Game begins with the competitors on pedestals in the river. They must start killing each other immediately, and do. Katniss’ allies help her and form a small group against the others. They need potable water, and get some from a tree. Peeta gets smashed by an invisible force field and almost dies. The force field covers a fair area, barring them. They take turns keeping watch at night. A poison fog comes and they must flee. They manage to wash it off with marsh water. Then baboons attack. Three of them flee to a river. They find more allies. They figure out that the arena is laid out like a clock, with different hazards each hour. Birds attack. All the action is being watched close-up by the proprietors who want Katniss dead, and they sometimes interfere. The group hatches a plan to wire a tower to a pond so that when the regular lightning strikes, it will electrocute those in the water: their enemies. Then Katniss uses it to take out the force field dome instead, but gets jolted herself. She gets rescued, unconscious, by a hovercraft run by folk who need her to be the Mockingjay for the revolution. So I gather that the Mockingjay set follows the others. Overall this is a hard-hitting adventure, and Katniss is human rather than a superwoman, which is fine.

I watched Mockingjay Part 2. Peeta has been conditioned to hate Katniss. The treachery and violence of the war continue. President Snow, ruler of Panem, orchestrates the deadly campaign to kill Katniss and wipe out the revolution. He controls the universal video broadcasts that all citizens must watch. The group walks into a trap and barely escapes, albeit with losses. They sneak into the city via the sewer tunnels, and encounter the mutts, ferocious pseudo-humans bent on killing. Snow issues a call for all citizens, including children, to come to his residence for safety and sustenance. Naturally it is a lie. They are gunned down and bombed, the carnage blamed on the rebels. Then Katniss meets Snow, and he says the woman Coin is the real conniver, playing the rest of them for fools. Now she is assuming the Presidency. She proposes a symbolic final Hunger Game to conclude it. Given the chance to publicly kill Snow, instead Katniss looses her arrow through Coin. Now it is over. Peeta continues to recover. Katniss marries him and they have a child.

I watched Kingsman: The Golden Circle. This is evidently a sequel to one I reviewed a decade ago. It’s a wild parody of hi-tech action-adventure movies, starting with a phenomenal fight in a speeding car. I love it already. The Golden Circle is a drug cartel run by Miss Poppy, a sweet looking, sweet talking murderess who has a prospective recruit popped headfirst into a mincer that turns him literally into hamburger. She has things like robot dogs to guard her. A formidable enemy. The Kingsman hierarchy is destroyed by homing missiles, leaving only Eggsy and Merlin to carry on. They are assisted by the Statesman whiskey company, a unit of Kingsman. Clara, a lovely Golden Circle agent, tries to seduce Eggsy, but he is cautious. Meanwhile he needs to restore the lost memory of his mentor Galahad. He finally succeeds and the team is gaining strength. But Galahad now has random memories of his lepidopterist phase, and sees butterflies. The Golden Circle lets loose a deadly plague that only it has the antidote to, so the welfare of the world is at stake. Eggsy’s girlfriend is one victim, which makes it personal. Phenomenal fight against the robot dogs and the last enemy agent, get the release code, and save the world. And Eggsy marries his recovered girlfriend. This may be the end of the beginning.

I watched Dunkirk. Remember, at the outset of World War Two, the invading Germans drove the French and British forces to the sea, where they would be exterminated if they didn’t manage to escape. 400,000 men trapped; it was a crisis. Soldiers line up on the beach for the ship to take them out, and the Germans bomb the beach. Where are the British planes, the RAF? There aren’t enough ships to take them all off. Volunteers come in smaller boats to take as many as they can. Those on the ships aren’t yet safe; they could be sunk. This is not a plotted story so much as a documentary sampling aspects of the evacuation. Oil spills into the water, and when a plane is shot down it sets fire ti it. Hell for the men in the water. We follow one boat as it rescues some from the water, a downed airman and others on the beach. We follow one British airman as he intercepts strafing German planes and shoots at least one down. Everyone is in it together, knowing that the worst may be yet to come.

I watched Limitless. Eddie is a burned out writer, about to commit suicide. His ex brother in law, Vern, gives him a pill his company is developing, AZT, and it abruptly magnifies his intellect. He resumes writing and it’s great. But now he has to be Vern’s errand boy, to get more pills. Then Vern is murdered. Eddie finds the pills. They make him a genius, organized and fearless. He completes his novel and the editor loves it. He plays the stock market and makes millions. He gets his girlfriend back. Then the drug’s side effects manifest. 18 hours of his life are lost in confusion. Uh-oh. He checks Vern’s list of clients, hoping some know about AZT, and learns that some are dead and others sick. Then, in trouble, he goes to girlfriend’s office, tells her the whole story, and she fetches the pills for him. But the bad guy gets a pill, loves it, and wants them all. He chases her and will kill her. So she takes a pill, and soon knows how to handle him. She turns on him and knocks him out. But word is spreading, and Eddie is not safe anywhere. He is about to commit suicide, but fights on, and wins through in an ugly fight. Eddie goes on to become a senator, in complete control of his situation, manufacturing his own variant of the pill, which is safer. This scenario is really not to be believed, but it is fun to dream about.

I watched Cruel Intentions. Step-siblings Sebastian and Kathryn—their parents married—connive endlessly at seduction. They make a bet: if he can’t seduce the new headmaster’s virgin daughter Annette, Kathryn gets his neat car. If he succeeds, he wins full sex with Kathryn, the one person he can’t otherwise have. She flirts and teases him unmercifully. It’s a real challenge, because Annette has been warned against him and knows his nature. She knows what he’s after: her virginity. But Sebastian and Kathryn are expert connivers, cleverly using friends, parents, any anyone else to achieve their ends. Until there is a complication: on the verge of seducing Annette, Sebastian backs off. He is falling in love with her. Kathryn is disgusted. She talks him into dumping Annette, breaking her heart. But it breaks his heart too. They reconcile too late; he is killed in a traffic accident. It’s really Kathryn’s fault. But Annette gets back at her by publishing his private journal that he lent her, that tells everything, totally shaming Kathryn.

I watched Cruel Intentions 2. Sebastian is a mischievous lad, doing things like getting a school administrator’s picture naked in the school yearbook. But his mother has mental problems, and he is sent to live with his exorbitantly rich father. His new stepsister is Kathryn, and she lets him know that the outset that she is not about to take any shit at all from him. There’s the challenge. Meanwhile he is interested in the headmaster’s daughter Danielle, a nice girl Kathryn is out to get. So it is war. Kathryn tries to seduce Sebastian, fails, so calls Danielle, who turns out to be another like Kathryn. They invite Sebastian to be a threesome with them. Believable? No, but endlessly sexy. Same characters as before, similar situation, but different story.

I watched Cruel Intentions 3. Patrick is a transfer student. He has a cough and seems awkward. Cassidy is a “black widow,” dangerous. She makes a bet with Christopher about seducing him within two days. She succeeds, then learns it was a different bet the boys made. Patrick was faking being a sick nerd. Then they get together with Jason to see who can seduce which other girl first. Patrick goes after Alison. Jason goes after Sheila. He seduces her while she is on the phone with her boyfriend Michael. Patrick blackmails Alison into letting him ravish her. It’s one sexual episode after another. Finally Jason and Patrick do the final competition: for Cassie. And betraying each other. These folk are sick.

I watched the first episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation Season 4, “The Best of Both Worlds Part II.” In Part 1 the Borg abducted Captain Picard, and now seem to have taken over his mind. The Borg are headed for Earth, and the Federation forces are mobilizing to take them on. It is a crisis. Guinan (Whoopee) tells Riker that since the Borg know everything Picard knows, the only way to defeat them is to set Picard aside and proceed independently. The Enterprise splits into its two main sections while firing on the Borg cube and a shuttle takes Worf and Data into space; they then beam from the shuttle to the cube, and capture Picard, bringing him back to the Enterprise. But he remains the Borg’s creature. They must separate him from the Borg, to ascertain what he knows about the Borg, without killing him. Data tries to get to the machine, via the Picard access, and in effect puts the Borg to sleep, and their cube explodes, ending the crisis. Picard is back, with the knowledge of the Borg. This is one hard hitting episode.

I read The Cannae Sutra, or the Scots “Joy of Sex,” humor. Maybe it tries too hard, as I found it only mildly funny. Theoretically the Scots don’t readily admit to ever having sex, and the text and cute illustrations play on this. In the section on courting traditions, “To find out more about your future partner: slice the peel off an apple, all in one go. Wait till midnight, then whirl it round your head. As the clock strikes twelve, chuck the peel over your left shoulder. The shape it lands in will form the first letter of the name of the one you will marry. It will be someone whose name begins with S.” Much banter about the kilt men wear, and what’s under it. Cartoon hows a mini submarine surveying Loch Ness. “I never thought this was a good idea!” Because the Loch Ness Monster is amorously clasping the submarine. And words of wisdom in the native dialect: “Thrappled crawf hath muckle snit.” Now you know.

SS TNG S4 #2 “Family” The Enterprise is undergoing extensive repairs following the Borg incident, and Captain Picard is in recovery. Worf’s human family is visiting, to his discomfort. Picard visits his family on Earth, also to his discomfort. Wesley Crusher gets a recording his late father made for him. Picard fights with his brother, and makes up; it is cathartic. Wesley meets the holo of his father, not much older than Wesley is now, wishing him the best. As the title says, it is family time, not always comfortable, but ultimately rewarding.

SS TNG S4 #3 “Brothers” A boy is ill, and being taken to a medical facility. Data takes over the ship, and directs it to an unknown destination. Then beams himself to a planet, where he meets Dr. Soong, who constructed him. He made Data imperfect, so made Lore, another robot. He gives Data emotions—only it turns out to be Lore, emulating Data. Lore kills Soong. Data returns to the Enterprize. The sick boy reached the facility has is cured. But is Data the same as he was? We can’t be sure.

SS TNG S4 #4 “Suddenly Human” They go to the aid of a Talarian training ship, rescuing five boys from dangerous radiation. One is Jono, who is human. The Talarian captain says Jono is his adopted son, and he will go to war rather that give him up. Mearwhile Picard is trying to teach the boy how to be human. It is a challenge. Jono tries to kill Picard, so that he will be killed for his crime. Picard realizes that the boy really does want to return to the Talarians, and returns him to his adoptive father, avoiding a battle in space. But Picard has now won the boy’s respect.

I watched the Discover Vesuvius, the volcano on western Italy tear Naples, of
Pompeii fame. The next eruption could kill more people that any prior volcano in history. In the past, almost four thousand years ago, it buried the Naples area under four feet of ash and pumice, which is gassy magma that will float on water. Today it could kill three million people. Pyroclastic flow hot enough to melt gold zoomed outward at over 400 miles per hour. Temperatures reached 900 degrees, incinerating local life. Liquid lava at 2,000F flowed out. Earthquakes preceded the eruptions, by months or years. There have been two massive tremors in the vicinity, maybe signaling another eruption. And it is not the only volcano near population centers. This is scary.

And Saturn: Lord of the Rings. Saturn, 750 times the size of Earth, would float on water. The rings are composed of millions of icy fragments, tens of thousands of miles wide, but only 65 feet thick. Paper thin, in comparison. At least seven rings, each with its own personality. They are much younger than the planet. The other giant planets also have rings, but they are feeble compared to Saturn’s. The moos Enceladus, much smaller than Earth’s, is ejecting water hundreds of miles up; that might be a source of matter for a ring. It also might enable life. We put a station in orbit around Saturn, and it is providing much new information, but there is much yet to discover. The fascination remains.

SS TNG S4 #5 “Remember Me” They pick up Dr. Dalen Quaice to give him a lift home. Next day he is gone, and there is no record of him aboard the ship. In fact there is no record of him anywhere. Beverly had interned with him. Now four members of her staff are not only gone, there is no record or memory of them in others. There were a thousand people on board; now the entire ship’s complement is 230. What has happened? There is another odd warp that only she is aware of—and only 114 aboard. Now Worf is gone without record too. And her son Wesley. Now there is no crew at all, just Picard and Beverly. Then just her. But to the others, she is the missing one. She has created her own reality, and can return to theirs only if she chooses to. The Traveler, the weird alien who understands this sort of thing comes to help Wesley recover her. The two of them concentrate on alternate realities, and Beverly concentrates too. The Traveler fades in and out as he focuses; then so does Wesley. Beverly finally leaps into the vortex and returns to them, for a happy reunion. This was one nervous episode!

SS TNG S4 #6 “Legacy” They answer a distress call, but barely arrive in time. The planet, Turkana IV, is where the late Tasha Yar came from. Ishara Yar, Tsaha’s sister, is there. They don’t trust this, as Tasha never mentioned a sister. But there are two Enterprise crew members captive of the Alliance they need to rescue if they can. So Ishara goes with Riker and Geordi, and she goes again with a subsequent away party of Riker. Worf, and Data. They rescue the crewmen, but Ishara deceived them in that she was trying to help the Coalition win a battle with the Enterprise’s help. They return her ho her folk, regretting that they were so readily deceived.

SS TNG S4 #7 “Reunion” A Klingon warship uncloaks, and the lady ambassador K’Ehleyr beams aboard the Enterprise with a child, who turns out to be Worf’s son he didn’t know about. The Klingon commander K’mpec meets with Picard, asking him to mediate between two rivals for new leadership, and to find out who poisoned K’mpec. During the proceedings a bomb explodes; evidence suggests a Romulan connection, with a Klingon conspirator. One candidate kills K’Ehleyr; Worf kills the candidate, who was instrumental in framing Worf for dishonor. But the matter is not yet finished.

SS TNG S4 #8 “Future Imperfect” They are surveying space near the Romulan border, and seem to be getting probed from an uninhabited planet. Riker, Worf, and Geordi beam down, but are overcome by gas. Riker recovers, but maybe to another reality, where he is Captain. He wakes 16 years later, having been in a coma. He has been captain nine years. Picard is now Admiral. Riker is now a father. His wife Min, for Minuet, died two years ago. But it’s all a charade, he realizes, and he calls their bluff. The Romulans set it up to get information from him. There is a boy who played his son. The two of them break out, but this too rings false. The boy is using generated images to make his own realities, but wanted someone real, so brought in Riker when he came in range. He’s actually a lonely alien. They are beamed aboard the present day Enterprise.

SS TNG S4 #9 “Final Mission” Wesley Crusher has been admitted to the Academy for training, so this may be his final mission with the Enterprise. Picard and Wesley join Captain Dirgo of a mining shuttle, which abruptly loses control and has to make an emergency landing on a barely habitable moon, without water. They trek across a desert to a mountain where there is a cave. Naturally, this being science fantasy, the gravity and air on the small lifeless moon are the same as on Earth. They discover a fountain, but it is protected by an electronic shield. Picard gets injured and Dirgo gets killed; Wesley is on his own. He manages to nullify the shield and fetch water for Picard. They finally get rescued.

SS TNG S4 #10 “The Loss” Deanna Troi suffers an attack of something and collapses. Something starts pulling the ship, and it can’t break free. Deanna can no longer sense others with her empathy. She is devastated. Deanna has to function blind as it were. She realizes that the two dimensional creatures that are hauling them along may be acting involuntarily, like a moth toward the flame. They act on that assumption, and escape. And Deanna gets her empathy back.

I read The Girl from Venice, by Martin Cruz Smith. This is historical fiction set in northern Italy 1945 as World War Two is ending. The Nazis and Fascists are still in control, but it is clear for not much longer. They are still killing people, however, especially Jews, so it is best to stay well clear of them. Cenzo is a fisherman heading to port with his catch when he spies the body of a girl floating face up in the water of the lagoon. This is mischief he doesn’t need, but he hauls her aboard, covers her with sailcloth, and rows on. Only to be intercepted by a German gunboat. They board him, trash his catch, but don’t find the girl. They move on, and he finds the girl eating his food. It goes on from there. She’s Giulia, a twenty year old Jewish escapee the Nazis are after. In the end she decides to stay with him, having ascertained that he is a good man, even though she is educated and he is just a fisherman. Much detail about the fish, food, politics, and other things of the area, but hardly the kind of thriller mooted on the jacket. It’s a nice kind of travelogue for the area and time, interesting but not, for my taste, really compelling.

SS TNG S4 #11 “Data’s Way” Data is” reporting on one day in his “life.” His friend Transporter Chief O’Brien is getting married, but the bride decides to break it off. Data tries to understand. He decides to learn to dance; Beverly Crusher teaches him. An ambassador is lost in a transporter accident, complicating negotiations with the Romulan empire. Or is she dead? They conclude the accident was faked. Indeed it was; she was a Romulan spy. Meanwhile the bride changes her mind and the wedding proceeds. Data dances at the wedding. He continues trying to learn to be human.

SS TNG S4 #12 “The Wounded” Trouble on the Cardassian border. It seems a Federation ship, the Phoenix, destroyed an unarmed science station, and is not not responding to Federation communications. Is its commander out for revenge against the Cardassian massacre of his family? Picard talks with him, and concludes that this is the case. But he also concludes that the man was right; the Cardassians are arming for war. He advises the Cardassian ambassador that he will be watching. This gives them fair warning that their plot is known, so they can back off. The peace will be kept.

I watched Return to Sender. Miranda, training to be a nurse, goes on a blind date. He shows up early and violently rapes her, and flees, leaving her bruised and in a kind of trance. He was not the real date. She carries on with her life, but is distracted and short tempered. Her job applications keep getting returned to sender. She visits the rapist, William, in prison. She gets to know him. Other prisoners are bullying him. He gets paroled, and she continues seeing him. He wants to make up for what he did. He fixes things around her house. Then she doses him with antifreeze and ties him down, and I think castrates him and lets him bleed to death. So she’s as bad as he is. I Spit on Your Grave did it better.

SS TNG S4 #13 “Devil’s Due” The Enterprise receives a transmission from a science station, where folk think the end of things is coming tomorrow and are going crazy. Ardra is returning after a thousand years of peace and prosperity, and will enslave the population. Picard, Data, Deanna, and Worf beam to the planet and meet Ardra, who demonstrates magical powers. Picard believes she is a con artist. The planet did have a thousand excellent years, but is she just taking advantage? So they go to arbitration, and Data is the arbitrator. The stakes are recovery of the world and the ship, but if they lose, Ardra gets it all plus Picard. But the Enterprise is able to take over Ardra’s orbiting ship and Picard can now perform her illusions himself, winning the case.

SS TNG S4 #14 “Clues” They are investigating an anomaly when a wormhole opens up and sucks in the Enterprise. This is of course mischief. They are unconscious for 30 seconds, according to Data, but crew members have aged a day. Deanna Troi gets dizzy, goes to her apartment, and screams: the mirror showed her features with someone else inside. Worf had a wrist broken and reset without his knowledge. There is definitely a missing day. An alien takes over Deanna’s mind and she talks to them. They return and learn that the Paxans, an advanced sapient species, require secrecy. They wipe the crew’s short term memories, and swear Data to eternal secrecy, so that the Paxans will let them go.

SS TNG S4 #15 “First Contact” Alien medics, the Malcorians are trying to stabilize a wounded, unconscious human man, uncertain what to make of him. He looks like Riker. Then Picard and Deanna Troi beam to the scientist lady Mirasta Yale. The Malcorians believe that they are the center of the universe, and they are on the verge of warp travel. That’s why the Enterprise is making first contact. The Malcorians, like most Star Trek aliens, are merely human beings with odd facial characteristics, even speaking the same language. The Enterprise will depart, on request, having rescued Riker, taking only Mirasta along.

SS TNG S4 #16 “Galaxy’s Child” Leah Brahms, a senior engineer, will visit the Enterprise to meet Geordi and talk with him about his work. Geordi knows her via a former holographic interaction. But when she arrives she says he has fouled up her engine design. He says that things don’t always work in the field the same way as in the laboratory. Meanwhile they discover an orbiting life form; it attacks them, they beam it, and it dies. This time the alien life form truly is alien. Then another life form appears within it. It was about to give birth! So they help that process. Then the new entity thinks the Enterprise is its mother. They guide it to where it’s mother was going and let it go in the company of its own kind.

SS TNG S4 #17 “Night Terrors” They may have found a missing science ship, the Brittain. Its entire crew of 34 has been shot down by phaser, all except one man, a Betazoid. The victims killed each other. Why? Meanwhile dissent starts festering aboard the Enterprise. Whatever operated there is operating here. Riker discovers a nest of vipers in his bed—which then aren’t there. Beverly sees dead bodies in the morgue sitting up. Worf tries to commit suicide. They are all suffering from dream deprivation. Humans need to dream to survive, or they start losing memories and hallucinating. Only Deanna dreams, and they are all nightmares. Then she figures it out: aliens are trying to communicate telepathically, but the telepathy has this side effect of suppressing REM dreams. Data takes over as acting captain, being the only fully rational person aboard, while Deanna enters REM sleep and sends a message to the aliens that enables them to break out of the trap.

SS TNG S4 #18 “Identity Crisis” Five years ago an Away Team was lost asd their shuttle craft stolen. Only Geordi and Susanna Leitjen remain. Riker leads an Away team to land on the local planet. Susanna starts suffering extreme sensitivity to light; her skin breaks out in purple veins. Geordi investigates while he can. Beverly locates a parasite in Susanna’s body causing the mischief. Geordi, infected, manages to beam off the ship. Susanna, recovering, says it’s not a parasite but the alien’s method of reproduction, transforming the host. Susanna locates him on the planet and brings him back, and they are able to cure him too.

SS TNG S4 #19 “The Nth Degree” They check a telescope array at the edge of Federation space, which stopped functioning properly two months ago. Geordi and shy Reg Barkley check an alien probe, and it flashes, taking down the shuttle’s computer and knocking Reg out. Thereafter Reg is surprisingly knowledgeable and confident. He has the insight that enables them to destroy the alien probe before it damages the ship. But he goes too far, taking over the ship and sending it into a space vortex. Cytherians are an alien culture exploring the galaxy by using others, such as Reg, no harm intended.

SS TNG S4 #20 “QPID” They will host an archaeology conference. Picard is preparing his speech. Vash appears, the woman he met in “Captain’s Holiday” in Season Three. She is attractive trouble. And Q appears, the super-powered mischief maker, saying he wants to do something nice for Picard. Uh-oh. Picard and the other officers are suddenly transported to 12th century English fantasy, Robin Hood. Vash is Maid Marion, about to be executed if not rescued. She promptly messes up the story line by agreeing to marry the Sheriff of Nottingham. In the end Vash and Q get together, two birds of a feather.

SS TNG S4 #21 “The Drumhead” In an exchange program they host a Klingon researcher, J’Dan. But he is suspected of leaking secrets to the Romulans. He denies it, but they send him off. The lady Admiral Satie is brought out of retirement to supervise the investigation. It turns out that there may be another saboteur aboard. They suspect crewman Simon Tarses, whose grandfather was Romulan. But Picard believes they are hounding an innocent man, as there is no evidence that connects Simon; the explosion was coincidental. The Drumhead trial may be immoral and unethical, driven by prejudice. Picard provokes an outburst by Satie that reveals her as a bigot. This is perhaps my favorite episode of this series, because of its establishment of the principles of basic human decency. The Salem Witch Trials and the Nazis’ pursuit of Jews and Gypsies are far from the only historical examples of institutional bigotry in action, and we must be constantly on guard against it.

SS TNG S4 #22 “Half a Life” Deanna’s mother Lwaxana in aboard, making her usual mischief. They are trying to help folk restore their dying sun to full power. The first test fails. Lwaxana latches on to the scientist Timicin, whose research is fundamental to the project. But he is going home to die. He is expected to commit suicide at age 60. They investigate and discover a variance that may make the key difference. But he needs more time to finish his work, which he can’t if he suicides. His daughter Dara beams aboard to try to persuade him. She loves him but wants him to die, because it is their way. So he returns, and Lwaxana joins him.

SS TNG S4 #23 “The Host” Bevely has a new boyfriend, Ambassador Odan. But there is something wrong with him physically. Something in his belly. Meanwhile there is a crisis as the moons Alpha and Beta prepare for war. Odan is a Trill, which turn out to be symbiotic; the “parasite” is his essence. The host dies, but they transfer the symbiote to Riker, who becomes in effect Odan, who still loves Beverly. He negotiates effectively with the two factions. But Riker’s body is rejecting the symbiote; there has to be a new host in another day. And the new Trill host is a woman. Who still loves Beverly, but a romance is no longer feasible. This is an emotionally challenging situation.

SS TNG S4 #24 “The Mind’s Eye” Geordi spies a Romulan war bird. They abduct him and prepare him to be their agent of mischief as the Enterprise handles Klingon negotiations. Some Klingons think the Federation has been secretly aiding rebels. They have captured some of the weapons as evidence. They were changed by a non-Federation technique. Data catches on and prevents Geordi from assassinating a key figure. Now they are able to ferret out the plot.

SS TNG S4 #25 “In Theory” The Enterprise is exploring a dark matter nebula. Data is friends with co-worker Jenna, who has trouble with regular relationships; she feels he has given her more attention than her dates do. She kisses him, which perplexes him. They date, and it is a constant learning challenge for him. Meanwhile there is some trouble getting out of the nebula, but they succeed. And Jenna breaks up with Data, as she needs some human emotion he can’t provide.

SS TNG S4 #26 “Redemption Part 1” Picard must arbitrate again as Klingon factions oppose each other. Klingon politics are complicated and deadly. Worf and his brother Kurn want vindication for his family name. One faction has secret Romulan support. Worf and his brother plan to support Gowron in return for clearing their family name. Two Duran sisters plot for power. Gowron is installed, but the Duran family plots insurrection. Worf must support Gowron, and resigns his commission as a Enterprise officer. He departs, and the Enterprise leaves. But human involvement may yet manifest. We’ll see, in Season 5.

I read The Greatest Books You’ll Never Read, by Bernard Richards. I had thought it might deal with suppression or censorship, but these mostly turn out to be unfinished or lost manuscripts. It does serve as a kind of review of the lives and works of many well known authors, from Chaucer to Stephen King, with interesting tidbits along the way. What strikes me is the number who suffered depression. You don’t have to be seriously depressive to be an effective writer, but it does seem to help. A number of unfinished books are because the authors suicided or died early. For example, Sylvia Plath, who turns out to have been born only a year before I was, but she killed herself at age 30. I was outraged by what happened to Dalton Trumbo. He was a highly successful scriptwriter in Hollywood in the 1940s. Then he wrote in a magazine article that if he were a Russian (which he wasn’t) he would fear the Americans even more than the Americans feared the Soviet Union. That was an opinion, which should have been constitutionally protected; it was also, in my opinion, quite true, as America was a stronger power than the USSR. But this was the time of the McCarthy witch hunts, and he got called up before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which denounced him and put him in prison for eleven months(!) for that opinion. Thereafter he was blacklisted for several years. Where the hell was the Constitution, or justice, let alone fair play? I have remarked before that the Un-American Activities Committee was itself one of the most un-American things we have seen, and I feel that the US Army’s finest hour was when it finally took down Joe McCarthy. I am a naturalized citizen; I believe in Constitutional values. It seems that many born Americans don’t. And Kurt Vonnegut’s intriguingly titled unfinished book, If God Were Alive Today. But it misses the mark on Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, which never was a lost manuscript; the author devised a story to explain why it was incomplete. I go into this more thoroughly in my collaboration with J R Rain, The Journey. So while I found the volume tedious to go through, it does have its moments. It reminds me of real lost manuscripts it doesn’t cover, such as Charles R Delaney’s opus, lost by a publisher, and his backup copy was lost by the storage facility. It might yet turn up. What a discovery that would be!

I read a number of magazines, my main interest being science, but sometimes other things catch my attention. Such as an Op-Ed opinion piece in the April/May issue of the humanist magazine FREE INQUIRY, by T Joshi, titled “The Party of Traitors.” It begins “The question of the day is: How have we reached the stage where an entire political party in this country has in effect descended into treason?” He is referring to the current incarnation of the GOP. He says the party has gone out of its way to subvert American law and American ideals in ways that could lead us down the road to autocracy. That is, a form of government where one person governs with the authority of an absolute monarch; a dictatorship. He goes on to give examples in the words of their politicians and the legislation they pursue despite the opposition of a majority of their constituents. It seems that they literally don’t care what the people want, only what their big donors want. It is not news to me; I have noted that Republicans seem to want to make a feudal state, with a few wealthy landowners and the rest being peasants serving them. So what can be done to prevent this? Get out and vote, while you still can. Another publication, THE HIGHTOWER LOWDOWN, details how back in the 1930s a group of multimillionaires plotted to oust Franklin Delano Roosevelt, because he was simply trying to do too much good for the common man with things like the New Deal, and taxes on the wealthy to fund a recovery from recession. They selected a figurehead to lead the new state. But he turned out to value the existing order, and the plot founded aborning, and they did their best to bury the news, as they still had the agenda. Now the billionaire Koch brothers want to try it again, only they have been smarter, and have made real progress behind the scenes. In some quarters supposed news items are actually propaganda pieces written by the special interests. That may account for the orientation of the Republican party; it is quietly governed by the billionaires.

A newspaper article may have bearing: it establishes that from President Nixon on, the Democrats have diminished the national deficit while the Republicans have increased it. I think they could go back farther than that. So the Democrats are the real fiscal conservatives, while the Republicans are financially irresponsible. Or as I put it, the GOP is governed mainly by greed. I am and have always been a registered independent, watching from the sidelines.

Odds and ends: There is evidence that our solar system got sideswiped by an alien star about 70,000 years ago, jerking asteroids and planets about. That may account for some of the odd orbits we are seeing now, so there is no missing ninth planet. The richest one percent of American women by income live more than a decade longer than the poorest one percent. For men, the difference is almost fifteen years.

Personal: remember, back in FeBlueberry I fell on my face during an exercise run, and bashed my rib-cage. My doctor had an X-ray picture taken, to make sure there wasn’t worse damage. It showed the ribs were healing nicely, but incidentally also showed a one centimeter spot on my right lung. So he ordered a cat-scan, and that confirmed the spot, which I think is called an “incidentaloma,” discovered by accident when looking for something else. Now I have seen a lung doctor, who verified that the spot wasn’t there seven years ago. We’ll get another picture in three months, to see if there is any change, and that could lead to a biopsy. We don’t want to fool around with cancer; it killed my daughter Penny in 2009. With luck, the spot is nothing serious. But wouldn’t it be ironic if I had to fall on my face to discover a tumor that might otherwise kill me? I have read that there are three kinds of cancer: the bird, that metastasizes so rapidly you’re doomed before you know it’s there; the rabbit, that can be stopped if caught early, and the turtle, that plods along never going anywhere, needing no treatment. So I’m hoping for a turtle.

Item on how Clearwater city council member Bob Cundiff diverges from his four colleagues, as well as the scientific community, on one of Tampa Bay’s most sensitive subjects: Fluoridation. He feels the science behind fluoridation is unsettled. The article says that medical professionals overwhelmingly agree that community fluoridation is safe and effective for the prevention of tooth decay, and that it is one of the ten great public health achievements of the 20the century. Wow! I take this as another example how the one person can be right, and the throng wrong. Fluoridation is really one of the ten great deceptions of the 20th century, and smart folk avoid it because not only does it not help teeth, children growing up in fluoridated communities mature physically several months early, and suffer IQ loss of up to ten percent. So the girls turn buxom as children, and are relatively stupid. Don’t the boys love that! I have researched this and been over it before, but will gladly rise to the challenge again if my accuracy is questioned. So challenge me, if you really think you know better. Go ahead. You have an education coming, if your mind remains sharp enough after fluoridation to assimilate the truth.

According to one of the “little magazines,” THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR, for April 1, 2018, some Democratic Party leaders are signing a pledge to try to remake the country. It calls for rebuilding America by renewing infrastructure, you know, crumbling roads and bridges, investing in “green” jobs”, empowering workers to reduce inequality, working for justice for all, guaranteeing women’s economic equality, enhancing public education by, among other things, canceling all student debt, bringing Medicare for all, making corporations pay their fair share, breaking up the big banks, and rescuing democracy from the special interests. One survey shows that at present eighty percent of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck; this might address that. I would love to see it happen, but fear that it is simply too beneficial to get past the entrenched forces of autocracy.

Newspaper review of the book Assume the Worst, by Carl Hiaasen. That is evidently some book. It is subtitled “The Graduation Speech You’ll Never Hear.” Graduation speakers are supposed to offer encouragement and inspiration. Well, this book says, that’s not what you need. You need a warning. For example, a typical platitude is to live each day as if it is your last. If you do that, you won’t accomplish a damn thing. Try to find goodness in everyone? A waste of time; if it requires the psychological equivalent of a metal detector to locate somebody’s true self, they’re not worth that trouble. Don’t be quick to judge other people? If you don’t learn how to judge them, and fast, you’ll quickly get screwed. I’m not sure I agree with all of this, but it is certainly worth pondering.

Why is the universe the way it is, with its weird assortment of matter and forces? Some call it the uglyverse, because it doesn’t just fit into a simple, comprehensible, esthetic scheme. What about the concept of myriad multiverses, with different rules? Where are they now? A letter in NEW SCIENTIST by Ken Goddard suggests an answer: in the beginning all the alternate universes came into existence together, with all the alternatives. The ones that weren’t viable collapsed almost instantly, leaving only one: ours. Or maybe, I am thinking, parts of several universes got tangled together, like mismatched socks, and formed a messy knot that didn’t clear, like a clogged drain, and that is what we are stuck with. Welcome to the messyverse.

PIERS

JeJune 2018

HI-

Early Bird Books (EBB) will feature Xanth novels #38 Board Stiff, #39 Five Portraits, and #40 Isis Orb on 6-26-2018, downpriced to $3.99. I am not clear whether that price is per book, or for all three together, which would be a real bargain. These novels introduce the woman who gets turned into a board (she misspelled “bored”), and the basilisk who rescues five children from doom in the future, and the appearance of the sexy Goddess Isis in Xanth, that story devised by a ten year old girl. #39 also introduces the children who will be important characters in several coming novels, such as Squid, who doesn’t believe that she is the most important person in the universe. But she is. So if you have not read these novels before—shame on you!—now’s your chance

I continue to watch the Star Trek episodes, in order, and these spot summaries account for most of this long column. Those not interested are free to skip those paragraphs. Those not interested in whatever else I have to say are free to quietly depart, so as not to disturb those snoozing in the background. That seems fair enough, don’t you agree?

I watched Star Trek The Next Generation, Season 5, Episode #1, “Redemption Part II.” The Enterprise is involved in a Klingon conspiracy, because there is sneaky Romulan interference to break up the truce between the Klingons and the Federation, so that the Romulans can gain a significant advantage. Data is given command of one ship in the fleet, which annoys its first officer. The Romulans have what they claim is Tasha Yar’s daughter aboard; how is this possible, as Tasha never had a child? But she says her mother was from the future, and became the consort of the Romulan leader. That could be, per a prior reality changing episode. The Romulans try to sneak through past Data’s ship, but Data catches on and exposes them. This gives Gowron, the Klingon leader they support, the victory. Worf, restored to honor, returns to duty aboard the Enterprise. And Data, who disobeyed a direct order, is absolved, because his insight saved the Federation fleet. It’s not smart to punish those who do that.

STTNG S5 #2. “Darmok” They meet with the Tamara, but the dialogue is incomprehensible despite being in English. Then Picard and the Tamana leader are beamed to the surface of the local planet. They still don’t understand each other. The Tamarians seem to speak entirely by analogies to stories that are familiar to them. A native creature attacks, fading in and out, killing the Tamarian, but Picard begins to understand. He speaks enough of the Taramian analogies to get them to back off. So the encounter is inconclusive, but not a loss.

STTNG S5 #3. “Ensign Ro” They receive a distress call; there has been a Bajoran terrorist attack near the Cardassian border. Ensign Ro Laren is transferred to the Enterprise. They don’t want her any more than she wants to be there, but they are stuck with each other. She is distinctly unfriendly. They beam to the planet to meet the rebel Orta, who says this band did not attack as accused. All is not as represented. It was in fact a Cardassian staging, blaming the Bajarans. Picard faces down the Admiral, who was taken in, and who is now likely to be removed. And he elects to keep Ensign Ro as an office aboard the enterprise. This is another sharp adventure, and there will be more of Ro.

STTNG S5 #4. “Tho Silicon Avatar” they are on a pleasant planet when it is attacked by the Crystalline entity. They retreat to a cave system and survive, emerging to a devastated surface. They are the only ones known to survive such an attack. Dr. Marr investigates, being a specialist in this entity. She doesn’t’ like Data and doesn’t want to work with him, but slowly learns respect. They try to establish communication with the Entity. They begin to succeed, but Dr. Marr interferes and the entity is destroyed. She got her revenge for the death of her son, but at what price?

STTNG S5 #5. “Disaster” They have time off and are relaxing when the ship encounters space filaments; this is like crashing in space. The ship’s communications and life support systems are down. Chief O’Brien and Troi survive, and Ensigh Ro, and Picard with three visiting children, and Geordi, Deanna Crusher, Data, Riker, and scattered others, but they are in isolated groups. Troi assumes command as the ranking officer on the bridge. Power is being lost, and if it drops too low the ship will explode. The separate groups work independently to salvage what they can of the situation. And O’Brien’s wife Keiko goes into labor, with Worf attending her. Riker takes Data’s severed head for instruction how to proceed. They succeed in stabilizing the ship. All ends reasonably well as the Enterpriseu heads to port for repairs.

STTNG S5 #7. “The Game” They are surveying an uncharted Phoenix Region. Riker visits Risa and brings back an interesting game. Beverly Crusher does something that knocks Data out, and does something to his brain, leaving him unconscious. What is going on? She has been playing the game, as everyone on the ship has. Wesley meets and dates Robin and they are suspicious of that game. Wesley warns Picard, not knowing that Picard is also playing the game. Indeed, crew members are activating the game to new outfits. Only Data would be immune, which is why he was taken out. Then Robin gets taken by the game. Wesley flees, but everyone is after him. They catch him and put the game headpiece on him. Then Data appears and shines a special light on them. Wesley managed to restore him, then distracted the others while Data prepared a counteraction. That saves the ship, and maybe a lot more. This is my new favorite episode, as it foreshadows the addictive nature of Internet social sites, but there are many other great episodes.

STTNG S5 #8. “Unification Part 1” Did Ambassador Spock, of the original series, defect to the Romulans? Maybe he went to see Pardek, a Romulan senator he knew. Picard calls in a favor from Gowron, and takes a cloaked Klingon ship to Romulus. Meanwhile Riker investigates mystery junk, checking with the Farengi. An anonymous ship attacks, and explodes when the Enterprise fires back. Picard and Data emulate Romulans and go to Romulus. They find Spock. Episode ends.

STTNG S5 #7. “Unification Part II” Spock says he is here on a personal mission of potential reunification between the Vulcans and the Romulans. But the Romulans mean to use it to conquer the Vulcan planet. Except that Data gets into the Romulan computer and changes Spock’s message to reveal the truth. So the plot fails. Spock will stay with the Romulan reunification group, taking the long view.

I read Wild Sex, by Dr. Carin Bondar. This is subtitled “The science behind mating in the animal kingdom,” which gives a better idea of its thrust. It covers every aspect of mating from getting together to raising the children, and parts are eye opening. Human beings are of course animals, so much of it relates to us more intimately that we might like to admit. The material is dense and I will only sample aspects here. “Humans are under the incorrect impression that our natural scents are somehow dirty and unwelcome.” So we scrub them clean, sacrificing much natural attraction. Is sex fun? Not for many creatures; it is more like a state of warfare between rivals and between male and female. Rape is common, as in bestiality, that is, sex between species, often involuntary on the part of the female. Homosexuality is universal, as is masturbation. Trickery is common, as is bribery for sex. In some species sex is like combat with knives, as seedpods are jammed into the body of the victim, anywhere, even the head. Some females have penises, and the spotted hyena urinates, copulates, and gives birth though her penis-like canal. She can even get an erection. Cross dressing occurs, with some females emulating males so they won’t be sexually harassed, and some males emulating females so they can sneak in for sex behind the dominant male’s back. Mankind is practically unique in trying to prevent pregnancy. There I think the author misses a key point: in the human kind sex is duel purpose. For procreation, yes, but also for companionship. Human women, with their babies that take years to become independent, need the constant help of men, and they get it by sex and love. Thus a woman is one of the most constantly sexually available creatures known, capable of sex all the time, which is how she keeps the attention of a man all the time. But she doesn’t want to be pregnant all the time, hence contraception. I’m surprised this aspect wasn’t picked up, as it is vital to human society. Maybe the publisher censored it.

I watched Valerian. This is set in the 28th century, and is multi-species. It is subtitled “And the City of 1,000 Planets.” This is wild visually stunning nonsense from the outset, with weird landscapes, aliens, and pretty girls. Obviously my kind of junk. It starts with a bald-headed scantily clad shapely young woman in an alien setting as it gets attacked from space. Then goes to agents Valerian and Laureline who are recalled from vacation for a special mission to Alpha, city of a thousand planets. Something is growing in it like a tumor; prior missions have been wiped out. A security meeting is raided by web-throwing creatures. Now the special powers of Valerian and Laureline are shown as they act to salvage the situation. But they get trapped. Valerian finds an ally, a phenomenal female shape changer who helps him escape. They rescue Laureline, but the ally dies. And they learn that a human general is responsible for the destruction of a civilized alien planet and he is responsible for the problem in the city. They finally manage to set things right, and Boy finally gets Girl. This is a completely unbelievable story, scientifically, but a lot of fun.

I watched Eye in the Sky. This is not related to the Philip K Dick novel of the same title, alas. Katharine Powell commands an international mission to capture terrorists in Kenya. They watch a key house by satellite and drones, one of which resembles a hummingbird. Another resembles a flying beetle. It discovers a deadly suicide mission being set up. That changes the picture; they need to destroy it before the terrorists kill hundreds in a crowded shopping mall. But there are legal and political issues. They need to strike now, but have to go up the chain of command to get approval. They get it, but as they ready the strike the pilot sees a nine year old girl come on to the site to sell bread, and balks. So they send in a local agent to buy the bread so the girl can go. He does, but soldiers chase him and the girl does not go. Do they sacrifice the girl to save maybe 80 other innocent people? That is the crux. The local agent gives a local boy money to buy the bread just before the strike. Did the girl get away in time? Yes, barely, though injured. They take her to a hospital where she is treated but dies. This was not the movie I anticipated, but is probably better, with its insights about drone bombing and the necessary trade-offs. What would you decide, given such a choice? And I think now I better understand how so many terrorist leaders have been killed by drones. It’s not random.

I watched Thor Ragnarok. Thor, the God of Thunder, is imprisoned on the far side of the galaxy. He burst out of his chains, grabs his Hammer, and smashes the swarming demons. Then he and his adopted brother Loki go to rescue their father Odin, but he prefers to remain in retirement. They will have to deal with Hela, his elder sister, who seeks to destroy Asgard. When Thor throws his mighty hammer at her, she catches it and crushes it to rubble. When he gets captured by a hungry throng, he is rescued by a woman who takes him to the Grandmaster, where he must fight the great green Hulk, though they were friends. They fight, then Hulk reverts to the human Bruce Banner and they work together, along with the girl, who is a surviving Valkyrie. They get a spaceship and maneuver their way to the Devil’s Anus to escape. There follows chronic mayhem and they finally prevail. Thor assumes the throne. Fun nonsense

I watched Life, where scientist aboard the International Space Station prepare to receive a sample from Mars, but they strike debris and have to scramble to get it. It turns out to be a large living cell. They revive it: alien life, albeit microscopic. They name it Calvin. It thrives, growing to several inches across, until an accident makes it go inert. They try a light shock—and it grabs the man’s hand and knocks him out. Now it’s loose in the station, as a kind of five petaled moving plant. They try to burn it up, but it survives and kills the man with the torch by diving into his mouth and mangling his guts. A larger starfish or octopus thing emerges from him. The leader, Kat, suits up and goes outside to reestablish communications with Earth—and Calvin gets on her suit and manages to kill her. Now it is caught outside, and surely can’t survive long. But it gets back into the station, kills another man, and is larger than ever. They vent the oxygen so Calvin will suffocate, but it’s not enough and they head for deep space to prevent Calvin from getting to Earth. But they don’t make it. Finally Miranda North and David Jordan are left, trying to lure Calvin into a lifeboat where they can send him into deep space. Only Miranda makes it back to the Earth surface—but a copy of Calvin is with her. Earth is doomed. This is realistic horror.

I read Bring on the Magic by Brian Clopper. Randall has connected with a magic book of spells that flies about, talks to him, and opens its pages to the spells he needs to collect and confine the wild magic that is appearing randomly on Earth. He is recognized as a Mage, one who can perform significant magic himself. But after a while he begins to wonder; it seems a bit too pat the way the book came into his life. Then his sister sets him up with a date with Lucy, a nice girl. But he wonders: again: could she be a witch? Witches can be very appealing, when they try, but he doesn’t want to be bewitched. Well, she is a witch, and more than that, she persuades him that he is on the wrong side, and that the magic spell book actually contains a demon who is using Randall for its own purposes. Whom is he to believe? Then it complicates; before it is done, there is a wild rampage of magic and danger. This is a fun read.

I watched Full Metal Jacket, a Viet Nam war movie. It opens in Paris Island, South Carolina, as a foul mouthed sergeant bawls out recruits, freely insulting them. The evident intention is to degrade them. There follows basic training. This is worse than it was when I went through it in the Army in Ft. Dix, New Jersey, in 1957, but of course this is a movie about the marines, and the essence is true. I was lucky to serve in peace time between Korea and Viet Nam. Basic training is hell, deliberately. One third of my unit washed out and had to recycle, mainly because of illness. As an out of shape vegetarian I had a rough time, but I made it through, thanks to getting leave time that enabled me to go home and recover form the flue-like bug going around. We learn that the movie title refers to the ammunition. One persecuted recruit goes crazy and shoots and kills the sadistic sergeant, then himself. That’s the danger when you push folk too hard. Then they are shipped to the hell of Viet Nam. The enemy attacks during the Tet ceasefire. Two are correspondent and photographer for the Stars & Stripes; they come under fire. They bargain with prostitutes. They encounter booby traps and take losses. And a sniper starts taking them out one by one. They finally get the sniper, who turns out to be a woman. They march on through the burning ruins, singing songs for unity. This is one hard hitting story.

I watched Hanger 10. This is one of those hand-held camera films, reminiscent of the Blair Witch Project, (if I remember chge title correctly) which I didn’t like. Young folk Sally, Jake and Gus are using metal detectors to prospect for buried Saxon gold in England when they happen to film a UFO, then come across mysteriously dead cattle. They proceed at night, because they’re not supposed to be here. A high fence has been cut through. There are sounds in the darkness, and mysterious light. Their car disappears. They continue next day, lost. There are more sounds. A light in the sky. One of them points a metal detector at the sky, and it beeps. A helicopter passes, and crashes. At night again, a light. Demonic shrieking. Many lights, sounds. Jake and Sally make it out, but where is Gus? They find a deserted top secret US Air Force installation. They think Gus is in Hanger 10, and go there. There are people on beds, maybe dead. Sounds, lights. Gus is there, dead. Sally runs out, and sees things floating in the sky. She falls. Jake comes out and is taken by something. End of movie. This is not my type of thing; I regard it as a poor substitute for real storytelling.

STTNG S5 #9. “A Matter of Time” They go to try to counter the dust cloud where a meteor impact occurred. They pass an anomaly, a temporal distortion, and a professor from 300 years in the future beams aboard. They want to know why he is here studying them, on this particular day, but he says he can’t tell them things that might change their future. So he is Along, observing, as they arrive at the planet, now in a nuclear winter. But things start to go wrong. Picard’s decision can save or wipe out twenty million people. He asks the professor for advice, but he refuses because it could change the future, so Picard gambles, and wins, saving the planet. Then it turns out the professor is an impostor, from the past, stealing things from his future. They catch on and arrest him.

STTNG S5 #10. “New Ground” A duel focus episode. They will participate in the first test of a new invention. Worf’s adoptive human mother visits and brings along his Klingon son Alexander, who enrolls in the ship’s school. The boy steals and lies about it. He promises Worf not to do it again. Deanna explains that the child feels abandoned, so is acting out. Meanwhile the experiment is going wrong; the ship is in trouble. Alexander is caught in a section that will be contaminated as they deal with the problem. Worf and Riker manage to rescue him. Alexander will stay on the Enterprise, no longer feeling abandoned.

STTNG S5 #11. “Hero Worship” They encounter a ship dead in space, near the Black Cluster, with one survivor, a young boy, Timothy. They learn that aliens attacked and invaded the ship. That may have been the Breen, an alien culture. The boy is difficult for regular folk to work with, still being in shock from the loss of his family. So Data works with him, as he relates best to the android. Timothy decides to be an android. Meanwhile the Enterprise explores the Black Cluster, one of the oldest structures in the galaxy. Its wave fronts interfere with their sensors. Their own shields are destroying it—which is what happened to the other ship. Timothy thought it was his fault. Data catches on, and that saves the ship.

STTNG S5 #12. “Violations” They are with the Ullians, telepathic folk who retrieve long forgotten memories. They are forming a library of archived memories. Deanna Troi suffers a traumatic memory that puts her in a coma. Then it happens to Riker. There’s a syndrome connected to memory, in the thalamus, that they share. Then Beverly Crusher. Then Troi recovers. A Ullian interviews her, evoking her memories. And she remembers being attacked by a Ullian. Jev; Jev was the common denominator of prior comas on other worlds. They will deal with him.

STTNG S5 #13. “The Masterpiece Society” The Enterprise goes to investigate a system where a neutron star has fragmented. There are humans there, but they don’t want interaction. But the neutron fragment will wreak havoc on the planet. So Ricker and an Away Team of Deanna Troi and Geordi beam down to discuss it. Their scientist Hannah Bates beams aboard to try to coordinate the diversion of the deadly fragment. They have what they believe is the perfect society without illness or malady, completely integrated with nature. Deanna converses with their leader Aaron Conor, and it becomes romantic. They succeed in diverting the stellar core fragment just enough. But now twenty three colonists want to leave. That will disrupt their society. The Enterprise may have done as much damage as the core fragment would have, albeit of a different nature. This is another thoughtful episode.

STTNG S5 #14. “Conundrum” They investigate signals that may indicate intelligent life. They intercept an alien ship, and it sends a signal at them that wipes out the memories of themselves and each other, without deleting their skills. They get busy getting to know each other and figuring out their roles and the ship’s mission. Riker and Ro get together romantically, not knowing whether in real life they are married or hate each other. The ship enters the Lysian system, that they may be at war with. An officer urges them to attack, but Picard balks, and the officer turns out to be an impostor. They are not at war with the Lythians. Deanna explains to Ro that in such a situation a person does what she really wants to do; in her case, to make out with Riker. In the circumstance, this was legitimate. He was hardly unwilling.

STTNG S5 #15. “Power Play” They pick up a weak distress call from an uninhabited moon. It is from the Essex, a ship that disappeared 200 years ago. Riker, Data, and Deanna take a shuttle down, and crash. Chief O’Brien beams down to help them, but all four are knocked out by an electrical burst. They wake back aboard the Enterprise. Then the prior Away party, except for Riker, attack the ship personnel and seize control of the Ten Forward bar. Their personalities are completely changed, including Data. Picacd joins them as a hostage so the injured can be freed. The captain of the Essex has taken over Deanna’s body. They demand that their physical remains be pickup up and shipped off for proper burial. But are they really the spirits of the Essex crew? They are not acting like it. They are alien spirits. Picard maneuvers them into an untenable situation and makes a deal to return them to the moon when they release their human hosts. All ends well.

STTNG S5 #16. “Ethics” Worf is seriously injured, several of his vertebrae crushed. It could be permanent. Worf wants Riker to help him commit suicide. There is a risky treatment that might save him, a one third chance against death. Worf decides to take it. They do the surgery to replace his spinal column with an artificial one. It fails. His son Alexander comes. Then he recovers; there was a backup in his system. So he survives after all. But Beverly is not pleased with the ethics of such a gamble.

STTNG S5 #17. “The Outcast” The Enterprise is contacted by the J’naii, an androgynous species, to help rescue a lost shuttlecraft. But they can’t find it, so they launch a probe—which vanishes. Riker and Soren agree to co-pilot a rescue shuttle. They discuss the distinction between genderless and sexual creatures. Soren confesses that she sees herself as female, but does not let it be known among her people lest she be ridiculed and treated to eradicate her aberration. It seems parallel to the way homosexuality was regarded in our own species. Soren is attracted to Riker. When alone they kiss and perhaps go farther. The others find out and she is arrested and tried. She pleads her case beautifully, but they insist she is sick and needs to be cured. The parallel to our own recent attitudes continues. Riker and Worf go to rescue her, but she demurs. He loves her but must leave her. As was the case with so many gay folk encountering the prejudice on Earth. It is painful.

STTNG S5 #18. “Cause and Effect” The Enterprise in trouble, and explodes as they try to abandon ship. But the main adventure gives no indication of this. Then the destruction occurs. And a replay of the prior sequence, almost the same. They enter the Typhon Expanse in space. Beverly remembers increasingly as things repeat. Deja vu? They explode again, and go back to the prior sequence. But more people are remembering. They are slowly zeroing in on the trace phenomena occurring. They realize they are caught in a time loop and decide to try to send a signal to the next loop that might warn them in time to change it. This time they succeed. They contact the other ship and learn it dates from a prior time. It has been caught in the loop much longer. But now all is well.

I read Mjolnir, by Brian James. Mjolnir is the powerful magic hammer of the Norse god Thor, a devastating weapon. But Thor threw it away when his beloved wife died. That was not smart. In this framework the Norse panoply of gods have settled in contemporary America and more or less blended with the population. Thor, god of thunder, is a devastating pro football player, making opposing quarterbacks quake; Freya, goddess of love, makes a rich living as a high class prostitute; even the gods lust for her. But she is very much her own woman; if a lout tries to molest her on the street, she may tear his heart out, literally. There is mischief afoot as the gods vie for renewed power, and layer on layer of betrayal as Odin, Thor’s father, plots to take Thor out of the picture and take Mjolnir for himself. Seeming friends turn out to be fake friends, except for Freya, who does her best to rescue Thor. No one can be trusted. But it turns out that Freya is a target herself, as she learns to her savage cost. The gods can be hurt and killed, and the violence can be sickening. This novel could use an educated editor, but the brutal action is compelling.

STTNG S5 #19. “The First Duty” Picard will give the Academy commencement address at Earth. The lady admiral calls him: there has been an accident. Wesley Crusher was injured in a formation flight exercise near Saturn that killed another cadet. But there is something they’re not telling. Why did one cadet break formation, causing the collision? They were attempting a special, flashy, but risky maneuver, that resulted in the accident. Picard tells Wesley that if he doesn’t tell the truth, Picard will. Wesley tells. Wesley receives a formal reprimand and will not advance with his class. Right; you don’t fool around when lives are at stake.

STTNG S5 #20. “Cost of Living” Worf and his son Alexander are having problems. Deanna’s provocative mother Lwaxana visits, and says she is getting married. She gets together with Alexander and takes him to a Holodeck program, where they wind up in a mud bath watching a nude sexy dancer. Meanwhile the food generator is malfunctioning, producing some weird variants. Something has changed the directives to jelly. It is the waste product of an odd form of life, a metal parasite. The mischief spreads and the ship is in danger of shutting down. They manage temporary repairs that save the ship. Then the wedding: Lwaxana shows up naked. That does it; the wedding is off. She has evidently caught on that this is not a good union. They all wind up in the mud bath. A naughty, fun episode.

STTNG S5 #21 “The Perfect Mate” They rescue two Ferengi from an exploding ship, but there’s a suspicion that all is not as it appears. They are up to mischief. Meanwhile the Enterprise will host a negotiation to end a long war between the Krios and the Valtese. The Ferengi mess up a glowing cocoon and Kamala emerges, the metamorph, a beautiful female empath who will be the perfect partner for the right male. She emits hormones and comes on to Riker. Picard interviews her and she comes on to him. So he assigns Data as her chaperon, because every man is attracted to her and vice versa. Then the Ferengi try to bargain with the ambassador to abscond with Kamala. He rejects them, and they knock him down so that he loses consciousness. Picard must take on his role in the ceremony. Chancellor Alrick will be Kamala’s mate, but she would prefer to be with Picard, a far more complete man. That is not to be, and she does go to the Ambassador, to her and Picard’s mutual regret.

STTNG S5 #22. “Imaginary Friend” A child, Clara, has an imaginary friend, Isabella. Meanwhile they investigate a nebula that formed around a neutron star. A pink light floats about, investigating things, and then becomes Isabella in the flesh. She starts directing Clara in an exploration of the ship—and there are odd manifestations. Isabella doesn’t like the restrictions of adults. Manifestations continue. They think that strands of plasma from the nebula are responsible. Isabella starts acting mean. She says others like her will come and kill everyone. Isabella beams Deanna, knocking her out. The energy strands outside the ship are dense. Then Isabella manifests to all of them. Picard explains that their rules are to protect children, not torment them. understanding that, Isabella departs, and the mischief stops.

I read I Can See in the Dark, by Karin Fossum, translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson. This is a murder mystery of a sort, wherein Riktor gets mad at a man for stealing from him and beats him to death with a hammer. He buries the body and no one knows. But then he is arrested for a murder he didn’t commit, ironically, a woman in the retirement home he works at. He is tried and finally gets off, but then someone discovers the body of the man he killed, and he is doomed. The cover material calls it gripping, but it’s not; it’s just an interesting exploration of the thoughts and impressions of a man who is largely anonymous and actually not very nice, because he quietly tortured several of the patients who couldn’t tell.

STTNG S5 #23. “I, Borg” They are charting six planetary systems for possible colonization, receive a faint distress call, and find a frozen Borg body beside a crashed shuttle. They save the Borg, identified as Third of Five. Geordi gets to knew him, calling him Hugh. Picard plans to modify the Borg’s program to instill a kind of virus that will destroy this species. Is this ethical? Others doubt it. Hugh is becoming a person. They give him a choice: return to the crash site to rejoin the Borg, or receive asylum on the Enterprise. Possibly his awareness of his individuality will infect the hive society. Geordi accompanies Hugh and sees two other Borg pick him up. Will it work?

STTNG S5 #24. “The New Phase” A Romulan ship is in trouble. Riker, Worf, Ro and Geordi beam aboard to help. A coil needs repair, so Geordi and Ro attempt to take it to the Enterprise for repair—but something goes wrong and they are lost. The bad core explodes, but they manage to escape in a pod with some Romulans. Meanwhile Ensign Ro wakes aboard the Enterprise, but she’s a ghost without substance. So is Geordi; they are solid only to each other. There is also a Romulan chief in phased out form, who threatens Ro. But Geordi manages to throw him out of the ship. There is a memorial planned, for they are believed to be dead. They are there, trying to make detectable traces so that decontamination will make them phase back in. It works.

STTNG S5 #25. “The Inner Light” They find an odd object in space, maybe a probe. It sends a beam that seems to strike Picard, who wakes in a what a woman says is his home. She calls him Kamin, saying he has had a high fever for three days. She is Eline, his wife. This is the Planet Kataan. He takes a walk; it is unfamiliar terrain. Eline wears a little model of the probe, saying he gave it to her. He has been here for five years, as Kamin. He is learning to play a special flute. Meanwhile Picard is unconscious in the ship, affected by the beam; only hours seem to have passed. But on Kataan years are passing, and they have two children. On the ship they interrupt the beam, and that puts Picard into convulsions, and on Kataan he collapses. His daughter Meribor is now a young woman. On the ship they track the probe’s trail back to Kataan—which was destroyed a thousand years ago. Now Kamin’s is old and his son is a young man who will make music his career. Kataan has caught on that the planet is doomed. Eline dies of old age. They send a probe into the future to find someone who can teach them how to make it. He’s the one. They will live in his memory. The probe shuts down, and Picard wakes 25 minutes after he fell. And inside the probe they find the flute he learned to play on Kataan. Now he can play it. He remembers. We will see that flute again.

STTNG S5 #26. “Time’s Arrow Part 1” It is discovered that extraterrestrials visited Earth five centuries ago. In an isolated cave is an android head: Data’s. At some point in the future he will be transported to the past, where he will die. That doesn’t bother him, but does bother the others. Data phases out, to the past realm, becoming invisible, but his voice remains as he reports. He finds himself in 1850 America. He joins a poker game, and of course wins cash. Outside the hotel a drunk encounters an elegant couple—and the woman rays him to death. So there does appear to be alien interference from the future. Mark Twain, as Samuel Clemens, is a character. Meanwhile an Away party from the Enterprise prepares to travel back to that situation. Picard accompanies them, as Guinan has advised him that this is necessary. Episode ends.

I read Why We Need Love, edited by Simon Van Booy. This is an anthology of pieces, stories, poems, essays, paintings, some of which hardly seem relevant to the title. It starts with an excerpt from Silas Marner by George Eliot, who was a woman. Silas is a good man who gets unjustly accused of robbery and loses his girlfriend because of it. Then he rescues a little girl whose mother got frozen to death, and therein will be his salvation, in his relationship with that child. But how does that clarify why we need love? There’s O Henry “The Gift of the Magi,” a famous story wherein she sells her lovely hair to buy him a chain for his precious watch, while he sells his watch to buy combs for her hair. Painful irony, but again, what is the relevance? “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament” by Willa Cather. Paul is a bad boy, misbehaving in school so that the teachers don’t know what to do with him. Then as a teenager he steals money and goes on a trip to New York, indulging in playing the role of a rich man. Then, having had his fun, he jumps in front of a train. Okay, a shock ending, but how does this show why we need love? Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale,” a famous naughty one, wherein a suitor is tricked into kissing her ass, literally, and gets revenge with a hot poker. But again, the need for love? James Joyce has a story, “A Painful Case,” that I indeed found painful to read because of its cruelty. James Duffy meets Emily Sinico and they converse, and other days meet and talk further quite compatibly. Their talks become fairly intimate. Finally she, excited, takes his hand passionately and presses it to her cheek. Whereupon he sharply breaks off their association, and four years later sees a news item where she has evidently committed suicide. My take on this: she was falling in love with him, and he roughly rejected her, wanting only an intellectual discourse, leaving little further point in her life or in his. The cad! This story does relate; they both needed love, but he destroyed it. However, some of the essays do address it. Eric Fromm clarifies that love is actually an act of will, otherwise men and women would simply copulate whenever they met, without any enduring commitment. Judi Krishnamurti, “On Love and Loneliness.” Too often our minds are fixed on what we think love should be, rather than on the experience itself. “Your mind creates a pattern and gets caught. Your desire crystallizes your mind.” This can apply to God, or a certain political system, or love. “I am caught in the labyrinth of my own desires.” I find this phenomenally meaningful. And a quote from Kahlil Gibran: “Love one another, but make not a bond of love./ Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” So while I found much of this book irrelevant to the topic, in the end I am glad to have read it.

STTNG S6 #1 “Time’s Arrow Part II” This leads” off the sixth and final season of “The Next Generation.” Riker and Beverly Crusher, in 19th century Earth, discover that the spate of deaths from cholera are actually from depleted electrical energy. Meanwhile Mark Twain is suspicious of them and determined to uncover their plot. Their “plot” of course is to stop the aliens from the future from ruining Earth. The alien couple appears; Data blocks them, but their weapon discharges and Data’s head is severed. They return to the 24th century, but Mark Twain is along. Deanna Troi shows him to his quarters on the Enterprise. He is glad to encounter the future along with the pretty girl Deantna is. They have brought Data’s head back and are trying to repair it. They succeed, and Data stops them from attacking the aliens until a key phaser setting is right. They return Mark Twain to his time, and rescue Picard. Guinan returns the hard way, by waiting 500 years, keeping her mouth shut.

STTNG S6 #2. “Realm of Fear” They check out a science ship that has not been heard from recently. Reg Barclay is supposed to join the Away Team, but he is afraid of being deconstructed and reconstructed by beaming, Beverly talks to him, suggesting a trick to gain confidence, and he beams across. But he sees a creature during transport, that touches him. How can that be? He does spot research and concludes that he is suffering from transporter psychosis. He is obviously agitated, and Deanna relieves him of duty. He transports again, and sees the fish-like creature again. He notifies the senior staff. They check it out, and discover an alien life form. He grabs it, and rescues a science ship crewman. They do the same for others, and four in all are rescued. There was something.

STTNG S6 #3. “Man of the People” A merchant ship is being attacked. They beam two passengers aboard, Ambassador Alkar and his shrewish mother. Mother soon dies; she was 93. Deanna Troi does the memorial service with Alkar, and something happens to her. She comes on to Alkar, but he politely demurs, angering her. It is as if another spirit animates her. She comes on to Riker, and scratches his neck. She seems increasingly like the late shrewish mother. An autopsy shows that the old woman was actually age 30, not Alkar’s mother. Alkar, a partial empath, is using Deanna for his own purposes, which he feels are noble. His victims soon die; the Enterprise folk must break his link with Deanna. They succeed, and the aging and negativity he had been transferring to her return to him, and he abruptly ages and dies.

STTNG S6 #4. “Relics” They get a signals from a ship lost 75 years ago. They encounter a Dyson Sphere, a sphere surrounding a star, capturing all its energy. There’s a wrecked ship on it; they beam into it and reanimate a man held in a kind of stasis for 75 years. He is Scotty, chief engineer of the original Enterprise. He wants to help Geordi, but he is 75 years out of date and just gets in the way despite his considerable experience. They discover the old Enterprise, that Scotty is familiar with, and fly it out of the Sphere, but have to destroy it to escape. They give Scotty a shuttle he can use for his own purposes, and he’s happy.

I watched Jack the Giant Slayer, a retelling of the famous fairy tale. Jack reluctantly sells his horse for a little bag of beans. Isabelle, the future queen of Cloister, is restless. She meets Jack just as a bean sprouts and rapidly grows a giant beanstalk. She is carried into the sky along with his house. Jack joins the king’s men next day climbing the sequoia sized stalk to rescue her, in the storm. He and the men emerge into the land of the giants. The fifty foot tall monsters make short work of the men they catch. Jack and Isabelle and the remaining men explore. Meanwhile the king orders the stalk to be cut down, to save the kingdom. The stalk crashes to the ground, doing much damage. But one giant, Big Fallon, has two heads, and he finds the remaining beans. He plants them, and now they have multiple new avenues to the ground. They land, and chase the king’s party to the castle. The giants besiege it. It is well defended, but this is a siege like no other. The giants throw burning trees into the castle. It is a phenomenal battle. Big Fallon is about to eat Jack, when Jack throws the last bean down his throat, and a bean stalk grows in him, destroying him. Jack recovers the giants’ crown, dons it, and the giants bow down to him. This is one wild fantasy, worthy of the original fairy tale.

STTNG S6 #5. “Schisms” They must chart a dense star cluster. Data reads his poetry; the others are bored. Riker sleeps regularly, yet remains sleepy and has trouble waking up. Geordi’s visor starts cutting out. Worf gets nervous. Data suffers time blankouts. There’s something about Cargo Bay Four. There is radiation there. Two crew members are missing. Then one returns, but weirdly ill. Riker believes that something has been taking him every night, and now his arm has been severed and reattached. The put a tracker on him and give him medication to keep him conscious. He finds himself in a strange laboratory, along with the missing female crew member. Riker rescues her. But who is doing it? That mystery remains.

STTNG S6 #6. “True Q” They take aboard a young intern, Amanda Rogers, selected from hundreds of applicants. She seems to have brought that can appear and disappear at will. Then she telekinetically diverts a container that is falling on Riker. Then she contains a reactor core explosion. Then Q turns up, and says the girl is another Q. Q made the problems to test her. Now Picard must introduce Q to Amanda. Q is too aggressive, and she hurls him into the wall. She’s his type. She talks with him, asking what a Q is, and he says a Q is omnipotent. He shows her. Picard investigates and learns that Amanda’s parents had denied the Q and were summarily executed by a seeming tornado. Q must decide whether Amanda is a full Q, and kill her if she isn’t. They need to tell Amanda. Amanda wants to be human, but concludes she is a Q and must join them.

STTNG S6 #7. “Rascals” A shuttle is returning to the Enterprise when there is an emergency call. They beam the group back, and they arrive as children. Picard, Ro, Guinan, and Obrien’s wife Keiko—their minds are intact, but physically they are twelve years old. Then two Klingon ships decloak and attack the Enterprise. Ferengi board it, claiming it as salvage. It is their ploy, using old Klingon ships to steal the Enterprise. The four “children” get busy to rescue the ship, with Ryker’s cooperation; they use the ship’s computer to empower themselves. They manage to change the children back to their adult stages. An unusual adventure.

STTNG S6 #8. “A Fistful of Datas” The ship has free time. Worf and Alexander indulge in a Holodeck wild west adventure. Deanna is also there as a gun moll. I think she is cuter in roles like this than in her normal outfit. Data gets wired to control she ship if there is need. A duplicate Data is also a desperado in the wild west scenario. A glitch means they have to play it through to the programmed end. But it’s a nice experience for Alexander and, surprisingly, Worf.

I read do fish feel pain? by Victoria Braithwaite. The lower caps are the way it is titled. This is a simple question with a complicated answer, because first you have to consider the nervous system of fish, and whether they have sentience. That is, the ability to feel and experience emotion, or more simply, consciousness. (Not to be confused with sapience, which is man-like intelligence) You can’t ask a fish and get a clear answer, so you have to do it the hard way, by studying the actual nerves and the reaction of fish to various stimuli. When the study was first proposed, half the responses were why bother, because it’s obvious that fish are too dull to feel pain. The other half say why study it, because it’s obvious that fish do feel pain. Both sides, of course, going largely on prejudice. Well, the conclusion is yes, fish are sentient and do feel pain, and they react to it much as we do, avoiding it when they can. For example, they tried numbering trout, then played catch and release, and found that they couldn’t hook the same fish twice on a line because they avoided it after being caught once. So the question is, how would you like to be netted and left to flop until you drowned, or caught with a hook thoughyour mouth and hung up to be admired? Commercial fishermen and anglers don’t like to address those questions. But progress is being made, and reforms are slowly coming.

STTNG S6 #9. “The Quality of Life” A mining operation called a particle fountain is behind schedule, and Geordi will try to help. A special unit, the exocomp, a cute little machine that lady doctor Farallon has modified marvelously solves a serious problem. Then the exocomp starts malfunctioning. Data analyzes this problem and concludes that the exocomps are alive. This raises a vital question. Data tests it, and it seems to fail confirmation of life, but then it turns out that it outwitted it. That’s life! They conclude that it must be treated as a new form of machine life.

STTNG S6 #10. “Chain of Command Part 1” Trouble is brewing along the Cardassian border. The lady Admiral beams aboard, here to relieve Picard of command of the Enterprise. Picard, Worf, and Beverly Crusher (now required to be a seductive brunette) are assigned to a separate mission. Captain Edward Jellico assumes command and immediately requires awkward changes in procedures. The Cardassions may be preparing to use a metagenic weapon, a supremely toxic agent to destroy all DNA on a planet, rapidly wiping out all life on it so that it can be readily conquered. Picard’s mission is to sneak into Cardassian space, to verify the plot, and stop it. They make their way through lava tubes. Picard is captured, and it turns out that he is the one they want; they set up to lure him here. Now he will cooperate or die.

STTNG S6 #11. “ Chain of Command Part I1” They question Picard, drugging him, then hanging him from the ceiling by his arms. Then he is asked how many lights he sees, there being four, but severe pain is inflicted when he says that. This is reminiscent of a sequence in the movie 1984 where a similar technique was used, conditioning the victim to believe what he is told to believe regardless of the truth. But he fights back despite the pain. Meanwhile Captain Jellico believes the Cardassians are hiding in a nearby nebula, and plans to ambush them as they emerge. Jellico and Riker sneak in and plant bombs on those ships, and force the Cardassians to yield and to return Picard. So they win, but it was a close and ugly call.

STTNG S6 #12 “Ship In a Bottle” Professor James Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ arch nemesis, has achieved a kind of life in the holodeck and is making mischief. Meanwhile they are about to witness the collision of two planets, a rare event. Moriarty achieves reality outside the holodeck, or seems to. He gains control of the ship, at any rate. He wants them to bring to life the woman of his dreams, the Countess Bartholemew. The planetary collision will destroy the ship if they don’t get clear soon, but Moriarty doesn’t care unless he achieves reality. Maybe they can reconstruct the two of them via the transporter beam. They do, and Moriarty returns control of the ship to Picard. Moriarty and his lady depart in a shuttle to explore the universe. But it is actually a reality within the holodeck, real to them. But could the larger reality be someone else’s simulation, Picard wonders? It is an interesting question, for them and for us all.

STTNG S6 #13 “Aquiel” They are to deliver supplies to a station near the Klingon border. An Away team of Riker, Beverly Crusher, Worf and Geordi checks, finding only a white dog; Maura, the station personnel appears to have departed in a shuttle or been melted down. Geordi manages to play some recordings of Aquiel, a pretty girl who was sending messages to her mother. She expresses having a bad dream, and tells how Rocha, the officer assigned to the station, is arrogant and threatening. The one who seems to have been melted down by a phaser. Did the Klingons kill her too? Then the local Klingon commander comes, with Aquiel, whom the Klingons rescued from the shuttlecraft. But she doesn’t remember what happened. But there is a report that she was assigned to the station because she was difficult. Could she be a murderess? Geordi likes her; what is the truth? Beverly discovers that there is an organism that takes over the bodies of others, becoming them for a few days. Did it take oven Aquiel? No, it took over the dog! Aquiel is innocent. A riveting mystery.

STTNG S6 #14 “Face of the Enemy” Deanna Troi wakes to discover she is a Romulan woman, now an enemy officer, Major Rakal. He is the only one who knows her real identity, and tells she she must keep the secret or die. She’s an empath; she knows this is true. Knowing nothing else, she fares down the female commander of the ship. The secret cargo is a high ranking Romulan officer and two top aides, in stasis, who are defecting. Ambassador Spock is involved, trying to gain more power for those who support his liberalization. After a tense standoff, they transfer the officers to the Enterprise and Deanna us beamed back as the Romulan ship warps away. The secret mission is a success, thanks to Deanna’s nerve.

STTNG S6 #15 “Tapestry” Picard was rayed on a mission and is in cardiac arrest. Q tells him “Welcome to the Afterlife.” There follows retrospective scenes from Picard’s life, especially what leads up to a fight where he gets stabbed through the heart and gets an artificial heart as a replacement. So he tries to change history, at least to the extent of avoiding the fight, and succeeds, but while that saves his heart, it puts him on a mediocre track. He never takes a chance, never gets noticed, and never commands a ship. So he returns to the original past, loses his heart, but becomes the leader he is. He wakes from the present injury smiling.

STTNG S6 #16 “Birthright, Part 1” Odd visitors appear, such as a doctor from Deep Space Nine and an alien who tells Worf that his father is still alive. Data when unconscious sees his father. Worf demands that he take them to the Romulan prison camp where his father is supposed to be. Data follows up and sees a blackbird. Then his father appears, as a young man. What is going on? But it is a trap.

STTNG S6 #17 “Birthright, Part I1” The captive Klingons do not want to be rescued, because capture means dishonor. They live in peace here; their Romulan jailer, Tokath, even married a Klingon. Ba’el, whom Worf likes, is their daughter. Worf tries to escape, but is recaptured. He tries to teach them Klingon ways. He teaches Toq to hunt. Tokath says he must execute Worf, but the others stand with Worf, including Ba’el, and he relents, letting the young ones go. They are allowed to go to the Enterprise. It is not clear whether this means Worf now has a nice girlfriend.

STTNG S6 #18 “Starship Mine” They must evacuate the Enterprise during a sweep to cleanse the ship of excess barions. But something is amiss; the sweep crew is not right. Picard is caught aboard as the sweep is supposed to begin. Then the supposed sweep crew turns out to be something else. They hold the Enterprise officers hostage. They are terrorists stealing trilithium, a toxic waste product of the engines, that they can sell for terroristic purposes. Picard manages to stop it, and abort the sweep before it kills him, in a nervously close call.

I read The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamy. It was published in 2010, and it is amazing how much has been discovered since then, such as the Higgs Particle and the reverberations of space/time itself when black holes collide, but I was familiar with the author’s name because of his articles in NEW SCIENTIST magazine. He is a marvelously informed and lucid writer, making horrendously complicated subjects intelligible. He is also, it turns out, a vegetarian, so he must be a good man. Here he goes into the background tools of discovery, clarifying along the way the importance of what is sought. Such as the neutrino observatory at Lake Baikal, just north of Mongolia, Asia. Continental drift split open the earth about 250 million years ago, and this filled in with water, forming the deepest and most massive body of fresh water in the world, 20% of the world’s unfrozen fresh water, marvelously pure. In winter it freezes over, and they drive trucks across it. This can be tricky, even hazardous, as there are ridges and crevices; they use planks to get across the larger cracks. The famous Trans-Siberian Railway passed that way in the old days, the tracks coming up to one shore and resuming at the far shore, and they would ferry the train across on icebreakers. Once in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War, the ice held firm, and reinforcements were urgently needed, so the Russians laid the tracks directly on the ice. Before they ran the full train across, however, they tested it with only an engine, just to be sure. It didn’t make it, and today it lies somewhere on the bottom of the lake. That’s the kind of history this lake has. Well, they put a kind of telescope there, about a mile deep, and it aims down, not up. Huh? Well, they are looking for neutrinos: a neutrino telescope. Why? Neutrinos are elusive particles traveling straight across the universe in a way that no other particles do. So, in effect, if you want to know what is happening in the center of the galaxy, ask a neutrino, if you can catch it. It’s a unique window into an otherwise invisible universe. They may even offer insights into dark matter. How do you catch one? You watch for the cone of light that occurs when one collides with the nucleus of an atom and makes a cone of debris. But it has to be the right neutrino; they are being generated by the millions from other processes, but most are not as powerful. So the planet itself is used to filter out the lesser ones, leaving only the strongest. That’s why the telescope aims down. A complicating factor is that neutrinos are form changers, shifting between electron, tau, and muon. I think of a muon as the sound made by a cow, but it’s actually pronounced mew-on, so maybe it should be a cat. Ah, well. Anyway, this is just one of the avenues clarified by this book. Observatories in deep mines, in orbit, even at the South Pole are searching for other hints of the ultimate nature of the universe. They are learning a lot, yet new mysteries abound. I get the impression that phenomenal discoveries are incipient; I can hardy wait for the reports.

THE WEEK has a summary of the teachers’ revolt. This year there have been teacher strikes is six states, for better pay and increased funding for classrooms. I was a teacher before I retired to writing full time in 1966, and while I don’t regret that change, I do remember. I suffered nightmares for months, dreaming that I was back in the classroom, unprepared for the assignments I had to present, facing whole classes of bad boys whose only purpose was to prevent anything from being learned, and knowing that if I reported the troublemakers the school administration would side with the boys and blame me for not keeping proper discipline. Now, it wasn’t that bad in real life, but it was suggestive. Over 50 years later I still remember how I reported two boys and was told, in essence, to get used to it. Months later those boys went on a rampage at night and spray painted school property. Then they were expelled. They had progressed, naturally enough, from sassing the teacher to sassing the administration, not realizing that they had crossed the line into territory where enforcement governed. They were surely more careful thereafter. I clearly did not have what it takes. Fortunately I had an avenue of escape to a far better life. Regardless, my sympathies are with the teachers who have had to carry on in a kind of war situation, lacking avenues of escape. It looks as if little has changed. It seems that today 59% of teachers work a second job to make ends meet, and more than 8 in 10 have bought school supplies with their own money to be able to do their jobs. Why is this so? Because in the striking states it has gotten so bad because Republican governments have dramatically cut education budgets over the past decade. Voters overwhelmingly support the teachers, but it seems they are not heeded until schools actually shut down. Now some teachers are running for offices so that they can affect the political process. I wish them well.

Perhaps related: the Spring 2018 issue of CENSORSHIP NEWS has a report by a fifteen year old girl. “First I fell in love with a book…Then my school district banned it.” The book was The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, which tells of a sixteen year old who witnesses the murder of her best friend by a white police officer. So the reader started a petition and managed to get the book restored. More power to her! It seems that half of all banned books are LGBTQ themed. That says something about the censors, doesn’t it? Bigotry in the name of protecting our children

NEW SCIENTIST has an item on how creative people have more mental health issues than others. As a militantly creative person, I am interested. A study of the population of Sweden indicates that those who study an artistic subject are 90% more likely to be hospitalized for schizophrenia, 62% more likely for bipolar disorder (in my day it was manic-depressive), and 39% for depression. “It may be that the same genetic variants that unleash creativity can also trigger mental health conditions…Creativity often involves linking ideas or concepts in ways that other people wouldn’t think of…But that’s similar to how delusions work…” Yes. Back in the 1960s when I went to my doctor because I was depressed and suffered chronic fatigue, I got ridered (excluded) on my health insurance for “all mental disease.” The medical profession thought I was imagining it. Decades later I finally got the diagnosis: low thyroid, and levothyroxin pills make me normal, physically and in mood. So I wasn’t crazy, the medical profession was. But still, the line between genius and madness runs closer to my turf than I am comfortable with. I try to stay safely within the boundary of sanity while still reaching across for inspiration. It can be chancy, and not every writer succeeds. One thinks of Philip K Dick and maybe Theodore Sturgeon, both with far more imagination and writing ability than success.

Some readers may get tired of my constant support for vegetarianism. Well, Tough Turds; you are free to go read something else while I pontificate with my well-known politeness on the subject. NEW SCIENTIST has a feature on the high price of meat and what is being done about it. That price is destruction of the natural world. About 70% of all farmland relates to livestock, driving wildlife toward extinction, while precious fresh water and energy are wastefully expended. Much of the mischief of the world could be abated if folk simply stopped eating meat. Charred cow carcass consumers know this yet continue with their snouts wedged in the bloodstained trough, shamelessly caring less about the salvation of the natural world than about their jaded taste buds. There are alternatives, but they don’t taste quite the same. Well, there is progress. Now there is the Impossible Burger, plant based imitations designed to look, smell, feel and taste just like meats. So you will not be able to tell the difference. So if you happen to be a carnivore with a conscience, oxymoronic as that sounds, you will be able to get off meat habit cold turkey, as it were, without sacrificing your beloved gutless gut. The Vegetarian Butcher in The Hague is already serving it, and it is being exported around the world. As the price comes down, you too can join the enlightened throng. Fairy makes your filthy mouth water, doesn’t it?

Perhaps related: they are now growing human brain tissue in the lab. No, not to eat, but maybe to develop another kind of intelligence. When they finally achieve a sentient (conscious), sapient (smart) lab brain…

The May / June issue of THE HUMANIST magazine—I don’t comment much on humanism, because there’s almost nothing there I disagree with—has a commentary by Rob Boston titled “Are We Headed for One Christian Nation under Trump?” It seems that conservative Christians who voted for Trump did so largely because of their quest to see the United States become a so-called Christian nation. They seem to be skeptics about the First Amendment separation of Church and State. But, the article says, it is a fool’s errand. For one thing, Christians don’t agree on what a Christian nation would look like. Christians run a spectrum from liberal to conservative and all steps between. The Religious Right incorporates the Republican Party platform as a tenet of faith, while other denominations are liberal, pro LGBTQ, and support abortion. Even the ultraconservatives can’t agree on exactly who should be stoned for having premarital sex or taking God’s name in vain. For another thing, long term trends are not going the theocrats’ way. In 1950 more than 90% of the US population identified as Christian. Now that figure is around 70% and dropping. There are 56 million unaffiliated, the “nones.” I am and have always been a none, since before it was fashionable. Most folk don’t identify as atheist, agnostic, or humanist, but neither do they embrace a Christian label. The trend is for more of these uncommitted voters in the future. Also, most Americans don’t really want to live in the religious right’s version. In the late 19th and early 20th century conservative Christian groups were at the zenith of their power. What did they do with it? They did not advocate for the poor and needy as Jesus did. The Jesus I know would abhor the bigotry practiced in his name. Rather, they censored books, magazines, stage plays, and later films. They curbed access to birth control. They made consensual same-sex relationships illegal. They forbade retail activity on Sunday. They made it illegal to teach evolution. They were blatantly antisemitic and racist. How many people really want that sort of thing today? A Christian America is a chimera that can never exist. So says this article, and I agree, as I think the majority of Americans do when they think about it.

Odd notes: A new review of past studies has found that in most cases exercise is strongly linked to happiness. Even ten minutes a day makes folk happier than those who don’t exercise. The top 1% of American adults earn 20% of the national income, and this inequality is worsening. But it seems that hardly anyone cares. That’s weird; why don’t they? If you have one point two million dollars you are within the top ten percent of Americans; ten million dollars and you are in the top one percent. Are ebooks thriving or dying? The answer is uncertain, but self published ebooks seem to be helping writers make a living. Marilyn vos Savant says that negative lightning accounts for 95% of all strikes. Positive strikes, though far fewer, are far stronger and cause most of the damage. So if you have a choice…The health newsletter ALTERNATIVES, which is the best of the ones I have tried over the years, says that sugar is a phenomenal unrecognized culprit in health destruction. As the saying goes, “We’re treated like mushrooms: kept in the dark and fed BS.” And perhaps the worst is sugary sodas, which have probably done more damage to society’s health than any other single factor. This is true the world over, as the drinks spread. In 1975 global obesity was 20%; now it’s 40%, with all the health complications entailed, such as diabetes. Physical activity does not prevent this; nor do diet sodas, because alternatives to sugar have their own hazards. “When it come to destroying health, sodas are basically liquid cigarettes.” So stay off them. I do.

STTNG S6 #19 “Lessons” Neela Darren is the head of the Stellar Cartography survey, quite competent. She is also an expert musician. She and Picard hit it off, musically, as he plays the flute and she plays the piano. They make lovely duets. That proceeds to romance. For the first time since he learned the flute in Episode #25 “The Inner Light,” when he lived a whole life in 25 minutes, marrying and having a family. He misses it. But then in the course of her mission, Neela is caught in danger. She survives, in a close call. If she stays on the Enterprise she may be put in danger again, because of her job. So they agree with regret to separate. I loved this episode, because of the music and the romance.

STTNG S6 #20 “The Chase” Picard’s old archaeology Professor Galen visits the Enterprise, bringing him an immensely valuable artifact. He wants Picard to join him in the pursuit of his final mission, but Picard declines despite serious temptation. Then Galen’s shuttle is attacked and he is killed. What was so important as to make him a target? Picard means to find out. They find a genetic algorithm four billion years old. What information is it hiding? Why is someone trying to destroy it? Cardassian and Klingon ships converge, all after the secret, which may be a weapon or a phenomenal power source, or something equivalently important. Then the Romulans appear. Then a four billion year old holo image appears, explaining how they seeded the galaxy, hoping that the ensuring species would join in harmony. Alas, that dream is not yet. At least this explains how it is that the folk widely different galactic civilizations are all humanoid, able to breathe the same air, and can interbreed: they were all seeded from the same vial, a while back.

I am enjoying these episodes, and expect to complete The Next Generation early next month and proceed to Deep Space Nine. Can it possibly be as interesting? I will find out. Yes, this probably means more novelette length columns. Can you stand it? Do you have a choice?

PIERS

Jewel Lye 2018

HI-

A reader told me that I was cluttering up my HiPiers Column with all the Star Trek episodes, so I am doing two things: I am moving the episodes to their own section following the regular column, and querying my other readers how they feel about it. I have wanted to catch up on Star Trek for decades, since missing half the original series, and now finally I am. This column covers what interests me, but I hope it also interests my readers, many of whom are Star Trek fans. So is this compromise satisfactory, or do you prefer something else? I am leaving my book and movie reviews in place, interspersed with my commentary on this & that.

I watched Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It starts with wild space action, of course. It has been a while since I’ve seen a Star Wars movie, so maybe I’m not up on details, but this strikes me as full of sound and fury, signifying not much. Slowly a comprehensible story line emerges from the scattered debris. There are Chewie, C-3PO, Yoda, Luke Skywalker, as incidental characters, to provide some flavor of the original movies. They need to recruit a master code breaker. Little Rose leads one strand with Finn. The girl Rey leads another, as she learns to invoke the immense power of the Force. Even so it is touch and go. A few survive, and they will teach the children. A so-so movie, for me.

I watched Divergent. This one reminded me of The Hunger Games. In the future society is divided into five factions, each a particular type, and folk know where they belong. Erudite. Dauntless. Amity. Candor. Abnegation. Except for Beatrice Prior—Tris—a Divergent who crosses boundaries. She undergoes the classification test that will show her where she belongs. Then she will get to choose, and will forever be bound by that choice. They say that for her it is Abnegation, but she is actually a rogue Divergent and must hide it. She meets Christina and they become friends. She makes a scary jump, and joins Dauntless, the warrior faction, where she meets the leader Four. It starts like military basic training, pushing to physical and mental limits. She has to fist fight another girl, and loses. She is taught that Dauntless never give up. She fights her way up, qualifying to continue training. The second part of it is mental, as she has to face her worst fear. She succeeds. Then she and Four do it together, facing their worst fears. They fall in love. The tests continue, and it’s hard to know what is real. There is war between the Factions as Erudite tries to take over. Then Tris is about to be executed, but is rescued by her parents, that she never knew were Divergent. Her mother gets killed, saving Tris, but her father survives. Then she encounters Four, turned by chemistry, now her enemy. But she manages to turn him back, and they struggle to stop the malign program. There is more to do, but they have won the first engagement. This is one hard-hitting movie.

I watched Insurgent, sequel to Divergent. The jacket has an impressive 3D cover picture. This picks up where the first left off. Jeanine, the evil woman, remains in control, spreading propaganda blaming the Divergents for the recent trouble. She has a box from the Founder that will enable her to destroy the Divergents, but only a Divergent can open the box. Tris, Four, and other insurgents are staying with an Amity Faction village, but government troops invade. They flee with her brother Caleb and manage to catch a passing freight train, but Factionless folk are aboard. Tobias Eaton—Four says that’s him; that’s his original name. They go to see his mother, whom he rejects. They head on to Candor, but Caleb declines to continue with them. But Candor arrests them and will turn them over to the Council. Four persuades them to use Truth Serum. She confesses to killing Will, which alienates them. Troops attack, firing sleep darts. Tris is hit, but it doesn’t work on her, because she’s 100% Divergent. So the government starts killing people, to force Tris to give herself up. She makes love with Four. The definition is that Factionless belong to no Faction, while Divergents belong to all Factions. They need to get these groups together as Insurgents. To stop the suicides—caused by embedded darts—Tris must pass all five simulations for the Factions. They are brutal. She must rescue her mother from burning house that is being carried aloft on a cable. She succeeds, passing Dauntless. Then Four rescues her, but she catches on that he is a simulation. She has passed Amity by sparing a traitorous friend. But in the next simulation she dies, or seems to. Peter found a way for her to fake it. Meanwhile the Factionless figure out how to stop the suicides. Then she has to fight herself. Then comes a message from beyond the Wall, saying the Divergents are the real hope of humanity. The future of mankind lies beyond the wall. And Jeanine is executed. This sequel is even harder hitting than the original.

I watched Allegiant, the third Divergent movie. The walled city is Chicago, and the wall remains. Now Four’s mother Evelyn governs, and she is acting pretty much like Jeanine. They decide to escape: Trice, Four, Caleb, Peter, Christina, Tori. They scale the Wall, under fire. Tori gets shot. They rappel down outside, the five remaining, and discover a devastated world,like the remnant of a huge strip mine. They are pursued by Edgar in a truck. And captured by an unfamiliar army with flying machines. Welcome to the future. They are taken to a base and decontaminated. They learn that the city of Chicago is now a genetic experiment to perfect humanity, to purify the genome. They are known here; they have been watched. Tris meets David, the Director. He tells her that she is the only pure person; the others are damaged. She sees the life history of her mother, Natalie, who left the project in the Fringe to join the city, to help the Damaged. Four and the others go through Simulations. Nita supervises Four. They go on a mission to save some more children in the Fringe. Four has his doubts about this; they’re not saving kids, they’re stealing them. They tell Four they are returning him to ‘Chicago, but they aren’t. He catches on and fights them off. Meanwhile David takes Tris to Providence, another island city, and she catches on too. Now she organizes another escape, stealing a flying craft with Christina. They return to Chicago and organize another revolt: “Chicago is not your experiment, it is our home.” Will they get it right this time?

I read The Names of our Tears, by P L Gaus. This is set in Amish country. The Amish don’t run drugs, but it seems an Amish girl was coerced into bringing an extra suitcase with her from Florida to Ohio. When she found out what she was carrying, she dumped all the cocaine out into a pond. Then she was shot to death; evidently someone was annoyed. The local sheriff investigates, and discovers that there is a considerable drug running operation using shady methods to move their wares. He does what he can, but it really isn’t much, and the novel ends inconclusively. That’s the way it tends to be in real life; it’s hard to nail a criminal gang that kills any witnesses and terrorizes the rest. I wondered about the relevance of the title, and learned that one legend has it that God names every tear, to honor human pain. A pastor explains this to a desolate ten year old girl who lost her only friend, the original murder victim. She is not much consoled.

I read The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, by Stephen Greenblatt. This is a thorough discussion of the biblical origin of the human species with interesting aspects, and some of the related art. There is a suggestion that Eve was the real hero, as she was the one who grasped the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, freeing us all from chronic ignorance. But Eve was also roundly condemned by the sexist Christian church, apparently because she was sexually attractive and amenable. It seems that the two led a vegetarian life in the Garden of Eden, eating animals only after they were expelled. Which raises a thought in my mind: maybe the true Original Sin was forsaking peaceful vegetarianism and then killing and eating the flesh of innocent animals, God’s other creatures. As for sex, of course they practiced it in the garden, as the animals did, thinking nothing of it; only when they ate of the fruit of the forbidden tree did they realize that sex was supposed to be sinful. The question is, what kind of a loving deity would refuse to permit humans to achieve knowledge? Would put the forbidden fruit right there in easy reach as a chronic temptation? He must have wanted them to break the rule so he had a pretext to cast them out. At any rate, this book is not up on the latest: the bone that God took from Adam to make Eve was not a rib; that was an editorial censorship by a scribe. It was his penis bone, the baculum. So now most mammals have bones there, but man does not. That explains why it is that modern man is not missing a rib, giving the Bible the lie, but is missing a key bone. And you wonder why authors don’t like censorious editing? This book goes into the life histories of a number of the architects of Christianity, and concludes with appendixes offering variations. One example: the Maker wanted company, so he went to a swampy place, dug out a lump of mud, shaped a male organ, and set it on the ground. Then he dug out another lump and shaped a female organ, leaving it beside the male. During the night the two lumps joined, generating the first Ancestor. Next night they did it again, and again, evidently enjoying it, until there were a number of Ancestors. But again, this book misses one of the nicest stories, from the American Indians: the Maker formed man and woman with open bellies, and gave each of them a length of thread to close them up. The woman meticulously and tightly stitched herself up, but that used up all the thread, and the bottom part was left as an open gash. The man carelessly stitched fast and loose, so that he had thread left over, which dangled down. That explains the anatomy of the two; now you know. So this book is marvelously informative, but I deem it incomplete.

I read Escaping Paradise by Kambry Ellis. This is a Romance on steroids. Alyssa Marks is a healthy young woman, out on an exercise run. When she returns there is a flyer on her windshield: a temporary employment agency. She plans to be a graphic artist, but it takes time to develop a clientele; maybe a temporary job would do. So she follows up, and it leads into romance, challenge, a brush with a kind of cult, amazing sex, torture, and fears of betrayal. Whom can she trust? Her boyfriend has an alarming alter ego. She gets more or less trapped on the cult site, theoretically a guest but unable to escape it. The leader is a pretty woman, soft spoken, wanting only the best for her followers—until she gets crossed and shows a much uglier side. This sort of thing interests me because I had an uncle who truly followed God; in fact it was hard to have him speak more than one sentence without God intervening. “The price of beans in Bohemia? I don’t know the answer, but I know Someone who does…” He got in a mini religion, and in the end it cost him his wife, who committed suicide because of her resistance to the indoctrination, and he died up alienated and unhappy, having dedicated his life to a false cause. That’s my cynical interpretation, which surely differs violently from that of others, but it left me with a profound aversion to cults. There were those who saw me as being rather similar to my uncle. Ouch; I have always been a total unbeliever. Regardless, I’m glad to see a novel addressing the subject. This story is incomplete, to be continued in the sequel Chasing Freedom, but it strikes me as hitting close enough in that respect.

I read Elf Doubt by Bryant Reil. I read the author’s first novel in this series, Elf Mastery, in 2016. My aging memory is not what it once was, and the details of the first book have faded, but I remember liking Kyla, the perky and sometimes headstrong tree-dwelling elf girl. In this sequel Kyla quickly gets on a new mission and into serious trouble. It is a restless time, politically, with threats against the existing order, and she discovers that it’s hard to trust anyone else, including the queen herself. Details are complicated, with many intertwining threads, and violence and death strike all around her. She seems to have been selected for some special purpose, but she doesn’t know what it might be, and her friends may not really be her friends. By the end the king and queen have been dispatched, and Kyla is chief of one group and queen of another, without much notion what she should be doing or whether she is likely to survive long enough to find out. In fact the story becomes grim, and it is not yet done, as this book ends in the middle of the action. So this is no sweet gentle innocent girl story. I suspect that much anguish remains before it ends.

Harlan Ellison died. There will be plenty about him elsewhere, but this is my purely personal take on him. He was about two and a half months older than I, about five inches shorter, and was the one person I knew of who may have had more trouble with publishers than I have. We had a lot in common, beginning with that matter of height: folk including other writers poked fun at him for his physical stature, but I never did. When I graduated from ninth grade I was the shortest and smallest person in my class, male and female, standing five feet tall and weighing one hundred pounds. Then I grew most of another foot to five ten and a half, and gained fifty pounds, and what do you know, the bullies disappeared. But I remembered, and was never amused by jokes about Harlan. As an adult my arena was no longer physical, but mental and legal, as his was, and I had many battles, including getting blacklisted for six years when I protested being cheated by a publisher. Harlan never blacklisted me, understanding what it was to stand up to publishers when few others did. We were fellow arch liberals; I know of no political differences between us, though there were social ones, as his five marriages vs. my one 62 year long one hinted. So we got along, generally, until I broke relations. Why? That’s a story in itself.

We met in 1966 at the Milford Writer’s conference, sponsored by Damon Knight, where writers submitted their stories for critiques. I liked Harlan’s story, “I have No Mouth And I Must Scream,” and I think he liked mine, which later became the basis for my collaborative novel with Philip Jose Farmer, The Caterpillar’s Question. Harlan was a frequent topic of private discussion; the consensus was that his input and his output were not connected. That is, he insulted others freely, but was hyper sensitive to any return insult. I overheard him on the phone, for something like half an hour, bawling out someone else for a baggage foul-up; he just couldn’t let it go. He also craved attention; he could keep telling jokes indefinitely, as long as he had an audience, and he was good at it, a showman. But discussions at that conference could get quite pointed. I described other fiction of Harlan’s as like garbage being hurled at the reader’s face. But Harlan was hardly my only fracas there. I remember how Algis Budris had raised the question in a column of his own about male writers writing female perspective stories, and vice versa: did readers find that off-putting? I don’t, and I have written many female protagonist stories that have been well received; for a time there was even a rumor circulating that I was a female writer myself. I take that as a compliment to my writing skill, and having raised two girls I do feel for the female perspective in this male dominated culture. But I thought the question was worth considering, so I raised it at the conference. John Brunner not only disagreed, he said there was something wrong with me personally because I even raised the question. Note that a general question was being answered not by consideration of the issue but by a personal attack, an error that intelligent folk are generally careful not to make. I have great respect for the body of Brunner’s fiction, and appreciate that he was born the same place I was, Oxford, England, not long after me, but he was dead wrong here. What did the other writers think of that? They applauded Brunner. That was an eye-opener, and I suspect it was not entirely coincidence that in the ensuing decades my success as a commercial writer may have eclipsed that of all of them combined, in sharp contrast to my unsuccess with critics. My thinking was simply more rational, and I had one phenomenally lucky break, which is what it generally takes to launch a writer out of the struggling pack. But of course the other writers might disagree, if they even remember the incident, if they are alive today. So where was Harlan on that matter? He wasn’t there; he was elsewhere that afternoon. I like to think that had he been there, he would have set the matter straight, as he had to be much aware of being unfaurly personally targeted. But it shows the kind of interactions that could occur, and I think is one reason why neither he nor I had a lot of respect for Milford. Theoretically it was a conference for writers to improve their skills, but it had become a kind of in-club that resisted critiques from outsiders regardless of their merit. I understand that writer and critic James Blish in a prior conference had told Harlan that he was so bad a writer that he would never sell a word. Harlan then sold many words, and won many awards, and said openly “Well, I’m here.” More power to him on that score. Meanwhile Blish said he had finally figured out what made a story popular, and he had written one. Others were careful to avoid the real issue until it was my turn to comment. Then I spelled it out point by point: the story stunk. Blish got heated, unable (like Harlan) to accept the kind of criticism he dished out himself, and was never thereafter any fan of mine. But after I had spoken, the others had to admit I was correct. He was an excellent literary writer and critic, but he didn’t know beans about commercial writing. That effectively alienated Milford, and cost me the market of Damon Knight’s annual anthologies, and I was not held in good regard thereafter. It is dangerous to speak truth to power, or to insult a local god by exposing his feet of clay. So I was like Harlan there, in that respect, both of us becoming pariahs for refusing to fit a false mold. It’s a sad commentary on the state of many writers’ ability to think rationally.

Then there was a critique of another writer’s story, an aspect of which related to the perception of male and female. I am and have always been highly aware of the distinction; I love the look and feel of women. But Harlan found my commentary far off-base, openly expressing derision even as I was speaking. He went and got a fly swatter and batted with it as if my comments were an infestation. Another writer chided him for his lack of courtesy. Then it turned out that the author had put in several copies of her story, and the gender of the protagonist had been reversed in the version I had read. That also torpedoed Samuel R Delaney who, being gay, was also highly aware. So Harlan was taking off on me discourteously for commenting on a different version of the story than he had read. Mark that strike number one. I still supported Harlan’s efforts generally, and he supported mine; when other fans attacked me without showing me the attack, so I was unable to respond immediately, Harlan defended me. Why didn’t they show me the attack? Because they knew I would refute it quite effectively, as I did when I finally did catch up to it. I stick to the truth, and that is usually an excellent defense against those who can be slipshod about facts. When there was early movie interest in my work, Harlan tried to help. But I remembered both the positives and the negatives.

Move ahead several years. My review of Harlan’s provocative anthology Dangerous Visions in a fanzine (amateur magazine) incited a discussion that lasted almost two years. I approved the effort, and said that if he ever did another, I meant to be in it. That, by his own statement, turned him on to the idea of a sequel, Again Dangerous Visions, and indeed I was in it with my story “In the Barn,” where in an alternate reality the cows had died out so they used buxom human women as the milkers. (A reviewer who evidently had not read the story called it vegetarian science fiction. I think there should be standards for reviewing.) But in the volume’s introduction Harlan chided me for a supposed error that, like the changed gender at Milford, was actually his misunderstanding of the issue, as I remarked in a recent HiPiers column. So I was chastised in print for an error I had not made. Harlan had not bothered to check for accuracy. I let it pass without more than a refutation in another fanzine, but I remembered. Strike Two.

Yet there are limits. When Harlan made comments that could be dangerous to my career, I wrote to him privately saying in essence that I did not want trouble with him, as we were on the same side in so many cases, but if he repeated some of the things in print I would have to take legal action to protect my reputation. He was dismayed, listing three things that I should have said and had not. I replied by quoting all three things from the first page of my letter. Again he had accused me without cause. It was apparent that he was incorrigible, simply not capable of getting such things straight; he was a loose cannon, possibly more dangerous to friends than to enemies. Strike Three. I decided to disengage. “Fare well, Harlan,” I wrote, and cut him off. When I became a best seller and a publisher sent me on an Author Tour to California, I declined to be interviewed by him, though it might have facilitated sales. But when he sued the Internet giants for facilitating pirating—I forget the details, but was satisfied that he had the right of the case, and of course most of my works have been pirated—I supported him with a check for $5,000. He won his case, and repaid me. But we remained personally estranged, by my choice.

And so it was when he died. I remember a story he wrote, where a man helped another who was dying, and then at the end asked “Did you think you would have to go alone?” and went with him. I hope Harlan found a friend to support him similarly on that final journey. He was a remarkable figure in the field, but he had some phenomenal liabilities and, to paraphrase Shakespeare, taken all in all he was a man, and we shall not see his like again.

Personal notes: my wife and I had our 62nd anniversary, and celebrated with a slice of blueberry pie. At our age, that suffices. I had another cat-scan, and it revealed no malignancy. Remember how the incidentalomas can be bird, rabbit, or turtle? I have a dead turtle. That’s a relief. Meanwhile I am making notes for Xanth novel #45, A Tryst of Fate, and have decided to have a lady character called Incident who is an oma, who has three animals: a bird, a rabbit, and a turtle. They are dedicated to deadly mischief, but get converted to doing good. Can’t think how that notion came to me. We are still marketing the prior three Xanths; maybe next column I’ll have news.

Healthy living: researchers now believe that loneliness is as bad for a person as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It can shave eight years from life expectancy and has a negative effect on quality of life. It is also important to be optimistic and to have a purpose in life. But material welfare also counts. There is a book titled Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by David Graeber, whose thesis is that a large share of workers today are engaged in performing pointless tasks. Up to 40% believe their labor has no meaning for contributing to society, and the indication is that they are right. They spend their time in make-work, pretending to be useful. Why do such purposeless jobs persist? Because they keep the masses busy and subdued. Then there is the wage mystery: with the economy doing so well, and unemployment under 4%, why is wage growth stagnant? It seems that the big companies are putting downward pressure on wages. They have largely gotten rid of the unions, or rendered them powerless, so the average man has no recourse. Today a minimum-wage worker can’t afford a two bedroom apartment anywhere in the USA. And maybe not coincidentally, the combined wealth held by the world’s millionaires has increased for the sixth consecutive year, passing $70 trillion, and rising rapidly. And the suicide rate is rising in tandem with the wealth inequality. Meanwhile the big companies that benefit most from the Trump tax cuts are not spending more, but hanging on to it. You expected generosity? There are now more guns than people in the United States; that facilitates suicide. So your job is meaningless and your wage is stagnant, but don’t be negative, because that isn’t healthy.

Food: if meat is grown in the laboratory without harming any animals, what should it be called? Clean Meat? The conventional meat industry doesn’t like that, because it implies that traditional meat is dirty. I, as a vegetarian, don’t like it either, because I don’t want to eat any meat, dirty or clean. So I have a suggestion: spell it backward. Taem, or Kaets, or Feeb, or Bmal, or Korp, or Nekcihc (maybe Neckich). Problem solved.

Fakery: a news item reports how press secretary Sarah Sanders and a party of eight entered the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. The owner quietly asked them to leave, because several of the restaurant employees are gay and Sanders is a known bully who echoes President Trump’s bigotry on that score. Sanders then attacked The Red Hen on Twitter, trying to ruin it, and so did President Trump. Well, I say a pox on both their houses. I disagree with that cake maker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay wedding, because he is in the business of serving the public, not of imposing his bigotry on others. If he feels otherwise, he should leave that business. Similarly, the Red Hen is serving the public, and should not have asked Sanders to leave. That kind of opposition to bigotry is its own bigotry, and fake liberalism. Had the party started a fight, or thrown food on the floor, or been otherwise obnoxious, they could have called the police to settle it. But just going there to eat? Refusing to serve them because of whom they were? The way blacks and Jews used to be refused? They should have been politely fed, like anyone else. At least it would then have been evident who was civil and who was bigoted.

PIERS

STAR TREK

I watched Star Trek The Next Generation Season 6, Episode #21 “Frame of Mind.” Riker is rehearsing for a role in a play by that title that Beverly is directing. He says he may be surrounded by insanity, but he is not insane. Then he encounters an odd person, and wonders. Then he finds himself elsewhere being treated by Dr. Syrus for mental disorders. It seems that his position on the Enterprise is a delusion. He wakes; was it a bad dream? What is reality? Dr. Syrus puts him into Reflection Therapy, interacting with different aspects of his own personality. These are animated by other officers of the Enterprise. He rejects them as delusions, and they vanish. He keeps breaking out of delusions, into other delusions, until they finally rescue him for real. This is an exercise in paranoia to which anyone can relate.

#22 “Suspicions” Beverly says she’s not a doctor on the Enterprise any more. What happened? She tells Guinan, and we go into a flashback. A Ferengi scientist has an invention that others don’t take seriously. But Beverly has read his paper and is impressed, so she assembles four noted scientists to check it out. It is a shield that can protect a shuttle flying into a star. Something goes wrong, and a scientist is lost. Then the Ferengi scientist dies. Did the Klingon woman kill him? Beverly does an autopsy on the Ferengi’s body—and finds nothing. She has violated protocols for nothing. Guinan persuades her to investigate farther. She takes a shuttle into the star, proving that the shield works. It failed because it was sabotaged. It was, but the saboteur is aboard planning to steal the invention for himself, and she has to fight him off. But she has won her case.

#23 “Rightful Heir” Worf does not report on time for duty. Something is wrong. He is trying to verify his Klingon beliefs. Picard gives him leave to visit Boreth, a sacred planet, and do what he needs to. And the hero Kahless returns, not a vision, but real. Worf challenges him, but can’t prove anything. Kahless is beamed aboard the Enterprise. The leader Gowron comes, skeptical. They test Kahless’ blood, and it matches. Gowron fights him and defeats him, which disproves him as the greatest warrior of all. Then the elders explain that he is a clone of the original Kahless. But the people need him as a moral leader. Worf argues that he should be Emperor, exercising moral power rather than political. But Worf’s own faith has not been found.

#24 “Second Chances” An Away party beams to Planet Nirvala IV, during a brief window of opportunity that occurs only once every eight years. And the man they encounter is Riker. So now there are two Rikers, genetically identical. He knows Deanna Troi; they had a relationship. She has moved on, emotionally but he hasn’t; he still loves her. She is interested. It seems that he was the one who broke it off before; now he won’t. They go together to receive a key database; there’s an accident, and Riker senior saves Riker junior. Deanna may join Junior in the future.

#25 “Timescape” They pick up a Romulan distress call. Meanwhile, about to return from conferences, Picard, Data, Geordi, and Deanna are comparing notes, but there are several one second pauses that only Deanna notices. Then she freezes for three minutes. The others notice that. Then their shuttle malfunctions. There’s a temporal anomaly that accelerates time 50-fold. They discover temporal anomalies all around, each governing time at a different rate, moving toward the Enterprise. They discover the Enterprise and a Romulan warbird frozen in time together. They make a protective time capsule and three of them beam aboard the Enterprise. They find everyone frozen, and three Romulans aboard, also frozen. It seems the Enterprise was in the process of beaming more Romulans aboard when the freeze occurred. They learn that temporal aliens mistook the Romulan engine core for a natural black hole, and placed their young there, triggering devastating time warps. Time is proceeding forward and backward. They manage to help enough to enable the aliens to depart, restoring things to normal.

#26 “Descent, Part I” Stephen Hawking has a bit part, playing himself in a holodeck sequence, which also features Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. That is interrupted by a problem outside; a strange vessel is there, and a planetary station may be in trouble. Riker, Data, Worf, and a woman beam to the station, which seems inoperative, the personnel dead. Data bypasses the primary system. Then they encounter the Borg. This is odd; they seem to be acting as individuals, with emotion. The Borg and their ship depart, but the oddness remains. Data is concerned, because he felt anger. Is he finally coming alive? Then the Borg attack a colony again. Two Borg beam aboard, and one survives. That one persuades Data to depart with him. Riker and Worf beam to a planetary surface with a team, looking for Data. They and other search parties canvas the terrain. Picard with Deanna and Geordi read another party, and get ambushed by the Borg. Data is there, with an artificial Data, now the enemy. This concludes Season Six. We’ll see what is next.

Season 7 #1 “Descent, Part II” Data is a Borg now, experiencing emotions. Picard talks to him, getting him to think about right and wrong. He begins to reconsider. His evil brother Lore is ready to kill him, but Data kills Lore. Meanwhile the Enterprise figures out how to destroy the Borg ship. So in the end the humans win, and Data is back as he was.

#2 “Liaisons” They formally meet the Lyaar ambassadors. Worf has to show one around the ship, and is not keen on the notion. Deanna shows another around. Picard goes with the third, Voval, to visit their planet. All the Lyaar are taciturn to the point of rudeness. Picard’s craft crashes on an anonymous planet, and he is rescued by Anna, a survivor of a prior crash seven years before. She says she loves him and tries to keep him there, and is distraught when he demurs. It turns out that Voval is a shape changer who assumed the form of Anna in order to study human love. They return to the Enterprise, mutually educated.

#3 “Interface” Geordi is testing an interface that seems to put him in the scene physically though it’s actually a probe there. Then they learn that the Hera, the ship that his mother commands, has disappeared. Meanwhile he interfaces with a locally distressed ship, but its crew are all dead. And there’s a fire, and he burns his hands, despite not being there physically. He visits another ship, and encounters his mother on the Raman. He touches her, there is a flash, and he is disconnected. The others don’t credit it, because the Hera should be 300 light years away. Geordi risks his own death in his effort to save his mother and her crew. But it’s not his mother, but an alien who assumed her form to communicate with him. At least he manages to save the aliens.

#4 “Gambit Part I” A crew from the Enterprise are at an alien bar, questioning creatures about the disappearance of Picard. The report is he got vaporized. It seems he is dead. They are all sad and angry, Riker especially; he is determined to deal with those who did this. They go to the planet where the mercenary perpetrators went, and the Away team gets ambushed and Riker gets captured. And Picard is there, now called the smuggler Galen, or someone who resembles him, saying Riker should be killed. But Picard is faking; it’s a matter of survival. The mercenaries are stealing Romulan artifacts, looking for one particular one, to sell to the Romulans.

#5 “Gambit Part II” The Romulan woman Tallera turns out to be a Vulcan agent who exchanges confidences with Picard. She says they are searching for a device that enhances telepathy so it can be used as a weapon. That’s the point of this whole business. Picard and Riker manage to fool the mercenary leader, and Picard and Tallera take over the mission. In the end Picard understands the artifact better than Tallera does, and knows how to defeat it. So all ends well. It may not be relevant, but I must say that Tallera, as a Romulan or Vulcan female, is quite attractive as a human, too.

#6 “Phantasms” Data suffers a nightmare. How is that possible? He is using a program for dreams, but why have they turned bad? Then he has one while awake, a bad vision, a hallucination. And others, as they cause him to attack Deanna Troi. He thought he saw a mouth on her shoulder, that he had to destroy. Then they discover odd creatures that feed on people like leeches. Data may be reacting to them. It turns out that Data can emit a high pitched noise that hurts the creatures. That eliminates the infection that came aboard with a new phase converter.

#7 “Dark Page” Deanna’s nuisance of a mother, Lwaxana, visits again. She is communicating with the Cairn, a visually telepathic race, and it is wearing her out emotionally. She collapses when communicating with Maques, a Carnn man. There’s something about the interaction between two kinds of telepathy that can damage a person’s mind. Deanna links with Lwaxana and finds herself in her mother’s bad dream. Incidental comment: ever since a visiting captain required Deanna to don a conventional uniform, she has continued wearing it. I think she looks better that way. Lwaxana’s horror is the memory of the accidental death of Deanna’s older sister Kestra as a child; Lwaxana blamed herself. Now she can let it go.

#8 “Attached” Picard and Beverly Crusher beam to the Kes, who seek admittance to the Federation of half of their world, an unusual request. Instead they arrive as prisoners of the Prytt, the other part of the planet. There are control implants in the back of their necks. They used a tractor beam to divert the transmission. Alone, they talk, and we learn that long ago he loved her, but she was married to his best friend, so he was silent, and now it has faded to friendship. The implants enable them to read each others thoughts to a degree. They escape the prison and flee across the surface, then are rescued. The implants are removed, but it is clear that feelings remain.

#9 “Force of Nature” They are in search of the lost medical ship the Fleming. They locate it. A lady scientist, Dr. Serova, has a theory that cumulative warp drive use can disrupt space. She tries to demonstrate, putting the Fleming in danger. Her brother Dr. Rabal does his best to help them. They beam the Fleming crew aboard and ride a distortion field out of the rift, bit it’s a rough ride. Warping does affect space. Hereafter Federation ships will be limited to Warp 5 except in extreme emergency.

#10 “Inheritance” Planet Atrea is cooling, solidifying the molten core at a rate that will make it uninhabitable in 13 months. They will try to use the phasers to inject energy that will keep it molten. The lady representative, Juliana Tainer, explains to Data that she was once Dr. Soong’s wife and was there at Data’s creation; in a sense she is his mother. But she turns out to be an android herself, who believed she was alive, and his mother. Data decides to keep the secret, rather than destroying her fond illusion. And they succeed in stabilizing the planet.

#11 “Parallels” Worf returns from a Klingon competition that he won. Then he experiences dizziness, and seeming loss of memory. But he clearly remembers things that the others don’t. What is happening? Then he turns out to be married to Deanna Troi. Riker is captain, as Picard died four years ago. This is weird! They conjecture that Worf is being shifted to different realities. Then different realities start merging, producing multiple Enterprises. They succeed in sending him back to his original reality. His memory is intact; he will have a considerable story to tell. Lost in space 12 years ago.

#12 “The Pegasus” This ship was lost in space 12 years ago, but now the Romulans may have found it. It was Riker’s first ship. The Romulans claim to be surveying local space. It seems that they were doing an experiment, and maybe they can now complete it. Admiral Pressman joins the Enterprise, Riker’s captain when the Pegasus was lost. He talks with Riker: did they do the right thing? Picard learns from Riker that at the time of crisis, there was a mutiny aboard the Pegasus. Riker sided with the captain. Why did the others mutiny? Riker won’t tell Picard. They find the Pegasus inside an asteroid, having materialized overlapping it. They salvage a key piece of equipment. It is a special cloaking device that can also phase through matter. It is also in violation of the Federation agreement. That’s why the Romulans were after it. They arrest the Admiral; there will be a court martial. Riker will be charged also, though he may give evidence and get off.

#13 “Homeward” They answer a distress call from Nikolai, Worf’s human brother, who is an observer of a primitive culture. The planet Boraal may become uninhabitable in 36 hours. Worf’s Away party beams to caverns, where he meets Nikolai. Picard refuses to violate the Prime Directive by saving the natives, but Nikolai beams a village to the Holodeck. They don’t know they are no longer home. They are taken to Vacca, the most likely suitable planet. But Vorin, their young village chronicler, happens to wander out of the Holodeck and discovers the Enterprise. They have to explain things to him. If he tells his people the truth, it will destroy their culture. But can he live with a lie? Vorin, in an impossible situation, kills himself. The Boraalsians reach their new planet and will survive, their culture intact. Nikolai marries one of their women and will stay with them.

#14 “Sub Rosa” A memorial service for Beverly Crusher’s grandmother, Nana, who raised her after her mother died. They are visiting a recreated Scottish colony. Beverly reads a journal. Ned the caretaker warns her that a particular candle brings bad luck, but she insists on keeping it. She learns from the journal that her grandmother, over a century old, had a 30 year old lover, Ronin. Ned says the house is haunted, and if she lights the candle it will summon a ghost. Ronin is the ghost, 800 years old . He has loved Beverly’s ancestors through the centuries. She is highly intrigued. Ronin tells her to light the candle so they can be together always. She lights it. He comes, dissolves into vapor, and phases into her. She resigns her commission and means to join the colony. Data and Geordi zero in on the source of an odd energy signal. Then Ronin appears to Picard and knocks him out. They exhume Nana’s body, and Nana wakes. Beverly catches on and destroys the candle, then shoots Ronin though she almost loves him. She is sorry to have eliminated the entity that made her ancestors so happy. This is one intriguing ghost story.

#15 “Lower Decks” This concerns promotion of lower ranking officers, who are much concerned with contacts and recommendations. Meanwhile the ship is near Cardassian space, and they have a wounded Cardassian in sick bay. He is actually a Federation operative. But the lady junior officer assigned to accompany him on his return is killed in the line of duty. That is a pall on all. This is a nice change of pace episode, showing another side of fleet operations.

#16 “Thine Own Self” Data seems to be suffering amnesia on a colony. He is carrying a radioactive artifact. They name him Jayden. Then he inadvertently shows his strength, amazing them. He learns to function well enough in this society. Then he is injured in the head and its metallic nature is revealed. Meanwhile the radioactivity sickens his host and the daughter Gia. He makes a liquid to cure it, and that helps. But the villagers distrust him and run a spear through his body. Then a party from the Enterprise comes and rescues him, getting him functioning again.

#17 “Masks” They encounter a rogue comet, en route for 87 million years. Something from it seems to be affecting the Enterprise’s computer. They vaporize the shell of the comet, and inside is an 87 million year old structure. Then Data changes to the alien Ihat, who says Masaka is waking. And prostrates himself before Dianna Troi. He has the android equivalent of multiple personality disorder. Meanwhile the ship is being reconfigured. A piece of equipment becomes a writhing nest to snakes. The alien artifact is using the elements of the ship to create its own culture. Picard dons the mask of Korgano that Data made and back Ihat off, restoring the ship.

#18 “Eye of the Beholder” A junior officer, Lieutenant Kwan, suicides. He seemed normal almost to the end. Why did he suddenly turn suicidal? Deanna talks with Maddy, Kwan’s girlfriend, and with his supervisor; both say he was normal. Then, in his workplace, Deanna experiences a sudden suicidal urge. Later she revisits it, with Worf as backup, and he disappears. She sees visions. Then Worf is back. She may have experienced an eight year old incident there, when the Enterprise was built. Later she talks with Worf, and they kiss and make love. They discover human remains that may have triggered memories. They plan to talk with Lieutenant Pierce, a person of interest, Deanna suffers hallucinations and tries to commit suicide. Worf saves her. She has relived an eight year old murder and suicide sequence. That is evidently what happened to Lt. Kwan.

#19 “Genesis” They are testing enhanced weapons, and a torpedo goes astray. Worf is upset; he is evidently suffering emotionally. He tears up his bed to sleep on the fragments. Deanna seems to be suffering too. She takes a bath in her uniform. Others are also reacting, including Riker. Something is spreading, causing mischief. Picard and Data return to the ship, and find it weirdly shut down. They find Deanna who has become an amphibian. The bridge is unmanned. Riker is an animal. The crew is de-evolving, becoming more primitive, victim of a virus. Some are transforming to completely different creatures. Data manages to develop a cure than slowly returns the ship’s personnel to normal.

#20 “Journey’s End” Wesley Crusher returns to the Enterprise, but seems ill at ease. Meanwhile there’s a new treaty with the Cardassians, and some colonies have to be moved, including an American Indian one. But they don’t want to go, as this echoes the malign experience on Earth. Wesley meets with an Indian seer, who enables him to have a vision of his late father, who tells him to follow his own course. He resigns from the academy, knowing that removing the Indians by force is wrong. Wesley tries to intervene, and discovers that the Indian sage is actually The Traveler, his alien mentor. They depart. Picard and the Cardassian leader confer with the Indian chief, and they decide to let the planet leave the Federation and became part of the Cardassian Empire. War is averted.

#21 “Firstborn” Worf is trying to educate his son Alexander about becoming a warrior, but the boy does not want to be a warrior. So they attend a Klingon ceremony. That impresses the boy. But Worf gets attacked, and his brother K’mtar intercedes, and also talks to the boy about Klingon culture. Who tried to ambush Worf? The Klingon Duras sisters Lursa and B’tar. So they go in search of them. Then Alexander returns from 40 years in the future, as K’mtar, trying to change the past, and make himself a warrior so he could protect Worf from a later, successful attempt at assassination. If he failed, he was going to kill himself as a child.

#22 “Bloodlines” A small probe projects a Ferengi holograph: the Bok Ferengi says
Picard killed his son 15 years ago, and now he will kill Picard’s son, Jason Vigo. Picard did not know he had a son from a casual liaison 24 years ago, but it could be true. They rescue Jason from a cave, a genetic test indicates that he is Picard’s son. Bok appears in Picard’s room. Jason is not much interesting in getting to know his father. Bok appears again, swearing revenge. Jason has a neural condition that could kill him if untreated, so they are treating him. Then Bok manages to beam Jason to his own ship. Picard pursues and rescues him, but has learned he is not actually his son; Bok faked the record. Picard and Jason part amicably.

#23 “Emergence” Picard and Data are in a Shakespearean play rendition in the holodeck when a physical train passes through: the Orient Express. And the Enterprise jumped into warp just in time to save it from disaster, without human direction. Also, at least seven holodeck programs are overlapping scenes. The holodeck has control of the ship. They help the train move forward, and it moves the ship forward at warp 9. When a new life form occurs, it takes off, and control of the ship returns to the regular crew.

#24 “Preemptive Strike” Lieutenant Ro Laren returns. There is a distress call from a Cardassian ship, that seems to be under attack by several small Federation ships. This is odd. The attack by Maquis ships is in violation of the treaty. Someone is trying to stir up war. They send Ro as an undercover agent, as her history makes her credible as a rogue. She succeeds in hijacking medical supplies the Maquis need for their mission. Now they trust her. Instead of leading the Marquis into a trap, she aborts the mission, saving them, and joins them. Picard is not pleased, but perhaps understands.

#25 “All Good Things…” Picard seems to be time traveling in his own life, one moment being young, another moment being an old retired man in a vineyard. He is with Tasha when they first met, then back in the present, then back in the future. He suffers from Irumodic syndrome that messes up his awareness. He keeps seeing others laughing at him. In the course of these shifts we gain a picture of the future of these personnel. Worf is to be with Deanna. Picard marries Beverly. And Q appears. He is putting Picard and mankind on trial, and the decision is to destroy mankind. They go to the Devron system to investigate an anomaly in the neutral zone. Here time and anti-time are merging and annihilating each other. Q says that Picard causes the temporal anomaly at the beginning of life on Earth, and the anomaly is destroying mankind. They create it by firing from three different times, and destroy it by nullifying it from three times. They have saved humanity. And The Next Generation series has ended. I really enjoyed it, finding it a shade more intellectual and sensitive than the original Star Trek, and with impeccable taste in sightly ladies.

Deep Space Nine season 1, episode #1 “Emissary” This is an outlying station tear the Cardassian border. The station is attacked by the Borg, who have taken over Captain Picard. The station is destroyed as Commander Benjamin Sisko escapes. Three years later they are reconstructing the station. Sisko meets Picard on the Enterprise. Then the Ferengi Quark. And Major Kira. Chief O’Brien, formerly of the Enterprise. Lieutenant Dax, who only appears to be an attractive young human woman. Sisko and Dax travel through a stable wormhole. Meanwhile the station is attacked by the Cardassians. Then the wormhole opens by the station, and Sisko returns. The Cardassians back off. The presence of the wormhole makes this an area of strategic importance to the Federation, changing the picture. Sisko, in doubt about remaining, has changed his mind. I suspect the actor was chosen for his remarkable evocative voice; it has a smoky quality that stands out in a way his appearance does not.

DS9 #2 “Past Prologue” A Bajoran officer, Tahna Loss, is chased by Cardassians and seeks refuge at the station. The Cardassian envoy Garak demands that Tahna be turned over to them. The Klingon women Lursa and B’tar arrive; Odo disarms them and lets them be, but watches them. They are troublemakers who show a lot of breast. Tahna is plotting to destroy the wormhole; Kira fights him, making her choice of sides: supporting Sisko and the station.

DS9 #3 “A Man Alone” This is a murder mystery. A visitor that security constable Odo doesn’t like is abruptly stabbed to death. It looks as if only a shape shifter could have done it, and the only one on the station is Odo, the head of security. Sisko relieves him of duty, though he doesn’t think he’s guilty. Odo becomes a pariah. Then they find that the murder victim was a clone; in effect he killed himself to frame Odo.

DS9 #4 “Babel” Chief O’Brien. Is working continuously to fix a glut of problems, losing sleep. He starts not making sense. Kira takes him to Dr. Bashir. He has become aphasic. Then it happens to Dax. And to others. It’s a virus that randomly reroutes mental signals. It quickly spreads throughout the station. It seems to be an artificial Bajoran virus left here 18 years ago. The doctor gets it. Sisko gets it. It’s up to Kira, Odo, and Quark. And Kira gets it. They find the antidote, and things are slowly returning to normal. 

DS9 #5 “Captive Pursuit” A small ship come through the wormhole, transported 90,000 light years. The pilot is Tosk. His ship needs repair. He refuses to reveal his mission. “Allow me to die with honor,” he says. Another ship comes through the wormhole. Three red suited figures beam aboard. This is a hunt, and Tosk is the prey. He lives to outwit the hunters, until he dies with honor. To be brought back alive would be his greatest humiliation. O’Brien helps him to resume the hunt. Sisko bawls him out, but tacitly helps. He understands.

DS9 #6 “Q-Less” And of course Q messes in with Deep Space Nine. Archaeologist Vash, an attractive and mischievous woman who once dated Picard, and also had an affair with Q, is passing through on business. She has a way with men of any species. But Q wants her back, and is guiding the space station into the wormhole where it will be torn apart, in the hope of persuading her to join him. Unless they can divert the power drain that is doing it. They succeed, barely in time. Q remains jilted.

DS9 #7 “Dax” Three strangers abduct Jadzia Dax, knocking her out. They catch a ship out, but a tractor beam hauls them back. Then they say they have a valid arrest warrant for her, for treason and murder that occurred 30 years ago. It is established that when a Trill goes to a new host, memories remain complete. It is a symbiosis, neither governing the other. Curzon Dax, the prior male, whom Sisko knew well, was an honorable man, incapable of what he is accused of. But his wife has a different impression. But Jadzia refuses to defend herself. Until the wife comes to testify that Curzon was in her bed at the time he is accused of sending the traitorous message. That ends the case. Jadzia did not want to tell.

DS9 #8 “The Passenger” Kira and Bashir answer a distress call, going out in a ship. They rescue Kajada, who was guarding a dangerous prisoner Vantika, who is dead—if he really is dead. He may be using a portion of another person’s brain. Maybe Kajada’s. Or Bashir’s. A Federation security officer Primmin works with Odo. Vantika takes over Bashir’s body and hijacks a ship. After a tense showdown they manage to enable Bashir to recover control and they banish Vantika.

DS9 #9 “Move Along Home” A Wadi ship comes through the wormhole, for First Contact. But all the Wadi want is to play games. They turn out to be excellent gamblers, consistently winning. Then Sisko, Dax, Bashir, and Kira get trapped in some alternate frame where they have to play a child’s game and go through mazes to make progress. Odo is left to figure things out, along with Quark. They are caught in a deadly game whose rules they don’t know. They lose but survive: it is only a game. The Wadi move on.

DS9 #10 “The Nagus” The Ferengi will have an important conference at the station. This is of course mischief. The Grand Nagus conducts it. There are millions of new worlds to exploit in the Gamma Quadrant, that are not familiar with the dubious reputation of the Ferengi. Quark is assigned to lead the effort as the new Grand Nagus. That makes him a target for assassination by his brother, who wants to take over. He is saved by his father, who isn’t dead after all. So he loses the position, which is surely just as well.

DS9 #11 “The Vortex” There is an altercation, and a killing, and Odo learns that there may be other shape shifters like him in the sector. But Croden, the only one who can take him to them, is a conniving criminal being returned to his world for justice. They pick up. Croden’s daughter on the way, and Odo gives them passage to a Vulcan planet, sparing Croden.

DS9 #12 “Battle Lines” Opaka the Kai visits and they take her on a tour into the wormhole. Sisko, Kira, and Bashir operate the ship. They encounter others, are fired on, and crash on a planet. Opaka is killed. It’s a prison planet. Then Opaka revives. Also a dead prisoner. They are in chronic war. But they can’t leave this planet or they will die. But all they want is to destroy their enemy. So they leave without Opaka. That is not a suitable answer.

DS9 #13 “The Storyteller” They are to negotiate a decision between Paqu and Navot, who are chronically at war. The course of a river has changed, butting land in the other territory. Who gets the land? The representative from Paqu is an attractive young woman, Varis. There is also a plague in a village on Bajor, so Bashir and O’Brien got there. The Dal’Rok comes, resembling a twisted cloud of smoke. Their dying leader, the Sirah, says O’Brien can stop it from destroying the village, just by standing up to it. And it works, as the Sirah dies. Now O’Brien must be the next Sirah, which he doesn’t want. Meanwhile the boys, Jake and Nog, get in trouble, trying to cultivate Varis. O’Brien learns that the Dal’Rok is the manifestation of the villagers fears. The Sirah unifies the villagers to emotionally repel it. Finally the villagers accept the apprentice Sirah as the real Sirah, letting O’Brien off the hook, and Varis works out a compromise between the enemies.

DS9 #14 “Progress” The moon whose molten core they hope to tap for energy was supposed to have been evacuated by now, but there is a sign of life, so Nerys Kira beams down to check. There’s a whole family there, determined to stay. Meanwhile Jake and Nog try to arrange a good deal for surplus merchandise, in this case self-sealing stem bolts. Kira likes the old farmer and sympathizes with his position, but she has to get him off the moon or he will die. Sisko likes Kira and understands her position, but reminds her that now she is on the other side. Finally she burns down the farm house and takes the old man off the planet, doing her job the hard way. It is touching and painful.

DS9 #15 “If Horses Were Wishes” O’Brien tells his daughter the Rumpelstiltskin story. Then Rumpelstiltskin appears in the flesh. Meanwhile Dax comes on to Bashir. He likes her very well, but doesn’t trust this, as she has rejected his prior advances. She’s a duplicate generated from his imagination; the real one still exists. In fact the two Daxes get into an argument about who is a cold fish. Delightful! A baseball player Sisko likes also appears from the holodeck. And an emu bird. Two sexy women for Quark. Something has turned the whole station into a holodeck of wish fulfillment. The figments get together and discuss the situation. So do the real folk. It’s a rupture in space that is expanding; they need to end it. Kira experiences a scary hallucination that does disappear. They finally manage to end the rupture, and adjust their imaginations, and the figments disappear. Mostly. It seems there is a species that is observing the station, and this is part of that. A really fun episode.

DS9 #16 “The Forsaken” Four ambassadors visit and are a supreme bore. Betazoaid Lwaxana Troi, of prior series fame, is one of them. She says her brooch has been stolen. Odo finds it on a relative of the Ferengi, and Lwaxana is highly impressed. She comes on to him. Meanwhile an alien probe arrives, tumbling through space; they check it cautiously. The station computer malfunctions. Odo and Lwaxana are trapped for hours in an elevator. He has to dissolve every 16 hours, and the time comes upon him. She catches him in her apron. The station finally gets back in working order. Odo and Lwaxana are developing mutual respect. Another fun episode.

DS9 #17 “Dramatis Personae” a Klingon ship come through the wormhole and explodes. They manage to beam one Klingon aboard. He says “Victory!” and dies. Meanwhile Kira is convinced a Valerian ship is bringing weapon grade Dolomide to the Cardassians to be used against the Bajorans. She seems to be conspiring for power against Sisko. But Sisko does not seem entirely rational either. There seems to be a telepathic field that is causing people to choose sides for a confrontation. That’s what happened on the Klingon ship. That’s what destroyed it. Odo manages to eject the field into space, and the personnel return to normal. Close call.

DS9 #18 “Duet” A freighter docks, and has an ill passenger, Marritza, who is beamed directly to the infirmary. Kira checks, and asks for immediate security. She recognizes him as a Cardassian criminal whose disease must have been acquired at a notorious labor camp, Gallitep. She interviews him, and his story differs; he was only a file clerk. But when they check a picture, they discover that he was not a file clerk, but the camp leader, Gul Darhe’el. He is proud of what he did, running a completely orderly camp, killing Bajorans. Further investigation indicates that Gul died six years ago. The prisoner had surgical alteration of his face to resemble Gul. He is actually Marritza, torn by guilt for the crimes he was unable to stop. He’s really on the same side as Kira. So they release him—but a Bajoran murders him simply because he is a Cardassian. A powerful episode, reminiscent of the horrors and passions of World War II.

DS9 #19 “In the Hands of the Prophets” O’Brien’s wife is now a teacher, teaching science, not religion. A Bajoran woman, Vedek (priestess) Winn, says this is blasphemy and must not continue. The teacher refuses to delete science from the program. So it is war. Most of the Bajoran children stop attending the school. There also has been a murder of a crewman. Then the school gets bombed. O’Brien’s assistant Neela, a Bajoran, is evidently part of a plot. It is increasingly apparent that there is more here than a simple difference of philosophy. It turns out to be a plot to prevent a more liberal Vedek from assuming leadership. This is another hard-hitting episode, addressing the problem of religion vs. science. It is clear that Deep Space Nine is ready to explore challenging issues. This ends Season One. I am favorably impressed.

DS9 Season 2 #1 “The Homecoming” A Balsic freighter captain gives Quark an earring to deliver to Bajor, saying any Bajoran will know what it is. He takes it to Kira, who does recognize it. It is from Bareil Li Nalas, a Bajoran resistance leader presumed dead; she must rescue him. Meanwhile the emblem of The Circle appears; that movement believes that Bajor should be for the Bajorans alone. Sisko is wary of that. Kira and O’Brien take a runabout to Bajor, theoretically to deliver a delicacy to an important figure. They land at a work camp, finding a number of Bajorans there. There are supposed to be no Baroran prisoners remaining. They rescue six in a pitched battle. The Cardassian commander apologizes and also returns the four prisoners they had to leave behind. Li Nalas has returned to unify Bajor at last. It badly needs it, but he does not want to do it. He says his reputation is based on an exaggerated story; he is not the man they think he is. He is appointed to be the new Bajoran liaison officer, replacing Kira. That pleases none of them: Kira, Li Nalas, or Sisko.

DS9 S2 #2 “The Circle” It seems that Kira has been promoted, but she is going extremely reluctantly, and none of the station officers wants her to go. For now she goes to the monastery, associating with Li Nalas. Bajoran unrest continues. Odo, in the form of a rat, is evidently checking out a ship suspected of running guns. Kira is abducted from the monastery and learns that Minister Essa Jaro runs the Circle and means to take over the government of Bajor. Sisko leads a raiding party on the Circle’s headquarters and rescues Kira. But ships are converging, and the station must be evacuated. The Cardassians seem to be in the verge of taking over Bajor again, and the station, and the invaluable wormhole.

DS9 S2 #3 “The Siege” Sisko means to stay to oversee the station evacuation, theoretically. Actually to try to delay things long enough for the Cardassian plot to be revealed. He releases the others to depart, but all of them elect to remain. But they will evacuate their families. The troops arrive and board the station, finding no one there. Until they get quietly ambushed. Meanwhile Kira and Dax locate and activate a ten year old shuttle and fight off other craft. Kira can pilot, and Dax has memories from one of her former hosts that has technical expertise. In the end they manage to show the Bajoran general that the Cardassians are behind it, and that ends that plot. Bajor has been saved.

DS9 S2 #4 “Invasive Procedures” A plasma storm forces a temporary evacuation of the station, with only a skeleton crew. Klingons invade and take over the station, having had Quark disable the security system. What do they want? Their leader Verad wants Dax—not the girl, but the sympbiont. They set Verad and Dax up in parallel beds in the infirmary and the symbiont is transferred. Now Verad has Dax’s memories, while Dax herself is dying. Mareel, the girlfriend, is sure she remains so, but Sisko tells her she isn’t. It is apparent that Verad is not the same man he was. Then Sisko shoots Verad, and they transfer the symbiont back to Dax. So they have Dax back, whole.

DS9 S2 #5 “Cardassians” Garak is a Cardassian tailor who does business with Bajorans, which requires considerable mutual trust, as their species are passionate enemies. A Bajoran man and his adopted Cardassian son, twelve year old Rugal, visit the station, and the boy bites Garak on the hand. That precipitates an investigation. Gul Dukat, the Cardassian leader, wants this clarified. There may be more going on here than shows. They separate Rugal from his father in order to learn more about him, and he stays with O’Brien and Keiko and plays with their four year old daughter. He turns out to be the son of a prominent Cardassian official, who thought he was dead and is eager to reclaim him. Sisko must arbitrate to decide where the boy goes. He decides to return him to his natural father, and the boy reluctantly goes. It is as much a political decision as a family one.

DS9 S2 #6 “Melora” A new cartographer comes, pretty Melora Pazlar. She is from a low gravity planet and needs a kind of powered wheelchair to get about, but she is fiercely independent, declining to accept much help. Meanwhile an old friend, Fallit Kot, comes to see Quark, saying he has come to kill him. Melora entertains Bashir in her non-gravity suite; she’s not at all weak or helpless there. He finds a treatment that enables her to walk normally in this gravity. She must move on, but she has enjoyed her stay here, especially with Bashir. And Quark buys his way out of trouble.

DS9 S2 #7 “Rules of Acquisition” Quark becomes a negotiator for the Nagus, with the chance to make a fabulous profit. The Dosi will hold a conference here. He enlists smart assistant, Pel—who turns out, in private, to be female. Ferengi females are not allowed out of the house, but she pretended to be male and has done well. Until she fell in love with Quark. That complicates things. It is not clear to me whether this torpedoes the big deal.

DS9 S2 #8 “Necessary Evil” This is a murder mystery. Quark gets shot and robbed. His brother Rom gets accused, though he didn’t do it. Gul Dukat asks Odo to investigate the murder of a Bajoran. The widow points out a suspect: a girl her husband was having an affair with. Odo questions the girl, who says no, no affair, just an acquaintanceship. Quark was shot for a list of names of Bajoran collaborators with the Cardassians. Kira was involved, needing the list to find out who was betraying the resistance. I am not clear what happened when, who who killed whom, but Odo was quite sharp, observing details few would catch, and did figure it out.

DS9 S2 #9 “Second Sight” Sisko meets lovely Fenna, who is passing through. He offers to show her around the station, but she is gone. Professor Seyetik visits, a terraformer. Fenna reappears, highly approachable, but quickly departs when he asks her about herself. She turns out to be Seyetik’s wife Nidell! Only she says she never met him before, and there’s no record of anyone accompanying Seyetik. Then Fenna reappears, says she thought she was looking for a place to stay, but realizes now that she was looking for a person. She kisses him, and disappears, fading out before him. Then she reappears in his room. It turns out that Nidell is a psycho-projector, and Fenna is her projection. Nidell is unconscious and dying; Fenna doesn’t know she is just energy, an illusion. The professor, conscious of the situation, commits suicide, to free her. But she fades, and Nidell can’t remember her, and goes home. The woman of Sisko’s dreams was only a dream. My favorite episode so far.

DS9 S2 #10 “Sanctuary” The musician Varani plays so beautifully that Quark is distraught; folks are listening instead of eating, drinking, and gambling, and profits are down. Meanwhile a ship is in trouble and stops for repairs, but the translators can’t handle their language so there is no verbal communication. Gradually the translators catch on, and dialogue is established. They are the Skyrreeans. Three million of their people need to be brought through the Eye of the Universe—the wormhole–here. They were virtual slaves to another culture, but escaped what that culture was destroyed by a third culture. Now they are refugees. There seems to be an ideal planet for them, but the Skirreeans want to go to Bajor. They refuse to listen to reason. They go to the other planet, feeling betrayed.

DS9 S2 #11 “Rivals” Odo arrests a con man, Martus. In a cell with an ailing man who dies, he takes a gambling device that resembles a child’s toy. Meanwhile Bashir plays racketball with O’Brien and wipes him out. Martus, released, resumes his con man ways. He’s good at it, and Quark resents it. But a run of bad luck occurs at the station, with people suffering minor injuries, computer foul-ups, etc. Quark promotes a big match between Bashir and O’Brien, to raise money. Dax discovers that neutrinos on the station are spinning the wrong way. This seems to affect luck, making highly improbable things happen. The “toy” is doing it. They destroy the toy and normalcy returns.

DS9 S2 #12 “The Alternate” Dr. Mora Pol comes to the station. He was the scientist at the lab where they were figuring Odo out. Mora thinks they may have discovered the origin of Odo’s kind. They go there and beam up a stone monument—and the ground shakes and they barely escape. They have a life form, but it escapes and trashes the lab. Mora is ailing. There is a 43 second gap in the security camera record. Then a blob attacks Bashir. Mora suspects that the blob is actually from Odo, when he’s in his gelatinous state. He’s right. They lure the thing into a force field and it materializes into Odo. They eliminate the aspect that is messing him up; he should be okay now.

DS9 S2 #13 “Armageddon Game” Bashir and O’Bcien are helping another station eliminate their stockpile of gene disruptors, the harvesters, left over from a war. One more weapon remains to be destroyed. Then raiders shoot the personnel; only Bashir and O’Brien escape, barely. Ambassadors tell Sisko that O’Brien accidentally caused a security device to flood the station with radiation and kill everyone aboard. That’s a lie; something more is evidently afoot. They are out to kill all who know anything about the harvester virus, so that it can’t ever be replicated, and that includes Bashir and O’Brien. And O’Brien has been infected by the harvester virus. Keiko views the recording and realizes that part of it is wrong. Sisko catches on and he and Dax manage to rescue them.

DS9 S2 #14 “Whispers” O’Brien is reviewing a wrongness. Keiko and their little girl Molly are acting oddly, and so are others. He suspects that they are not the real ones. He tries to check via the computer, but access is denied to key files, as of his return from the Parada system. He talks with Odo, who promises to check into it. But then Odo demurs, and he realizes that Odo, also, has been compromised. Then Sisko and others come, and he fights them off and escapes. But now he is a fugitive and they are searching for him. He beams himself to a shuttle and takes off. He contacts the admiral, who tells him to turn around and go back to the station. Instead he enters the wormhole and goes to the Parada system. He is pursued, but hides, then beams down to Parada II, were he is caught and turns out to be a replica himself. They don’t know what his programmed mission was, but the replica believed he was the original. I love there paranoid adventures!

DS9 S2 #15 “Paradise” They explore for good locales to set up new colonies. Sisko and O’Brien beam to a promising forested planet and are challenged. People were on their way to colonize elsewhere and had to land here, where no electronic equipment works, and have been here ten years. They have made a viable community governed by Alexus, but there are aspects that are not nice. It is really a dictatorship, masked as beneficial reforms. They punish Sisko because O’Brien tried to make his transporter work. O’Brien continues, and locates the buried device that suppresses technological activity, and turns it off. Now their phasers work. Now rescue is at hand, and all can be evacuated. But most of the community elects to remain.

DS9 S2 #16 “Shadowplay” Odo and Dax go to investigate odd particles beyond the wormhole. Dax hints that a woman is interested in Odo, but he’s not interested in any romance. They learn that 22 people have mysteriously disappeared over the last few months. Odo interviews Taya, the child daughter of the last one to disappear, and really likes her. She is really curious about his shape changing, but he demurs. It turns out that the whole village is populated by holograms: illusory people, who don’t know they’re not real. In fact they have been marrying and having children. Exactly what is reality, anyway? These people seem real enough. But the projector is breaking down. That’s why they are disappearing. Dax fixes it, and they are all back. Before he leaves, Odo performs one shape change for Taya, becoming a fancy jug, then returning to human.

DS9 S2 #17 “Playing God” Arjin comes to visit Jadzia Dax. He’s a prospective host for a trill, here for field training. Dax has a reputation for eliminating candidates. On the way, their shuttle collides with something, and they bring it in to the lab for analysis. It is a proto universe, destined to grow into a new universe. As it does, it will destroy this one. They need to contain it. But there’s an indication of life in it, which could be advanced. They don’t want to risk destroying it. They will take it back through the wormhole, to get it to where it can safely expand. This requires precision flying, but they get through. Dax will give Arjin a good recommendation.

DS9 S2 #18 “Profit and Loss” A Cardassian ship is in trouble. They bring it in and work on repairs. On it is a pretty Cardassian woman, Natima. Quark knows her and loves her, from seven years ago, but she wants nothing to do with him. The ship was attacked by another Cardassian ship. It seems they had an affair, but he stole money from her and she felt betrayed. Garak, a Cardassian who has been here, says the visitors are rebels that the government is hunting down. Quark has a cloaking device that can help them escape, but he wants Natima to stay with him. She agrees; she does love him. But the provisional Bajoran government has agreed to turn them over, and this is a Bajoran station; their will governs. They depart, using the cloaking device. Maybe Natima will return one day.

DS9 S2 #19 “Blood Oath” Dax in a prior host, as Curzon, swore a blood oath with three Klingons for vengeance against the Albino. Now they have found the hidden enemy. 80 years ago they set out to eliminate the predators, but one escaped and killed Dax’s godson. Curzon swore vengeance for that. Jadzia Dax inherited that oath. Sisko tells her not to go, but she joins the three Klingons and they raid the Albino’s well defended compound. They kill the Albino, but the Klingons die in the action. Jadzia returns to resume her duties, and Sisko does not challenge her.

DS9 S2 #20 “The Maquis. Part I” A Cardassian ship implodes as it departs the station. It can’t be an accident. The Cardassian Gul Dukat appears, saying he wants to help Sisko. Indeed, something is going on. Meanwhile Quark dialogues with the pretty Vulcan lady Sakonna, who wants to buy weapons. There is a group called the Marquis involved. Sisko, Kira, Gul Dukat and others get abducted. There is real mischief here.
DS9 S2 #21 “The Maquis Part II” It seems that Sisko’s friend Cal has joined the Maquis. Sisko refuses to join him. Sisko and a party rescue Dukat. Thus Sisko and Dukat become unusual allies. Dukat is quite effective in hardball negotiation. Quark lectures Sakonna about sensible strategy, and he makes sense: better to establish peace now, than escalate to war. Sisko manages to stifle this outbreak, but fears he has only delayed the inevitable.

DS9 #22; “The Wire” the Cardassian Garak is ill. It seems that the Cardassian Obsidian Order is involved, and that’s devious mystery. Something has been implanted in him that alleviates the pain of the local environment. He was once important in the Obsidian Order. Bashir is determined to find a cure. He does, and Garak recovers.

DS9 #23; “Crossover” This is an alternate reality episode, where the actors get to play entirely different roles. Some nice ones are now mean ones. Those are fun. Bashir and Kira are returning in a shuttle from a spot mission, but run afoul of an anomaly in the wormhole. They discover the station with the same personnel playing different roles. It is an alternate reality where Cardassians and Klingons are allied. Kira talks with herself in this frame, who is the cold-blooded leader, and her alternate understands the situation. Several others do too, but they are playing their own roles. Sisko laughs all the time. Garak wants her help for him to take over the station, but betrayal is treacherous. Sisko helps them reach a shuttle and escape. Oh, are they glad to be back!

DS9 #24; “The Collaborator” Vedek Bareil, Kira’s boyfriend, is visiting. In two days he will be elected kai. He is running against Vedek Winn, and there was trouble the last time she was on the station. Bareil suffers a warning vision of his betrayal and death. Kira investigates, and learns that there are conflicting versions of who was responsible for a massacre of Bajorans. Vedek Beku? Another Vedek? A key section of the records is restricted, and the files erased. By Vedek Bareil? Yes, he betrayed the rebels in order to save many times their number of innocent Bajorans. But is that all? No, Kira learns that he is accepting the falls for the late Kia Opaka, to preserve her reputation.

DS9 #25; “Tribunal” O’Brien and Keiko take a vacation, but their shuttle is intercepted by the Cardassians, who arrest him for some undefined crime, his execution already scheduled in the manner of their law. His lawyer is Kovat. Odo will be his nestor, or adviser, as he qualifies by Cardassian law. Someone has planted weapons in his runabout. Sisko investigates and discovers the Cardassian operative on the station, presents him to the court, and the judge realizes that the ploy is over and releases O’Brien. That’s how you handle a stacked deck.

DS9 #26; “The Jem’Hadhar” The final episode of Season Two. Jake and Nog have a science project, and Quark insists on coming along, ruining Sisko’s planned father/son time. Then on the forest planet Sisko and Quark get captured by a tribe that was chasing a woman, Eris. She’s telekinetic, but the Dominion puts a collar on her to suppress her talent. The two boys are not captured, and get to the shuttle. The station comes to the rescue. O’Brien beams aboard the shuttle. Quark picks the lock on Eris’ collar and frees her, and she then frees the three of them from confinement. Then the shuttle beams them aboard. They escape, but discover that Eris is actually an agent of the Dominion. She beams away. The mischief has only begun. We’ll surely see it in Season Three

Having watched two seasons of Deep Space 9, I have to say that to my surprise I like it just as well as The Next Generation, and perhaps slightly better. In due course I will be watching Voyager and Enterprise, measuring them against the standard set by the first three series

PIERS

Aw Ghost 2018

HI-

The electronic edition of Xanth #39 Five Portraits will be downpriced to $1.99 on 8-6-2018. That’s the one that introduces the five unusual children from the future, rescued by Astrid Basilisk and Demoness Fornax. Those children feature increasingly prominently in subsequent novels, especially #44 Skeleton Key where Squid, the cuttlefish in the form and feeling of a girl, is the most important person in the universe, not that she believes it. On 8-20-2018 books 38, 39, and 40, I think in a single deal, will be downpriced to $3.99. Those are Board Stiff, Five Portraits, and Isis Orb. The first introduced Astrid Basilisk, lovely and nice but with a literal drop dead stare, and the third was plotted by a ten year old girl. They’re all worth your while, regardless.

I watched the Discover video “Digging for the Truth: The Hunley: New Revelations.” They discover new evidence in the mystery of what sank the Civil War era The Hunley, the South’s submarine, which they have finally found. It was only four feet by three and a half feet in diameter, pretty crowded for eight men. It sank twice when being tested in 1854, killing 13 men including Mr. Hunley who financed it. The sub did sink a ship, but then didn’t come home. What happened? Did the crew run out of oxygen? There was a hole in the hull; did that sink it, or did that happen later? They found bones at the individual duty stations. They had to use candles for light. The propeller was hand cranked. The energy used in cranking used up the oxygen faster, and making carbon dioxide that would poison them. Was it a suicide mission? They found the captain’s gold pocket watch, which marked the time of the end. The sub used a torpedo with a hundred and thirty five pounds of black powder explosive, which it had to jam into the target ship, then back out and detonate by pulling on an attached cord. The sub survived the blast; something else sank it, rapidly. They don’t yet know, but the indication is that something shattered the port and let in water that flooded the sub and drowned the men in place soon after the blast. The sub was being fired on; could a lucky bullet have done it? It’s an intriguing mystery.

I watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the first movie. There is an invisible wave of crime in New York; stealing is rampant, but there are no witnesses. Until something starts catching the criminals. The mutant turtles: Michelangelo. Raphael. Donatello. The reporter April O’Neil almost gets mugged, but the turtles rescue her and tie up the muggers. Now she is going after the criminal Foot Clan. But she has one of the turtles’ tridents. The Clan ambushes her, and the Turtles rescue her. They tell her their history. The rat Splinter, who had been a pet of Master Yoshi, discovered four baby turtles in a polluted area. Then they all grew rapidly in size, coordination, and intellect, and began to talk. Now they fight crime, wearing bandannas that cover their eyes as token masks.. They love pizza. Then the Foot Clan comes after them, invading April’s apartment where they are. Ninja combat erupts and soon there is fire that burns down the house as they escape to her family’s old country estate. When they recover they return to take on the Foot again, along with Casey Jones, who rescues Splinter. Then they have to fight the fearsome Shredder, Oruku Saki. Splinter kills him. Casey kisses April and all ends well. For now. It is crazy wild fun nonsense. So why did I watch this? Because I have a versatile turtle in my next Xanth novel, and I wanted to find out more about fantasy turtles. But my turtle is really not this type. It does remind me, however, that one of my favorite cartoons ever was when the fishing industry used huge nets to catch fish, which also caught and drowned threatened species sea turtles, and I think they had to pass a law to finally stop it. The cartoon was of the Ninja Turtles quietly boarding a fishing boat… I read Safari, by Dan Kainen and Carol Kaufmann. He did the pictures and she wrote the text. Our daughter gave us this book for our anniversary. The pictures are special: as you open the book, the animals move, showing them walking, running, flapping ears, or chewing. It is done in the manner of pop-up books, with tabs drawing one frame over another so that new images form. It is startling at first, as the creatures seem to come to life. The text is interesting too. The animals are all African: cheetah, lion, gorilla, rhinoceros, zebra, elephant, gazelle, and giraffe. Did you know that more than half of young giraffes don’t grow up? That an elephant can squirt water from its trunk with enough force to kill a human? That an elephant dies around age 70 when its sixth and final set of teeth falls out so it can no longer chew enough to survive? That only about one in twenty cheetahs make it to adulthood? That a hippo can weigh over seven thousand pounds? Okay, so you don’t need to know such things in your daily life, but they are nevertheless interesting. It’s a nice little book for a coffee table.

I watched The Shape of Water. In 1962 during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, young white Elisa is trapped in a life of isolation in the city. Black Zelda is her co-worker as they do routine cleaning and housekeeping at a government laboratory. It seems Elisa is mute from childhood, so Zelda does all the talking. Then something happens to one of the scientists, Strickland, and he emerges injured and bleeding. They have twenty minutes to clean up the blood. Elisa finds a severed finger, and sees an alien creature in a water tank. She keeps her mouth shut, as such workers do, but what is going on here? Another day she sees an alien man creature in a pool and offers him a boiled egg to eat. He growls and scares her off, but does eat the egg. Strickland says the thing may look human but is a monster who bit off two of his fingers. She continues to befriend the creature, bringing him more eggs to eat, and dancing for him. But Strickland cruelly uses a cattle prod on it, not caring at all for its welfare or feelings; no wonder it doesn’t like him. Because the creature can breathe air or water, the Russians want him, but Strickland means to vivisect and maybe kill him. Elisa devises a plan to smuggle him out; but first she gets to know him better. She gets him in a bathtub, then joins him naked. So they make love, off-screen. Later she fills a bathroom with water and they do it again, but water leaks out and down, wetting folk in a theater below. Meanwhile. Strickland is desperately searching to find the creature, pushed by the general who demands that this mess be unfucked. But the creature is ailing, needing a more compatible environment. Strickland ruthlessly investigates and pursues. He finally catches up and shoots both the creature and Elisa, but the creature revives and kills him, then jumps into the sea water with Elisa. He kisses her and somehow she revives, breathing water. It seems he can heal himself and others. They are together, and their future is unknown. I don’t believe this, on several levels, but what a story it is! She had nothing, and now she has a phenomenal new life and lover.

I read the booklet sized first installment of Tales of Isos, written and drawn and self published by Hannah Beck, queen.chain.designs@gmail.com. She was inspired by Princess Nada Naga in Xanth, Prince Dolph’s first girlfriend. I did not invent the naga folk, they are from mythology, but I adapted them to Xanth. They are serpents with human heads who can change form to full serpent or full human, or somewhere in between. Hannah is working out their species history, which turns out to be as long as the universe. It starts: “Long before us, there was only the Sky and the Water. There was no Sun. No Stars. No dry land. Only stretches of Deep Night…and Endless Ocean.” Well, the ocean grew bored of simply existing, so she lapped and played and twisted herself into the form of a body with human head, breasts, arms, and serpent tail. Thus Nadia was the first person, rather than Adam or Eve. But she was still bored, being alone, so she decorated the ocean with corals and kelps and made it glow. Still she wanted someone to talk to, so she pulled up a big stone, crying “Speak to me!!” The stone sailed up into the sky and fractured, forming pieces that I think became the stars, but it didn’t speak. Meanwhile lava bubbled up through the hole torn in the bottom of the sea and made continents and sang of its birth, forming into Alanwi, another lady. The volcano left behind sprouted a new being, Tsuuba, the first male, and his delight brought forth other life. Now at last Nadia had company. New creatures formed, including Bala, the first snake and then first true naga. There is much more to tell, and the Tales of Isos will cover it in due course. But for now the essence is that it was from the naga that snakes and humans and others derived. Now you know.

I watched The Sense of an Ending. Anthony “Tony” Webster leads a quiet British life. His daughter Susie takes him to a meeting of pregnant lesbians, as her mother can’t attend. Susie is a pregnant lesbian herself. He talks with his ex, Margaret, who wants to know about his prior relationship with Veronica. Flashback to the past as Tony visits Veronica’s family, meeting her father, mother, and brother Jack. Later they are making out in the car, until she says it doesn’t feel right, maybe because they aren’t in love. Another time she approaches him and seduces him; now it feels right. Her mother warned him against Veronica, who uses people. A friend commits suicide. Tony is manic-depressive, pondering similar. In the present he hears from Veronica, who will meet with him to discuss her mother’s estate. Her mother willed to him her diary, but it turns out Veronica burned it. What did it contain? She gives him a letter, I think a nasty one he wrote her when they broke up. Now he learns that the baby Veronica supposedly had was actually her mother’s. What a family history! But all is quiet now.

I watched Murder on the Orient Express. About 70 years ago, as a child, I picked up one of my mother’s books, a murder mystery by one Agatha Christie, and read it, and it amazed me. This movie is based on that book. Hercule Poirot brilliantly wraps up a case and takes a vacation: a ride on the famous luxury Orient Express train. But an avalanche traps the train between stations and it must wait until help comes. Then they discover a body: a man has been stabbed to death in the night, Mr. Ratchett, a man man nobody likes. The murderer has to be still on the train. So Poirot is drafted to solve the case. The victim was drugged and stabbed a dozen times. Poirot interviews the passengers. A woman gets stabbed, but not fatally; the killer is disposing of the murder knife. Poirot discovers that a number of the passengers were connected to a prior crime in America relating to the Armstrong family, which suffered brutally. Then the movie differs from the novel, as I vaguely remember, pumping up the conclusion with violence; movie makers do that, seemingly unable to appreciate nuance. But the essence remains: all twelve suspects did it, taking turns to sneak in and stab the man in the dark. Or in the movie version, coming in together and passing the knife around until he was dead, then departing. They murdered a murderer. So who is guilty? All of them, or none of them? They aren’t killers; none of them could have done it alone. They don’t deserve to be condemned for it. So Poirot blames it on a lone assassin who escaped the train, accusing none of them; they are all free to go, and to make peace with their consciences in whatever manner they can, as will he. Regardless of the version, it’s quite a story, possibly the most famous murder mystery ever.

I watched Keeping Mum. The chaotic household of the pastor, Walter, needs stabilization, which arrives in the form of Grace, the new sweet old housekeeper with a hidden history. The wife, Gloria, is having an affair with her handsome golf instructor, Lance; the daughter is making out with a chain of boyfriends, the young son is getting bullied by classmates, and Walter is ruinously clumsy on his soccer team and generally disorganized. Grace helps Walter shape up his sermon with some humor, helps mess up Gloria’s affair, messes up the bullies, distracts errant daughter with cookery, and the neighbor’s chronically barking dog disappears along with the neighbor. She even gets Walter to rediscover Gloria sexually, renewing their love. Gloria and daughter get suspicious and try to check in Grace’s big trunk. Grace catches them and clarifies things. She is Gloria’s mother, and is acting to set things straight in her own sometimes brutal fashion. There are bodies to hide. They hide them, and Grace moves on, having set things right. They just need to deal with the bodies hidden in the pond.

I watched War Games, uncertain whether I’d seen it before. I recognized an early scene, and another, so thought I had seen it, but didn’t remember the details. It’s a 1983 movie, so it could have been some time. Maybe I saw a preview with those scenes, because I sure don’t remember the rest of it. There is an alert and the nuclear missiles are readied for launching, likely to kill twenty million people. But one man at the last moment is unable to turn the fatal key, aborting the launch. Turns out it was a test case. 22% of their key personnel can’t turn that key. They can’t have that; they need to know that the missiles will launch when a crisis comes. Then to high school: David is a computer whiz who changes his recorded grade from an F to a C. His girlfriend Jennifer also got an F; he changes hers to A. Then he manages to hack into a secret government training game, Global Thermonuclear War. Only that connects to the actual defense system and triggers an alert. David hangs up, but now the game is in progress. David gets arrested, but hacks his way out of confinement, merges with a tour group, and escapes. He calls Jennifer, who drives three hours to join him. They go find the supposedly dead professor who designed the game. He lives on an island without a boat. The game proceeds; victory will mean a nuclear strike. But it’s a fake attack by phantom missiles. They wait it out, and there is no impact. But the game wants to make a retaliatory launch anyway. It finally decides that the only way to win is not to play. The world is saved. It’s one dramatic finale. And I am satisfied: I never saw this movie before.

I watched Hackers, another computer movie. Dade Murphy is in a new school in New York City and doesn’t know his way around. He beats Kate at a computer game, the first to do so, thereby making her an enemy. A man comes and bashes Dade’s computer with a bat. Then Kate comes, kisses him, and others swarm in to catch them together. Obviously a frame job. Then the two of them agree to a contest: she wins, he’s her slave. He wins, she’s his girl, in a dress. But they are both under siege by a criminal enterprise that threatens Dade’s mother if he doesn’t do what they demand. They labor to identify the enemy so they can stop the Da Vinchi virus and copy a worm to prevent an ecological disaster. The action is so fast and scrambled that I had trouble following the story. They manage to expose the evil plot to the world, and finish with a date with her in a dress. They do like each other.

I watched Antitrust, the third computer related movie I got in a bargain price package. Milo Hoffman is a young genius programmer thinking of doing a start-up by raising venture capital. But Gary Winston, powerful CEO of NURV, the world’s largest computer company, makes a pitch for him to join them. What about serving the world with open source? Gary spells it out: someone is bound to steal the program and become a billionaire from Milo’s idea. It is better for Milo to make his own billion, and use his money for good works. As a creative cynic who has dabbled in dreams and in business, I have to say that this makes sense to me, though I rejected it when I was a teen. Milo signs on, and meets pretty Lisa Calighcan, a fellow employee, which makes his girlfriend Alison Poulson nervous. But smart computer programmers are getting killed in mysterious accidents. Then his best friend Teddy is brutally murdered just when he was on the verge of a breakthrough. Gary mentions a similar breakthrough. Someone was spying on the friend, maybe NURV. So Milo starts investigating on his own, in ways only he can. He learns that NURV is watching all its employees, and has a visual record of the murder. So it is connected. And that Alison is secretly working for them. So he goes to Lisa, who is not part of the conspiracy. Meanwhile Alison may be putting sesame seeds in his food; they are deadly to him because he is allergic. Does she mean to kill him? She says she loves him, but catches on that he knows. They catch him, but he has sneaked a disc to a friend, who puts it on global broadcast. The world has the program. Lisa betrays Milo in the end, but Alison helps him. She really does love him.

I watched Panic Room. Meg and her young daughter Sarah move into a New York house equipped with a panic room: a hidden chamber for emergency use in case of intruders, that has monitors to track the rest of the house. Not that they’ll need it, they think. But the first night three men invade: Burnham, Raoul, and Junior, who thought it was empty. They are after something worth a million and a half dollars—in that room. Meg and Sarah escape to the panic room, which has monitors so they can see where the men are. Also a public address system so they can talk to them. They say to get out, but the men don’t. One man has worked on making panic rooms, so he knows they can’t break in; they have to get the girls to come out. The men try to pipe in gas, to make the girls sick, but Meg manages to set it afire, blasting the men back instead. Sarah gets a flashlight and signals SOS to the neighbors, if only they see it. But it’s raining outside; folk aren’t looking. Meg sneaks out to recover her cell phone, but it’s hard to get a signal in that room. She manages to make a land line connection, but 911 puts her on hold. She calls her ex, but gets cut off. But he comes over, and gets caught by the men. They savagely beat him up, trying to make Meg open the door to save him. Sarah has a seizure, maybe diabetic; Meg sneaks out again to get the shot she needs. One man shoots another. They catch the girl, while Meg gets their gun. Burnham gives the girl the shot to save her from going into a coma and maybe death. Then he drills out the lock on a safe to get the X-bonds in it. Meanwhile Meg bashes out the house cameras so they can’t tell where she is. It devolves into an ugly melee, until Burnham shoots the third man just before that man clubs Meg. The police come, ending it.

I read Ancient Allies, by Sharon Cindy Cameron and Lenn Cameron. This is a kind of picture book with a difference. The authors share their experiences with, and appreciation of, assorted animals ranging from ravens, dogs, cats, giraffes, a black rhinoceros, snow leopards, a tarantula, a hawk, lion cubs, bears, an octopus, a bumble bee, and a duck. Many are associated with the San Francisco Zoo, where they are well cared for. Some are pets, or just observed in passing. So much of nature is literally at our feet, if we just look. Each creature is its own person, lovingly depicted and pictured here. You can feel the joy radiating out as the wonder that is life is revealed in its nuances, and sometimes more. There is a picture of “A Voluptuous Goddess Derriere” floating over the sea, dare I say mooning us? But the main characters are the ravens: “Scientists now believe that of all the creatures on the planet, it is the ravens that are in contact with extraterrestrials.” Their brains are different, and they show a community and caring that few other creatures do, and even have a kind of wedding ceremony. The authors love life in all its aspects. This is the kind of book that you can just look at, letting its ambiance surround you.

I have made no secret of my religious agnosticism, but not everyone chooses to accept that. Some seem to think that I must have not read the Bible, or heard of Jesus, or simply not have thought about it enough, and that it is their mission to persuade me to come to Jesus and save my soul from everlasting torment in Hell. I do not suffer fools or rascals gladly, but do take seriously those who are serious. I have an ongoing dialogue with Daniel Daly of Noahide Books, http://noahidebooks.angelfire.com/, who says that atheism is wrong, and so is agnosticism. Oh, really? I responded “Just as the Apostle Paul had his vision on the road to Damascus, you had your vision. But I’m pretty sure God did not tell you to disrespect those whose visions are other than yours. If God exists, he surely has reason to accept atheists and agnostics. They are not wrong, just different from your belief.” He replied that he would argue that out of Theism, Agnosticism, and Atheism there is a position which is factually correct, and asked to publish my letter in his letters section. I replied “I stand by what I said, being a militant agnostic, and you are welcome to publish it in your online letter section.” He responded with a discussion concluding that I was probably really an atheist. “Militant agnostic? I don’t think so.” Oh? I replied “Interesting that you think that my lifelong agnosticism is really atheism, and that you are free to redefine my belief. With similar license I could choose to think that your belief in God is a delusion. The one is as valid as the other, no?” As may be becoming clear, while there is an element of humor in my “militant agnostic” description, there is also an element of warning. I don’t just smile and let arrogant ignorance pass unchallenged. He replied with an invitation for me to share my understanding of life, the universe and everything with him. Okay, since I think my readers may also be interested, here is a more extended discussion.

When I was a child, circa 1940, I was told that the night before Christmas Santa Claus traveled the world on his sleigh, delivering presents simultaneously to every child in the world. I thought that was bovine feces, and never believed. Subsequently they told me about God: he was an old white man with a long white beard sitting on the edge of a cloud, looking down and deciding which mortals on the ground below would be admitted to Heaven and which would be relegated to Hell. The decision seemed to hinge mainly on whether a person subscribed to Jesus as his Savior. I smelled more bovine feces, and never believed in that. But since it may not be fair to let a child’s definition govern the existence of God, I clarify that it may be a matter of definition. If you define God as Truth, Beauty, Compassion, Honor, Rationality and the like, then you can say I believe. But the moment you get into the supernatural, my acceptance fades, and God as commonly defined by the Bible is supernatural. One fan of mine did have a good take on that: she said she regarded God as natural. But I don’t regard burning bushes that talk, or folk rising from the dead, or the conversion of water to wine and wine to blood as natural. For most folk God is almost by definition supernatural. Indeed, only magic classified as miracles can make a Catholic saint. So by accepted standard definitions, I am an unbeliever. But, say the Theists, the universe is far too complicated to have been formed by mere chance, so God must have created it. Oh? Then who created God? If he had no creation, being eternal, well, why not the same for the universe? It is not a persuasive argument.

What then of agnosticism, which is uncertainty? Here we have three broad classifications. The Theist says that there is a God, and probably adds that He is My God, while all others are false. For thousands of years folk have killed each other and made wars because they have different gods. But I want to know where is the proof? What actual objective evidence is there that any god has ever existed? Don’t quote the Bible for this; that is a compendium of the writings of believers. Anyone can believe what he chooses, but that has no objective validity. Some may believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, others in Zeus. None have made a sufficient case for me. The Atheist says there is no God. Okay, where is his objective evidence? He can’t prove his case any more objectively than can the Theist. So as I see it, Agnosticism is the only sensible position. It is not a vague uncertainty, but a demand for rigorous mathematical or scientific proof. Until persuasive evidence is presented, my private impression is that there is no God. Don’t confuses that with atheism. I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow morning—that is, that the sun will continue shining and the world will continue spinning—but I can’t prove it, so I am agnostic on that score also, but I do look forward to another day.

I am not anti-religion, merely rational. I married a minister’s daughter, and we have been together 62 years. I have written about belief and religion, notably my quarter million word novel Tarot, unfortunately broken by a publisher into three parts. Therein Brother Paul, of the Holy Order of Vision, is sent to the planet named Tarot to ascertain whether the supernatural manifestations there are or are not God. It’s quite a challenge. I like to say that if you can read it and not be offended at some point, you don’t properly understand it.

But let’s assume, for the sake of debate, that there may be a God. His ways are devious indeed. I remember a famous story by Arthur Clarke, “The Star.” I read it scores of years ago, so may misremember details, but have the essence. They discover an ancient alien civilization far from Earth that was a miracle of technology and deportment, an ideal we well could emulate. But it was destroyed when its star went nova. We learned of its existence only when the light of the nova reached us, two thousand years ago, but we noticed. The concluding question is “What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the light of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?” What a question, and it echoes in my mind as I remember my own personal history. When I was sixteen my cousin Teddy was fifteen, a grade behind me, at the same boarding school. He never finished; he got cancer and died. It was a shock I never entirely got over. If there is a God, it seemed that he faced a choice in the ongoing story that human history is; as a novelist I am a kind of god of my fiction, and I do encounter difficult choices. It seemed it was necessary for one of two boys to die, Teddy or me. He had everything going for him, being a good student with many friends and a likely future in his father’s successful business, while I was a disturbed character with little prospect for success; few would ever miss me. But God made His choice, and he was the one taken, while I was left. What was the need to give this fine young man to the fire, that I might survive? It seemed to make no sense. I visited Teddy’s family, sleeping in his bedroom, getting to know and love his sibling, who seemed like the perfect little sister. I saw the awful impact his death had on his grieving family. Well, the ensuing half century suggests that I, with my erratic creativity, did things that conventional Teddy would not have done, such as becoming a writer who has received hundreds of letters from fans telling how my books helped them through dark times and may have even saved their lives. Did God, cognizant of the future, choose to save those lives instead of the one life of Teddy, though there was no way he deserved to die? Was it simply a numbers choice, like steering a train onto the track that kills only one person instead of several? That was not a choice I could have made. Teddy’s untimely death continued to disturb me, and finally I concluded that death out of turn was wrong, for people or animals, and I would try not to contribute to it. I became a vegetarian in college, so as not to kill animals on my behalf, and have remained so for 65 years so far. That is about as close as I come to religion; my vegetarianism has religious force. It was the one requirement I made of my wife, and she became a vegetarian for me. I am not against religion, but neither do I have any brief for it. I think of the way that God was a woman in the old days, circa 3,000 and more years ago, and the Israelite religion had to compete with neighbors who offered sex with seductive priestesses as a kind of worship. It was hard to compete. So Israel, and later Christianity, tried to make sex itself, together with attractive young women, sinful, ushering in the ugly misogynistic millennia that have suppressed the rights of women ever since. It’s a shame.

We married, and soon my wife was pregnant. But it went wrong, and she had a miscarriage at about four months. That catapulted me into the US Army, because in the 1950s the draft took all fit young men who were not fathers. She rejoined me in Oklahoma—and suffered another miscarriage in 1958, at about five months. Then, out of the army and in civilian life, I had the worst day of my life. I lost my job, my wife lost her third baby at about six months, and my doctor told me that my concerns were all in my head. It turned out years later that my depression and fatigue derived from low thyroid hormone; levothyroxin pills ameliorated both. So it wasn’t in my head, it was in my neck. It left me with an abiding dislike of abortion, because that was technically what happened to those babies. They died because they were forced out early. But the loss of our third baby, who lived only for an hour, freed us to gamble. My wife went to work so I could stay home a year and write full time, and in that year I made the breakthrough, selling my first two stories. It was a small beginning, but it was to lead in due course to a phenomenal career that made me wealthy. I think it would not have happened had any of those three babies survived; as parents we could not have have afforded the gamble. So here is the question I ask of that theoretical God: what was the need to give those three innocent babies to the fire, that I might have my career?

But my wife’s doctor thought he had managed to fix the problem that cost us our babies. My wife had a septum in her uterus, that divided it so that there was not room for a baby to grow to term. Once that was fixed, we carried two babies to term, finally having our family. But my career was in difficulty. When I protested getting cheated by a publisher, I did not get a settlement; I got blacklisted for six years. One publisher did not honor the blacklist, so I got through, but not in the way I would have otherwise. Then came the miracle: the publisher may have cheated one too many writers, and got sued, and the errant proprietors fled, and the company was taken over by another. The new administration sent me a brochure inviting me to do business with them. I wrote back “Don’t you know you’re blacklisting me?” They said things had changed. Then I had to wrestle with my conscience: should I resume selling to the publisher that had blackened my name with lies and crippled my career for six years? True, it was under new ownership, but it was the same publisher. It was the hardest decision of my career, but I concluded that forgiveness was better than grudge, and I wrote and submitted a fantasy novel. It was A Spell for Chameleon, the first Xanth novel, and if ever there was a turning point in my career, it was there. Here was the key: the new editor, Lester del Rey, had written for this publisher before, and when he got there he looked up the records of his own book, and discovered that they had been cheating him by crediting him with 69,000 sales when the true figure was 169,000. That’s why he understood my situation. What were the chances of such a coincidence happening? Or was it divine intervention? The series continued, and the fifth Xanth novel, Ogre, Ogre, may have been the first original paperback fantasy novel—that is, no hardcover edition—to make the NEW YORK TIMES bestseller list. I had achieved the stratosphere, thanks to a popular series and the publisher’s effective promotion. So in effect I forgave them, and they made me wealthy. But my experience with the unfair blacklisting left me extremely cynical about the ethics of publishers and of the writers who knowingly support them, and today I actively expose publishers I catch treating writers unfairly. I can do it because I am now independent of writing sales and have the will and the means to take it to them, and they dare not mess with me; I will take them to court and win, because I have the resources to do so, as I did not before. I have also supported self publishing, and helped make it feasible in a way it was not in the past, in part by my support of and significant investment in Xlibris when it was a fledgling enterprise. Was that the service God wanted of me? Was I deviously guided to help other writers gain their fair chance to achieve their dreams? The average bestselling writer seems to have the attitude “I got mine; too bad for you.” I am not average, really, in any respect, because of my bitter experience. I don’t know, but a case can be made. God did what was necessary to save lives and improve publishing, using a disenchanted agnostic as an instrument in a manner that a believer might not have had the stomach for.

If there is a God, he must be a cynical brute.

I watched Flatliners. Five ambitious medical students are set to die, and to live to describe the experience. The deal is to go under with drugs, heart stops beating, wait one minutes, then revive and report. But it is risky, because they can’t be quite sure the recovery process will work. We see Nelson’s vision of running through a green field with a dog as they labor to bring him back. But then he suffers a vision while awake, a continuation of the death vision, but more violent. David and Rachel get into a weird bidding war to decide who is next: stay dead for a minute and twenty seconds? Minute and a half? Two minutes? David wins. Meanwhile the waking visions continue for Nelson, who chases into the subway, an odd network of passages and columns. Where is Sam, the dog? Instead there is a child—who savagery beats him up. David goes under next, and sees snowy mountains, dark waters. Now David starts having visions. Rachel is third, visiting her childhood and youth. The power fails, and they have to restore her manually, a damned close call. And now she has the waking visions too. Is it memories of children they have wronged, now getting revenge? Nelson in another vision finds himself besieged by pretty girls on the prowl for him. Rachel suffers a vision of a man while she is in anatomy class. David visits and apologizes to the black woman who was the girl he cruelly teased as a child. Nelson gets beaten up again by the child. It turns out that he really killed that child, throwing stones so that the child fell out of a tree and died in the fall. Nelson’s participation wasn’t known. Rachel sees her father kill himself. Nelson, remorseful about not telling the others sooner about these grim aftereffects, puts himself under. They find him, but it’s been nine minutes. Twelve. The child forgives him, and he recovers after all. This is a tense story, psychological rather than supernatural, but scarily effective. It also point up the cruelty of children to each other. They are not necessarily sweet innocents.

I watched Perfect Stranger. This one has Bruce Willis and sightly Halle Berry, two names I actually recognize, but even with ear plugs I had trouble making out the dialogue. Rowena “Ro” Price is a sharp investigative reporter, but political pressure shuts down a major expose she’s been working on for six months. She quits. Then a friend is murdered, and Rowena teams with her associate Miles to go after powerful ad executive Harrison Hill, who may be connected. She goes undercover as Katherine, a temp at Hill’s agency, and as Veronica, who flirts with Hill. But he catches on. But they get the goods on him, and he is convicted of murdering his associate Grace. But Rowena’s own life is complicated. Miles tries to blackmail her, hoping to make her his sex slave, and she kills him. My impression is that this tries to substitute unlikely surprises for solid plotting.

I watched Freedomland, the last of the dollar movies. Brenda Martin walks to the police station with blood-soaked hands. She tells her story: she got carjacked, her hands scraped as she landed on the ground, her car stolen, with her four year old son Cody in the back seat. It’s a rough neighborhood, with high racial tensions; the blacks resent that there so much fuss over a white child when similar problems with black children are largely ignored. The detective assigned, Lorenzo, is black, but Brenda trusts him, and he knows this neighborhood well. The people are angry, and verging on a riot. Lorenzo believes in God, and that there is a purpose to everything, and that Brenda is lying about something. What really happened to that boy? They check Freedomland, a deserted institution where children were kept and mistreated. Then she says that the child drank cough serum and died. She shows where she buried him, but it is clear that she could not have done it. She’s still lying. Then she says Cody started rejecting her, demanding things. She wants him to sleep, and he says “If you go, you’ll be sorry.” When she returned he had drunk the whole bottle and was dead. So Lorenzo has to charge her with homicide, and she goes wild and has to be restrained. The mob attacks the police, and the battle is on. It turns out that Lorenzo’s own son is in and out of prison; he has really done no better than Brenda, and she sees that. He will visit her in prison. This movie has the feeling of telling it as it is.

I watched The Signal. Nic, who walks with crutches, his friend Jonah, and girlfriend Haley are making a cross country road trip, delivering her to California for a year. He faces gradual degeneration that will in due course put him in a wheelchair, and he is pondering breaking up with her so as not to hold her back. That’s not the way she sees it. Meanwhile a mysterious hacker who got into MIT’s secured network is now into Haley’s computer, contacting them. They agree to meet the hacker, Nomad, in a remote location at night. Haley screams and disappears—and Nic wakes alone in a wheelchair, largely paralyzed, in an isolation unit, being interviewed by a man in a bio-hazard suit. He has encountered an EBA—Extraterrestrial Biological Alien. Jonah and Haley are there too, in other wards. Or are they? He discovers that his legs are mechanical; no wonder he can’t feel them. He finds Haley unconscious on a gurney. He wheels her out of the building. But then a truck departs with her. Nic runs after it, with his metal legs, and rescues her. But then the highway ends. They detour, but don’t seem to get anywhere. Armed, suited men come after them. They find Jonah, who says they are in Area 51. Jonah’s hands are mechanical. Jonah gets shot, but helps them escape. But the troops catch them. They haul Haley away, but Nic runs, using his alien tech body. And the doctor turns out to be alien tech too. This is Nomad, Damon spelled backward. This is where it ends. Intriguing but inconclusive.

I watched The Seventh Seal, which has a personal history for me. I ordered it long ago, back in the tape playing days, but they sent me a different Seventh movie, then no longer carried the one I wanted. So for maybe twenty years I have searched for it, and now at last I have the restored edition on DVD. It is Swedish with English subtitles, in black and white. A Crusader knight, Antonius Block, encounters Death on a desolate beach and proffers a deal: they will play a game of chess, and Death will not take him as long as the game continues, and if the knight wins, he goes free. Death agrees, and they start to play. Between moves Antonius interacts with others, and his friend saves a woman’s life, and Death takes another man. Another young woman is be be burned at the stake because they say the devil is in her. Meanwhile the plague is coming. Death wins the chess game, and says the next time they meet, Antonio and his friends will be done. That seems to be the case. I don’t think I properly understand this movie. The blurb material suggests it was a turning point in the movie industry, with phenomenal sequences like the Dance of Death, but I was not even aware that Death danced.

I watched The Sorcerer and the White Snake. This is a visually spectacular movie, in Mandarin with English subtitles. Two naga, snakes with the heads of women, watch men gathering herbs. One fears they will clean out all the herbs on the mountain, so she spooks a man and he falls into the lake. It seems he can’t swim. But the other changes into a woman and dives down to save him. She kisses him, giving him a lungful of air, saving his life. But when Xu Xian wakes he is being revived by his friends, who did not see the girl. But she’s there, watching him, and when he mentions being saved by a girl others think he imagined, she pushes him into water, dives after him in full clothing, and kisses him again, maybe her way of flirting. She associates with him as Susu, and he falls in love with her and marries her, not knowing her nature. But the Sorcerer knows, and fights her as an evil demon, and Xu Xian wounds her, not recognizing her in her giant snake form. She flees. But Xu, now at last knowing her nature and still loving her as Susu, is determined to save her. So he goes to fetch a magic herb that will cure her. That leads to a phenomenal adventure as Susu and her naga friend try to help him when he is captured, but have to battle the Sorcerer. It is a fantastic show. The Sorcerer wins, and Xu loses his memory of Susu, but she is allowed one last kiss and he begins to remember. Human and demon are not supposed to mix, but their love was true. They will meet again in another life. This is a moving Chinese-legendary romance.

My summer project this year is Hilltop Farm, a collaboration with my sister Teresa. When we came to America in 1940, having been kicked out of Spain by Dictator Franco who seemed not to understand or appreciate the feeding of hungry children, my parents were totally set against war. Quakers—the Religious Society of Friends—protest war anyway, and they had had an ugly taste of it being in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, which was the prelude to World War Two, and wanted no more of that. They feared for America as the war intensified. They decided to withdraw from society, returning to the fundamentals, as it were: subsistence farming, largely independent of the modern society. They would make an ideal religious and secular community, living off the land. When the world crashed and civilization died, then they might emerge to begin the restoration. They started with two or three committed couples, one of which was our family of four. This was my home from 1941 to 1945, a significant section of my childhood from age six to eleven. But trouble started early: the second couple was Canadian, and they were denied visas to live in the United States, on technical bureaucratic grounds; had they seen that coming they could have avoided the ban. New participants came in, but they often lacked the understanding and commitment of the ones lost, and in the end the project foundered. You can’t make a unified community when it’s like a herd of cats. Now my sister and I, both octogenarians, who were purely incidental and mostly in the way, are about the only survivors who were actually there throughout. We have the voluminous records, and the memories, and if we don’t present it, ironically, no one else is likely to. So we’re doing it while we can. We’re about 19,000 words into it at this point and not nearly done. I expect to self publish it in due course, for the wider family, as this is not a commercial effort. Others will be able to find it if they want.

I am a fan of Ötzi the Iceman, who was killed in the Copper Age Alps and buried in ice for over five thousand years before global warming melted him. It’s the oldest murder mystery, and we still don’t know the killer, and probably would have trouble bringing him to justice now. I have Ö in my GEODYSSEY series; his daughter was distraught when he disappeared, but he saved her life by leading the pursuit away from her. NEW SCIENTIST has another note on him, as more is slowly discovered. It seems he was in dire straits, having been cut off from supplies of essential tools and pursued by enemies. He took good care of his weapons, frequently resharpening them, but they were almost worn out. More were available about 40 miles away, but he couldn’t go there because they were watching. Even as it was, they found him and shot him in the back, and left him to die. Ugly business.

Our bodies are basically bags of bacteria. The microbiome is the collection of microbes that live mostly in our guts, affecting just about everything we are; they greatly outnumber all of the fixed cells in our body. Even so, we have been missing many, such as the archaea, which look just like bacteria but are a different branch of life. We don’t know exactly what they do in us, but they surely aren’t there just for fun. Well, except maybe for the ones in our genital tracts. It should be interesting as medical science zeroes in on them.

Long article in NEW SCIENTIST for June 30, 2018, on how to think about 13 assorted subjects. Such as the Multiverse, the idea that our known universe is just one of perhaps infinitely many we can’t see, overlapping ours without affecting it. Or Consciousness: if you don’t believe in anything you can’t define or measure, you have a problem, because the fact that you are thinking about it proves it exists, but what the hell is it? How is it made? What happens to it when you sleep? Can you be sure that anybody else is conscious, or are they faking it? Time, generally considered the fourth dimension, but again, what is it? The closer we look, the more devious it becomes. Particles—we may think of them as marbles, but closer inspection shows they are nothing but waves of energy. What is an atom, really, but some tiny ball of energy (the nucleus) orbited by even smaller balls or waves (the electrons), with an immense proportion of space surrounding them. So is an atom merely curled up bits of energy flashing each other? What counts are the fields and forces that suffuse space and determine how they behave. Think of them not exactly as marbles, but as the waves generated when marbles are dropped into a pool of water, making ripples. Now if we only knew what that “water” is made of… Genes: bits of protein that define us. Or do they? What about epigenetics? I think of the genes as like the keys of a piano; the epigene is the player who selects those keys to make the music. Yes you need the keys, but without the player you still have nothing worthwhile. Schrodinger’s Cat: alive or dead? Many scientists think it is in both states at once. I see that as nonsense; we simply don’t know its state until we open the box. Logic—another straightforward concept that suffers when inspected too closely. Life: one definition is “A self sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” I am not sure of that; I suspect future robotic machines will be capable of such evolution, if they aren’t already. I’d call them alive, but not chemical. Gender: do we really know the difference between male and female? I like their definition: gender differences fall on a continuum, not in two buckets. Entropy: this is that tricky measure of disorder, which always tends to increase. That is, things become more disordered, and complete disorder is 100% entropy. Place 20 coins heads up on a tray, shake it, and they become jumbled. Play the film backwards and you see them weirdly orient to put their heads up, becoming organized. That’s order, or low entropy, and you don’t see it happen on its own. Similarly hotter dissipates to cooler. Life is a process or organization; when it ends, the body dissolves back into garbage. But why? What rule governs entropy? We just know it is so, not why it is so. The Blockchain: this is the essence of Bitcoin, the electronic currency. It is a kind of database storing monetary information so that it can’t be faked. It is independent of any government, so can’t be controlled or inflated by government meddling. That also makes it the darling of crime bosses who don’t want their financial dealings traced. But it requires some heavey computation. The bitcoin blockchain alone consumes more electricity than the country of Ecuador, and that is getting worse. Black Holes, those spots where so much matter gets crammed into so little space that gravity prevents even light from escaping beyond their event horizons, the point of no return. Classical physics can’t explain what happens inside a black hole. They lie at the margin of what is knowable and what is not. And Scientific Truth, if that is not an oxymoron. Science observes and makes predictions, but how can we be sure there won’t be an exception ahead? That is the basis for my rejection of knowledge about God, above: how can we ever prove there is not a god in the universe next door? Or that there is a scientifically undetectable God in our universe? Could God be made of Dark Matter? Challenging questions. And no, I don’t believe in Dark matter either.

Other notes: a study of studies indicates that married folk have less heart disease than unmarried folk. I did not get married for my health, but my 62 years of marriage suggest that it was a healthy thing. Brand names that actually exist: Fartek babywear, Krapp toilet paper, Bums biscuits, Nora Knackers crackers, Dribly lemonade, Cock Drops cocktail bitters, Arses red wine, Plops savory snacks, Bum toilet paper, Pee Cola soft drink, Crapsy high fiber breakfast cereal and its rival called Plopsies. Fairly makes your mouth water, or maybe something else. A quarter million Americans in their 80s are still working. Yes, it’s healthier; I do it myself.

Situation in Tampa, Florida, that is arousing attention. A car pulled into a parking lot, skipped the open spaces and parked in the disabled reserve space though it had no disabled sign. That’s a no-no; the disabled need those spaces. My wife has a disabled sign; she’s essentially home-bound, on oxygen at home, and uses a wheelchair when on errands in town, mostly doctor’s visits. But if there’s a parking space close enough to where’s she’s going we can do without the wheelchair. She can walk, she just can’t walk far or stand very long. To have healthy folk grab those spaces is annoying at best, and real trouble at worst. So we know what it is about. Well, this car took the place and the healthy man, Markeis McGlockton, got out and went into the convenience store. Another man, Michael Drejka, approached and berated the woman remaining in the car with her children, Britany Jacobs, who was the driver. McGlockton emerged from the store, saw Drejka harassing his girlfriend, marched up, pushed him to the ground and stepped toward him to follow up. It seemed that not only did this man not care about the law or the rights of the disabled folk, he was going to beat up anyone who challenged his girlfriend for violating them. Then Drejka, on the ground, drew a gun and shot him, and he died. It was all caught on video. Oh, my! Where are the rights of this case? It turns out that the Drejka had been bugging folk in the area before, looking for trouble, knowing that if it came he was protected by Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. Sure enough, he was not arrested. What a dandy way to kill people: find a cause where you are technically on the right side, give them hell, and shoot them if they get ugly. McGlockton was arrogant and aggressive and wrong, a bully, but did he deserve to be killed for that? Should a gun be used to settle a parking quarrel? It is hard to pick a side. Would a few more details help? McGlockton stepped back when he saw the gun, so the action was over at that point, but Drejka shot him anyway. Drejka was white, McGlockton black. Drejka pulled his car right up next to Jacobs’ car, as if his whole reason for being there was to confront her. When the Stand Your Ground law was passed, justifiable homicides in Florida rose by 75%. But the NRA is pushing to change the law to make it easier for shooters to use it as a shield. They sell more guns when people shoot people. Britany Jacobs has now hired a lawyer, civil rights attorney Ben Crump. This is not the first or second time a gunman has initiated a confrontation in Florida, and shot the other person. THE WEEK for August 3, 2018, has a feature on the reality of the notion of a Good Guy with a gun stopping crime. It’s complicated, in part because the police can’t always tell right away which armed man is Good and which is Bad, and the wrong one can get shot. So who is ultimately guilty of this murder? It was enabled by the Stand Your Ground law, and I think would not have happened without it. I think that law should be abolished; it would make us all safer. Yes, folk could still stand their ground, but when they kill others, there should be an investigation and trial. No automatic immunity for killing. One commentator made a very interesting remark: that maybe the answer to overly permissive gun laws is to get more guns into the hands of people of color. That might make hard line white legislators pause.

I watched the Discover DVD video How the Earth was Made: Ring of Fire. The Pacific Ocean is surrounded by volcanoes, historically some of the most devastating on Earth. The viscosity of the lava depends on how much silica it contains. Hawaii has little, so is runny; the others have much, so it is thick and forms cones. They trap the gases until they burst out with horrendous force. Some magma contains hornblende crystals, which means the presence of water. The water does not cool it, but pressures it with steam so that it explodes. Also Carbon 12, made by plants. Oceanic rock becomes magma hundreds of miles inland; how can that happen? By the process of subduction, the edge of one tectonic plate plunging beneath another, carrying its rock below. There are also associated earthquakes; ninety percent of the world’s quakes occur in the Ring of Fire. Rock thrusting over rock makes the quakes on land, and tsunamis in the sea. There are about 1,500 earthquakes in Alaska every month. Subduction makes the deepest ocean trenches in the world; those trenches really define the Pacific. The continent of North America is moving west at about three inches a year. Powerful convection currents separate the sea floor, pouring out magma, making new land. It is a dynamic global system. The Earth is never at rest.

And I will surely be restless, too, until I meet you here again next month.

PIERS

STAR TREK

Deep Space 9, Season 3, Episode #1: “The Search Part I” The Dominion says it means to stop Federation incursions. Sisko reappears, having used a Romulan cloaking device, as the Romulans also wish to halt this problem. He says that five years ago they prepared a ship, the Defiant, to tackle the Borg. It as a thorough warship, and they will board it per Federation orders. It will go to the Gamma Quadrant to locate the Founders to establish peaceful relations. The personnel are not easy with this, but must fall in line. There is a lady Romulan officer with them, T’Rul, to guard their cloaking device, and a Federation security officer, which antagonizes Odo. They learn that the Vorta are a possible connection. The Jem’Hadar are the enforcers, deadly and merciless. Soon they are in a battle with three enemy ships. They destroy one, but three more are coming. The Defiant gets boarded and there is personal combat. Odo gets himself and Kira to a shuttle. They go to a planet in the Omaran Nebula and discover a vast pool of shapeshifters. A woman forms and approaches Odo “Welcome home,” she says.

DS9: S3 #2 “The Search Part II” Odo and Kira have just encountered the shape-shifters, who are are part of the Great Link. A woman takes Odo’s hand, sharing the Link, and now he knows he is Home. Meanwhile Sisko meets Borath, a Founder; O’Brien and Dax managed to get in touch. Odo was one of 100 babies sent into the galaxy to learn its ways. Now he merges, literally, with the woman, as they embrace and dissolve into fluid together. Sisko is outraged that a sudden new treaty is reassigning all personnel of the DS9 station without his approval. What is going on? Sisko gathers his crew and they go to shut down the wormhole. It turns out that the changelings are the Founders of the Dominion, trying to impose order on the rest of the galaxy despite the horrendous cost. Odo refuses to go along, and parts company with them, sparing the galaxy. For now.

DS9: S3 #3 “The House of Quark” Business is down and Quark is annoyed. Then the lone customer, Kozak, attacks him; they struggle, and the knife ends up killing the Klingon. Then Kozak’s brother D’Ghor comes. Then Grilka, Kozak’s wife, who abducts him and takes him to her home, and marries him at knife-point so she can have an heir. Quark checks her family’s finances and discovers that D’Ghor has been systematically cheating Kozak for five years. D’Ghor challenges Quark to combat, but Quark demonstrates that there would be no honor in this, and the Klingon authority agrees. So he has saved Grilka’s estate for her. All he wants in return is a divorce, which she grants.

DS9: S3 #4 “Equilibrium” Jadzia Dax is distracted by a melody and is acting strangely and suffering hallucinations. The only previous Dax host, Joran Belar, to experience trauma was in a coma for six months. So Sisko and Bashier take her to the Trill Symbiosis Commission, who are the experts. Timor says her hallucinations acre actually memories of one of the prior hosts. Next day Timor is evasive, as if someone doesn’t want him to talk. They investigate, and learn that Joran Belar should not have been a host. That information has been deleted; there was a cover-up. It turns out that half the general population is capable of being Dax hosts, but that information would bring chaos because they would all want to be hosts. Sisko keeps the secret, to save Jadzia, who is now integrating more properly with Joran. She will be all right.

DS9: S3 #5 “Second Skin” There seems to be a duplicate Kira Nerys, who was in a Cardassian concentration camp ten years ago. Our Kira departs to investigate, and disappears. She wakes later made up as a Cardassian woman on Cardassia. They tell her she was Iliana, sent to infiltrate the resistance, given the memories of Kira so she could merge. She meets her supposed father, whom she doesn’t remember. The Obsidian Order needs information from her, as she was their operative. They put pressure on, but her “father” intercedes to protect her. But she points out that this may be a trap for him, as they suspect him of disloyalty: cause him to betray them to protect her. Sure enough, the authorities step in—but so do Sysko, Odo, and Dax, and their Cardassian ally, Garak, rescuing Kira and giving her “father” sanctuary so he can continue looking for his real daughter. He and Kira have developed a real respect for each other; he’s a good man, and she does resemble his daughter.

DS9: S3 #6 “The Abandoned” Mardah is Jake’s lady interest. She works for Quark, at the gaming tables, and is a distractingly pretty girl, by no coincidence; she distracts customers who might otherwise win too big. Is there cynical reason for this 20 year old woman’s interest in the 16 year old son of the station commander? Meanwhile Quark accidentally bought a baby, thinking it was equipment. But the child ages rapidly; in a day he looks eight years old. Why has he been sent here? He is a Jem’Hadar, a natural killer. Odo helps him, but it is tricky. Mardah has dinner with Sisko and Jake, and Sisko gets to know both of them better. Odo helps the killer escape; he can’t integrate with others not his kind.

DS9: S3 #7 “Civil Defense” Jake has trouble with a file. O’Brien checks, while Sisko is there. And the file is balky, triggering an ancient Cardassian message that workers are in revolt and have eight minutes to stop. The three of them are locked in the ore processing unit 5. The automated messages continue threateningly; gas may kill all people on the station. Failing that, the station will be destroyed. They have to regain control before they all die. It even summons Gul Dukat, who arrives and means to bargain to establish a Cardassian garrison here. And the program makes him a captive too, with delicious irony. Now they all are battling together to save the station before they all die. They manage to accomplish this at the last second. This is one tense episode.

DS9: S3 #8 “Meridian” Kira pretends to be Odo’s lover, to get rid of an objectionable prospective suitor. Meanwhile the planet Meridian appears, literally, from an intersecting dimension. They visit, using the Defiant, learning about it. Handsome Deral comes on to Dax, and she is interested. They walk through a garden, climb a tree, kiss. Meridian’s sun needs to be stabilized so the planet won’t phase in and out so much. Jadzia plans to join him on Meridian, leaving DS9. But her presence there messes it up and they have to haul her back; she can’t join Deral after all. Quark schemes to make a holo image of Kira naked to satisfy a customer, but she catches on and doctors it to put Quark’s head on her body. The customer is furious. It’s a nice body, though.

DS9: S3 #9 “Defiant” Kira has been overworked too long and is on the verge of a breakdown. Bashir relieves her of duty so she can unwillingly relax. He takes her to Quark’s establishment and gives her four relaxing things to do, two of which she must accomplish. And Commander Riker from the Enterprise introduces himself. She gives him a tour of the station, including the Defiant ship—and he shoots her, stunning her, and takes the ship. He’s an impostor named Tom, Will’s second self, with two accomplices. Gul Dukat and Sisko go to Cardassia to organize the search and nullification of the Defiant. An observer from the Obsidian Order is with them. There are political secrets and complications. They surround the Defiant so it can’t complete its mission, and negotiate a deal that saves all parties. But what is going on in that system that the authorities don’t know about? Fascinating questions. Kira brings the ship back.

DS9: S3 #10 “Fascination” It is the Gratitude Festival. Everyone attends, many in costume. Lwaxana visits and monopolizes Odo. Jake, who lost his girlfriend, now says he loves Kira. Keiko has to spend yet more time away from O’Brien. Other relationships are strained. Kira’s boyfriend Vedik Bariel gets interested in Jadzia, but she is interested in Sisko—or is it a practical joke? Then Kira and Bashir suddenly get together, unable to resist each other. It turns out to be Zanthi Fever going around, that mixes up attractions. It passes, and normalcy returns. Zanthi? An interesting name.

DS9: S3 #11 “Past Tense Part I” They take the Defiant to Earth for a formal event. Sisko, Dax, and Bashir beam to Earth, but land in 2024 and are in trouble. O’Brien, Kira, and Odo are left to crew the ship. Sisko and Bashier are arrested; Jadzia meets Chris Brynner separately, and he helps her. But Sisko and Bashir end up in Sanctuary District A, a hellhole, where they know there is about to be a phenomenal riot; they need to get out before it happens, as they must not interfere with history. But they inadvertently do interfere, and history starts changing, and they have to try to fix it.

DS9: S3 #12 “Past Tense Part II” Sisko assumes the identity of the key man who died, Gabriel Bell, so that history won’t be changed. In the present time there is a bubble of un-change around their ship, while the rest of the cosmos differs; they send an away team of O’Brien and Kira to go into the past to try to salvage things, but they go to a later time. Dax sneaks into the Sanctuary and joins Sisko and Bashir; she looks quite different in 21st century style. O’Brien and Kira try again, this time more successfully. The state troops invade, slaughtering a multitude. Sisko gets shot, but survives. But the original time-line is restored, and our folk return to their own time. History has been saved, as it were, but it was a close call, thanks to a glitch in transmission.

DS9: S3 #13 “Life Support” pretty Leanne approaches Jake for a date, but his friend Nog’s” crudity messes it up. Meanwhile there is a problem with an approaching ship, and Vedik Bareil, Kira’s boyfriend, is injured. He dies. Then there is a sign of life, amazingly. Bashir manages to revive him, to the great relief of everyone, as he is involved in key negotiations between Bajor and Cardassia that might result in permanent peace. But he is ailing, and still may die. Bashir wants to put him in stasis, to save his life, but he wants to complete the negotiations despite the danger. They do negotiate the treaty, but he dies. Kira will not be pleased.

DS9: S3 #14 “Heart of Stone” Odo and Kira are returning from a spot mission when there seems to be trouble with another ship. It lands on a moon, and they follow. Kira’s foot gets caught in some kind of growing crystal that feeds on energy. The cave is threatening to collapse on her. We learn that Odo’s name in Cardassian means “nothing.” Kira seems to be doomed as the crystal slowly surrounds her. She says she loves Odo, and he confesses that he loves her too. Meanwhile Nog wants to attend the Academy and become a Starfleet officer. He persuades Sisko to support him. And Odo catches on that Kira is an impostor. She’s another changeling trying to persuade him to leave Starfleet and join the changelings. The real Kira likes him but doesn’t love him. When the real Kira inquires whether anything significant was said, he demurs, choosing not to tax her with his private emotion. This may be my favorite episode so far; I like Kira and I like Odo, and each could do worse.

DS9: S3 #15 “Destiny” Three lady Cardassian scientists visit to assist in setting up a communications system that travels through the wormhole. But others don’t want them here, lest it bring prophesied destruction on the station. Two are polite but the third seems arrogant. Stage by stage the Prophecy seems to be coming true; a reaction threatens the closure of the wormhole. That alarms Kira. One of the ladies comes on to O’Brien, in a cross-cultural misunderstanding; that’s awkward. But one of them may be an agent sent to mess up the project. They realize that they may have misinterpreted the prophecy, and succeed in setting up the system.

DS9: S3 #16 “Prophet Motive” Quark has a great deal in progress, including the attentions of a lovely Cardassian woman Emi. Meanwhile the Grand Nagus may have a plan, but Quark distrusts it. There’s a big gift to be announced. Quark is going crazy trying to figure it out. He realizes that the Nagus has been changed, and argues to change him back. Things revert, and all is well, maybe. And Bashier fails to win an award he expected to win. So nothing much has been changed.

DS9: S3 #17 “Visionary” Both Klingons and Romulans are here for two days, coincidentally. This of course means mischief. O’Brien suffers a dose of radiation poisoning, and starts having visions of the near future. In fact they are real, and at one point there are two of him meeting each other. He is actually time shifting about five hours into the future. He tells Bashier to give him a special test that will save his life, and does, in the “past.” “Who told you that?” Bashir demands. “You did.” In the future. The Romulans suggest that Odo has a romantic interest in Kira, which of course she rejects, though we know from Episode #14 “Heart of Stone” that it’s true. The future O’Brien discovers that the Romulans are about to destroy the station to cover up their nefarious activity. The “present” O’Brien is too sick with radiation poisoning, so the “future” O’Brien returns in his place to give the alarm and save the station. What a story! Another candidate for my favorite.

DS9: S3 #18 “Distant Voices” An alien Lethean wants a restricted substance, and zaps Bashir when raiding his supplies. He wakes alone in the station, except for Quark, who flees. And Garak the Cardassian tailor. The computer and other systems are down. Where are the others? He finds them, except for Sisko, but they are oddly argumentative. Bashir discovers that he is in a coma, and concludes that the others represent aspects of his personality, and the station is his mind. Now he find Sisko, who represents his skill and professionalism. And the Lethean represents Death, stalking him. Meanwhile Bashir is getting visibly older and weaker. He tries to open panels to address the computer, but the cabinets ace filled with tennis balls. But he finally pulls through, having confidence in himself, and recovers. He has survived his 30thbirthday.

DS9: S3 #19 “Through the Looking Glass” O’Brien pulls a phaser on Sisko and beams them to a parallel universe, through the looking glass where Sisko led a rebellion against the Alliance. But he is dead, so they need our Sisko to take his place. Why should he? Because his wife Jennifer is the leader of the other side. The wife our Sisko lost in this universe. In that universe Dax is Sisko’s mistress. Kira is the leader of the Alliance who sort of likes Sisko, and she is sexy as hell in this role. Bashir is a high lieutenant rivaling Sisko. Garak is on the side of the Alliance. Kira manages to capture Sisko, and they kiss, though they are enemies. And Jennifer is there, but a different person. Sisko overcomes his guards and makes a break, taking Jennifer along. Kira leads the pursuit. Sisko activates the station’s self destruct system and bargains with Kira, winning freedom for the rebels and respect from Jennifer, whom he must leave.

DS9: S3 #20 “Improbable Cause” Someone tries to kill Garak; there is an explosion in his residence. But Odo concludes that Garak blew up his own shop. The two of them get captured by the Romulans, who are on a mission to pass through the wormhole and attack the Dominion. If they eliminate the Founders, the Dominion will be wiped out. Odo is a shape changer, one of the Founders by species, though not with them. Enabran Tain, the Cardassian who tried to kill Garak before, now wants Garak to join him so they can work together, as they did before—and Garak agrees, to Odo’s chagrin. The story is to be continued.

DS9: S3 #21 “The Die is Cast” Odo is now a prisoner. Tain assigns Garak to persuade Odo to join them, but Odo is disgusted. At DS9 they are preparing for war; the Federation is sending nine warships, but a larger Romulan invasion fleet is already passing through the wormhole. They want to eliminate the Founders. Sisko and his crew take the Defiant to the Gamma Quadrant in direct conflict with Federation orders. Garak tortures Odo by preventing him from liquefying, to get information on the changelings or Founders, but doesn’t work. Tain attacks the planet, but it turns out to be a trap as 150 Jem’Hadar ships appear, an overwhelming force. One of the Romulan officers turns out to be a changeling, tricking them into it. Odo and Garak escape in the runabout and return to the Defiant. The Cardassian and Romulan fleets are wiped out. The Federtation command forgives Sisko, but hopes he doesn’t do it again.

DS9: S3 #22 “Explorers” Sisko has grown a small beard and has a project to build a spaceship based on an ancient blueprint. Lovely Leeta introduces herself to Bashir, when Dax brings news that soon another woman he is interested in will visit the station: his main competitor in school. But when she comes, she walks right past him as if he doesn’t exist. That’s curious. Sisko and Jake voyage on the newly built ship, which looks like a butterfly when its solar panels are spread. Then the sail gets torn off and they are zooming at warp speed without control. They wind up in Cardassian space, having recreated a famous ancient journey. Bashir introduces himself to the lady and learns that she didn’t recognize him, having confused him with someone else. They are soon deep into technical dialogue, having much in common.

DS9: S3 #23 “Family Business” Jake is setting Sisko up with a date with a lady freighter captain, Kasidy Yates. Quark is faced with a Ferengi Writ of Accountability, a disaster. It relates to his mother, Moogie, who is guilty of making a profit, as Ferengi females are forbidden to do. She turns out to be a financial genius, making far more latinum than Quark ever did. She is also wearing clothes, also forbidden. But in the end Quark us able to bribe the official and make it right. And Kasidy turns out to be an ardent fan of the extinct game of baseball, as is Sisko. Suddenly that relationship is alive.

DS9: S3 #24 “Shakaar” The new head of the provisional government of Bajor is Vedik Kai Winn. Kira is not pleased, but agrees to perform a mission for Winn. She has to persuade Shakaar, her old rebel squad leader, to return reclamators to the government for recovering devastated fields. But Shakaar’s group needs those reclamators for their own fields. Violence breaks out because Winn lied to Kira and tried to have Shakaar arrested. Rebel leaders are on the verge of fighting each other, but meet and decide to avoid civil war. Instead they unite, and Shakaar will run for the top office. Scheming Winn is finished.

DS9: S3 #25 “Facets” Nog Ferengi is determined to get into the Starfleet Academy next year. Meanwhile Jadzia Dax will have a special Dax event of her kind, the zhian-tara, and would like to borrow the bodies of her seven closest friends, which are the regular crew plus Leeta, possibly Bashir’s girlfriend, who will tune in to Dax’s previous hosts. Kira becomes Lela, the first host. O’Brien is Tobin, the second host. Leeta is the third, Quark is the fourth, animated by a female, to his discomfort. Bashir is the fifth. Sisko is the sixth, Joran, who may have been crazy. He attacks her, but she fights back, and Sisko returns. Odo is the seventh, Curzon, whom Sisko knew. The last two decide to stay merged, which does not thrill Jadzia. Sisko says she should confront Curzon and make him back off. She does, and he admits that he had fallen in love with her, and still loves her. She persuades him that if he rejoins her, he will be a part of her, as he should be. But the experience benefits both Jadzia and Odo. A most interesting episode.

DS9: S3 #26 “The Adversary” Sisko has been promoted to Captain. The others congratulate him. Meanwhile there has been a change in command at a neighboring empire. Tzenkethi, and the Defiant must go to show that the Federation remains in charge overall, lest the new administration forget. But something has taken over the key ship’s systems; a saboteur must have done it. They discover a changeling, who escapes. The Dominion hopes to start a war between the Federation and the Tzetkethi. The ambassador was fake, and they can’t trust anything he told them; there may never have been a change of power int Tzenkithi. They don’t control the Defiant, but must stop it. They must find the changeling, who can resemble any of them. They go out in teams to fire phaser beams down all the passages. They start the self destruct sequence. Then there are two Odos, each claiming to be the real one. The real one defeats and accidentally kills the fake one, and they save the ship. But the fake one tells Odo as he dies “You’re too late. We are everywhere.” That promises real mischief for the future.

DS9: S4 #1 “The Way of the Warrior” A double-length episode. There is a station wide search for the changeling. They don’t catch it, but are alert. Cisco has a date with Kasidy Yates, interrupted by a Klingon visit to the station. They use the drops of blood test to prove they are not changelings. The Klingons attack and beat up Garak for no apparent cause. The freighter Xhosa, which Kasidy commands, is attacked; Sisko backs the Klingons off. But they need another Klingon to handle the Klingons, and fetch in Worf (from The Next Generation), who quickly investigates. But the Klingons are not forthcoming. Something is going on. Worf finds out that the Klingons mean to attack Cardassia, thinking that the Dominion has taken over the Cardassian Empire. The Federation disapproves, and the Klingons withdraw from the peace treaty between them. Mischief indeed. Sisko contacts Gul Dukat, who is no longer in power, and will try to rescue him with the Defiant. They succeed, barely. The Klingon fleet attacks the station; the station returns fire, destroying a number of ships. Klingons beam aboard and there is combat. The Federation ships arrive, and the Klingons back off. Sisko talks Worf out of resigning from Starfleet. He becomes the station’s new Strategic Operations officer.

DS9: S4 #2 “The Visitor” A young woman, Melanie, an aspiring writer, visits old Jake Sisko, Ben Cisco’s son, a famous writer. She asks why he gave up writing at 40. He says his father died when he was 18. It was an accident with a special unit. The others helped Jake cope, and he recovered. Ben’s ghost appears to him, and vanishes. Problems mount in the sector and there may be war with the Klingons; folk are departing the station. Then Ben reappears; it seems he was not killed but knocked out of phase, and this is a year later. But he fades out again. So Jake knows his father is alive bunt locked in a temporal flux. Then the Federation turned over control of the station to the Klingon Empire, and Jake had to leave. He came to this house and became a writer, got married to Korena, and was happy for a while. Ben appears and talks to him, and fades out. He decides to return to school to learn what he needs to somehow save his father. He is so absorbed in that effort that he loses his wife. Now he is going to make one last effort, in a window of opportunity, to cut the astral cord that links him to Ben, and return Ben to the moment of the accident, maybe freeing him. It works, and Ben Cisco is back in the real world, alive.

DS9: S4 #3 “Hippocratic Oath” They believe that a Jem’Hadar visitor to the station is an enemy agent, as this species is all killers. Sure enough they take O’Brien and Bashir hostage. Bashir decides to help them, as they are trying to escape the white, the drug to which they are addicted, but O’Brien objects and escapes. They search for him. But it seems that only the commander has any conscience. All the troops here will die. Worf doesn’t trust any of this, but does not properly understand the ways of the station, which differ from those of a star ship.

DS9: S4 #4 “Indiscretion” Kira receives a message from Bajor: a fragment of a ship has been found, the Ravinok. Kira will investigate, but the Cardassians send a representative to accompany her. It is Dukat, her nemesis of old. And they find it. He finds the bracelet of Tora Naprem, the Bajoran woman he loved. Kira is looking for Lorit. Another is Ziyal, Dukat and Naprem’s daughter. Meanwhile Kasidy and Sisko have a difference that threatens their relationship. The crew and prisoners of the Ravinok survive! But Dukat says he has to kill his daughter to preserve his reputation she is evidence how he fraternized with the enemy. Kira said if he does, Kira will kill him. Ziyal says that if she can’t be with her father, she’d rather die anyway. He capitulates and welcomes her. And Sisko apologizes to Kasidy, and all is well. A feeling episode.

DS9: S4 #5 “Rejoined” A Trill science team is coming to borrow the Defiant, to conduct an experiment making an artificial wormhole. The team is led by Lenara Kahn, whom Jadzia knows. A former host was once married to one of Jadzia’s hosts, and now both are in later hosts. But Trill protocol requires that they have no romance now, lest they be banished from Trill society. Yet both are tempted. Jadzia and Lenara talk and find they have more in common than their married prior hosts did. They kiss, desiring each other. They are in love because of the Trill history. They want to be with each other, but that would get them exiled, and their trills would die when they do. Finally Lenarta departs, heartrendingly for them both. Another feeling episode.

DS9: S4 #6 “Starship Down” They take the Defiant on a mission to the Gamma Quadrant to meet the Karemma, where two Gem’Hadar ships appear, going after the Karemma ship, which hides in a planetary atmosphere. The Gem’Hadar go after it, and the Defiant follows. It gets hit, but recovers, then runs afoul of another enemy ship and gets hit again. Power is out, Sisko dangerously injured. Kira and Sisko are together; she must keep him awake until a medic comes. Bashir and Dax are together, huddled against the chill temperature. Sisko is slowly slipping away, and Kira is desperate. Quark and a Karemma, Hanok, try to defuse a torpedo that penetrated the hull. Kira prays for Sisko, and he starts to recover. Worf learns how to work with regular folk, and they succeed in blasting the Gem’Hadar ship fighting them. All ends well, barely.

DS9: S4 #7 “Little Green Men” The Fenengi Quark and his brother Rom take a ship to Earth to deliver Nog to the Academy. But something goes wrong and they arrive in Earth’s past, circa 1950. They adapt translators so that they can communicate with the primitive folk. Odo is there with them, having changed form to go along, watching them. The Earth authorities don’t trust them, taking them for little green men from Mars. They escape and return to the present 400 years later and deliver Nog safely to the Academy.

Oops, I got the wrong disc, and am watching these two out of order. Sigh. DS9: S4 #24 “Body Parts” Quark says he is dying; his recent physical indicates he has the Dorek Syndrome and he has six days to live. Keiko O’Brien has been away, and returns with a complication: her baby had to be transferred to the only other woman available, Kira. So now Kira will bear O’Brien’s baby. Quark auctions off his soon-to-be remains; the Ferengi Brunt, FCA, buys them, then Quark learns he doesn’t have Dorek Syndrome, but still must deliver his remains. So he sets up with Garak to kill him. But it has to be the right way. Finally he decides to break the contract, which deprives him of all his assets and puts him out of business, but at least he lives. The O’Briens invite Kira to live with them, because of the baby. And the other members of the station come to Quark’s rescue, giving him supposedly surplus junk that is anything but.

DS9: S4 #25 “Broken Link” Garak introduces Odo to the lovely new restaurant owner on the station. She expresses interest in a closer relationship. Then Odo suffers an attack of something and collapses. He’s got something, and must go to the Dominion in the Gamma Quadrant, to see the Founders. They take the Defiant. The Gem’Hadar assume command of the ship. The lady leader of the changelings talks with him. They caused his illness, to bring him back for trial in the Great Link, because he killed a changeling. They beam to the planet, where Odo and the woman enter the pool. They return later with Odo cured and rendered human. That’s his punishment: to be completely human in biology as well as in appearance. Meanwhile the Klingons are declaring that they are taking over this sector, and the Federation has ten days to clear out, or there will be war. But Odo says that while he was in the pool the other changelings there were trying to hide things from him, but he did pick up some identities, and the Klingon chief Gowron is one of them. He is a changeling. Wow! This promises to get dangerously complicated next season.

Back to where I belong: DS9: S4 #8 “The Sword of Kahless” the old Klingon Kor has a quest: to find the Sword of Kahless. Dax and Worf accompany him, taking a runabout to the planet where the ancient evidence was found. The Hur’q invaded and plundered Klingon territory over a thousand years ago and stole the Sword. They find it, but are pursued by rogue Klingons. It is apparent that the Klingon who holds the Sword gets dreams of leading the Klingons; both Worf and Kor want it, and neither trusts the other. So Dax holds the Sword. They fight each other for it, and Dax shoots to stun them both. They realize that it is not their destiny to keep the Sword, and they return to the station.

DS9: S4 #9 “Our Man Bashir” A James Bond parody, with Bashir as Bond. He, Garak, and Kira are locked in a Holosuite drama, she as a sexy Russian agent. Dax is Honey Bare, another sexy agent. O’Brien is one-eyed Falcon, an enemy. Worf is Dr. Noah’s assistant. Sisko is Noah, who plots to release so much lava that the continents of the world will sink, and Mt. Everest will became an island in the sea. They can’t interrupt the program lest the folk trapped in it be lost. But Bashir has the sheer nerve to save the day. I love these parodies; they show off the actors in brave new roles.

DS9: S4 #10 “Homefront” They receive a priority message: there has been a suspicious explosion on Earth, killing 27 people. The recording shows that it was a changeling who did it. The changelings have finally reached Earth. That is mischief. They go to Earth, as Odo is a changeling and should have valuable information. Earth security is lax, as Odo demonstrates. Blood tests, phaser sweeps, random checks are required. Odo starts finding shapeshifters imitating key personnel. There is a general power failure, the result of sabotage, and the Gem’Hadar, the most brutally efficient soldiers ever, may be coming. They get the president to declare martial law.

DS9: S4 #11 “Paradise Lost” The siege of Earth is continued. Sisko investigates the Red Squad of cadets, who sabotaged the power grid. He concludes that Star Fleet is behind it, as a demonstration that triggers the necessary action: martial law. Now Star Fleet is in charge, not the civilians. When Sisko doesn’t agree, he is relieved of duty here. A changeling in the form of O’Brien talks with him, saying there are only four changelings on Earth at the moment, and look at what they have done. Sisko is arrested to keep him out of it. Odo springs him. The Lakota challenges the Defiant and fires on it. The Defiant fights back. The Defiant gets through when the Star Fleet officer lets it, and the Admiral is through; even some of his own key personnel abandon him. Martial law is canceled. Earth is saved from dictatorship. But the changeling threat remains. This is one tense episode, and one tense situation.

DS9: S4 #12 “Crossfire” Bajor First Minister Shakaar, whom we met in Season 3 as a rebel fighter Kira worked with, visits the station on business. Odo gets news that someone plans to assassinate Shakaar; the True Way faction has assassinated others. So Odo and Worf step up security. Shakaar tells Odo privately that he thinks he is falling in love with Kira. That’s awkward for Odo because he loves Kira himself. Quark catches on to that situation. The central elevator drops out of control when Shakaar, Kira, and Odo are in it. Odo uses his shape changing ability to halt it, and Worf tracks down the saboteur. Odo is distracted by his hopeless interest in Kira, as she in increasingly interested in Shakaar, and it is interfering with Odo’s job. This is clearly a situation that needs to be resolved. But how?

DS9: S4 #13 “Return to Grace” Kira must negotiate with the Cardassians. Dukat is assigned to help her, having been demoted for bringing his illegitimate half Bajoran daughter Ziyal home. It also cost him his wife and reputation, but he says he doesn’t regret it. Kira still feels he did the right thing; she had interceded to save the girl, preventing him from killing her. Now Dukat seems to be interested in Kira himself. On Dukat’s freighter they encounter a Klingon ship, fire on it, and it warps away. Dukat and Kira work together to improve the freighter’s fighting capacity, their personalities clashing, as he clearly admires her and she clearly wants no part of him. But they cooperate to spring a trap on the Klingon War Bird—and manage to exchange all personnel between the two ships, so that the Klingons are on the freighter and the humans and Cardassian are on the War Bird. Then they blast the freighter. And they discover key information. And Dukat makes his pitch for Kira to join him in fighting the Klingons. But she has been that route, and prefers to return to the station. She takes Ziyal with her, with Dukat’s acquiescence, as the war front is no place for the girl.

DS9: S4 #14 “Sons of Mogh” Worf’s brother Kurn visits, wanting Worf to kill him, per a Klingon ritual, as he has been deprived of honor. Worf does, but Dax catches on and intervenes to save Kurn, who is not pleased. Meanwhile the Klingons have activated mines in this region of space. Worf and Kurn beam aboard a Kingon ship and get the addresses of the mines so they can be detonated. That saves much mischief, and the Klingons clear out. But Kurn is unsatisfied, so Worf arranges for him to have his memory wiped and he is adopted into a new Klingon family. No dishonor there.
DS9: S4 #15 “Bar Association” Quark treats his employees badly. Rom forms a union, and they go on strike. That complicates things on the station, and Sisko orders that it be settled. Brunt comes, a tough Ferengi liquidator enforcing Ferengi law. He beats up Quark, because Rom cares about his brother, and this is a way to pressure Rom. Finally they work out a sneaky compromise to get rid of Brunt: the union folds officially, but they get everything they were demanding, including immediate pay raises. All is well again.

There is more to watch, and I will continue watching. But I already know that Deep Space Nine is my favorite of the Star Trek series I have watched so far. I especially like feisty Kira, but they are all good characters.

PIERS

SapTimber 2018

HI-

My children’s short novel novel Pandora Park will be featured in Early Bird Books on 9/5/2018, downpriced to $1.99 on that day. That’s the one where a boy discovers a trail in a mall park that leads to a magic land and meets a girl from China who followed a similar trail. It turns out she has a bit of magic; when he annoys her she slaps him, and his clothing falls off. Later she gets chased by a scaly monster; she turns and slaps it on the snout, and its scales fall off. You never can tell what you’ll find in a mall park.

On 9/17/2018, three Xanth novels 38-40 will be downpriced to $3.99. If you missed this bargain the last time it ran, now’s your chance to catch it. That’s Board Stiff, Five Portraits, andIsis Orb, all good punny fantasies introducing characters who will become important subsequently, such as the five children from the future, one of whom will be the main character in her own novel when it gets published. There has been a clog in the pipe, but eventually you’ll see the more recent novels. Meanwhile Board is about the young woman who asks a wishing well for adventure and romance but get changed into a board, and Portraits presents the special children, and Isis is the one worked out by a ten year old girl in Mundania.

I watched The Book of Life, a musical animated feature. The figures are impossibly exaggerated, but it is charming. The children waiting to enter the museum are a wild bunch, completely undisciplined. But a young woman handles them, taking them to the Land of the Forgotten. The inset story features a Mexican setting, with a wager between an evil god and a good goddess: which of two boys will eventually win the hand of Maria, the girl they both like? The people are self animated wooden and cloth puppets. Joaquin (pronounced wa-KEEN) gets a brooch that makes him bold and fearless. Manolo (man-O-lo) fights a bull in matador fashion, but he would rather play his guitar and sing. Maria must go to school far away, in Europe, causing a years long separation from the boys. When they grow up Manolo fights the bull brilliantly, but refuses to kill it. Maria applauds, but no one else does. Joaquin has won many medals, especially the Medal of Everlasting Life that makes him invulnerable, but has an attitude toward women that turns Maria off. When bandits attack the town, Joaquin readily dispatches them. The townspeople want her to marry Joaquin, so he will protect the town. Then a snake bites Maria and she sinks into near-death, but later Joaquin rouses her. Manolo goes into the land of death, not knowing she is alive after all. He struggles through, determined to save her. He has to fight a huge fiery bull, but rather than stab it with the sword he sings beautifully to it, pacifying it. Thus he wins back his life; the realm of Death releases him, and he is alive again. He and Joaquin work together to defeat the last of the evil, and Joaquin, having finally learned how to give, is now satisfied to let Manolo marry Maria. And I love Maria’s impossibly voluminous hair.

I watched The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a comedy about Pat Kramer, a typical mother with three rambunctious children whose day is one harried hassle. Her husband works in an add agency promoting new products, some of which foul up in their home. In the midst of this she discovers that she is growing smaller. She was 5:7 tall; now she’s 5:5, and shrinking. Which of the myriad products she uses is causing it? She becomes a reluctant public center of attention as she gets smaller than her children. She moves into the dollhouse. Her husband’s agency wants to exploit t her for ads; she can be a living doll. Caged, she finds an ally in the friendly gorilla Sidney, evidently another experiment who knows sign language. The police come, like the Keystone Kops, and it devolves into mayhem. Pat finally shrinks into microscopic invisibility. She falls into a puddle of goo and gets restored to full size. But now she is growing… A fun farce.

I watched The Brass Bottle, which was the inspiration for the TV series I Dream of Jeannie. Harold buys an antique Arabian bottle at an auction, and discovers that it contains the three thousand year old genie Fakrash, who grants Harold his every wish. For example the genie arranges for the couple who were staying with Harold to win a lot of money so they can go live in Paris, amicably getting rid of them. But the shenanigans also get rid of his fiance Sylvia and her family. So Fakrash summons Tezra, daughter of a king of the Blue Jinn, to be his wife. When Fakrash tries to reason with Sylvia’s father, he gets kicked out, so he changes the man into a mule. Harold catches on and tries to take the mule home so Fakrash can change him back, but the car has a will of its own. Fakrash agrees only on condition that they go into business together. Thus Fakrash & Ventimore Industries. But the authorities crack down and Harold is soon in a straight jacket. He finally agrees to let Fakrash prove he is a genie. Then it get wild indeed. He flies, then changes three senators to miniature size. They begin to believe. Finally Fakrash sets things back where they started and erases the memories. But at the end Fakrash and Tezra show up as business partners. A fun movie.

I watched The Green Inferno, a horror film about an effort to save the Amazon rain forest and its native tribes. Student activists plan to fly to Peru with cameras to make publicity for the cause. Justine joins them. They take a boat on the river, and change to jungle gear with yellow and green outfits and blue helmets. They don face masks and chain themselves in place. They are threatened with guns to the head, arrested and released, having made global headlines. They take their plan back—and it crashes in the jungle. They survive the crash, but then the natives ambush them, stun them with poisoned darts, and take them prisoner. They cage most of them, and sacrifice the leader and eat his flesh, chopping him into pieces, drinking his blood, beheading him. They carve the rest of him up and cook him. It’s a feast. Then they take the girls and apparently take vaginal cuttings for their blood. Justine is marked for something. Samantha escapes. Another girl slices her own neck and commits suicide. Justine and Daniel escape while another man is being eaten. They make their way back to the crashed plane, where others have been crucified—and get recaptured. Daniel is tortured and given to biting ants. Justine is stripped and painted white. But a little boy she has befriended helps her to escape again. She finds a government patrol, and they take her out by helicopter. Then she lies to protect those same natives, saying they helped her survive. Or was it all just a horrible dream? The issue is left in doubt.

I read Subtle Motion Journal and Journey of a Cranial Osteopath by Jacob William Watters, D.O. The D.O. stands for Doctor of Osteopathy. Osteopathy is a therapeutic therapy originally based on the premise that manipulation of the muscles and bones to promote structural integrity could promote or preserve health. I am skeptical about that, but my wife’s doctor is an Osteopath and he got her to quit smoking after 50 years, which I think is a significant reason why she is still alive today, so my skepticism is tempered. Actually Osteopathy now uses many of the techniques of conventional doctors so it can be hard to tell the difference. But I have to say that even if the basic theses were to be entirely wrong, that doesn’t mean that there is no value in it. I am a total skeptic about astrology, but I studied it when I wrote Macroscope and gained respect. Its thesis is that just as the motions of the stars and planets in their apparent courses can be observed and predicted, and human events have their own unpredictable courses, if you can draw a parallel between them, you can use the stars to track human events. I liken it to trisecting a line: you construct a trisected line, then draw parallels between it and the line in question, thus trisecting it indirectly. Your invented line enables you to handle the existing one. Draw similar parallels from the stars to human events and you’ve got it. Where I differ from astrology is that I don’t believe they have found the correct parallels. But I personally knew Marc Edmund Jones, a leading astrologer, when I was young; he gave me a compass, which in retrospect seems fitting because a compass enables folks to use parallels to the direction of the North Magnetic Pole to find their way locally. He also told me a naughty poem: “Mary had a pair of skates/ With which she loved to frisk;/ Now wasn’t she a foolish girl/ Her little*” Don’t get it? Sound out the word Asterisk: Her little ass ter risk. I told you it was naughty. Anyway, Marc Jones was no charlatan, and I’m sure he helped many people. I’m sure witch doctors help many people too, because of the personal attention they give, even though I am skeptical about their magic too. I like to link Astrology to Psychiatry: they may do a similar amount of good, for similar reason, though neither really understands human nature. So setting aside my skepticism about the original science, I have to say that today Osteopathy is just about as good as conventional medicine and may be better in some respects, because conventional medicine has its errors too. For example, I have a thumbnail judgment of a doctor, any doctor, that if he doesn’t believe in Vitamin C, he is dealing at least in part in ignorance. Or a dentist: if he does believe in fluoridation, ditto. I can discourse for some time on those subjects; don’t get me started. Well, Dr. Watters has an appendix covering nutrition and other health considerations, and he endorses Vitamin C and rejects fluoridation. He passes my spot test! Incidental note: this book was published by Xlibris, a self publisher I helped to survive in its early days twenty years ago because I wanted feasible self publishing to exist. I was at one time its major investor. It is in other hands now, and I can’t say I approve all of what it has become, but I’m glad to see that it is still accomplishing the purpose. It led the way to the fulfillment of the dreams of myriad writers. Then Amazon came on the scene, further transforming the picture. It’s a new world.

But let’s clarify. Osteopathy concerns manipulation of the muscles and bones. The cranium is the bone of the head: the skull. How can manipulating the head ameliorate, for example, an upset stomach? Well, it’s technical, but I will try to simplify it. A piezoelectric substance can transform vibrational energy to electromagnetic energy, and vice versa. In effect, squeeze it and it makes electricity; electrify it and it vibrates. The biological fascia are sheaves of connective tissue binding together bones, muscles and organs of the body, and they are piezoelectric. So stroke the bones of the head in the right way and they generate trace currents that affect other cells of the body. Thus a physical touch becomes a kind of electric chemistry. Thus subtle motion is a parallel line from touch to health. “Physics is the science of understanding the universe from without. Osteopathy is the science of understanding the universe from within.” It may be related to what in judo I learned as Ki or Qi, that special force that enhances proficiency. I am a skeptic there too, but many serious judokas believe in it.

This book is as it says also a journal, chronicling daily activities from June 2013 to June 2017. It is also a collection of thoughts along the way. So technical material alternates with philosophic and scientific material. It’s an unusual combination. Dr. Watters has treated many patients with quite varied ailments, and has thought about the nature of the universe. One patient suffered severe low back pain. The treatment alleviated it. One had trouble breathing; treatment helped. One had cerebral palsy; treatment helped. Then thoughts: “Before the Big Bang there was Stillness. It is from this Stillness that all energy and life sprang. The Stillness cannot be measured and it is known only from what was the moment before and now is manifest.” There are thoughts on black holes and the way stardust becomes iron. On the way he sees colors of energy: blue, gold, green, white, red. “Science is the knowing of something. Art is the implementation of something.” “We are Mind, Body, and Spirit. Each is a window into the other two.” At one point he draws a naughty parallel: “If someone farts in a crowded mall, nobody cares. But one fart in a small car and suddenly everyone’s upset.” Thus with mistakes and understanding. Also “Mind is the element of your self that is conscious…responsible for thought, thinking, knowing, learning. Spirit is the part of oneself that possesses the intangible qualities of love, desire, passion, emotion, connectedness.” We also learn along the way that the author suffered a serious accident in childhood that left him in chronic pain, so that at times he needs to treat himself. So he knows it works.

There is a lot more in this 500 page book, but I trust this gives the general nature of it. It is not light reading, but it has much to recommend it, even from this skeptic’s perspective.

I watched The Space Between Us. Sixteen year old Gardner Elliot was raised on Mars. First a flashback to the sending of the mission: five men and one woman, Sarah Elliot. Who turns out, too late, to be pregnant. This could ruin the mission. The East Texas company authorities decide to keep it quiet and see how it plays out. So the baby is born on Mars. But she suffers postpartum pre-eclampsia and it kills her. Now what to do? They decide to keep it quiet, to save the company. Sixteen years later, young Gardner is restless. He communicates with a girl on Earth his age, Tulsa, not telling her where he really is. On Mars a woman, astronaut Kendra Wyndham, generally takes care of him. They bring him to Earth, keeping him in quarantine. He fears they will send him back to Mars, so he escapes and goes to join Tulsa, named for where she was adopted. At first she doesn’t believe he’s really from Mars. She turns out to be quite a girl, flying with him on an airplane she pilots, then stealing a car. They are on a search for his unknown father. But Gardner’s heart is grossly enlarged; he can’t survive long on Earth. They do finally locate his father, and struggle to save Gardner. The take him in an airplane and go into free fall, easing his condition. He returns to Mars. And Tulsa goes into training with Kendra to go to Mars herself. This is a marvelous romance.

I watched Hacksaw Ridge, based on a true story. Desmond Doss is a conscientious objector who doesn’t carry a gun despite being in the front lines of the war in the Pacific. We see him first in childhood, then meeting the girl of his dreams, then in basic training where the sergeant mercilessly harasses the recruits. No one in the army understands his pacifism. The officers harass him, putting him on KP and guard duty. The men beat him up. They deny him leave so he can’t meet his girl and get married. They court martial him. But his father gets a letter from a brigadier general he served with in WWI reminding them that his constitutional rights can’t be waived on a technicality. That was evidently news to them; the military is not much into the Constitution. So the court martial is dropped; he has won his case. Which case should never have been brought against him, of course; I know from my own experience that the US Army is no bastion of human rights. So in due course he makes it to the ugly front, Hacksaw Ridge. Very few medics remain; the enemy targets them. The action is brutal, with rifles, bayonets, machine guns, grenades, mortars, flame throwers, bombs, and artillery strikes. Rats feast on the bodies. Desmond ropes wounded men and eases them down a cliff to safety, one by one. He saved 75 men that way, and won the Congressional Medal of Honor, the first conscientious objector ever to do so. A number of those who had ridiculed him were sav>ed by him at the end. This is one hard-hitting movie, physically and morally.

I watched Victoria and Abdul, a semi-historical story. Abdul, a clerk in India, is selected to present a Mohur, a special coin, to Queen Victoria because he is the tallest man available. Much pomp and circumstance. They rehearse the presentation, everything has to be done just so. Then the little old Queen appears. When the Queen finishes a dish, it is removed for everyone, regardless how much they have eaten. Then she falls asleep at the table. She is plainly bored with all this ceremony. Then Abdul has to present dessert, which is quivering jelly. He does, and also kisses the Queen’s foot. The servitors are outraged, but the Queen is intrigued. She makes him her personal servant for the duration, and then her companion. He tells of of the art of carpets, where the threads are like lives, and the Taj Mahal. And of the taste of the mango. So she has a mango sent from India so she can taste it. He teaches her to speak and write Urdu. She likes his company and takes him traveling with her. She confesses to being horribly lonely. Then she learns he is married—so she insists that his wife join them in England. His wife arrives with her mother, completely shrouded. Then Victoria learns that the Muslims had killed many British soldiers and were conquered enemies, not friends. But she forgives Abdul, and sees to his pregnant wife. She sees him as a son, maybe better than her own son. Victoria’s household threatens to resign. “Treason!” she exclaims, and calls their bluff. They back down. But Victoria is ill, and knows she will not live much longer. Indeed, she dies. Her jealous son becomes king, and immediately burns Abdul’s papers and packs him and his wife back to India. Fortunately his private journals escaped destruction, so his story is now known.

I watched The Terminal. I thought I saw it years ago, but didn’t remember details. But I don’t remember this movie at all, so it must have been another terminal encampment I saw. Viktor Navorski, a Bulgarian, arrives in New York, speaking little English, but his government has suffered a coup and no longer exists, so his status is in limbo. He has no country. He is restricted to the JFK airport terminal until they sort this out. Naturally he has problems, as he really can’t communicate with others here. He loses his meal tickets and has to learn to scrounge. Airport cameras are watching him throughout, hoping he will depart illegally so he can arrested and deported or imprisoned, but he has been told to wait here, so he waits. They try to encourage him to leave. He meets Amelia Warren, who has just been jilted. She is intrigued that he doesn’t try to grope her the way other men do. He gets to know the local workers, and gets a job with them. Then a Russian speaking man gets in trouble and they need a translator, and Viktor serves, and manages to find a way to solve the problem. The airport employees learn what he has done, and now all of them like him well. They help him learn more about Amelia. They help him intercept her, and they set up a nice romantic meal for them. And it due course he wins her love. She helps him get a one day visa so he can enter the city and get the last signature for his father’s collection, which is why he came here. But the airport director insists that he immediately go back to his native country, and will take it out on the employees if he doesn’t. So he agrees to go home. Then the employees learn why, and rally around him, and delay his flight for a day, so that he can get that signature after all. He gets it. Now he will go home.

I read Mr. Barsin’s Toy Emporium, by Lois Wickstrom. I have known Lois from way back; she’s the other Dvorak keyboard typist in the Fantasy genre. Seven year old Jake sees a mermaid in St. Augustine Bay; she wears an orange seashell top and a pearl necklace, and she waves to him as if she knows him. Naturally his parents don’t see her; few parents perceive the realities of children. They take him to the Toy Emporium for his birthday, where he searches for and finally finds the mermaid he saw. She is Arrabella. She can talk, and swim in air, and she’s for him if he commits to her. She is an imaginary playmate, and she costs nothing. But the proprietor, Mr. Barsim, makes clear that there is a cost. The nature of that cost slowly clarifies as the novel progresses. Imaginary playmates interest me; I understand that many children have them, but I didn’t, though I could have used one. But I wrote about one in my novella Self Image, not yet published. Anyway, it is similar for three other children looking for their own imaginary playmates: Audrey, a girl who wants to slay a dragon, but winds up taking it home. Nick, who gets Yuri, a gnome. Wheelchair-bound Lily, who wants a sylph or two. Things gradually complicate as they discover that Mr. Barsim is not entirely benign. In fact he may be a dragon himself, or at least have a close affinity to one. If the children really want togetherness with their imaginary friends, they may have to become imaginary themselves. That way they can be forever happy children, with magic, but without their original human families. Mr. Barsim may be collecting real children in this devious manner. It becomes a contest of wills as the children struggle to have their imaginary friends without sacrificing their places in their own families. This is a children’s novel with some serious considerations.

I watched Let the Right One In. This is a Swedish movie in English. Twelve year old Oskar is lonely and picked on by other kids, and dreams of a friend. Then Eli moves in next door, saying she is about the same age, but she says she can’t be his friend. Meanwhile in the snowy woods a man knocks out another man, strings him up by the feet, and starts bleeding him into a jug. It’s a weird neighborhood murder. Oskar lends Eli a Rubik Cube. Then someone who looks like her attacks and kills a man, vampire style. Someone else dumps the body into a river. Eli returns the cube solved, and shows him her proficiency with it. Bullies waylay Oskar on his way home from school. Eli says he has to fight back; then they’ll stop. That she can help him. He gives her a candy, but it makes her sick. She asks if he likes her, and he says yes. Her father, or at least the man with her, caught extracting blood, pours acid on his own face, wounding it horribly, then commits suicide. Oskar asks Eli to go steady. Later when the bully comes after Oskar again, he hits him with a stick, defeating him. He is fighting back now. He wants to mix blood with Eli, but she tells him to get away from her. She’s a vampire and doesn’t want to kill him; his blood could make her do it. Meanwhile a woman who was attacked may be turning vampire herself. Then her cats viciously attack her. Eli tells Oskar she is a vampire. That yes she is twelve, and has been for a long time. The bitten woman has her husband open the blinds, and the bright light makes her burst into fire. Eli comes to visit him, without his parents’ knowledge. Now Oskar helps her get live folk to feed on. A bully tries to drown Oskar, but Eli tears the bully apart, literally; pieces of him drop bloodily into the pool. They are a team, traveling elsewhere. The blurb says “A vampire movie like no other!” That may be true.

I watched Secrets of the Mountain. It starts with a man teaching a little girl how to imagine things like pirates burying treasure, making them come alive to her eyes. Then to the present day, when Dana’s a lawyer tied up in a case when her ex is getting married, so they think she’s late on purpose. There are stresses on her family. There’s a memory of seeing a man run a car off the road so the driver dies. That was her Uncle Henry, and she thus inherited his mountain property. Then she gets an offer to buy it, so she and her three children Jake, Jade, and Maddie, go to check out that property. There’s a house on it. And in it is Uncle Henry, who isn’t dead after all. He says he was thrown from the car, and chose to disappear for a while. It was Nigel who forced him off. He says there are secrets inside the mountain, if they can just find the way in. Son and Daughter find words on a stone. Nigel shows up; he is the one buying the property. He threatens them. Jake and Jade find a map, and then the entrance cave. Dana and Maddie catch up—and they all get dumped into an underground river. Then they blunder into a chamber with ancient skeletons. The mountain is honeycombed with passages and gulfs and slowly moving stone doors. They manage to escape harrowing threats and survive. Now they will keep the mountain in the family estate

I continue to work on our Hilltop Farm project, having now completed the year 1942. It is depressing as the wonderful dreams descend and crash like a disabled airplane. But one incidental detail caught my attention. It was about me when I was eight years old. Well, let me quote that paragraph from my weekly letter to Jenny, my paralyzed correspondent. Jenny was twelve when it started, but is in her forties now, and still paralyzed. “I have been working on the Hilltop history project, much of it transcribing letters from the 1940’s, and suddenly I encountered a discussion of my testicles, which it seems had not yet descended into my scrotum. This was news being circulated to other family members? It reminds me of the song: “The night of the marriage she lay on the bed/ Her breasts they were heaving, her legs they were spread./ She reached for his penis and found it was small;/ She felt for his balls, there were no balls at all!” Yes, my balls descended in due course, thank you so much for asking. You had wondered?”

Last column I discussed my Agnosticism at some length. I have a thoughtful response from Dr. Ben A. Potter, an Anthropology professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He points out that agnosticism and atheism relate to different things. Gnosticism and agnosticism relate to what a person knows or claims to know, while atheism and theism relate to what a person believes. Thus I am an agnostic atheist, not being able to prove or disprove God or gods, but not believing that any exist. The agnostic atheist says “I don’t believe there is a God,” while the gnostic atheist says “I believe there is no God.” It may seem like a fine distinction, but it works for me. To put it more crudely, it is the distinction between saying “You are a shit,” and “I suspect you stink.” The one may be actionable; the other is not. Ben Potter concludes with a quote by Arthur C. Clarke: “One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn’t require religion at all.” Indeed, I think that the ongoing revelations of child molestation by Catholic priests amply makes that point. They could greatly ameliorate that situation by allowing priests to have girlfriends or boyfriends, and to marry. Trying to suppress the sexual impulse is a loser’s game. Which reminds me of my bemusement when I learned that there is a painting of Mary nursing Jesus that is covered over in the Vatican because it shows a breast. It would be okay if she bottle fed Jesus?

I don’t mention the Science Fiction and Fantasy news magazine LOCUS much because, though I have subscribed to it from the first issue, it refuses to review any book of mine or to mention me with any favor. If you asked it why, I doubt you would get an answer, as an honest one would embarrass it. But I have to remark again on a column by Kameron Hurley, a novelist who tells it as it is. In the August 2018 issue she discusses the economics of writing, which are not pretty. This one is titled “So You Still Have a Day Job,” and says welcome to the club. The fact is the average writer can’t earn a living from writing alone. Yes, I can and do, and I haven’t had a day job since 1966, but I am one of the lucky one percent of one percent. And yes, it was luck more than skill that got me here, and you are unlikely to have similar luck. Yes, you can self publish now; I worked to help make that possible, but you do that for art and pride rather than for money. She remarks on luck: “’You should feel lucky’ is something that a boss says to an employee about being employed. It often justifies inequalities and abuses. It covers up the fact that while there is a large component of luck in everything, our careers could be vastly improved by minimum rates…” She goes on to remark about the manipulation of our society to ensure we feel lucky with less and less, while they squeeze us more and more. She concludes “Demand more. Demand better. We deserve it. Luck be damned.” And I say, damn well told, Kameron.

Back in the 1980s I attended a science fiction genre conference in Kansas, taking my then twelve year old daughter Cheryl along for the experience. I sat beside Theodore Sturgeon, arguably the finest stylist the genre has seen, on a panel. His eyes were fixed on Cheryl in the audience, who was just coming into flower as a young woman, something Sturgeon appreciated more than most. Meanwhile one of my projects was Death or Dialysis, a nonfiction book on kidney disease I was collaborating on with a doctor. Then he pulled out, offering to turn his portion over to an associate, a nurse, but I felt the book would not be marketable without the doctor, so the project foundered, and I had to swallow a novel’s worth of lost time. That nurse was Patricia Collom, Sturgeon’s daughter, who passed away at age 77 in August. So I almost collaborated with Sturgeon’s daughter. Thus Sturgeon interacted in his fashion with my daughter, and I interacted with his, in my devious fashion, in one of those odd incidental bypaths that happen in the tapestry that is the intricate obscure record of human existence.

For, oh, forty years or more I have had a little toy structure consisting of five metal balls suspended by strings. Lift one to the side, let it go, and it collides with the remaining four, and the ball on the other side swings out, the impulse transmitted through the middle three balls. I have found it a fascinating lesson in physics. You see, if I lift up two balls, then two balls rebound from the far side. Three, and it’s three, or four for four, or five, in which case there is no collision, they just swing. It knows the count. If I lift one ball on each side and let them go simultaneously, then one ball rebounds on each side. If I take two on one side and one on the other side, it will send two and one. How does it know? How can the signal pass accurately through the center balls without canceling out? I see it as an analogy of quantum physics, where particles do weird things like being in two states at once. I know it’s possible, because I see it happen with the swinging metal balls. Well, I finally learned the name of that structure, from an illustration in an article: it’s called a Newton’s Cradle. Now maybe my education is complete.

Letter in the newspaper by M Kunkel titled “Why I left the Republican party.” It says in part “My party had stood for rule of law, fair play and a conservative approach to spending money that our children would have to pay back.” Yes. I have been an independent voter since I got my citizenship and first signed up as a voter in 1957. There was a time when conservatism meant integrity, fiscal responsibility, and respect for tradition. Today it smells more like bigotry, greed, and the hell with tradition. I am liberal, which means roughly that I care about the welfare of folk at the bottom of the pile. In the interim I went from poverty to wealth, thanks to some writing talent and a lot of sheer luck, but my orientation hasn’t changed. I hope a political upheaval comes to restore sanity before we destroy what’s left of the world.

I saw a reference to the Silver Rule. As I understand it, the Golden Rule is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Silver rule is Do not unto others as you would have them do not unto you. The Brass rule is Do unto others before they do unto you. I’m not sure I have them correct, and wonder whether there are other similarly cogent rules.

AUTHORS GUILD has an interesting discussion in the form of a letter by Richard Russo. He addresses the problem of the downward pressure of e-book pricing, the relentless erosion of copyright protection, the scorched-earth capitalism of companies like Google and Amazon, the information wants to be free crowd that believe that art should be cheap or free and treated like a commodity, and by internet search engines that are happy to direct people to sites that sell pirated books. Author incomes are declining. Companies tend to see writers as mere hirelings. There is a massive transfer of wealth from the creative sector to the tech sector. The letter concludes with an appeal for writers to join the Guild. It’s an impressive case. But there is another side, or sides. I recently sent a letter to the Guild detailing how early in my career it had not helped me when I needed it because they helped only hardcover writers, not paperback writers. That is, a publisher was sending me obviously faked statements of account that an audit would have exposed, but AG did not audit paperback royalties, only hardcover. That strikes me as unkind elitism; most working writers were limited to paper, as I was. The interest should be in helping writers and correcting publishing wrongs, not in whether publication is hard or soft. I received no answer. The writer who made a good living before did so in significant part because hardly one percent of writers ever got published at all. It’s like winning a lottery: the winners love it, but what about the great majority of losers? Their dreams never had a chance. I have worked to help make it possible for anyone to get published, and that has the effect of evening things out, diminishing the haul of the winners. Sure the winners don’t like that. But I feel writing should not be limited to elites; the grunts in the trenches should have their chance too. It reminds me of a man I once talked with who said he had been in the Army as an enlisted man and didn’t like it. Later he returned as an officer, and then he discovered how great it could be. Sure it’s more pleasant to be treading on faces that to be one of the faces. But is it right? So I remain uncertain just whom AG really serves.

Conservative comment in the newspaper on Chicago’s violence, blaming it on liberalism. And “What’s needed most is to get poor people to change their behavior. Chief among the modifications is reducing female-headed households.” Because they produce most of the losers. “The only people who can fix these problems are black people themselves.” Get it? Don’t make better schools and jobs available for the poor, don’t eliminate racism that keeps blacks out of the better positions, don’t stop imprisoning blacks for drug offenses that whites get away with, don’t make the police play fair, just leave it to the ghetto dwellers to somehow fix it themselves. Blame the victims; they must be guilty. As an old song refrain put it, Dig it with a shovel, spread it with a hoe; Put it on your garden, it will make your flowers grow.

At long last the answer to a centuries-long mystery, thanks to NEW SCIENTIST: it seems there is a novelty food called Dragon’s Breath, made by coating cereal puffs with liquid nitrogen. When you put it in your mouth, the evaporating nitrogen makes it look as if you are breathing smoke. However, the nitrogen can damage your mouth with cold burns or skin injury and infection. “At least now we know why dragons hoard gold: it is to pay for all the dental bills.”

PIERS

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

DS9 S4 #16: “Accession” A ship emerges from the Wormhole after 200 years, containing a famous poet, Akorem Laam. He becomes Emissary, as Sisko relinquishes it, not being comfortable with it, and plans to return Bajor to the old ways. But this may be mischief. Both Sisko and Kira are wary. D’jarras is the ancient law, that is contrary to Federal law and would cause the Federation to reject Bajor from membership. So they go into the Wormhole to see the Prophets—who return Akorem to his own time, and give Sisko back the office. That saves enormous complications, and now he is happy to honor its rituals, having seen the alternative.

DS9 S4 #17: “Rules of Engagement” Worf is on trial for firing on and destroying a Klingon transport ship. In the situation this was according to protocol, but the prosecutor means to prove that Worf did it for the love of battle and destruction. He makes quite a case. Then Sisko shows that the 441 civilians killed on that ship were faked by the prosecution; they were actually on a different ship. Worf had not really killed them. That was one hell of a defense.

DS9 S4 #18: “Hard Time” O’Brien wakes as an old man, imprisoned for 20 years, now released. But wasn’t real; the memories were implanted. Only a few hours have passed. That is how the Argrathi punish their criminals. But it’s real to him. He had inadvertently run afoul of the alien law, and was punished before his folk caught up. Now it’s hard to adjust to an almost forgotten reality. The memories impact his current life. He snaps at his friends, even his daughter. He sees his alien prisoner companion, maybe. Then that prisoner Ee’Char talks to him, telling him he is a figment of O’Brien’s imagination, there because O’Brien needs him. It seems he does. At the end of the imprisonment he quarrels with Ee’Char, fights with him, and kills him, really for nothing. O’Brien finally turns the corner, Ee’Char fades out, and he is mending. This is a telling episode.

DS9 S4 #19: “Shattered Mirror” Jake misses his Ferengi friend Nog. Then Jake’s mother Jennifer returns, from the parallel universe; she’s the same woman, but not Sisko’s wife or Jake’s mother in this universe. She takes him to her universe. Sisko follows—and is trapped there, at least until he does what they want. That’s how they got him to come to help them. But even so it is complicated, because Jake is really taken with the woman who so closely resembles his mother. The regular cast of characters is here, but with wildly different roles and personalities. Sisko does enable them to win, but jealous alternate Kira shoots Jennifer and she dies in this universe as well as the other universe.

DS9 S4 #20: “The Muse” A passenger ship docks. One of the travelers is Lwaxana, crying because she is pregnant. Her husband Jeyal means to take the baby away the moment he is born, because men are supposed to raise sons. That’s why she fled. The traveler Onaya meets Jake, appreciating that he is a writer. She likes artistic folk. He visits her so she can help him evoke his talent. She’s good; soon he is writing his novel, letting the words flow. But her manner is seductive; what does she really want? Meanwhile Odo will marry Lwaxana, to enable her to keep her baby. Jake collapses and is put in the infirmary; his brain have been seriously overstimulated. Onaya appears and takes him over again. She’s some sort of vampire spirit feeding on talent, and floats away when Sisko challenges her.

DS9 S4 #21: “For the Cause” The Federation is working to repair damage done by Klingon incursions into Cardesian territory. There may be a Maquis agent on the station: Kasidy Yates, Sisko’s girlfriend. This is awkward for Sisko. He orders Worf to take the Defiant to follow her freighter and observe. Garak makes a date with Dukat’s daughter Ziyal to experience a holosuite program. Evidence accrues implicating Kasidy. But it is a more subtle trap, to draw Sisko away from the station. Commander Eddington takes over, as a Maquis agent. Garak fears Ziyal means to kill him, but she satisfies him that she just wants his company as another outcast, so it works out. Kasidy loves Sisko, but had to accomplish her mission. Maybe that will work out too.

DS9 S4 #22: “To the Death” The Gem’Hadar attack the station, killing and wounding a number. Sisko, Kira, Dax, Worf, O’Brien, and Odo take the Defiant out on their trail. They rescue survivors of a crippled Jem’Hadar ship, among which is a Dominion leader, or a Vorta, who says that renegade Jem’Hadar attacked the station and his ship. The renegades are setting up a Gate that will enable them to put troops instantly on any planets without the use of spaceships, a critical advantage that wills enable them to conquer all others. Now the Federation and the Gem’Hadar must work together to handle the common threat. It’s an uncomfortable juxtaposition. They make a surprise joint attack on the Gateway—which turns out to be no surprise, and their power weapons are nullified. So they use swords instead, and succeed. They part with the Gem’Hadar allies, who say the next time they meet they will be enemies. But they did work well together.

DS9 S4 #23: “The Quickening” Bashir and Dax encounter a planetary plague whose onset is called the quickening; their dark scars turn red and they soon die. They meet Ekoria, a pregnant local woman. Bashir sets out to find a cure, though the natives don’t believe it is possible. He is making progress, when it goes awfully wrong and they all die. But he is determined to find a way. Then Ekoria quickens. Her concern is to birth her baby before she dies. She succeeds, and the baby is without the blight. Now Bashir can make an innoculant to protect all future babies. The present is lost, but the future of these people is secure.

DS9 S5 #1: “Apocalypse Rising” Sisko is sent to infiltrate the Klingon Empire and do whatever it takes to prove that Gowron is a changeling. Sisko, Odo, and O’Brien get made up as Klingon warriors, and join Worf to use Dukat’s ship to travel. They have special little globes that will force a changeling to dematerialize. They are caught, but their captor suspects Gowron too, and lets them go. But it turns out that Gowron is not the changling, but one of his close advisers. When that is revealed, Gowron lets them go, knowing that peace is better than war when war benefits on the Dominion.

DS9 S5 #2: “The Ship” They are checking for a rich mining lode when a Gem’Hadar warship crashes nearby on the planet. No survivors. To salvage that would be the score of the decade. Then another enemy ship appears. The lady Vorta captain talks with Sisko: they want their ship back. Sisko says no. What do they really want? One Federation crewman, Quique, is wounded and needs to get back for medical attention. They find a changeling, who dies. That was what the others wanted.

DS9 S5 #3: “Looking for Par’mach In All The Wrong Places” Grilka, Quark’s one time Klingon wife, visits. Worf is entranced. The war has been hard on her family, and it is in financial distress. Quark agrees to take a look at the records; he really helped her, before, and they are friends now. “Par’mach” means Klingon love. But it is clear that Worf has no chance with Grilka, because of the dishonor of his House. Meanwhile O’Brien massages Kira, who is carrying his baby. Keiko is fine with it, but it is awkward for him. In fact Keiko encourages them to be together, though both are wary of that. Worf helps Quark win Grilka. Dax expresses interest in Worf; they may become a couple. So who knows what may develop?

DS9 S5 #4: “Nor the Battle to the Strong.” Bashir and Jake are doing emergency assistance of the wounded in a battle zone. It is a real education for Jake as he sees people suffer and die. They get caught in shelling, and Jake runs, then blames himself for being a coward. One of the patients has similar feelings. Then the Klingons come, killing the defenders. Jake hides, picks up a phaser, and shoots at the ceiling, so that rocks fall, sealing the entrance so the Klingons can’t pursue further. That saves the others, and he is called a hero. Then the Defiant arrives, the Klingons go, and Jake is rescued. But he knows that the difference between being a hero and being a coward can be a fine line. He just did what it took to stay alive.

DS9 S5 #5: “The Assignment” O’Brien is in trouble, because he is responsible for accidentally killing Keiko’s pet plants. Then she returns and is easy with it, but tells him she is not Keiko, but someone who has taken possession of her body and will kill her if he does not do whatever she tells him. She wants him to do some special re-calibration of some equipment. But that’s only a test. When he is about to tell Sisko, Keiko stages a fall from a height that could readily have killed her: she’s not bluffing, and knows him just as well as his wife does. He finds out that beams are being readied to focus on the wormhole that will kill certain “gods” and give power to certain banished wraiths. But he manages to fix it so that it takes her out instead, saving the gods and Keiko. Now he can explain everything. This is a tense episode.

DS9 S5 #6: “Trial and Tribble-Ations” The Defiant accidentally travels in time, and encounters The Enterprise. Someone means to change history, and our crew must stop it. So they get into archaic uniforms, including Dax in stunning red. They infiltrate, and encounter the tribbles. They see Captain Kirk and Spock in passing, and get involved in the famous barroom brawl. The time traveler Darvin plots to kill Kirk. They capture Darvin and work to nullify the plot so as to pre>serve history. There is a bomb in one of the tribbles, but which one? They are all over, and multiplying. But they find it and beam it into space, where it detonates. Sisko briefly talks with Kirk, then returns to the present. Meanwhile the tribbles have infested the station. What to do now? This episode was also packaged with the original series, beside the tribbles episode there.

DS9 S5 #7: “Let He Who Is Without Sin…” Worf and Dax have a thing, and get teased by others. They will visit Risa, a fabulous resort planet. Others invite themselves along: Quark, Bashier, Leeta. It turns out that Bashier and Leeta are having a rite of separation, celebrating their breakup. Worf and Dax have problems; he feels she isn’t taking their relationship seriously enough. A change of pace episode.

DS9 S5 #8: “Things Past” Sisko, Odo, Dax, and Garak wake up on the promenade, having evidently been knocked out by a passing plasma field. They conjecture that they have been moved back about nine years in time. They may be in the bodies of three who were publicly executed. But things don’t match the past perfectly. They make a break for it, but don’t succeed. This is a reprise of an execution Odo arranged, where innocent people died. Was it the only one? Odo is not sure.

DS9 S5 #9: “The Ascent” Odo takes Quark to the authorities for some crime he refuses to identify. Jake goes to room with Nog. Odo and Quark gets stranded on an isolated planet. They don’t get along. Neither do Nog and Jake. Odo and Quark have to climb a high cold mountain to get a transmitter high enough to send a distress signal. They finally do get rescued, still despising each other. And Nog and Jake work things out.

DS9 S5 #10: “Rapture” Sisko is trying to identify the location of a fabulous ancient Bajoran city, B’hala, and is making progress when he gets zapped by a Holosuite image. It gives him a vision of the real thing. Kasidy joins him, and propelled by the vision, he succeeds is locating the lost city that the Bajorans couldn’t find in 10,000 years of searching. He gets headaches, and the visions continue. He needs surgery to survive, but that will take away the visions. One vision says Bajor must not join the Federation, lest it be destroyed. They do the surgery and he loses the visions. Was that the right thing?

DS9 S5 #11: “The Darkness and the Light” Someone is killing the people Kira used to associate with in her resistance cell. She gets a message saying “That’s one.” Soon a second one dies. “That’s Two.” And a third. A fourth and fifth. Kira zeroes in on a suspect, A Cardassian, but he catches her and is about to cut the baby from her body because it is innocent, when she kills him.

DS9 S5 #12: “The Begotten” Quark buys a container that holds a baby changeling and sells it to Odo. He means to tlain it and teach it to be a good shape shifter. Dr. Mora, who raised Odo, comes to help. Odo shows it the basic forms: sphere, cube, pyramid, etc. Meanwhile Kira is about to give birth to the O’Brien baby. The baby is born, but the changeling is dying. But then it merges with Odo, and he becomes a changeling again. Kira, back to her normal figure, says she never wanted to have a baby, but now she wishes she could hold it in her arms. Odo says he knows how she feels. They take a walk together. I regard this as a beautiful way to handle the pregnancy of the actress without writing her out of the script.

DS9 S5 #13: “For the Uniform” Sisko goes to the Badlands to see Eddington, a Federation traitor to the Maquis. Eddington says the Federation handed his people over to the Cardassians. Yes, they were offered resettlement, but they wanted to live where they were. Eddington says don’t follow him, then beams out. But Sisko on the Defiant does pursue him. And the ship’s computers get fried. They limp home, and Sisko is taken off the case. But his replacement gets outsmarted and nullified, so it’s up to Sisko again. Sisko starts wiping out the planets that serve as the Maquis base. That gives him the victory, and Eddington surrenders.

DS9 S5 #14: “In Purgatory’s Shadow” They intercept coded Cardassian messages, but they turn out to be old inconsequential documents. But Garak lied; it was a message that a leading resistance fighter is alive, and maybe others. Worf and Garak take a shuttle to follow up. They encounter a Dominion fleet. This is real mischief. They manage to send out a warning message to the station before being captured by the Gem’Hadar. Bashir is also there, and another Klingon. The station tries to shut down the Wormhole to stop the invasion, but is unsuccessful. The Dominion ships pour through.

DS9 S5 #15: “By Inferno’s Light” So the station must fight the Dominion invasion. But it doesn’t attack the station; it heads for Cardassia. And Dukat goes to join the Dominion; they have made a deal for Cardassia to join the Dominion. On the station, they don’t know that Bashier has been replaced by a changeling. Worf must fight a Gem’Hadar bare-handed, and another. He wins five times. The prisoners labor to escape. Meanwhile Sisko is forging a renewal of the Federation alliance with the Klingons; together they have a chance against the Dominion. And a Romulan fleet appears, requesting to join their effort, amazingly. The fake Bashir sets out to trigger a supernova in the local sun. They manage to destroy his runabout first. The prisoners escape and rejoin the station with heartfelt reunions. But much remains to be resolved.

DS9 S5 #16: “Doctor Bashir, I Presume?” A researcher says he is here to make Bashier immortal. That is, Bashir is to be the template for a holographic doctor who can operate in places where life support is not feasible. But the interviews with his associates get complicated when his parents come. It seems there is a family secret that could ruin his prospects. He was genetically enhanced. If that becomes known, he will be barred from service and as a doctor. His father agrees to serve two years in prison for illegal genetic practice, and Bashir will carry on as usual. It is a workable compromise. And Rom finds true love with Leeta.

DS9 S5 #17: “A Simple Investigation” Visitors are looking for something, and kill the man who didn’t tell them where it is. Odo meets Arissa, who is says she is looking for her lost daughter, and was to meet the deceased here. She has found a crystal with vital information that the killers want too. Odo and Arissa are drawn together, and finally wind up in bed. It turns out that the crystal contains Arissa’s real identity. She worked for Draim, a criminal leader, and is undercover to expose him. The crystal returns her real identity, and she knows now she is married and must go, but her alternate identity did love him. It is a sad parting.

DS9 S5 #18: “Business as Usual” Quark is broke and in debt, but his cousin hires him to do publicity for the business of selling arms that will make him rich. But Sisko says that if Quark violates any law at all, Sisko will nail him to the wall. Quark is in trouble. But he manages to put the opposing forces together, so that they pretty much destroy each other and he is mostly out of trouble.

DS9 S5 #19: “Ties of Blood and Water” Kira’s Cardassian “father” Tekeny Ghemor visits; he’s he main hope to oppose Dukat. But he has a terminal illness. He knows more about Cardassian politics than any other person alive, and now will share it with her. The information is invaluable. Meanwhile it turns out that his real daughter Iliana is still alive, in hiding. But Kira doesn’t learn that. Complex emotions here. Will the two “Kiras” ever meet?

DS9 S5 #20: “Ferengi Love Songs” Quark, blacklisted, in financial trouble, is depressed. Rom will marry Leeta, but that doesn’t cheer Quark. He goes to his mother Moogie—and learns that she and the Grand Nagus are dating. Maybe she can help him. Rom and Leeta break up, as do Moogie and the Nagus, to mutual chagrin. It is a plot by Brunt to take over as Grand Nagus,who knew that Moogue was advising the failing powers of the Nagus. So Quark works to set it right, foiling Brunt’s plot, and all is well again, in Ferengi fashion.

DS9 S5 #21: “Soldiers of the Empire” The Klingon General Martok has been a prisoner of the Dominion for two years, is blind in one eye, and injured., but has been given a command to investigate the disappearance of a ship, the B’Moth. He asks Worf to join him as his friend and First Officer. Worf agrees. Dax joins him as Science Officer. The Rotarran War Bird has a poor crew with a bad record; the crew feels it is cursed. They find the B’Moth. But why was it left? Is it a trap? Worf challenges the captain, but lets down his guard, giving Martok the victory, and now the crew supports him and they win their first battle with the Gem’Hadar and rescue 35 survivors. Martok understands what Worf did, setting him up for full crew support, and welcomes him into the House of Martok when they return to the station.

DS9 S5 #22: “Children of Time” They take the Defiant to investigate an anomaly, and discover a planet, Gaia, with 8,000 people, who says that the Defiant crashed here two centuries ago and founded the colony, and they are the Defiant crew’s descendants. It seems to be true. An Odo is there, surviving 200 years. Now he tells Kira he loves her. But Kira died on this planet, of a malady that modern technology could have saved her from. There is a dilemma: if they return to the station, saving Kira, 8,000 people will cease to exist. Do they do it? Kira doesn’t want to. They decide to crash, preserving the settlement. But the ship veers away, saving them, sacrificing the 8,000. It was the other Odo, who changed the flight plan, to save Kira. Kira is horrified. “That makes it right?” she demands, appalled.

DS9 S5 #23: “Blaze Of Glory” They intercept a message that says cloaked missiles have been launched and will strike Cardassia soon. They must stop them lest the strike trigger a war that kills billions. They need help, so Sisko fetches Michael Eddington from prison. Edditton hates Sisko and the Federation for destroying the Maquis, and helps reluctantly, openly saying that after this is over, he means to kill Sisko. Meanwhile they must work together, fighting Gem’Hadar. They rescue a few surviving Maquis, but Eddington dies in the rear guard. So Sisko’s emotions are mixed.

DS9 S5 #24: “Empok Nor” The station needs a Cardassian replacement part. So they go to the abandoned station Empok Nor to salvage one. But the station is likely to be booby trapped against non Cardassians. So they take Garak along on the runabout. There are indeed weird and dangerous things there. Their runabout is destroyed and they are stranded. They decide to generate a signal, but odd things continue to happen. People start getting killed. Garak says he found a psychotropic drug in the tissue of one of the reanimated defenders. But then the drug contaminates Garak, making him a paranoid killer. He faces down against O’Brien, who manages to defeat him. They get the needed part, and Garak is brought back to the station to recover.

DS9 S5 #25: “In the Cards” A derelict was found with a cargo of items, some of which might have value, Quark conducts an auction. Jake bids on an ancient baseball card, for Sisko. He borrows the money from Nog. But they are outbid. The winner is on a quest for immortality. He will trade he card for certain medical supplies. Meanwhile Vedik Winn is concerned for the future of Bajor. Sisko says she must stall for time, as the crisis is not yet here. And somehow Jake and Nog’s quest for the card changes things on the station so that the gloom lifts and the personnel are happy again.

DS9 S5 #26: “Call to Arms” The Dominion seems to be massing ships for an attack on Bajor. Meanwhile Rom and Leeta plan their wedding. Sisko organizes the mining of the wormhole. Vorta ambassador Weyoun objects, saying the ships are to defend their ally Cardassia. The wedding occurs, and the siege of the station begins. The Dominion ships attack the station. It is a fair battle, and a number of ships are destroyed, but finally they must evacuate the station. Worf and Dax agree to marry if they survive. The Dominion takes over the station. This of course is not finished.

DS9 S6 #1: “A Time to Stand” The personnel have evacuated and Cardassians have taken the station. Worf remained behind. But he rejoins them, and he and Dax plan to marry. Kira, Quark, Jake and Odo remain at the station as it is restored to functioning. Sisko is reassigned to command a captured Jem’Hadar ship, his mission to destroy the enemy cache of white, the drug that controls the Jem’Hadar. Odo is promoted to be one of the three ruling councilors of the station. Kira doesn’t trust this, or Dukat’s attentions to her.

DS9 S6 #2: “Rocks and Shoals” They have bombed the White station, but two Gem’Hadar ships are headed their way; Sisko takes them into a nebula to hide. They crash on a barren shore. The Vorta Weyoun and the Gem’Hadar are there, trying to capture them. Weyoun is injured and needs a doctor. They trade prisoners, and Bashir operates on Weyoun, and learns that they are out of White. He gives Sisko the plan of attack, and the Gem’Hadar, refusing to yield, are destroyed. Weyoun is now a prisoner, out of the action. It’s an ugly conclusion.

DS9 S6 #3: “Sons and Daughters” They get five recruits to the Klingon ship the Rotarran . One is Alexander, Worf’s son, now grown. Dukat’s daughter Ziyal returns to the station. Kira is pleased, and so is Dukat, but the personality war between Kira and Dukat continues. The crew members tease and harass Alexander, who is really not a warrior. But gradually the relationship between father and son clarifies. The ship sees some action and is victorious.

DS9 S6 #4: “Behind the Lines” The Admiral has learned that the enemy has a massive observation station that enables it to know all the Federation ship movements, giving them a significant advantage. Sisko must eliminate it. On the station the Cardassians and Gem’Hadar are allies, but they hate each other, and brawls ensue. The lady leader of the Changelings comes to the station. She still wants Odo to join them. She knows about his love for Kira, a “solid.” He links with her, the two of them dissolving into fluid and merging. Kira is not pleased. Quark manages to get information from the Cardassian Damar: they are finding a way to deactivate the mines. The Resistance plans to mess that up, but Odo gets subverted and they don’t succeed.

DS9 S6 #5: “Favor the Bold” They are fighting Dominion ships and retreating, not making progress, and morale is low. Then Sisko plans to retake Deep Space Nine. Meanwhile Odo has spent three days with the changeling lady, becoming intimate with her. She is really trying to win him over. And Kira is working to get Rom pardoned from his sentence of death for trying to implement her plan to stop the nullifying of the mines. Sisko’s fleet approaches the station. The battle is about to begin.

DS9 S6 #6: “Sacrifice of Angels” Kira and other are arrested. Sisco’s fleet attacks, but only the Defiant gets through. Meanwhile Quark and Ziyal rescue Kira and Rom. Odo helps them, saying the Link was paradise, but it seems he’s not ready for paradise. The Defiant plunges into the wormhole and encounters the Dominion fleet. Sisko suffers a kind of hallucination where the enemy takes the form of his companions, but he refuses to capitulate—and somehow this makes the Dominion back off, and the station is recaptured. But Ziyal is killed, to Dukat’s overwhelming grief.

DS9 S6 #7: “You are Cordially Invited” One week later and the celebration continues. DS9 is now HQ for the Ninth Fleet. General Martok has been promoted to commend the Ninth Fleet. Sirella is Martok’s wife, and will review Dax to be sure she is suitable for Worf to marry. Is she worthy to join the House of Martok? She seems forbidding. Meanwhile the Bachelor Party is more like a trial of deprivation. Dax sets Sirella back by knowing the uglier details of her ancestry. The women have a party too. But Sirella cancels the wedding. They fight. Dax apologizes to Sirella, and wins her respect, and the wedding proceeds.

DS9 S6 #8: “Resurrection” Someone beams into the transporter room but they don’t know who it could be. It turns out to be a man with a gun he aims at Kira, saying she must do exactly as he says. He turns out to the the alternate universe Vedic Bareil, whom Kira loved before he died. He is Antos, a professional thief. She is attracted to him, and soon sleeps with him. And Kira’s self of the other universe turns out to be with him. He is here to steal the Orb, in cahoots with Alternate Kira, but he sheets Alternate and departs without the Orb. Our Kira obvious had an effect on him.

DS9 S6 #9: “Statistical Probabilities” A group of people who were genetically programmed to be smart are coming to see Dr. Bashir, hoping he can help them as he helped himself. They are super smart but also odd in other ways. One is Laurie, a sexy woman who figures she’ll seduce him. One is Jack, hyperactive. Serina is a demure girl. Patrick is a plump older man whose feelings are easily hurt. Meanwhile the new Cardassian leader Damar claims to be on a mission of peace as he and the Vorta Weyoun visit the station. The mutants calculate the chances, and conclude that the Federation will have to surrender to the Dominion. Bashier opposes them, so they tie him up and head out to arrange a surrender of the Federation. But Bashir persuades Serina to untie him, and he foils them. They will return to the institution. They may be geniuses, but can overlook details.

DS9 S6 #10: “The Magnificent Ferengi” Quark’s mother Moogie has been taken hostage by the Dominion, and the Grand Nagus wants Quark to rescue her. This is mischief. They recruit Leck as part of the rescue team. And ex-Liquidator Brunt joins them; he has a ship. They abduct the Vorta Weyoun for the prisoner exchange. It is of course a madcap adventure; naturally things go wrong. But they muddle through and rescue Moogie.

DS9 S6 #11: “Waltz” Sisko is aboard a Federation ship Honshu taking Gul Dukat for a war crimes hearing. Dukat recovers from his mental breakdown, triggered by the death of his daughter Ziyal. They talk. Then the ship is attacked and destroyed. Several shuttles survive. The Defiant will search. Sisko and Dukat are marooned on a planet, Sisko injured, Dukat taking care of him. But Dukat is suffering visions. Such as Kira viciusly taunting him. They fight, and Dukat takes the shuttle. Sisko finally is rescued, but Dukat escapes.

DS9 S6 #12: “Who Mourns for Morn?” Morn remains as a hologram taking his place at the bar while he is away. Then word comes that his ship was caught in a space storm and destroyed. He left everything to Quark, including a thousand bars of latinum. Except it seems he had a loan of that amount that thugs want repaid, or else. They learn of 1,000 bars Morn had, and decide to split it five ways, 250 bars each (funny math). But finding it triggers immediate mayhem, and the others will go to prison. Then Morn shows up, alive; he had faked his death. So things are back to normal.

DS9 S6 #13: “Far Beyond the Stars” Sisko starts seeing people that others don’t. Then he finds himself in 20th century America. The other station personnel are there two, other roles, in civilian dress, working for a magazine, with its sexism and racism. It’s painful to be reminded. Sisko writes a story about a black space station commander, but his boss won’t print it unless he makes the captain white. After all, it has to be somewhat credible. He rephrases it as a dream to make it acceptable, but it still won’t be published. He swears he created it and it is real to him. Then he wakes back at the station. And wonders if his present life is all an illusion. Are they all mere figments of illusion?

DS9 S6 #14: “One Little Ship” They take a runabout, the Rubicon, to investigate a rare space anomaly. It is small; they shrink to a fraction of normal size, shuttle and all. Dax, O’Brien, and Bashir are separated when the Defiant is attacked by the Gem’Hadar. They capture it and confine the human personnel. The Rubicon emerges from the anomaly, but by a different route, and they remain under an inch tall. The tiny ship enters the Defiant, traveling through its conduits, then enter the personnel section. So the tiny ship is flying around the people, not being spied. Sisko is in charge of repairing the drive; the Gem’Hadar will execute one human every fifteen minutes if he fails, starting with Kira. But with the help of the mini-ship they manage to resume control, and the minis return to their own size.

DS9 S6 #15: “Honor Among Thieves” O’Brien is in a bar, making contact with criminals. If they find out who he is, they’ll kill him. During his absence, things are going wrong all over the station; it seems that only he can keep the Cardassian and Federation technologies working well together. O’Brien is trying to discover who in the Federation is the Syndicate contact. There’s a Vorta involved, so it’s the Dominion on the other side. They plan to kill Bilby, O’Brien’s contact. So O’Brien tells Bilby, to try to save him, because Bilby trusted him. It’s a difficult situation.

DS9 S6 #16: “Change of Heart” Worf and Dax are sent on a mission to the Badlands. They get information from a Cardassian, but have to help him defect to the federation. They land in a wilderness. Meanwhile O’Brien and Bashir play a high stakes game of Tongo against Quark, and lose. Worf and Dax make their way through the forest. They take out a couple of Gem’Hadar, but Dax is wounded. He has to leave her and go on. Then he returns and carries her. He had to save her, even at the cost of the mission. Sisko is not pleased, but understands. Dax is saved.

PIERS

OctOgre 2018

HI-

My Cluster series, which should be five novels if they include them all, will be on special ebook sale for $2.99 on OctOgre 26, 2018. That includes USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. This series is net when mankind and other sapient species colonize other planets, forming stellar spheres of influence, but because of the light-speed limitation in most contacts the farther out a world is, the more primitive it is. So our protagonist, Flint of Outworld, is in the stone age, making his living by knapping flintstones for arrows and spears, hence his name. If you think that means he’s dull and ignorant, as civilized folk do, beware; he has an IQ of about 150, if they had mental measurements in the stone age, and an aura of about 200. That’s the key: the aura is in a way like a spirit, that can be transferred to other hosts so that Flint in effect takes charge of another body regardless of its distance from his original body. The higher the aura, the longer it lasts in a foreign host, and his is the highest known. So he is needed as a human agent. So they take him, and he is not pleased, and that’s mischief. He knows about civilization; he just hasn’t been part of it, until now, and holds it somewhat in contempt. So there are wild adventures, especially when he comes up against an alluring high aura enemy alien female. The sequel, Chaining the Lady, features Melody of Mintaka, a high aura alien who gets caught in a human body and she doesn’t like being chained in that manner. The third one, Kirlian Quest, features another protagonist in the same setting, Herald the Healer. The fourth is Thousandstar, where a human aura is transferred to a creature who can neither see nor hear; that was perhaps my most challenging novel to write, but one of my favorites. The fifth is Viscous Circle, concluding the series. So each novel has a different protagonist, but each has its points; if you like science fiction and are not familiar with this series, you have a treat coming.

I watched The Lost City of Z. It starts in Ireland 1905, hunting deer on horseback with a rifle. The protagonist, Major Percy Fawcett, bags the deer. The following year he is sent to Bolivia by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) to map the Bolivia/Brazil border through the inhospitable jungle. It’s a dangerous venture, but it may restore his family’s tarnished name. He goes there, assembles a party with a native guide, and heads up the river. And is attacked by tribesmen, apparently just because they are there. Some of his crew are killed. The guide says that the was a gold city here, but he is going into likely death. They run out of food, which makes the crew restless. They make it to the source of the river. They find ancient pottery sherds. There must have been a city here! But others prefer not to believe it. In 1911 he resolves to return to find the lost city. His wife wants to go with him, but he demurs; it simply too difficult and dangerous out there. In 1912 they return to the Amazon. The natives attack, but the men sing a song and the attack stops. They get to see the native village. Percy’s main partner, Murray, proves to be highly unreliable, stealing their food, not doing his job, endangering the whole party. They give him their last horse and some food and send him back to civilization. Back in England, Murray claims he was abandoned. Disgusted with the man’s lying, Percy resigns from the RGS. Percy’s own children rebel. Meanwhile World War One begins. Percy serves in that. Ugly trench fighting, with flame-throwing and gas. He is blinded, but recovers. In 1925 he goes back to the jungle with his grown son Jack. They are captured by tribesmen. A later report says they are living among the tribesmen. That is where it finishes, his real fate unknown.

I watched Satin Rouge, an Arabic movie with English subtitles. Lilia is a widowed seamstress with a headstrong teen daughter Salma she suspects is having a liaison with a cabaret musician. She checks the cabaret—and faints for no apparent reason. A dancer helps her, and another night the friend encourages her to try belly dancing herself. She turns out to be good at it. She becomes popular; men want to take her home, but she’s not interested. Until she gets together with the handsome drummer. Then he breaks it off. She is left with a nice profession but no man. Then her daughter brings home her serious boyfriend—and it is the same man, a surprise to them both. She tells him not to worry, she will be the perfect mother in law. It is described as “a steamy stunner” but it’s really not very steamy.

I read The Tomb of Tomes by Brian Clopper and his character Irving Wishbutton. This is the third in the Wishbutton series, where fictional folk gather at a school for the characters of various novels being written, when they’re not actively participating in their own stories. They can form relationships with characters not in their own stories, even romances, but it is all temporary until their authors need them. Irving’s study companion is Roon, once a zombie, now a vampire. Authors can do what they choose to characters, never mind consistency. In fact an author can be somewhat of a trial to his creations. He learns she may have feelings for him, which is awkward because not only is she in a different story, he has another girlfriend, the fairy Sarya. But certainly they are friends. Irving can also get into the mind of his author a bit, and learn what’s coming. Sometimes he can even plant a notion in his author’s mind, like giving him a new talent or special wish. For some classes different characters have to compete for benefits. Characters that have not been fully described by their authors are called smudges, because parts of their bodies are just undefined smudges. The carelessness of authors is a chronic nuisance. Meanwhile something is going on, and Irving wants to find of what and by whom. Are characters being wrongfully killed? So the interactions can get complicated. This is a fun story that will be continued in the next volume.

I read Sisters of Shiloh by Kathy & Becky Hepinstall. This is an American Civil War story wherein sisters Libby and Josephine dress as men and enter the Confederate Army. Libby’s husband Arden is drafted as a soldier, and disappears, so Libby goes to find him, and Josephine goes with her to try to keep her safe. They bind their breasts and practice mannish ways so as to conceal their gender. It’s a rough life, and when they come across a recent battle the details are excruciating. Josephine finds Arden, but he is dying of a stomach wound and will only suffer further, so she smothers him as a mercy killing. Her sister suspects, and sees Arden as a ghost who accuses Josephine, so there are levels of ugliness. Meanwhile Josephine falls in love with a male soldier, Wesley, but can’t be open because she’s supposed to be male Joseph. Eventually she does reveal herself, literally while swimming, and their love is realized but not openly. This is a slice of life kind of story that ends when they leave the army, he as a deserter, she because she’s female. It’s the only way they can be together.

I watched Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to the original Blade Runner. An introductory text explains that replicants are synthetic humans who tried to rebel and were outlawed, but a few remain and are being hunted down, as it turns out, by other synthetics who won’t rebel. Officer K is one such hunter, a blade runner. His girlfriend is Joi is a sort of semi-solid hologram. She names K “Joe.” Theoretically K doesn’t have a soul because he wasn’t born, but he evidently wonders. For his next case the replicant Luv provides him some background. His flying car crashes in the monstrous garbage dump. Joi flickers out. Scavengers attack. Luv, watching from afar, directs bombs that drive them out. K resumes his search for a lost replicant child of 30 years ago. There are physical records, but that years has been ripped out. He talks with the memory maker Ana. She has a good imagination because she was much alone as a child and needed to create her own world. Joi overlaps Mariette, a real woman; together they are real with Joi’s knowledge of him. They make love. Mariette departs. Joi gets to participate in an adventure where she seems real. Joshi the boss lady balks her and she kills Johshi. Or is it Luv who kills her? I may confuse the two. He locates Decker, and gets the name of the woman who birthed his child: Rachel. Then Joi and Luv face off and I still can’t tell them apart. Mariette appears. Rachel birthed a girl, not a boy. Ana. Rachel appears, but her eyes are the wrong color. K and Luv fight. He kills her and rescues Decker, who goes to meet his daughter as K slowly expires of his wounds. Ana is the proof that replicants can reproduce and will survive as a species. The cover blurb says this is an award winner. Indeed it is the kind of thing critics like: slow, labored, obscure, dark, sometimes ugly. But it has its points.

I watched Lady Bird. Christine, who prefers to be called Lady Bird, and her mother argue when driving, and crash. A fender bender, and life goes on. She attends a Catholic school in Sacramento, and longs to go to an eastern college. She gets a role in a play, and meets a boy, Danny, in that connection. They fall in love. Then she gets interested in Kyle, because Danny is gay. She will keep his secret. She speaks too candidly in class about the morality of abortion and gets suspended. She has sex with Kyle. Then learns he was not a virgin; that ruins what she thought was special. When she goes to the prom, Kyle has another event in mind, so he drops her off at her friend Julie’s house, and she and Julie attend the prom. She applies to an eastern college with a chance of a scholarship, but her mother is mad because it was behind her back, and won’t speak to Christine, but her father understands. She goes to college. Her father sends her letters her mother wrote to her but never sent, showing her suppressed love. She phones and leaves a message for her mother: “I love you.” So this is a slice of life story, more emotional than exciting. It will do.

I watched The Astronaut’s Wife. Jillian is Spencer the astronaut’ wife. There is an explosion in space; ground base loses contact for two minutes, then contact is recovered. They bring the two astronauts back down. Spencer is unconscious, but when he wakes he reacts violently to something he won’t talk about later. Neither will the other astronaut, Alex. Alex suffers a stroke and suddenly dies. His wife Natalie commits suicide. Jill asks Spencer what happened in those two minutes in space, and he has violent sex with her and doesn’t say what happened after the cold quiet of the first minute. Time passes, and Jill is pregnant with twins. An official at NASA, Reece, is concerned about slight changes in Spencer; the authorities won’t listen and fire him. He contacts Jill. It seems that Natalie was pregnant with twins. Are Jill’s twins from Spencer before, or Spenser after the space incident? Are they human or alien? She gets a video from Reece that says an alien transmission implanted a different code. Maybe her twins. She considers killing herself, as Natalie did, but Spencer stops her. He clearly wants the twins to survive. He’s on the other side, turning ugly. She tumbles down stairs, but survives in the hospital. Spencer kills her sister. She flees but he pursues. She sets up a suicide by electrocution system and faces him, then uses it to electrocute him instead. The twins are born, and she remarries. The twins seem normal, but are they? There is no answer.

I watched Beguiled. The setting is the Civil War, Virginia, a girls’ boarding school. Amelia—Amy—discovers a wounded Union soldier, John, in the forest. She helps him get to the school, where Miss Martha removes the metal fragments from his leg and sews it up and washes his body. There are only five students and two adults. John recovers enough to walk, then to do some gardening, tree limbing and such for them. When he shaves off his beard he is a handsome man. He flatters Miss Edwina romantically and asks her to go west with him. Then she catches him seducing one of the girls, pushes him, and he falls down the stairs and breaks his leg. Martha has to cut it off. That drives him almost crazy; he threatens and attacks the women. They know they have to be rid of him. Edwina goes to distract him by having sex with him while the others make a fancy meal containing lethal mushrooms. He eats them and dies. They will bury him and say no more. Problem solved. Ugly, but rational.

I watched Far From the Madding Crowd, from the novel by Thomas Hardy. I read it in high school, but had forgotten much of it in the interim. Bathsheba is a headstrong young woman who attracts men but is choosy about committing. Neighbor Gabriel Oak asks her to marry him, but she declines. Then his herd of sheep run over a cliff, wiping him out. She inherits her uncle’s farm and manages it with dispatch, and Gabriel runs it for her. As a joke she sends a provocative Valentine card to her wealthy aloof neighbor Mr. Boldwood, who takes it seriously and proposes marriage to her. She politely demurs, not having anticipated this reaction. She encounters Troy, a dashing soldier, and is intrigued. He kisses her, and she is lost. Gabriel warns her against Troy, but she won’t listen. She marries Troy. Then Troy’s former girlfriend shows up pregnant. And dies. Troy tells Bathsheba that Fanny was more to him than Bathsheba will ever be, then swims out to sea and is reported drowned. That leaves her with his debts. Boldwood renews his proposal, offering to cover the debts and allow her farm to prosper. Then Troy returns, not dead after all. Boldwood shoots him. Gabriel plans to depart for America. She realizes how much he means to her, the best of the men she has known, and finally commits to him. A bonus is one of my favorite songs whose title I’m not sure of, but I think of it as “Rue.” A key line is “Let no man steal your thyme,” with a pun on “time.” Also “Every place your garden is waste will spread all over with rue.”

I watched Sea Beast, a horror flick. A fishing boat in a storm, the Solita, is attacked by something. It gets through with the loss of a man. Then crewman Danny and his friend are fishing and catch something odd: a dead albatross. Bad portent. Will is the one buying the boat, but the loss of his catch means he can’t make a payment. That night his friend is attacked by a weird monster, a sort of reptilian quadruped that spits toxic venom and has a long prehensile tongue. In the morning Danny finds part of what remains: a severed arm. Then it eats his girlfriend. The people realize there’s a problem and several parties go in search of it. The thing seems to be able to turn invisible. It picks them off one by one. It multiplies, so now there are several smaller ones. Danny and his girlfriend Carlie fight off a swarm of them, stabbing them, cutting off their tongues. They can be stopped, but there are too many. Danny leaves Carlie safely in a ship hold, but the monsters come after her there. She fights them off until Will and the biologist woman, Arden, rescue her, but Danny is lost. Will sets a fire trap for the big monster and manages to burn it up. Crisis over, for now. This seems well done and compelling to me, considering its genre.

I watched G-Men from Hell. This is a parody of the tough detective genre. Mike and Dean are rough G-men who get murdered and sent to Hell. They figure it’s a mistake in the paperwork, and decide to do good deeds to earn their way to Heaven. They manage to escape and come back to Earth, where they start doing their good deeds, beating up anybody who gets in their way. They seem to be alive again, but not exactly. They hire pretty Maurice (male name; maybe I heard it wrong; I can have trouble without subtitles) as secretary. Their first client is rich bombshell blonde Gloria Lake whose husband may be trying to kill her. Only he has just been murdered. Meanwhile the Devil is trying to bring them back below. They have his magic crystal, which he wants back. There is also a man with a puppet that seems more alive than he is. And Cheetah Man. The story dissolves pretty much into mayhem. The Devil shows up, recovers his crystal, and lets them go. For now. Mike departs with Gloria, and Dean with Maurice. It’s all nonsense, but fun in its fashion.

I continue to work on the Hilltop Farm project, now in the chapter on the year 1943. When I started I had no idea how long or short the project would be, and it is turning out long. The current chapter is now about 55,000 words; that’s novel length, and I’m still in July. It is a marvelously illuminating study for me, though I suspect few readers would be much interested. Who else cares about a subsistence farming project in he early 1940s in New England? But it was critical to my formative years, and there are insights there that the world could profit from, had it the interest. My parents were both top graduates at Oxford University, and they did have minds; I was the dull one in our family. I will probably self publish it in due course

The powers that be seem not to much like health for the masses, I suspect because there’s too much money to be made from commercial nostrums for the common cold on up. (Which is why Vitamin C gets disparaged: it stops the common cold. As I like to put it, there are two groups with opinions about Vitamin C: those who know it doesn’t work, like some doctors, and those who actually try it.) Columnist Paul Waldman has an interesting take on it. A congresswoman was interviewed on a CNN show and asked how she was going to come up with $40 trillion that Medicare for All would cost in the course of a decade. That figure might have been inflated by a hostile study, but let’s accept it as valid for now. The columnist says that’s the wrong question, because if we do nothing, health care will cost $50 trillion, because of expensive visits to the emergency room by uninsured folk, unbridled prescription costs, and so on. That medical cost affects everyone. I have only one prescription, for levothyroxin, that is, thyroid pills. It cost me about thirty dollars, until I switched to generic, when it dropped to five dollars. But then they found ways to get at me anyway, and now that same prescription, costing the maker no more, costs me $51. Someone is taking $46 out of my hide, because there are no price controls. I can afford it, irritating as it is, but what about the average user who may have to choose between that and paying the rent? It’s not academic. If my prescription were included in my Medicare the price would be much lower. Anyway, the real question is who is to pay the $10 trillion more we’re going to be stuck for if we don’t get Medicare for All or the equivalent? The anti-Medicare folk seem to be silent on that, but I can answer: we will. The non-billionaire 99 percent.

NEW SCIENTIST has an article on gut health. We are in effect walking, talking bags of bacteria. There are about ten times as many bacteria and the like in our guts than there are in the rest of our bodies, used to digest the food we eat. It is called the microbiome. Obviously we do need to digest food if we are to use it in our bodies. But now there is a question about whether it is smart to take probiotics, that is, special bacteria to enhance that microbione, especially after taking antibiotics the medical profession insists on, that wipe out the good bacteria as well as the bad ones. Maybe a simple all-around healthy diet is preferable. Well, I have the healthy diet, and I also take supplements and probiotics, and I exercise, covering all bases. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. So far it seems to be paying off; I’m about as spry an octogenarian as any, and still sassy, as this column indicates.
NEW SCIENTIST also has an archaeological article on “The Horror of Hasanlu.” This was a town in ancient Iran in the Iron Age, successful with paved streets and palatial two and three story houses with columned courtyards. It was on an important trade route and may have flourished for four or five thousand years. Its people were rich, with irrigated farms. Then around 800 BC it was raided and destroyed, its men, women, and children systematically slain and left where they lay, its goods looted, its buildings burned. It became a forgotten mound. Until now. Why? Evidently it was passionately hated, and of course the loot was valuable. We deplore savagery in contemporary human events, but the ancients may have been worse.

Incidental note on the quest for artificial intelligence: there are more potential configurations of the neurons and their connections in your brain than there are atoms in the universe. I trust that makes you feel special. I believe artificial intelligence will come; the correct feedback program will do it. If a gnat can have it, why not a robot (a mechanical person), or an android (a laboratory made person)?

Book review in THE WEEK: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. It says that college students insist on being shielded from exposure to any words, acts, or ideas that could make them uncomfortable. They refuse to be referred to by the pronouns “he” and “she”; they shout down speakers they dislike, and stop professors who stand up to them. Talk of spoiled brats! Apply that to the larger world and bigots can stifle rights for folk of color, Jews, gays, victims of sexual abuse, atheists and so on, because it hurts their sensitivities. What the hell do they go to college for, if not to be educated? Fortunately there are those who try to stand up for the First Amendment rights. Those are what I call the true Americans, and I hope my readers are among them.

Stray notes: I read a comment on neoliberal capitalism: it is a Ponzi scheme because it is predicated on infinite growth; when growth stops, it is over; there is no way to a soft landing; and the point of collapse can’t be predicted. A Canadian company, Kinky S Dolls, wants to open a “robot brothel” in Houston, not actually for robots but for love dolls, which are life size dolls used for sex. Wouldn’t you know it, the prudes are campaigning to prevent it, saying they want to end sex trafficking. They are concerned that the dolls may be being coerced? I think it is simply sex they are against. Surely the ready availability of really sexy dolls would diminish the market for trafficked women. Regular brothels are up in arms (legs?) against this competition, saying that real women are better. Paul Krugman says that the CEOs of the largest companies used to make 27 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but now make 270 times as much. How’s that for progress? Florida has 63 active hate groups, second only to California with 79. I live in Florida, but hate this aspect. You have heard of the placebo effect, where folks’ belief in medication makes their bodies respond even when they only think they have taken it? Its evil twin is the nocebo effect, where they respond negatively without actually having the bad stuff. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was founded in 2006 by Bobby Henderson, to satirize existing faiths. Adherents promise to abide by its dogma of being nice to each other and eating lots of pasta. Those are tough conditions, maybe barring me from membership. I suspect the monster is telepathic, and enhances the well-being of believers with placebo while degrading nonbelievers with nocebo. And a copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover used by the judge in the UK obscenity trial is expected to sell at auction for up to $20,000. I suspect a cheaper copy is available if you bargain for it.

When I cleaned up another corner of my study, something I try to do every decade or so, I found some old clippings. One was an item in LIBERAL OPINION WEEK, whose paper edition is now defunct, for August 11, 2005, by Peter Phillips tracking election anomalies. Evidence in the presidential race between Bush and Gore showed that in 2000 Gore won Florida, and therefore the election, but the Supreme Court on a party line vote gave Florida to Bush. Maybe that provides a notion why Democrats don’t want another party line player on the Supreme court today. Then in 2004 in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, the number of recorded votes was 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters. Exit polls showed Kerry winning in 2004 but the official tally was for Bush. Interestingly it was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting machines that the exit polls were different from the final count. The odds against that happening by chance are 250 million to one. I wonder what tricks we’ll see in 2020? Another old clipping dating from December 2007 says money is critical in marriage. You may remember the statistic that in second marriages, the more money the man has, the less his wife weighs, reflecting how men go for sex and women for money regardless what they claim. This column breaks it down further. In answer to the question “How willing are you to marry an average-looking person that you liked, if they had money?” half the men and two thirds of the women said they were very or extremely willing to marry for money. I suspect there were more who lied about it. How much money? Women in their 20s said $2.5 million; men in their 20s were willing to settle for a paltry $1 million. Among women in their 20s who would marry for money 71% said they expected to get divorced. Different ages have slightly different figures. If I lost my wife and looked to marry again I believe I would avoid women in their 20s however appealing they might seem. Another clipping from 2005 is on John McCain’s effort to ban torture in America. Would you believe, the Republican establishment opposed him? Yet we know that torture doesn’t work, because the victim will usually tell the torturers whatever they want to hear, to stop the torture. That’s how we got into the Iraq war: a made up story to stop the torture. And a NEW SCIENTIST clipping of 2005 suggests that the same natural laws that control the spread and evolution of human ideas and behaviors such as war, also control the spread of diseases.

A comment in the OLD SCIENTIST feature of NEW SCIENTIST: in 1995 a paper reported that four people taking the antidepressant drug clomipramine had orgasms every time they yawned. Some asked to continue on the drug after treatment was done, because they liked the side effect. The question was would a person on the drug seek out the most boring person to be with at a party? I wonder whether any were like me; I can yawn at will. Which reminds me: they haven’t ever figured out what yawning is for, other than calling it a stretch of the mouth. So I will provide the answer: it is to open the Eustachian tubes to equalize the inner ear pressure and change out the stale air there. When a person is active this happens automatically, but when he gets too still for too long a yawn becomes necessary. Now you know. (Sometimes I get tired of waiting for science to catch up to the obvious.)

I read Ink, by Jobie Baldwin. This is what the author terms urban fantasy (which makes me wonder what rural fantasy is like), and it is British in spelling and location. In fact part of it is in Oxford, where I was born, though I have no memory of the locale. There are strong ecological and vegan themes to which I also relate. Christian Blake is an unruly English teenager, smart but reckless. He spies an odd tattoo parlor, enters, meets the proprietor Raven, and gets a tattoo—that is the ink of the title—on his chest. This provides an intimate association with a Rune God, Hagalaz, Laz for short, who sort of resides in the tattoo. Hagalaz is the God of Disruption, of elemental forces, such as the weather, who tends to express himself violently. When he takes over, Christian can conjure horrendous storms, throw fireballs, and perform other violent acts, even when he doesn’t want to. He is also pretty much invulnerable and immortal. This is more than he had bargained on, but he has little choice. It seems that Christian has been chosen to join a small tribe that will try to save the world from a global catastrophe of unknown nature. There are visitors to Earth called the Settlers who will invoke this mischief. Christian goes to Las Vegas, America, to join with other tattooed teens with special Gods and powers, and they will all properly learn their potentials. They turn out to be the frail girl Kai, who is a healer, and Zack, whose God is a protector and can ward off evil. Meanwhile Christian dreams of a pretty Settler girl, though they are the enemy. Then Pax joins them; he is silent but can commune most effectively mentally. And finally Lexy—the girl he dreamed of. She’s to be a member of their tribe! She is beautiful and six and a half feet tall, her God is a warrior princess, and Christian is immediately smitten. After that the adventure becomes wild. This is a fast moving, high action story with insights into real world problems, the first of what promises to be a compelling series.

And a grab-bag of last moment items: remember the labored explanations what Jesus meant when he said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? I’ve always known that was nonsense, and sure enough, Jesus said no such thing. He said it was easier for a rope to pass through the eye of a needle, such as a huge ship’s hawser, which might have been made from camel’s hair. The translator made a typo, is all. Nearly half of all cell phone calls will be from scammers by next year. This is the sort of nonsense that the authorities could stop—if they wanted to. I mean, the source and destination of every cell phone communication is on the record. I presume the scammers make sure to pay off the necessary officials. A North Carolina woman who runs a nonprofit animal shelter took in 27 cats and dogs abandoned by folk fleeing Hurricane Florence. She gave some injured animals antibiotics, so county officials have charged her with practicing medicine without a veterinary license. She’d have been okay if she had just let the animals die? Shame on you, North Carolina. For every 1,000 rapes, only 310 are ever reported to the police, and 6 result in conviction and imprisonment. Meanwhile the reputation of the victim is ruined, even if she manages to keep her job or marriage. And folk wonder why more women don’t report the rapes? If I ran the world, there are reforms I’d make…

PIERS

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

DS9 S6 #17: “Wrongs Darker than Death or Night” Dukat calls Kira on her mother Meru’s birthday, saying the her mother was his lover after leaving her father. That her father told her her mother died, to cover that up. Oh, my! He has to be lying. Kira decides to consult the Orb and maybe see back in time to discover if it is true. She goes back in time and sees herself at about age two. The affair wasn’t love; her mother was selected as a comfort woman and taken involuntarily. The adult Kira and her mother are taken together. Naturally Kira, calling herself Luma, has a problem with the role and quickly gets in trouble. But her mother chooses to believe what Dukat tells her. Kira plants a bomb, then reconsiders and warns Meru and Dukat away from it, saving their lives. She has severely mixed feelings. Who wouldn’t?

DS9 S6 #18: “Inquisitions” Information is leaking from the station, and all senior officers are confined to quarters while the investigation proceeds. Director Sloan seems to suspect Bashir. He thinks the Dominion, when it held Bashir prisoner, succeeded in making him their spy without his knowledge. Then the Vorta Weyoun beams him out. Weyoun says he’s their agent too. Sisko beams him out, rescuing him. But he catches on that this is another fake scene. Then Sloan says he has been exonerated. He wants to recruit Bashir for the secret Section 31. There’s no record of such a unit.

DS9 S6 #19: “In the Pale Moonlight” Sisko rehearses the events of the past two weeks. There have been Dominion incursions. Sisko decides to bring the Romulans into the war against the Dominion. To do that he needs solid evidence. But the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Sisko rescues an expert forger, Tolar, from prison. That man stabs Quark, so Sisko has to bribe Quark to drop charges. Sisko presents a Romulan Senator with a data rod containing an excellent forgery of a Dominion plan to invade Romulan territory. But the Romulan recognizes it as a fake. Then his ship is bombed, looking as if the Dominion was trying to stop the news from being revealed. And the Romulans declare war on the Dominion. And Sisko is left with his guilty conscience. This political realism makes me wince.

DS9 S6 #20: “His Way” This is a musical episode. The holo suite animates Vic Fontaine who knows he’s an animation and is good at it. He takes Odo in hand to help him make progress with Kira. He needs to thaw, to show more personality. Kira plays a seductive hologram singer. Holo Vic talks with the real Kira, then sets up a holo date with the two of them, Odo not knowing it is now the real Kira, she not knowing that Odo thinks she’s a holo. Neither is pleased when they discover the truth. Next day they argue about it, dare each other to cut short the ritual and just kiss, and do, in full public, maybe a hundred people watching, and that’s it. The kiss is obviously compelling; the ice has been shattered.

DS9 S6 #21: “The Reckoning” Sisko, Kira, and Jake visit the excavation of holy ruins of Bajor, 25,000 to 30,000 years old. Sisko is Emissary, and an ancient inscription says “Welcome, Emissary.” Then a blast hurls him into a wall and he is unconscious. Kai Winn comes and lodges a protest about Sisko’s removal of a tablet for study. The prophecy is that the gateway to the temple will be destroyed. That must mean the station by the wormhole. Flustered, Sisko breaks the tablet, and odd vapors rise from it and depart. Then Kira is taken over by a Prophet, exhibiting enormous power. The Reckoning is upon them. They will evacuate the station. And Jake is chosen as the enemy leader’s vessel, the Pah-wraith. He and Kira face off, beams of energy shooting from their chests, meeting in the center, until both fall unconscious. Somehow Kai Winn managed to stop it. So the issue is undecided, but it certainly demonstrates the power of the Prophets. They are dangerously real, here.

DS9 S6 #22: “Valiant” Nog and Jake take a shuttle out for business with the Grand Nagus, but a ship comes after them, firing. The Valiant rescues them. It is a training ship, run by cadets. But they are short handed, so Nog is promoted to Chief Engineer. They are collecting technical data on a new Dominion ship. They shadow it, observing. Then they set up to destroy it. But that mission is highly risky. Jake warns against it, but they chant “Red Squad!” and are gung ho for action. This is of course mischief. The ship is lost. Jake and Nog take an escape capsule, saving themselves and one surviving crew woman. The crew had blindly followed a captain who led them over a cliff.

DS9 S6 #23: “Profit and Lace” The Dabu girl Aluura is nice to everyone, and Quark is getting interested in her. Meanwhile Zek the Grand Nagus has added a rule that Ferengi women can now wear clothes and go into business. So the Nagus has been deposed, and Brunt will be the new Nagus. Quark has a row with Moogie and she collapses. Now they need a female Ferengi to negotiate, so Quark must pretend to be Lumba, another female adviser to consult with Chairman Nilva. Lumba is too good at it, and Nilva wants to get romantic. Lumba does prove she’s female; Bashir had done surgery to make it temporarily so. So all is well again.

DS9 S6 #24: “Time’s Orphan” O’Brien, Keiko, and their children Molly and Yoshi go on a picnic in the country. Molly falls into a pit and gets sent 300 years into the past. They manage to beam her back, but she has aged ten years and is now a feral 18. She gradually remembers them, but wants to go home: to that landscape of the past. They take her to a holo image and she loves it, but that time is limited. She is simply not suited for life in the contemporary realm. So they send her back into the past, where she finds 8 year old Molly, and sends her back. So they have their original daughter again. An interesting, touching episode.

DS9 S6 #25: “The Sound of Her Voice” The Defiant, on the way back to the station, receives a general distress call for a female star-fleet officer, Lisa. They establish communication, and they talk continuously to her in relays. But she runs out of medicine. They have to hurry, though that puts she ship at risk. Meanwhile Quark conspires to distract Odo so that Quark can get some profitable illegal business done. Sisko, Bashir, and O’Brien take a shuttle in a risky rescue mission. But Lisa turns out to be three years dead. It seems the planetary barrier shifted the communications into the future, and their responses into the past. Still, the association profoundly affects all of them. This one sort of gets into your gut and twists.

DS9 S6 #26: “Tears of the Prophets” Sisko has been selected to plan the invasion of Cardassia. Kira is mad at Odo for arresting a Vedik who broke the law. Humans, Klingons, and Romulans are allies against the Dominion. Gul Dukat is possessed by a malign spirit. He beams aboard the Defiant and shoots Dax. Kira takes over command of the Defiant when Sisko is set back by the prophets. Sisko realizes that he should have heeded the prophets instead of Starfleet Command; that might have saved Dax. This of course isn’t over.

DS9 S7 #1: “Image in the Sand” Three months later things are bleak. The invasion of Cardassia has ground to a halt, but causalities continue. They have not heard from Sisko. But he is still back home, in the restaurant. He has a vision, digging in sand and finding the face of a woman that seems to come alive. Is it a message from the Prophets? He tries to recreate the face on a computer, and his father recognizes it but refuses to talk about it. Kira is now a colonel, working with the Romulan contingent. Worf is badly out of sorts, with Dax gone. Ben Sisko’s father met Sarah, married her, and she was Ben’s mother. But she left after Ben turned one. Then died in an accident. She’s the face in the sand. She left a locket with Bajoran writing on the back, says “Orb of the Emissary.” A visitor comes, and attacks Sisko with a knife. Someone doesn’t want him finding the Orb. And a young woman comes to Sisko, saying she is Dax. Evidently the symbiont has a new host.

DS9 S7 #2: “Shadows and Symbols” She is Ezri Dax. There was an emergency and the symbiont had to be transplanted to the only host available, though Ezri was not at all prepared. Meanwhile Sisko and party go to Tyree to search for the Orb. The Romulans arm the hospital planet, so Kira sets up a blockade. Worf goes on a mission to win a place for Jadzia in Klingon heaven. Sisko also finds himself in a hospital ward; they want him to admit this whole adventure is a fantasy. But he resists, views the Orb, and wins what is needed. The Wormhole reopens, the Romulans back down, and all is well for the moment.

DS9 S7 #3: “Afterimage” Ezri Dax meets the other members of the group, sometimes awkwardly. She is now short and cute and left handed, and her likes and dislikes differ. She plans to leave, as there are too many memories here. Meanwhile Garak has emotional problems. Sisko assigns Ezri, who is a counselor, to work with him. She manages to help him. Her main problem is with Worf, who knows she has Jadzia’s memories, but finally accepts the new order. She plans to leave, but finally feels she can be the station counselor.

DS9 S7 #4: “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” The station crew takes on a Vulcan crew in a holosuite game of baseball. They have to learn the game, and they’re horrible, but determined to win it for the captain. They are the Niners, of course. It promises to be a disaster, and is; it gets to be 10-0 against them. But they make a good show at the end, and celebrate that. And an incidental view of Ezri reveals that she has an outstanding figure, when she shows it.

DS9 S7 #5: “Chrysalis” Bashir’s four mutant associates arrive unexpectedly, putting Bashir on the spot to try to help Sarina Douglas, who is in a trance-like state. The others are Jack, who is hyper, Uahtrick whose feelings are easily hurt, and Laurie, determinedly sexy. Ezri tries to help, sympathizing. Then Sarina recovers on her own, to the delight of them all. They are soon singing together. She has a whole new world to catch up on. She is a genius, like the other three and Bashir kisses her. But next day she reverts and is unresponsive. She can still talk, but is afraid she doesn’t know how to love. So she departs, with regret.

DS9 S7 #6: “Treachery, Faith and the Great River” Odo has to go on a mission to meet a man he thought was dead. But it’s a Vorta ruse; Weyoun wants to defect. He regards Odo as a Founder, a god, because he is a changeling. It turns out he is Woyoun 6, of 7 clones so far. Apparently he is defective, not being sufficiently cynical. Meanwhile Nog is making convoluted deals to obtain a desperately needed stabilizer, causing mischief all over the station. Weyoun 6 terminates himself, and the Dominion pursuit withdraws. But Odo has learned that a mysterious illness is killing off the changelings. This is another kind of mischief.

DS9 S7 #7: “Once More Unto the Breach” Kor visits Worf, asking Worf to intercede to enable him to fight and die as a warrior. Worf tries, but is rebuffed. Finally on his own authority he makes Kor third officer on the ship. Worf volunteers for a vital but suicidally dangerous mission. Kor pre-empts his place and wins the time they need, nobly sacrificing himself in the Klingon manner, which was his ambition.

DS9 S7 #8: “The Siege of AR-558” Sisko, Ezlri, Bashir, Quark, Nog beam to a base under siege. The personnel here are long overdue for rotation but are stuck. Only one third of their original crew survives. They are on edge. The Gem/Hadar are near and invading. Nog loses a leg. There are Houdini mines. They move them to ambush the enemy instead. There is ugly close combat. They manage to hold. But there is little joy in it.

DS9 S7 #9: “Covenant” A former instructor visits Kira, and gives her a gem, which activates and transports her to Empok Nor. There the head man is Dukat, weirdly. These are the Pah-wraiths, the spiritual enemy. Dukat joined them for cynical reasons, but became transformed. He wants Kira by his side; he always has had a hankering for her. They show her around the community, hoping to persuade her to join them, but she is understandably cynical. The first community baby is born—and it’s a Cardassian crossbreed. Did Dukat sire it? They did have an affair. He tries to kill her. It is clear Dukat hasn’t changed. Now to cover up his mischief, he tells them they will leave this mortal life and join the Pah-wraiths. But Kira blows the whistle on that. The community revolts and survives. This is a savage take on religious cults.

DS9 S7 #10: “It’s Only A Paper Moon” Nog returns from hospitalization, with his artificial leg. He is obviously not recovered emotionally, but sick of talking about his feelings. His leg hurts all the time; others think he is imagining it. He goes to the holosuite to see Vic Fontaine, who seems to be a regular now, and listen to “I’ll be seeing you.” Nog goes over Vic’s books and reorganizes his business for expansion. This animates Vic, who has never actually lived before. But he knows he’s just an illusion, and sends Nog back to real life. In return Nog arranges for Vic to exist 26 hours a day. He’s still a hologram, but also real it his fashion.

DS9 S7 # 11: “Prodigal Daughter” Chief O’Brien goes to try to help the widow of Bilby, the man he was responsible for killing on New Sydney. Ezri Dax’s family is there, so she enlists her mother to help. To do that she must visit her strong-willed mother. It seems her whole family is Trill, without symbionts: mother and two brothers. They find O’Brien, arrested for brawling. He found the body of the widow, but the Syndicate doesn’t want him to investigate further. It turns out that her brother Norvo arranged it, because she was making bad mischief. Was their mother indirectly responsible? It is a difficult family, best left in the background.

DS9 S7 #12: “The Emperor’s New Cloak” To save the Grand Nagus, Quark and Rom steal an invisible cloaking device. Bad guys from the alternate universe come and mix it up, so we see the actors in opposite roles. Kira is always sexy when she’s evil. The cloaking device is for the other Worf, so he can conquer the universe. Evil Kira is directing it, and she kisses evil Ezri; the two are evidenttly lovers too. What a plot! Devious plot and betrayals occur, and they rescue the Nagus. Madcap nonsense throughout, but fun.

DS9 S7 #13: “Field of Fire” Ilario piloted the Defiant against six Gem’Hadar ships and won. He gets drunk, and Ezri sees him to his room. Next morning he has been shot dead by a chemical weapon. Who could have done it? Ezri has a nightmare. One of the symbiont’s prior hosts, Joran, was a murderer; he says she needs his help but she wants nothing to do with him. But when there is a second murder, this time of a woman, she reluctantly summons Joran, though only she can see him. Then a third murder. They figure out who the culprit is, and stop him. She banishes Joran, but he will not be buried as deeply as he was, somewhat to her dismay.

DS9 S7 #14: “Chimera” O’Brien and Odo see a ship in space that swims like a fish. But there’s nothing there. Then a changeling appears. He is another of the 100 sent into the galaxy the way Odo was. He is Laas; he doesn’t know what’s what among humanoids. He wants Odo to join him out in the galaxy searching for others of the 100. but Odo can’t leave Kira. So Kira helps Laas escape, and tells Odo where he will be so they can get together. But Odo won’t go. For him, love is stronger than the Link. Now Kira has the proof of his love for her. Laas will seek elsewhere, not understanding love.

DS9 S7 #15: “Badda Bing Badda Bang” Bashir and O’Brien invite Vic Fontaine to the Alamo program. Vic declines, but starts singing a song about the Alamo, when it is interrupted by dancing girls and tough characters who say they are taking over and Vic is history. They can’t be deleted, there being some kind of glitch, so it’s a problem. The new boss is Frankie Eyes. They beat Vic up. A man named Zeemo is behind it. Frankie takes a shine to Kira and she plays along. Ezri takes a job as a waitress. The good guys are planning to rob the casino, to make the new boss write it off as not worthwhile. Sisko resists, because the real casino in 1962 discriminated against black folk, but is finally brought into it too. They work out an elaborate plan, with all of them playing their roles. These alternate roles episodes are always fun. Their plan runs afoul of changed details, such as Frankie Eyes being busy elsewhere, and a special reset feature on the big safe so Nog has trouble cracking it, and Mr. Zeemo arriving a day early. But they manage to pull it off.

DS9 S7 #16: “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges” Sloan of Section 31 has a mission for Bashir to spy on the Romulan allies. Sisko tells him to take it. But the Rumulans don’t trust him, and interrogate him thoroughly. There are levels and levels of betrayal and innocent people suffer. “In time of war the law falls silent.” That’s the translation of the episode title. Basvhir, an honest man, doesn’t fit this mold.

DS9 S7 #17: “Penumbra” Sisko plans to retire on Bajor, in due course. News comes that two ships were ambushed by the Dominion, one lost, and Worf’s fate is unknown. Ezri, with Jadzia’s memories, is especially concerned. She takes a shuttle and goes out to look for him. She searches in the fiery Badlands. She finds him. Meanwhile the Changeling woman has the malady; they are testing samples from her trying to find a cure. Two Gem’Hadar ships attack the shuttle; they crash on a local planet. Dukat comes to see Dumar, needing his help. Worf and Ezlri argue and kiss and sleep together. Then are captured by the Breen. A surgeon converts Dukat to the semblance of a Bajoran. A vision of Sisko’s mother tells him he can’t marry Kasidy, lest they know nothing but sorrow.

DS9 S7 #18: “’Till Death do us Part” Kai Winn arrives at the station, and the Prophets speak to her fer the first time. Dukat comes to the station in his Bajoran guise, as Anjohl. He is the one the Prophets told Winn would come to her. The Breen brutally interrogate Worf, then Ezri. Anjohl evidently has Winn fooled. In her delirium Ezri “says ““Kiss me, Julian,” to Worf’s surprise. Anjohl kisses Winn. Sisko decides to marry Kasidy despite the warning of the Prophets. This is mischief. The Dominion and the Breen form an alliance, with Worf and Ezri witnessing it. These assorted unions are devious.

DS9 S7 #19: “Strange Bedfellows” the Cardassian Damar doesn’t want to sign a treaty requiring unnamed territorial concessions. Anjohl has made Kai Winn into an obliging female. That’s phenomenal mischief. Worf and Ezri must help the enemy or be executed. They bleak out of their cell, but are recaptured. Winn views the Orb but tells him nothing. Anjohl tries to persuade her to join the Pah-wraiths, but she rejects them and him. She talks with Kira, who says she should step down as Kai, but she has trouble accepting that. Worf and Ezri realize that they are not for each other; she prefers Bashir. Damar frees Worf and Ezri, knowing that the Breen and Dominion are not Cardassia’s friend. Winn decides to join the Pah-wraiths.

DS9 S7 #20: “The Changing Face of Evil” Worf and Ezri return safely to the station and are welcomed. The comes a message: the Breen have attacked Earth. Kai Winn decides to look in the evil Book of the Kosst Amojan but the pages are blank. The Breen attack locally and Siski must take the Defiant out. It destroys two enemy ships, then gets hit and they must abandon ship. The escape pods are allowed to return to the station, to spread word of the fate that awaits future incursions. Winn learns that the real Anjohl died nine years ago, and that this is Dukat. Cardassia rebels against the Dominion. The war has taken a drastic new turn.

DS9 S7 #21: “When it Rains…” The Breen used their energy suppressing device to destroy an entire fleet. Only the Klingons survived, while the Federation and Romulan ships remain vulnerable. Kira must go to guide the Cardassian resistance in distractive techniques while more is researched on protecting the ships. She is not pleased. Neither is Kai Winn pleased to be working with Dukat as she studies the Kosst Amojan. Bashir discovers that Odo is infected with the changeling-killing disease. Dukat looks at the evil book and is blinded. The Cardassians don’t like working with Kira and Odoo, but realize that this is the key to victory. Winn kicks Dukat out. Bashir discovers that it was Starfleet Command that infected Odo, using him as a carrier to infect other changelings. They are trying to commit genocide.

DS9 S7 #22: “Tacking Into the Wind” Odo is degenerating rapidly, apparently because he has been shapeshifting frequently recently. Kira knows, and ignores it because she wants Odo to keep his pride. Worf tries to get Martok to assume command, for the good of the Klingons, because Gowron is foolishly costing them ships. Ezri is avoiding telling Bashir of her interest in him. So the tapestry of interactions continues.

DS9 S7 #23: “Extreme Measures” Odo is dying, and wants Kira to leave so that her last sight of him is not his ugly death. Bashir and O’Brien tell Sisko of their plan to lure in a Section 31 operative for interrogation, their only chance to save Odo. Sloan arrives and they capture him. They interrogate him, but he tries to kill himself. They analyze his brain anyway. They mind travel into Sloan’s mind, which resembles the DS9 station. Sloan is hiding there; they have to find him. But he dies before they find the cure. But then they realize this is a ruse; they are still in Sloan’s mind. But maybe Bashir finally finds the cure. He treats Odo. Will it work?

There was a glitch of some sort, and I saw a section of an episode that fits around here: three Cardassions bring Kira as a prisoner to the local headquarters. The Changeling leader appears, inspects a weapon, passes it to one of the visitors, who promptly shoots the Cardassian personnel. The woman is actually Odo. So now they are operating within the enemy HQ. Meanwhile Worf challenges Gowron, defeats him, and puts Martok in charge. Odo is expiring, but Kira stays with him.

DS9 S7 #24: “The Dogs of War” USS Sao Paulo arrives, looking just like the Defiant. In fact they change the name to the Defiant. Kira and her Cardassian allies are caught in a planetary cave, having been betrayed. They contact another resistance cell. Meanwhile the Grand Nagus retires, leaving the office to Quark. Kira and Damar hatch a desperate plan. Quark sees Ferengi civilization as deteriorating and he means to do something about it. Bashilr and Eli agree to be just friends. Then they kiss. So much for that. It turns out that the Grand Nagus actually wants Rom, not Quark, to be next. Kasidy tells Sisko she’s pregnant.

DS9 S7 #25: “What you leave Behind” Bashir and Ezri, O’Brien and Keiko, Sisko and Kasidy are all concerned that they can survive the war. Odo wants to be reunited with Kira. Kira is now impersonating a Breen, active in the resistance. Dukat and Winn are not getting along, but she has learned how to release the Pah-wraiths. The power goes out on Cardassia Prime as the Resistance sabotage occurs. The Dominion will destroy a city for each act of sabotage; they mean to turn the Cardassian people against the rebels. The Gem’Hadar raid the rebel headquarters and capture the leaders. But at the execution a Cardassion officer shoots the executors; he supports Cardassia. The battle is joined in space. The Cardassians change sides and join the battle on the Federation side. Dukat and Winn go to the Fire Caves, and she invokes the horrendous fire. Kira and the rebels can’t get into the capital, but when a prisoner is taken out, the door opens, and they charge in. They kill Weyoun and capture the Changeling leader lady. Winn kills Dukat and frees the Pah-wraiths. Odo links with the woman and cures her. But 800 million Cardassians are dead. The Pah-wraiths strike down Winn and reanimate Dukat. Sisko goes to stop him, and does; the Book is the key. Now he is with them, and may return to Kasidy at some point. Until then, he seems dead; there’s the sorrow the Prophets warned of. Worf becomes an ambassador. Odo dissolves into the pool, to cure the Changelings. Kira will now run the station. So things are more or less wrapped up, and there is peace in the galaxy. For now.

Deep Space Nine is wild and often unbelievable, but this is my favorite Star Trek series so far. I think Kira is my favorite character. Next I will see how Voyager is, I admit with some trepidation. So far I have liked each series better than the last, but that can’t go on forever. Or can it?

PIERS

NoRemember 2018

HI-

The Cluster series will be featured in Early Bird Books, down-priced to $2.99 on 11/28/2018. Xanth novels 38-40 will be priced at $2.99 at Amazon on 11/22/2018. And my anthology of the stories that propelled me into the sense of wonder and indeed eventually into the profession of free lance writing, One and Wonder, will be priced $1.99 in the USA on 11/4/2018. So if you want to know what turned me on when I was young, this is it, but you have to hurry to catch it. I still remember picking up an old magazine lying forgotten in my mother’s office, starting to read about a spaceship returning to Earth to discover everything changed, cities deserted, the space program shut down, and my being mesmerized. That was about seventy years ago, and the genre has shifted since, so you probably won’t be moved the way I was. A number of the original notions there have been copied since, so no longer seem original. But if you’re curious, this is it.

When cleaning up, I encountered a DVD sent me by a fan in 2002, sixteen years ago, X-Men. I surely watched it then, but didn’t remember it, senescent as I am becoming, so I watched it again. It starts with people getting painfully separated from their families in what seems to be a concentration camp, in a downpour. Then elsewhere a boy and girl kiss, and he goes unconscious and she screams. She has done it to him by her touch. Then a government hearing about the question of the mutants: are they dangerous? Then the girl, Rogue, gets picked up by Wolverine, or Logan, in a truck; they don’t know each other, but both are mutants. His attention drifts and the truck wrecks, hurling him out. He is injured, but rapidly heals himself; that’s part of his talent. He can also sprout deadly metal spikes from his hands.. Two others attack him; they are enemy mutants. He winds up in a strange house, a sanctuary and training center for mutants with dangerous powers, rescued from the bad mutants. Rogue is there too. Xavier (why does he remind me of Star Trek, The Next Generation?) runs it from a wheelchair, and makes a deal with Wolverine: give him two days to find out why the enemy wants him, and he will help Wolverine to recover his lost memory. Another one there is Mystique, a sexy blue skintight garbed enemy woman. Others are Storm and Cyclops. Rogue’s talent is to borrow the talents of others, briefly. She borrows Woverine’s, leaving him unconscious, and departs the compound. Wolverine finds her, and they apologize to each other. He talks her into returning to the sanctuary. But the enemy mutants, commanded by Magneto, have other plans for them. Or, as it turns out, plans for Rogue. They mean to use her to facilitate the conversion of all the people in the world to mutancy. That will of course be chaos. The good mutants raid, and it is mutant against mutant, making for interesting combat. But Magneto captures them inside the Statue of Liberty. After more mayhem there is a pause; the battle will be continued in due course.

I read Laws and Prophecies by Lee S King. This is the third in a series, and it is 149,000 words long, with more to come. It seems to be a segment in a larger story, and its pace is glacial. It is indeed concerned with the details of laws and prophecies, which fundamentally affect every citizen. I would call it a novel of manners, where social and legal interpretations are essential. Alcandhor is the new Thane, governing his tribe and the Rangers, who enforce laws and protect people. His sister is Sarinna, and his mentor is Mattan, who is a kind of alien with special powers he does not like to show carelessly. There is some question among the nobles whether Alcandhor has the gumption to really do the job, and some resistance to his edicts. He was married, but his wife was not good for him so he had to put her out, the equivalent of divorce, and now he is the target of swarms of women who want the status more than the man. That may be analogous to our own world, where swarms of men want the woman’s body without commitment. Elaborate social rules both limit and protect him; he can’t escape the women, but neither is he obliged to accept any of them. He would like to marry again, if only to back off the swarms, but finding an ideal partner is difficult. Meanwhile another noble sees a pretty young woman of the appropriate class, but she turns out to be only thirteen, too young. Then there is a rebellion, and when Alcandhor goes to suppress it he gets captured, bound, and left in a cellar to die of hunger and exposure. Mattan acts to finally rescue him, but that is a violation of protocol that Alcandhor will have to punish; the laws are very strict. Then there is a romance between a noble young woman and a ranger, perfect for each other, who are not permitted to marry because they are of different tribes, something she had not known. They do marry, and are sentenced to the mines, where she will surely die. It is senseless, but it is the law. That is the straw that breaks Alcandhor’s indecision, and he acts to cancel the restrictive laws. The nobles are up in arms, but the ultimate power is his, once he chooses to exercise it. A prophecy called it exactly, but in the manner of prophecies, the meaning was not clear until the event actually occurred. Not that he wanted more power, but it was the only way to establish the proper order. This book will not be to every genre reader’s taste, as it lacks blasters, sexy femmes, and bug-eyed monsters, but those interested in the nuances of protocol should find it worthwhile. There is indeed more to science fiction than pyrotechnics.

I read Writing on an Ethical Life, by Peter Singer. I got it portly by accident, thinking it was by the singer Pete Seeger, but it is well worth reading on its own. This is actually a collection of pieces by the author, assembled to address a particular theme. That means it lacks the dynamic of a normal book; it does not build up to a resounding climax, but moves on from one aspect to another. Still, there’s a lot there. He addresses, among others, the issues of abortion, vegetarianism, animal welfare, the environment, and sanitary suicide with singular clarity, and I agree with him almost completely. If the fetus has a bad malformation and will live only in pain, is it right to abort it? If not, because it is wrong to take life, what about the myriad lives of animals sacrificed so that we may eat them? Speciesism is drawing the line at what is human; if it is human it is sacrosanct, but if it is animal, even one as aware and as capable of suffering as a human, it is not. Is that fair? His exploration and reasoning are inexorable; if your mind is not completely closed you are likely to wince. Even I, a vegetarian who does not like abortion, was not completely comfortable throughout. Is there an ethical distinction between abortion, infanticide, abstinence, and contraception? Why draw the line at conception or birth? Don’t be sure you have the answer; it’s a continuum. Naturally such logic is controversial. When the author was invited to speak at a university in Germany, students chanted to drown him out, and when he continued, one came on stage and attacked him physically. He was condemned for positions folk thought were his, and were not; self righteous ignorance is distressingly common. By my definition those who refuse even to listen to the other side of any debate are bigots, and they exist on the right and left; bigotry knows no philosophy. I recommend this book to anyone who would like to rationally explore issues of life, death, and fairness. Too many of us are living lives of selfish denial.

I watched Inferno. If the switch is thrown, the plague Inferno will be unleashed and half the people of the world will die in agony. If the switch is not thrown, in a century mankind will be extinct. Humanity is the disease, Inferno is the cure. Robert Langdon wakes in an Italian hospital with amnesia. The cute lady doctor Sienna knows him from a meeting when she was nine years old; she read his books. Then an assassin comes to kill him. They barely escape to her apartment. They can’t all the police because it was a policewoman, who came gunning for him, so they call the American consulate. But the response is suspicious so he gives a false address for them to come to pick him up. But they also come to the apartment, so the two flee again. They search in Dante’s works for clues to where the virus is hiding, while Robert remembers fragments. Then Sienna turns out to be working for the other side; she wants to release the virus and cull the species. The several sides converge on the key spot. They finally manage to stop the release of the virus. But does this mean that humanity is doomed? I am not quite sure which side I am on here; there is a case to be made either way. The plague is ugly, but so is the consequence of doing nothing.

I read Tell Me What You Want by Justin Lehmiller. PhD. It is subtitled “The science of sexual desire and how it can help you improve your sex life.” No, I didn’t get it from eagerness to supercharge my own sex life; I am after all 84 years old. That said, I may be old but I can still dream. The author is a fan of mine, and sent it autographed “To Piers Anthony: Thank you for inspiring me to become a writer at a very young age. I continue to be a huge fan of your work, especially your foray into erotic sci-fi. With much admiration.” I presume he is referring to novels like Pornucopia and Eroma, and novellas like Captive and Soul of the Cell. Maybe even stories like “Knave” and “Rat Bait.” I do erotic fiction, but the emphasis remains on the story rather than the sex, though I don’t like ellipses unless I parody them in Xanth. Tell Me is actually a survey and discussion of the sexual fantasies of more than four thousand Americans ranging in age from eighteen to eighty seven. It puts me in mind of Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, describing women’s sexual fantasies. Yes, I have that book on my shelf; I bought it in 1984 and found it fascinating. Let me tell you, those female fantasies can be a real turn-on for males as well. For example, she tells of how she had a man in bed, and he asked her what she was thinking, so she told him how in her imagination she was with friends at a big football game, all of them huddled under a large blanket to keep warm. Then a key running play occurs and they all jump up in excitement to watch and cheer. One man gets behind her, under the blanket where others can’t see, pressing up against her buttocks, his breath hot on her neck. Each time she jumps he gets closer in, his stiff erection getting under her short skirt and past her tight panties stage by stage. As they all go mad with excitement watching the game she lifts one leg up to brace it on the next higher tier of the bleachers to steady herself, and that provides him better access, and he starts to nudge into her, she not eager but also not at all reluctant. As they continue to scream and jump he gets right up inside, like a ramrod, deeper and deeper. “All the way! All the way!” the crowd screams. She feels his spasm of pleasure as he jets into her core… and at that point her companion in the bedroom got out of bed, put on his pants, and left, sex not completed. What a turd! Apparently the very idea of a woman actually enjoying her fantasy of wild illicit almost public sex was so foreign to him that he just had to get out of there. If it had been me, I’d have wanted to turn on a TV football game, place a stool for her to brace her foot on in case she wanted to lift her leg, and stand very close behind her as I navigated her underwear during her joyous and passionate distraction of the game.

So the present volume is a nice follow up, as it covers both genders. What are the more contemporary fantasies, male and female? Ninety seven percent of those surveyed reported having sexual fantasies, most fairly frequently. That is, several times a week, or several times a day. What’s the most popular fantasy? Sex with multiple partners, such as threesomes. Men typically do it with two women, women with two men, or with a man and a woman. Other fantasies relate to power, control, and rough sex; novelty, adventure and variety; taboo and forbidden sex; non-monogamous such as wife swapping; passion and romance; and erotic flexibility, such as homo-eroticism and gender bending. Each category has variations, so there’s quite a spread of overlap. In general, fantasies are for pleasure rather than discomfort, with the subject the center of attention. Positions vary, with about a third of both men and women imagining doggie style sex, or face to face with partner on top, or with themselves on top, and fewer going for other variants such as reverse cowboy/cowgirl, which I assume is one person lying flat and the other straddling as if on a saddled horse. Using sex toys is popular—85%–including “pegging,” or receiving anal sex from a woman via a strap-on phallus. Some women like the idea of doing it to a man, and men like to have their “P-spot” or prostate massaged in this manner. Perhaps the most frequent fantasy is simply vaginal intercourse. Kissing is extremely popular, as well as giving or receiving oral sex. About two in five women like receiving anal sex, slightly less for men, while giving it is another matter: a majority of men yes versus a majority of women no. Oral sex is more popular; a great majority of both men and women like giving and receiving it. Remember, this is in their fantasies; actually doing it would probably be less popular. Fantasy is freer than reality, being largely risk free, both physically and emotionally. Why have fantasy sex at all? It seems that passion in real life fades in a few months; even sex can get dull when there’s too little variety. Incidental statistics: the average time from penetration to orgasm for straight men is 5.4 minutes. 92% of those who act on their non-monogamy fantasies find the outcome as good or better than they had dreamed, but less that half found that the case with larger group sex. Men’s rate of infidelity has remained stable, but women’s rate has increased by 40% since the 1970s. The average length of an erect penis is 5.14 inches with a standard deviation of .65 inches, but porn penises run larger, just as porn breasts run larger than reality, giving folk a skewed notion of what is real and what is desirable. For example, my own erect penis is five and a half inches; I always thought average was six inches, making me small, when it turns out I’m slightly large. Now they tell me! Many folk have been ashamed of having sexual fantasies, thinking they are a sign of mental derangement, when in fact such fantasies are completely normal and healthy. Better sex education is desperately needed, but in America that’s a forlorn hope where masturbation and variety are discouraged and gay sex can be considered a mental disease. I regard this book as a valuable compendium; if I find a fault, it is that the fantasies may be a bit too objective, reduced to statistics and explanations. There are no personalized stories like that of Nancy Friday at the football game. The reader does not experience the sensation of having sex with an excitingly different partner, or using a novel sex toy, or feeling forbidden lust, the fear of discovery, or joy admixed with guilt. He does not exchange glances with his friend’s attractive wife and wonder whether there is any way to get alone with her without jeopardizing his friendship. That personal involvement remains the domain of fiction, but it’s the very essence of sexual fantasy, isn’t it Regardless, this is an interesting and worthwhile book to read, and I recommend it to those who want to get a better notion what’s what. We’re all more typical than we may believe.

I watched Solo, a Star Wars movie. Han Solo and Qi’ra steal a car and make a break for freedom, pursued by monsters. But they are betrayed as they are about to escape, and only Solo makes it through and signs up for training as a pilot. Three years later he gets kicked out for having a mind of his own. He befriends a Wookie, Chewie, who was supposed to kill him. They hijack part of a train and escape. In due course he gets back together with Qi’ra and schemes for a good ship. They get the cargo they need and fight their way to the shop, losing the female robot L3. But they use her brain to help pilot the ship. Solo wants to be friendly with Qi’ra, but she demurs; she owes someone else. But in the end, after a tangled mass of betrayals, it is Solo she chooses. He wins his ship and his future is on. But I can’t say I really liked this movie; it was too consistently dark in picture and spirit, and even with subtitles I had trouble following the confusing story line.

I watched Mad Max: Fury Road. Max is caught, tied, tattooed, escapes, pursued. He is fleeing the living and the memories of the dead. There is a ceremony, and a cascade of water is released for the thirsty throng below. Then we see Furiosa, who directs her caravan east, leaving the normal road. Why? They are pursued, and fight back with spears, bombs, machine guns and flame throwers, all while speeding across the desert. But over-matched, they plunge into a giant dust storm. Max is chained in front of a car with a mask on his face. The car wrecks and he encounters six fair girls washing up: Furiosa and her associates. Her loft arm is mechanical. They form an uneasy bargain, going together in their giant tanker truck, while the pursuit appears. The leader of the gang regards the girls as his property. When they finally get where’s they’re going, they discover that they have overshot the mark, the green home; they have to back a distance. They do, as the battle with the pursuers continues. They finally do get there, and there is a hint that Max and Furiosa, both battered, will make a couple.

I watched Ready Player One. The year is 2045. Wade is 18, a typical teen, who loves virtual reality. The Oasis is the main arena, where anything is possible. The founder set it up so that whoever finds the hidden Easter Egg will control the Oasis. Get the three keys and proceed. But so far no one has found even one key. Wade gets into a wild car race with destruction on every side, and spies slender Art3mis on a motorcycle. Mode saves her from getting crunched by a giant ape. Next time he interprets the founder’s words and drives backwards while all the others are racing forwards, finds a new route, and gets a key. Art3mis saw him going backwards, followed suit, and got another copy of the same key His friend Aech (pronounced H) gets the third copy. Wade tells Art3mis he loves her. She says he doesn’t even know her; she does not look like her avatar. They fly into an ambush. She leaves him. Then schemers for power, the 101, come for him in the real world; he barely escapes. He meets Art3mis in real life; she has a birthmark that discolors the right side of her face. He still likes her. Art3mis figures out that the founder’s worst regret was not kissing he girl he loved. She searches out that girl and discovers the jade key. The second one. But then the enemy catches her in real life. Wade rescues her. They fight back. It turns out that everyone who wins—loses. They can’t win by winning. The third key is the invisible dot in the center of the beginning of the game. Wade finds it by casting about blindly, the only way. There’s a contract to be signed—but he realizes that’s wrong, and refuses, as being locked into anything is bad. Which is the right thing to do. He shares the game with his friends, and they set about doing the right things. This is one phenomenal movie, in special effects and imagination. I’d have loved Art3mis’s avatar too.

I watched Jobs. I never liked Apple Computers and never bought one, because it was apparent from the start that the company was dedicated to shafting its customers. I don’t do business with that kind. Which was too bad, because I think I would really have liked its operating system. But I was curious about the history of its founder, Steve Jobs, so I got the video. I learned that he tricked a girl into having sex with him, before telling her he had a girlfriend. That he worked for Atari originally. He had trouble there because his boss said that while he was brilliant, he was an asshole. His friend Alcorn helped him get through. Wozniac is another friend. Jobs doesn’t like working for others; he wants more freedom to do his own thing. So he and Alcorn go into business for themselves on a shoestring basis, starting Apple. They need investors, for operating cash. I learned that he’s a fruitarian, eating nothing but fruit. He gets an investor, bargaining hard. When his girlfriend gets pregnant he kicks her out. When his best programmer tries to raise a reasonable point, Steve summarily fires him. Jobs is not a people person. He picks a fight with the giant IBM. The board has had enough; it fires him from the Lisa project. He returns to work on the Macintosh, which is languishing. He recruits more competent people and the Macintosh makes news. Then he calls Bill Gates of Microsoft and cusses him out for stealing Apple technology. Then his close friend tells him he is leaving Apple, because it is no longer about making great toys for people, it’s all about the corporation. Then with regret the board kicks Jobs out. They simply can’t make the company work with Jobs, who is an awkward wild card. But it turns out they don’t make it work very well without him, either. He remains a major stock holder, but the stock is dropping. He returns as an adviser. The board won’t allow innovation, so he gets the board changed. He brings back the square pegs, making Apple an innovator again, and ultimately one of the most successful companies in the world. He died in 2011, but the new direction continues. I agree with the supervisor: Jobs was a genius, but an asshole.

I continue to work on my summer project, Hilltop Farm, and there is interesting material there. Remember, this is the history of my parents’ experiment in subsistence farming in the early 1940s. Why would top graduates from the University of Oxford choose to become isolated farmers in the Green Mountains of Vermont? The answer is now about 130,000 words long, and growing. One tidbit is one of their first home-canned meals: canned porcupine. The porcupines were a menace to anything made of wood, and some garden vegetables, a real nuisance, so they killed them, then realized that the meat should not be wasted. I became a vegetarian in college, but even as a child I did not like the killing of animals, and as an adult I have trouble seeing how dedicated pacifists should routinely commit the ultimate violence of killing sentient creatures just because they are inconvenient. To my way of thinking, any pacifist who is not also a vegetarian hasn’t thought it all the way through. My father wondered in a letter of the time how such a monster as Adolf Hitler could arrange the wholesale slaughter of Jews; he thought if he could only understand that, he might have the key to human violence, and thus maybe a way to abate it. My somewhat sour note is that maybe Hitler regarded the Jews as like porcupines. I doubt my father would have understood that comment, but it does suggest the key: if an animal is in your way, kill it. If a person is in your way, look upon it as an animal, then kill the animal. That’s how a self respecting person can wind up doing the unspeakable. I read Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in high school out of similar curiosity. I remember how he said he studied the ills of society and discovered that at the root of each was a Jew, so to improve society the Jews had to be eliminated. Evidently he started with his racist prejudice and sought reasons to justify it, as bigots do. We see a similar process in today’s American politics. Letters in the local newspaper say that since Democrats are out to destroy whatever is good in America, they need to be gotten out of power. Fortunately another day there was an answer detailing the ills Republicans are doing, such as lying and cheating to win elections because they can’t do it honestly. Democrat, Jew, porcupine—I see a similar progression. If I had ultimate power I would simply eliminate the bigots. That might even ameliorate the population problem. But there is the trap: who defines a bigot? But I am drifting slightly from the subject. Anyway, you can see that however dull Hilltop might seem to a reader who favors spaceships, blasters, and Bug Eyed Monsters who lust after barely clad young women instead of lady monsters, there is food (vegetarian, I hope) here for thought.

Speaking of vegetarian food, an article in SCIENCE NEWS by Susan Milius asks “Can science make meat without the moo?” That breakthrough is getting closer. One approach is to grow in the laboratory just the edible parts of animals. Another is to grow simulated meat directly. Such as a burger: brown, roasted, salty, some fat, juicy, springy, cohesive. Something that looks, smells, tastes and feels just like a steak, and has the same nutrition, but never passed through a cow. That is cheaper than the original. So that the market for dead animals would fade out for economic, if not moral reasons. That would not only be kinder to the animals, it would eliminate the monstrous negative impact the meat industry has on the environment. To get one calorie of chicken meat takes nine calories of feed, and that’s one of the more efficient forms of meat. Transform the plants directly into meat and it would genuinely help the world without requiring gustatory sacrifice on the part of Joe Lunchbox. The details are complicated and the process has not yet been perfected, but progress is being made. Meanwhile a newspaper article says that farming of the future will be done by robots.

Other notes: Meanwhile air pollution is shortening lives around the world by months or even a year. It’s worst in Asia and Africa, but still four months in the USA. Article in the WASHINGTON POST by Max Boot says he can no longer be a Republican, because Donald Trump is not an anomaly; the history of modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism. “It’s amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed!” They have discovered that hidden within our genomes are traces of completely unknown species. Not just Neandertals, but others we never knew about. It seems that humanoids have sex regardless of the species, and some of it took. Looking for non-polluting sources of power? They are making progress toward geothermal, a giant waiting. In 2016 Europe’s geothermal power capacity was 2.5 gigawatts; but with enhanced systems technology that could be 6,500 gigawatts. It is a matter of adding fluid to dry rocks to transport heat to the surface and generate steam, or fracturing impermeable formations so that liquid can flow through the hot rocks, heating up along the way. A kind of fracking, really, only for heat, not gas. In the USA alone this process could unlock 130,000 times as much energy as the country uses each year. But there is the risk of causing earthquakes. And an item on our local fantasy monster, the Skunk Ape. Why travel to Loch Ness or Siberia when you can search in warm Florida using only your nose? Because the stench is horrendous. I get a whiff of it when I consider local politics. I see that NBC commentator Megyn Kelly is in trouble because she’s being accused of racism. She said that when she was a kid blackface was acceptable when portraying a character. I’m sure that was true. There are things that were okay when I was young that are no longer okay because they were racist, such as the original words to “eenie meenie minie mo…” or “Shortning Bread.” and children’s books like Little Black Sambo or Doctor Doolittle. I am glad that our historic racism is being beaten back. But Kelly is being condemned because she even commented on it? How can you get rid of it if you aren’t allowed even to identify it? This is political correctness gone wild. She is not the one who needs re-education; it is those who try to suppress candid comment. It reminds me of a local incident some time back, when funds were quite limited and the man in charge said that they would have to be niggardly with the money. That is, stingy. It’s a legitimate word that predates the similar-sounding racial slur by three centuries. But black folk there mistook its meaning and demanded that he resign. They should have checked the dictionary and apologized to him. And a “Curtis” comic strip, where he is writing a chapter in his horror series wherein a zombie becomes an uninvited house-guest. His little brother says this is the work of a dark, twisted mind, an upside-down brain running backwards. Curtis says that’s all the prerequisites of a successful horror writer. Indeed, just as a bit of insanity is helpful in making a fantasy writer. I should know.

I finished the month reading the book-sized comic, more properly known as graphic art, Astro City: The Tarnished Angel, by Kurt Busiek. I believe this is the fourth in the series, but I don’t have them all. The introduction by Frank Miller is interesting, bemoaning how the Comics Code castrated the comics so that they lost their interest, but how this series helped restored some vitality, addressing things like guilt and debt and honor, embracing the ambiguities, doubts, and disappointments of real life while keeping the vital sense of wonder alive. Well said! This one is about Donewicz, who has served twenty years in prison and now hopes to go straight. He is not rich, powerful, or even handsome; he’s just a sort of beaten down nobody. He wishes he could be one of the super-powerful Angels. Then he goes to a scientist who converts him into the Steel Jacketed Man, eight hundred pounds of invulnerable ugliness. he wants to join the angels, but they consider him one of the enemies. So his new life seems not much better than the old life. But he does try to do some good where he can, though it can be misunderstood. Yet in the end they realize how he is helping them, and at last accept him. It is a depressing narrative with hope at the conclusion. Indeed, not the conventional kind of superhero comic. Comics Code be damned; this is worthy. –PIERS Star Trek: Voyager

#1 and #2, my numbering. “Caretaker” Trouble continues along the Cardassian border; the Maquis are considered enemies by all sides.. Under fire, the Voyager passes through a warp of some sort. Scene shift to a penal colony where Captain Janeway recruits Tom Paris to assist her in her mission to rescue a lost ship. Then Quark of Deep Space Nine talks with Harry Kim. Crew assembled, the ship departs from Deep Space Nine. Soon it enters the Badlands where the other ship was lost. Suddenly they are 70,000 light years from where they were, on the other side of the galaxy. Then people start disappearing. They find themselves in a holographic Array, amid friendly country folk in a rural setting. Then the folk turn nasty and herd them into another venue. They encounter the personnel of the lost ship. Each ship is missing one crew member, Harry Kim and B’Elanna Torres. Janeway discovers Neelix, a scavenger, and beams him aboard. Kim, a handsome young man, and B’Elanna, a pretty half-Klingon woman, find themselves together, captives of the Caretaker. They are in sick bay, attended by a holographic doctor. [I had a problem with a lost place and missed some of the action; the disc may be defective, but the essence is that they destroy the Array and start their long journey home, merging the crews of the two ships. So the first double length episode is really the introduction of the members of the cast. The episodes do not seem to be numbered, just titled.] [Or maybe the numbers start with 100, so 103 is the third episode.]

#3 “Parallax” There are stresses between the Maquis personnel and the Federation personnel, but they have to work together. B’elanna Torres has bashed Tom Paris in the nose, breaking bones. She has a temper. But there are others who think she didn’t hit him hard enough. The Doctor, who is a holograph, is growing shorter by the hour. Meanwhile they encounter a singularity, escape it, but find themselves back with it. They go again, and are back again. Crew members are coming down with symptoms, such as splitting headaches, but the Doctor can find nothing wrong with them. Janeway and B’Elanna investigate in the shuttle, and encounter themselves, but figure it out and return safely to she ship, which then escapes the singularity. The crew is slowly becoming integrated.

#4 “Time and Again” They encounter a civilized planet that may be dead. Janeway, Paris, B’Elanna and Tuvok beam down to investigate. Janeway and Paris slip through a fracture and find themselves amid the living people of the planet the day before the mass destruction. They are captured, but if they warn the people of what is about to happen, they will be interfering, violating the Prime Directive. Meanwhile Kes seems to be psychic, and tunes in on them. It turns out that the rescue attempt is what triggers the explosion. Janeway stops it, and the explosion doesn’t happen, and so the ship did not interfere and the population is saved. A day before the ship arrives. So it departs without contact. Kate Janeway shows to better advantage in civilian clothing and her red hair loose.

#5 “Phage” They need dilithium, and find a planet rich in it. They go there, but Neelix gets shot and his lungs are removed. Janeway takes a crew to investigate, and they find a passage leading to technology. There is no dilithium, only the appearance of it. Meanwhile the Doctor works to replace the lungs with a holographic breathing system to keep him alive. Kes comforts him. They spot an alien ship and pursue it to a planetoid, which it enters. They track it down amid multiple images and capture two aliens. Their world suffers a plague, and they harvest organs from other species as replacements. Janeway has no ethical choice except to let them go; Neelix will have to manage as he is.

#6 “The Cloud” They encounter a nebula and enter it, but encounter an energy barrier. They try to leave, but they seem to be trapped inside. Chakotay helps Janeway to discover her animal guide. It is a lizard. The nebula is a life form, which they have damaged by trying to enter one of its vital organs. Now they must try to help it heal. They succeed, but use energy they can ill-afford to lose.

#7 “Eye of the Needle” They discover a wormhole. But where does it lead? It turns out to be only about one foot across, too small for the ship. So they send a probe. There seems to be observation of it from the other side. From the Alpha Quadrant. It is a Romulan science ship, in space a year. They enable visual communication. The Romulan captain, Telek, agrees to try to get his superiors to transmit Voyager’s message. But he is from 20 years in the past; it’s a rift in space and time. This messes up their chance to return; there would be paradox if their message were even relayed now.

#8 “Ex Post Facto” the Doctor is a hologram, but clearly conscious and feeling. He would like to have a name. Meanwhile Tom Paris is accused of murder. He and Kim take a shuttle to a civilized human planet. Professor Ren and his sexy wife host them. She comes on to Paris, her husband discovers them, and Paris kills him. Or so a memory trace indicates. Banea and Numiri are at war, which complicates things. Tuvoc investigates with a mind meld, and learns that Paris was framed by a Numiri scheme.

#9 “Emanations “ They may have discovered a new element, the 247th, in a passing star system. An away party investigates a cave in an asteroid, and discovers a number of dead humanoid bodies. It is a burial site, and the element seems to be formed as part of their decay. Then a disturbance arises; they hastily beam out, but Kim is accidentally exchanged for one of the alien bodies. They are the Venahri. Meanwhile the exchanged body is revived aboard the ship. This is Ptera, an ordinary girl with four nostrils from another dimension. Naturally she speaks English. (Well, they have a universal translator.) She doesn’t want to be here. They try to duplicate the anomaly so as to exchange Ptera with Kim. They succeed, in a manner. Kim returns, dead, but is revived. And maybe the Venahri do have an afterlife, in the form of the energy field that manifests every two hours or so. That would be nice to believe.

#10 “Prime Factors” They visit Sikaris, a planet famed for its hospitality; it’s like a vacation resort. Kim accompanies the native girl Eudana to Alastria, which turns out to be 40,000 light years away. But their cultural law forbids sharing their technology. Janeway talks with handsome Gath and tries to persuade him to trade the literature of Earth, which they would love, for a 40,000 light year transmittal closer to home. But all he and this culture want is pleasure. B’Elanna plots to make the deal regardless, but Tuvok catches her—and says he will do it himself. But a field of anti-neutrinos interferes and it comes to nothing. Janeway is furious about the attempted violation of the Code, but can’t act, as she needs her crew.

#11 “State of Flux” An away team is harvesting edible roots on a passing planet, when another ship is discovered in orbit, Kazon. They must take precautions immediately, but one member of the party, Ensign Seska, is missing. Chakotay goes into a cave to look for her, finds her, but they encounter two hostile men. They escape, but this is mischief. She is his girlfriend. They discover odd art, and one live Kazon survivor. There was an explosion, and evidence of Federation involvement. Maybe someone on the Voyager sent the Kazon information. Seska is under suspicion. So is another crewman. When they check Seska’s blood they discover she is not genetically Bajoran; she might have been born Cardassian. She says no, it is a symptom of the disease she suffered as a child; she had a bone marrow transplant from a Cardasian woman. They contact the commander of the Kazon ship, who comes aboard and kills the Kazon victim. It turns out that Seska was guilty, and is Cardassian, feeling the the Maquis could do a better job of getting them home. She escapes to a Kazon ship. This is a good mystery adventure.

#12 “Heroes and Demons” Harry Kim is missing. Chakotay and Tuvok check the Holodeck, where Kim disappeared. It is set in 6th century Denmark, Beowulf, where the monster Grendel ravages the kingdom. The Holo safety features have been damaged, so they are not safe. So they send the Doctor, as he already is a hologram and can’t be dematerialized in that manner. He is transferred to the scene, getting his first experience of nature. He chooses the name Dr. Schweitzer. The king slices him in half, but the sword passes through him without effect. A Danish girl kisses him invitingly. Grendl attacks him. They beam him out, but he is missing his right forearm. They replace it, but Gendl seems to be a life form breaking out of the holodeck and on out of the ship. They had inadvertently captured some of its minions. So the Doctor will try to return the last one to the energy creature. They do, and it returns their three crewmen. A good alien-contact adventure.

#13 “Cathexsis” To relax Janeway participates in a new holodeck novel, set in England. The mistress of the servants gives her the word: she sets the rules. Janeway gives her the rule: she serves the master of the house. So they will try to get along, but it may be difficult. The master appears and says he is not an easy man to get along with; his late wife had been a buffer, but now the children, a boy and a girl, may be difficult though they need support. This is interrupted by news of an attack on a shuttle, when Chakotay was knocked out and Tuvok barely managed to contact the Voyager. An alien ship disappeared into a dark matter nebula. Chakotay is in a bad way. B’Elanna tries to help him with a medicine wheel according to his cultural belief, but there may not be enough of his mind left to work with. And the ship is being directed by some outside force. Tom Paris is under suspicion, though he says it’s not him. The Doctor analyzes brain patterns and discovers that Paris’s brain was overridden briefly each time, and so was B’Elanna’s. Something is taking over their minds at key points. So the Doctor is their fail-safe as he is inorganic and not affected. Then he gets taken out. Kes is telepathic, and is aware of something on the ship. Tuvak will mind meld with her to investigate. But both are hit by an energy discharge and knocked out. Tuvok recovers but B’Elanna remains unconscious. She was physically attacked, and Tuvok is under suspicion. The alien takes control of one person at a time. Stymieing their efforts to track it down. It takes over Tuvak, who takes the ship into the nebula. He speaks for the Kuemar; this is their domain. More mischief is by Chakotay, though he is unconscious. Chaketay uses the medicine wheel to communicate indirectly with them, showing them a way out of the nebula. The aliens wanted to feed on their neural impulses.

#14 “Faces” They survey a passing planet, and the away team is caught by the Vidiians. The aliens operate on B’Elanna, converting her to a Klingon. Klingons may be immune to the phage that affects the aliens. Paris is another captive. B’Elanna as pure human appears to him, but B’Elanna as pure Klingon remains manacled. Is the human one a fake, or a second aspect of the original crossbreed? Meanwhile Chakotay is made up to resemble a Vidi. The two B’Elannas meet, and plot to escape. They make it with Chakotay’s help, but the Kilingon one gets killed. The Doctor will reintegrate them as she needs her Klingon half to survive physically, but it has been a weird experience.

#15 “Jetrel” Dr. Jetrel on another ship must urgently talk with Neelix. But Neelix regards him as a mass murderer of his people, because he developed the weapon. Jetrel says it was the military who used the weapon; now he is trying to helps the remaining survivors. He has the malady himself and will be dead in days. He lost his wife and children because they, too, regarded him as a monster. Now he thinks he has a way to reverse it, but it doesn’t work. This is an exploration of the ethics and guilt of the destruction of war.

#16 “Learning Curve” Janeway resumes the holodeck program started in “Cathexis,” meeting and getting to know the two royal children she is to supervise. Naturally it is interrupted. There is a discipline problem with a number of the Maquis crew members. Tuvok as assigned to train them in Starfleet ways, but they rebel. So Chakotay, their Maquis commander, talks with them and makes clear the Maquis way—with his fist—that they are to fall in line. Tuvok’s training resumes. Meanwhile there’s a problem with the bio gel-packs that are vital to many processes; they are becoming infected. They conclude that a virus has infected the bacteria Neelix uses in cooking, that the air circulation system spreads throughout the ship. They devise a cure, but meanwhile things are breaking down all over. Tuvok bends the rules to save a Maquis crewman, and the other Maquis conclude that if he can bend, they can follow.

Season 2, episode #1: “The 37’s” They discover a trail in space, of rust. They follow it, analyzing it. They find an old 1936 red Ford pickup truck with trace of horse manure. Its AM radio that receives an SOS. So they go to the source. They land the ship on the planet, and find an old aluminum alloy airplane. It is sending an automated SOS using an alien power source. And a cryogenic vault containing Amelia Earhart, from 1937. This as 400 years later, 2371. They wake all of them simultaneously. The universal translation device enables them to talk. They take the party to see the ship, as they don’t believe where they are. Aliens attack—and turn out to be humans. The Briori abducted 1,500 humans and brought them here; now there are over 100,000 humans here and the Briori are gone. It’s like Earth. All the ancient folk want to stay, including Amelia. Janeway will let any of the crew who want to stay here also to do so, though it could cripple the ship because of insufficient crew. But none do. They move on.

#2: “Initiations” Chakotay takes a shuttle for a private mission to honor the memory of his father. A Kazon ship fires on him; he has entered their Ogla space. He fires back and destroys them, rescuing one person, a child named Kar. He wants to return Kar to another Kazon ship, but Kar demands only to be killed. The Ogla capture them. There is no honor for Kar among the Ogla. Chakotay and Kar escape to a moon. Chakotay sets a signal so the ship can locate him and they wait. Meanwhile the ship is searching. Janeway, Tuvok, Kes and one other man land and zero in, joining with a party of Kazons. It is complicated, but they rescue Chakotay.

#3 “Projections” the Doctor is activated, but finds no one on board. What has happened? He has the computer play the last message: Janeway was ordering abandonment of the ship. Then he finds B’Elanna, who was where the sensors were inoperative. She says they were caught by surprise by two Kazon ships. Then he find bodies strewn about. He revives Janeway. Then Neelix calls; he is fighting a Kazon. Then the Doctor is bleeding, which is odd. The computer says he is a living man; Dr. Zimmerman, who originally programmed him. Then it turns out the others are holographic simulations. Then his assistant shows up, a man he doesn’t know, Barclay, who says the Doctor is Dr. Zimmerman in a holographic simulation. Thus he has existed for six hours, not the six months he thinks he’s been on the Voyager. Barclay says he must destroy the Voyager to end the simulation; otherwise he”ll die. But is this true? He can’t be sure that he isn’t being set up to destroy the real ship. Then Chakotay appears and says it’s not true; he must do nothing while they work to repair the program malfunction. Who is he to believe? Kes is here; she kisses him and says she loves him. That she is his wife. Then reality returns, maybe.

#4 “Elogium” Kes, probably the prettiest girl on board, is a magnet for the attention of men. She also likes bugs. In fact she eats them live. Meanwhile the ship encounters a swarm of space bugs. Kes is now eating ravenously, all manner of foods including dirt. She may be experiencing the reproductive cycle of her species, though she is young for it. She’s not at all sure she can raise a child. A larger space creature collides with the ship. They ram it back. That doesn’t work. So they play submissive, and that works. Kes decides not to have a baby at this time. But another crew-woman turns up pregnant, so it is an issue the ship must deal with, especially if the voyage turns out to be 75 years.

#5 “Non Sequitur” Harry Kim wakes in bed with lovely Libby, his fiancee, in the city he came from. He attends a meeting with admirals, to present his new ship design, but he has no idea and has to demur. It seems he was not assigned to the Voyager; this is an alternate reality. But the others here don’t believe it; they think he must be some sort of spy. He goes to see his friend Tom Paris, but he’s alcoholic and unbelieving. But later Paris comes to help Kim escape the authorities, because Kin is the only one who cares about him. They steal a shuttle and enter the time stream. Kim makes it back, and in the process saves Paris from the bad life in the other reality.

#6 “Twisted” A Surprise party for Kes, who is two years old today. Her timeline differs from ours; two is more like twenty. Meanwhile Tuvok spies something in space, an unusual phenomenon. It surrounds the ship, and things start malfunctioning. People can’t get where they are going. They organize a search, but that has mixed results. Janeway gets touched by the anomaly and rendered unconscious. It seems better to do nothing. The ring of distortion closes as they wait, and passes. They conclude that it was trying co communicate with them. It downloaded the entire ship’s database, and provided a similar amount about itself. They move on, unharmed.

#7 “Parturition” Paris gives Kes a lesson in piloting via simulation, and becomes attracted to her. Meanwhile the ship needs supplies, so will pause at a planet for them. Jealous Neelix picks a fight with Paris. Then the two are assigned to land on the planet to prospect for food. Kes is perplexed, then chagrined as the Doctor clarifies the situation for her. Now she is furious with both men. Something attacks the ship, while the two men are exploring a cave, having wrecked their shuttle in the landing. They come across creatures hatching. They maneuver to escape the hostile ship. The two men adopt the alien hatchling, figuring out how to feed it. The alien ship lands and an alien claims the hatchling, so they feel free to depart and all is well.

#8 “Persistence of Vision” The Doctor orders Janeway to report to the holodeck for her relaxing program, because she’s over-stressed. Lord Berleigh faces her; she is Lucie Davenport, new governess for his two children. He kisses her; he has fallen in love with her. That should be a distraction! The children don’t want to eat cucumber sandwiches. But she is called back to the ship. Then at lunch there are cucumber sandwiches. The holodeck program characters start appearing. One attacks her. They may be illusions, but Kes, who is telepathic, sees them too. The Botha ships attack. The Botha captain appears as Mark, the man Lucie loves, and as other figures to other crew members. Now many crewfolk are suffering hallucinations. Chakotay kisses B’Elanna; he’s a fake. Then it takes Janeway too. Only the Doctor and Kes remain functional. It attacks her, but she manages to fight it off and activate their defense program. Kes identifies an alien aboard who telepathically manipulated them. It disappears, but leaves the all shaken. Another hard-hitting episode.

#9: “Tattoo” They are looking for what they need on a barren world, and Chakotay spies a sacred symbol of his people. Flashback to when he learned. It way be a blessing of the land. They discover what they need on another world, and take a shuttle down with the Away team of Chakotay, Neeklix, B’Elanna, and Tuvok. A hawk attacks Neelix, and they beam him to sick bay on the ship. Chakotay connects with the native tribe. They provide some of what is needed. Meanwhile the Doctor learns what it feels like to be sick; he will have more compassion hereafter.

#10: “Cold Fire” Tuvok helps Kes mentally orient on the thoughts of others in the ship. The ship picks up intermittent sporocystian life signs. They orient on the source and discovers an alien space station. Could this be the mate to the Caretaker, Suspiria, with the power to send them home? Kes talks to Tanis, another Ocampa, who is 14 compared to her 2 and has full control of his powers. He makes the plants in her room grow marvelously. But a later exercise of hers makes them all burn up. Suspiria appears as a little girl who then starts to destroy the ship. Janeway fends her off and she departs, but remains out there. Kes will continue learning her devastatingly powerful mental skills.

#11 “Maneuvers” The ship is haled by a beacon using a Federation signal. Then a Kazon raider attacks. A shuttle collides with them, and Kazons board. Seska, Chakotay’s former girlfriend, is with them, actively working with the enemy. They steal a device from the Voyager that will enable them to significantly advance their technology. Chakotay takes a shuttle and goes after Seska. Janeway doesn’t like that. B’Elanna argues his case; she evidently has her own interest in him. Meanwhile the Kason are beating up Chakotay, trying to get him to give them key codes. They rescue Chokatay. Seska sends a message: she extracted his DNA and impregnated herself with it. He is going to be a father.

#12 “Resistance” Janeway, Tuvok, B’Elanna are in a planetary setting, and get raided by masked figures and captured by the Mokra. Janeway wakes to find herself in the care of a man, Caylem, who takes her for “Ralkana,” his daughter. Tuvok and B’Elanna ace being separately interrogated. He and Janeway go to rescue them. She plays the part of a lady of the evening, overcomes a guard, takes his weapon, and helps rescue them. But Caylem dies. Janeway, as Ralkana, reassures him at the end, but his wife and daughter were dead years ago.

#13 “Prototype” B’Elanna is studying something; we see her in black and white. Then we see it as they do, in color; it’s a humanoid robot or cyborg with an impaired power source. She finally succeeds in activating it. It was operating aboard a Pralor ship when an explosion cast it into space. It is unit 3947. It would like to reproduce its kind, but B’Elanna isn’t allowed. It abducts her and beams them both back to its ship. It attacks the Voyager, and will destroy it if B’Elanna does not build the module it requires, so she agrees. She learns that when the robot Builders tried to end the robots, the robots terminated the Builders. With heavy heart, she destroys the prototype, maybe saving mankind.

#14 “Alliances” They are under fire by the Kazon and are disabled. It’s the fourth such attack. Chakotay says maybe they need to start following Maquis rules, in order to survive. They decide to forge an alliance with one of the Kazon factions. Janeway contacts Seska, of the Nistrim, though Chakotay is wary of this. Neelix contacts his friend Tersa, but is betrayed into captivity with the Trabe. Janeway’s overture does not work out, because the Nistrim treat women with too much contempt. But the Trabe prisoners revolt and with Neelix arrange a meeting with the Voyager. They invite all the Kazon factions to a conference to maybe establish peace. But the Trabe betray them, a ship attacks, and they and the Kazon leaders barely escape. This region of space is mischief.

#15 “Threshold” Paris is taking the ship into trans-warp, but at 9.9 it breaks up. He emerges in the holodeck. “You’re dead” B’Elanna says as he sits there on the bare floor. Warp 10 would be infinite velocity. Neelix has an idea, and they think it could work. Paris tries it in the shuttle. He achieves Warp 10 and disappears. Then he returns. He saw everything, including their looking for him, so he returned. If they can do it and emerge where they choose, they can go home with a phenomenal breakthrough. But Paris is suffering acute allergy to—water. He is rapidly mutating. He dies. And comes alive again. With two hearts. The mutation is accelerating. They treat him to save his life, but he breaks free, abducts Janeway, and flees in the shuttle at Warp 10. The Doctor concludes that Paris is evolving naturally into his future state. Now Janeway also . They are found on a habitable planet, resewbling two lizards, with three offspring lizards. They are rescued and restored, the babies left on the planet. This is one weird conclusion.

#16 “Meld” A crewman, Darwin, is murdered. Suder, who was working with him, is under suspicion. He confesses, saying he didn’t like the way Darwin looked at him. Tuvok investigates, then does a mind meld. That gives Suder better control, but puts stress on Tuvok. He says he is no longer fit for duty. He will recover, but it has been difficult.

#17 “Dreadnought” They discover the debris of a small ship. B’Elanna says it’s her fault; she had programmed Dreadnought, a sophisticated Cardassian missile, and thought it was gone. Now it’s active, and heading toward an inhabited planet. She beams to it and turns it off; it knows her. But when she returns to the Voyager, Dreadnought returns to its mission. It assumed she was operating under duress. She makes a second visit to it, but it does not let her turn it off. Janeway decides to destroy the Voyager in the missile’s path, destroying both, saving millions of planetary civilians. B’Elanna continues to try to stop the destruction despite life support ending. She succeeds, and is beamed back to the escape shuttle as the Voyager’sdestruct sequence ends. Barely in time. This may be my favorite episode so far.

#18 “Death Wish” They check a passing meteor, take a sample, and Q beams aboard. This is of course mischief. He tried to commit suicide, but instead all the men aboard ship disappear. He’s not the Q we know, but soon that Q arrives. He restores the men. We learn that this other Q was locked up in the asteroid for 300 years, by the Q Continuum. Janeway sets up an asylum hearing. If Q2 wins, he gets to commit suicide. Tuvok represents him. Q1 says that it would be impossibly disruptive if individuals could choose for themselves whether to live or die. Q1 shows that Q2 has been a key factor in Earth history; for example he was there when Isaac Newton saw the apple drop. If Q1 wins, he will deliver the Voyager safely back to Earth space. They visit the Q Continuum, a scene in the old west of Earth. Q2 says that they are depriving the individuals of choice; the disease is immortality. She decides in favor of Q2, who then commits suicide. This is a provocative, thoughtful episode.

#19 “Lifesigns” There is a distress call. They pick up a woman’s body. She’s alive, but rapidly fading; a device is stimulating her, but there’s is little to work with. Danara Pel was chronically ill, but the Doctor makes a holographic body for her that is healthy, though it won’t last long. She calls the Doctor Schmullus, after her uncle. He shows her around and it’s like a date. They are attracted to each other, but neither knows how to handle it. So Paris helps the Doctor and Kes helps Danara. They meet for a date in a car parked on Mars and he shows her the stellar sights. They kiss. Her body will sicken and die, but they can have two weeks together before she must depart. It’s a nice temporary romance.

#20 “Investigations” Paris has trouble getting along, and asks to transfer to another ship. He departs, to Neelix’s regret. Then a Kazon ship raids and takes Paris. This is Seska’s plot. Meanwhile Neelix is on the trail of deleted files. It turns out that Janeway knew that someone on the ship was secretly giving information to the Kazon, and Paris played along so that his departure would seem reasonable. Paris gets the information, steals a Kazon shuttle, and returns to the Voyager after a hazardous journey. The spy was Jonas, whom Neelix kills in a fight. Paris’s reputation is restored.

#21 “Deadlock” Ensign Wildman is birthing the first baby aboard the Voyager. They enter Vidiian space and need to avoid the Vidiians. They try, but are not completely successful, and take casualties. Power systems are interrupted, and the baby dies. But then the baby is alive. Janeway sees herself running through the ship. Kim dies. Now there are two Kes, with different memories. In fact here are two Voyagers, overlapping. They manage to establish communication between ships, and Janeway talks with Janeway on the screen. They try to merge, but can’t quite do it. So Kes and Janeway cross by themselves. Now there are two Janeways interacting. They decide on a course of action, but are interrupted by the attack of a Vidiian ship. They send the living Kim with the surviving baby to the damaged ship, and self destruct, taking the Vidiians out with them. Now the surviving ship has Kim and the baby restored, but they are both from the other ship. They find it weird. So do I.

#22 “Innocence” Tuvok is on a moon where another crewman dies. Tressa is a child from another ship, maybe six years old; Tuvok says he will see that she and the two other children with her get home safely. They hug him, relieved. But they fear the morrok, which will take them tonight if they don’t leave the moon. Then their people come—and they says to hide because if they are found they will die. This is where children are sent to die. So Tuvok plans to take them to the Voyager. Meanwhile they should sleep, and can’t, so he sings them to sleep. And in the night two of them disappear. Tuvok explores the morrok’s cave. All he finds are children’s empty clothes. There is a face-off between Janeway, Tuvok, and the Drayans, who say Tressa is actually 96 years old, because they live backwards. Tressa wills inevitably die. Tuvok will stay with her for that. A thoughtful episode. #23 “The Thaw” They encounter a system where a solar flare wiped out a population of 400,000, about 19 years ago. Are there any survivors? They are hailed. There are five stasis pods. Two are dead, three remain. So Kim and B’Elanna occupy them and enter the fantasy realm of the survivors. It is as though they are there physically. It’s a costume party. They are discovered and captured. The characters don’t want the real folk removed, because then they will disappear. Rather it’s the computer’s persona, the Clown. The Doctor enters the scene, but the Clown can read minds and governs by fear. They try to disable the program from outside, but the Clown kills one of the hostages, Janeway has to capitulate. Then Janeway delivers an ultimatum: the program will be completely shut down, unless all hostages are released. Janeway herself will become the new hostage. But she does not enter stasis; she does it while awake, sending in her holo image. Now she controls the Clown, and like all fear, he fades out. A fascinating episode.

#24 “Tuvix” Tuvok and Neelix go on planet to get a specimen of a potentially valuable flower. When they return there is a transmission foulup and they are merged as Tuvix, including also some of the flowers. Next day Paris and B’Elanna beam down for more flowers, but the merger can’t be undone. Kes is distraught; she loves Neelix, not Tuvix. They work out a way to restore Tuvok and Neelix, but in the interim Tuvix had made a life for himself on the ship, made friends, and he wants to live. Is it right to end him to restore them? Janeway must make the decision. She does, painful as it is, and the originals are restored. An uncomfortable episode, though I agree with her choice. Tuvix did not have the right to pre-empt two other lives for his own benefit.

#25 “Resolutions” Chakotay and Janeway awaken in pods in a rustic scene. They have caught a plague from an insect bite, and have been in stasis for 17 days while the Doctor searches in vain for a cure. They are okay as long as they stay here. So she turns the ship over to Tuvok, who will continue the quest for home. Meanwhile she and Chakotay will continue researching for a cure. Six weeks later they encounter Vidiians. Kim wants to make a deal with them, exchanging research to cure the illnesses each suffers. Tuvok vetoes it as too dangerous. On planet, a weird storm comes that wrecks their insect traps and equipment, so they can’t continue research. They face the rest of their lives here. The Vidiians betray the Voyager folk, but they are able to get the serum. They return to pick up Janeway and Chakotay. All is well again.

#26 “Basics, Part 1” Chakotay gets a message from Seska that others are taking Seska’s baby. What should he do? They try to rescue the baby. They generate multiple additional holographic ships to confuse the enemy. It works, but they have a traitor aboard, a man they rescued from space. He generates an explosion that partly cripples the ship. The Voyager is captured by the Kazon. They are marooned on a volcanic planet, the ship departing without them. To be continued.

Season 3 #1 “Basics Part 2” They are marooned on as uninhabited planet. They find human bones before a cave. Hogan is assigned to collect them, but something in the cave snatches him inside. They find part of his knife. Meanwhile on the ship Seska takes the baby to the Doctor, who determines that it is not Chakotay’s child. He also learns that Suder is aboard. On planet, a band of humanoid primitives captures Neelix and Kes. Chakotay rescues them with the help of Tuvok and others with improvised weapons. Janeway’s party enters the caves and discovers a cave monster they manage to thwart. A volcanic eruption commences. On ship, Seska deactivates the doctor. Now it is up to Suder. Chakotay rescues a stranded native, finally establishing rapport with the natives. Suder kills a number of Kazon and activates a special program before he too is killed. Paris is able to take over the ship and bring it back to pick up the others. They are back on their way.

#2 “Flashback” They discover a deposit of Sirillium, a potentially valuable energy source. Tuvak suffers a challenging flashback. It may be repressed from childhood. He mind melds with Janeway, who appears as an unobserved observer in his memories. There is something else masquerading as an anagram. The doctor tries to abolish it, but it migrates to Janeway’s mind. They manage to eliminate it, curing them both.

#3 “The Chute” Harry Kim gets thrown into a cell with violent prisoners who immediately start beating on him. He recognizes Tom Paris, who hits him seemingly without recognition. It turns out that each was told the other implicated him in a bombing. There are implants in their heads that will kill them if they try to escape. Meanwhile the Akritirians demand to board the Voyager and arrest its personnel. Janeway says no. They locate a ship that makes bombs; the people claim they are rebels, not terrorists. Paris gets stabbed. Kim makes a deal with a prisoner for help in exchange for taking the prisoner along when they escape. Janeway and Neelix rescue them.

#4 “The Swarm” Paris and B’Elanna are in a shuttle investigating an anomaly when they are boarded by aliens and phasered. They return to the ship, but Paris is in a bad way. The Doctor needs to do spot surgery on him, but has a mental problem and can’t remember how to do it. Kes does it instead. What is wrong with the doctor? B’Elanna gets on it, and the holo originator Zimmerman is activated. He looks just like the doctor in different clothing. He says the doctor needs a complete re-initialization. That’s not feasible, so Zimmerman proceeds to treat the Doctor. A swarm of mini-ships attacks the Voyager. They clamp onto the hull like leeches. They manage to start a chain of destruction of the mini ships. And they manage to re-initialize the Doctor, by overlaying Zimmerman.

#5 “False Profits” They investigate a possible worm hole. Chakotay and Paris go native and beam to the primitive local planet. Two Ferengi have used technology to fashion a profitable “religion.” So the Voyager improvises a scheme to get them out of there. The “Grand Proxy” arrives and tells them they have been recalled. They get them out of there and move on.

#6 Remember” The Voyager helps Enarian travelers to return home more swiftly. In return they share their energy technology. While they travel, B’Elanna dreams of making out with a lover. The Enarians are telepathic, and share their skills and emotions, but they say the dreams should not be so strong. Something is going on. She learns that the memories are from an older traveler, Jora. That a group is being resettled, but that’s a ruse; they are actually being destroyed. Is that true? How can she be sure? Jora is killed, but B’Elanna persuades another woman to share the memories she now has, so she can investigate for herself. That will reveal the truth.

#7 Sacred Ground” They take shore leave at a passing planet. The Nechristi invited them. Neelix and Kes explore a native shrine. There is a flash and Kes falls unconscious. They beam her to sick bay and investigate. The natives say the spirits do what they do. There is a ritual that a responsible person can undertake that might enable him/her to help. So Janeway decides to do it. She beams to the shrine. The native women set her up. She encounters three who are waiting indefinitely. She studies a rock, but sees only a rock. She paints a picture, evidently a vision from the rock. She puts her hand in a jar and gets burned in three places on her arm. She passes out. She wakes by the shore of a sea. But she is told it is all meaningless. She returns to the ship, and the Doctor says what has passed so far is meaningless. She goes back to the shrine and talks to the three, who tell her that if she believes she is ready, then she is. She carries Kes into the dangerous field, and that cures her. The Doctor has an explanation, but it may seem meaningless.

#8 “Future’s End, Part 1” Flash back to 1967 Earth. Then a Federation ship from 500 years in the future says it has returned in time to prevent the Voyager from destroying Earth. And they are in 1996. They beam to Los Angeles. They find an old man who is Captain Braxton, who has been here 30 years. The one who came back from the 29th century to stop them. He says an explosion in the 29th century make debris going all the way back to here. His timeship actually caused the explosion. A man called Starling is the one who caused it. Tuvok and Paris encounter a young woman searching for extraterrestrial visitors. They are shot at, but escape in her car. Meanwhile Janaway and Chakotay check and discover they are involved in a time paradox. They meet Starling. Kim and B’Elanna beam Janeway and Chakotay out of there. There follows an interesting battle. The Doctor winds up with Starling. Word of the Voyagerbegins to appear in the 1996 news. To be continued.

#9 “Future’s End Part II” Tuvok and Paris must work with the young woman, Rain Robinson, to communicate with the Voyager. Starling animates the Doctor, and shows he can coerce him with pain. They go to pick up Rain. Chakotay and B’Elanna bring the shuttle down to pick up Tuvok and Paris. And Starling. The Voyager manages to beam Starling aboard. Two local men capture Chakotay and B’Elanna. Rain and Paris are getting to like each other. The Doctor rescues Chakotay and B’Elanna. In the end they do manage to nullify Starling and save Earth. They return to their original time and place. Earth is saved, but Paris has to leave cute Rain behind.

#10 “Warlord” They pick up three survivors, one of whom dies. They go to Ilari. Kes helps the two others steals a shuttle. Kes has been taken over by another entity. By the one who died, Tieran. He is clearly a mega-maniacal tyrant who destroys anyone who tries to oppose him. But Kes is fighting within the body, and that finally drives him out. But the experience has changed her; she is no longer the same person. This suggests a change in her role on the Voyager. We’ll see.

#11 “The Q and the Grey” They witness a supernova explosion from up close. Tired after a long session, Janeway discovers Q in her room. He says he has chosen her to be the mother of his child. This is of course mischief. He says she is playing hard to get; she says she’s impossible to get. A lady Q appears, jealous, saying her affair with Q was about four billion years. It seems that the Q continuum is in civil war. And suddenly he and Janeway are in an American Civil War setting, besieged. They are about to be executed by firing squad when Union troops attack. Q and Lady Q make up and mate by touching fingers and soon have a son. Janeway will be godmother. Otherwise things are back to normal. Maybe. Nothing really is normal with the Q.

#12 “Macrocosm” Neelix and Janeway are on the shuttle returning to the Voyager after three days negotiating with the Tak Tak. But the ship is empty. No damage, no departures, just no crew. They seem to have disappeared eleven hours ago. There’s a snakelike alien creature aboard. Maybe also humans, hiding. It’s hot. Green goo is on some objects. She explores the ship, carrying a rifle. She finds Kim, unconscious. A flying bug attacks; she shoots it. She finds the Doctor. He says a macro-virus has infected the ship. They went to help another ship that was suffering a viral infection. The Doctor beamed across to help. But the virus traveled back with him. He makes an antivirus and starts stopping the giant bugs, which look like flying balls with three heads on long necks. He cures Janeway, who was infected. The Tak Tak attack, to eliminate the virus, but Janeway talks them into holding off for an hour. She fashions a bomb that destroys all the viruses.

#13 “Fair Trade” They encounter the Nekrit Expanse, ominous looking clouds in space. They stop at a supply station at the edge. Neelix inadvertently gets involved in something shady, misled by an acquaintance. Chakotay and Paris get arrested for a murder they did not commit, but Neelix helps get them free. He and his friend say they will expose the smugglers. They do, and nab them. But Janeway is not pleased with his deception, and puts him on cleanup duty.

#14 “Alter Ego” They investigate an inversion nebula. Kim asks Tuvok’s help in controlling his emotions, because he has fallen in love with Marayna and doesn’t want that; she is a holo female, nonexistent in real life. All are invited to a Hawaiian Luau in the holodeck. Tuvok attends reluctantly, and Marayna makes a play for him. Kim gets jealous. The nebula seems to be interfering with the computer. Then Marayna appears in Tuvok’s quarters. He summons security, but she vanishes. They conclude that the nebula is giving her power. They need to stop that. They try, but the folk of the luau attack them physically. Mayayna wants Tuvak and won’t let the ship depart until she gets him. Now he sees her as she is, a different humanoid species. She is lonely. He tries to persuade her to return to her own kind, perhaps finding better interactions there. She says she will consider it. She lets the ship go.

#15 “Coda” Janeway and Chakotay get caught in a storm in a shuttle and crash on a planet. She is knocked out, but recovers. Vidiians are after them. Then they are back in the shuttle, being fired on, and it explodes. Then back in the shuttle. It is a time loop. This time they manage to contact the Voyager, and rejoin it. But Chakotay does not remember any time loop, only Janeway does. The Doctor says she has the phage. She faces prolonged distress and loss of mind. The Doctor prescribes euthanasia. Then they are back in the shuttle. They crash and she dies. The ship rescues them and the Doctor treats her, but can’t revive her. This time she is there, invisibly watching, a ghost. She almost contacts Kes. Her father, who died 15 years before, appears and says there can be another state of consciousness. Tuvok and Kes try to locate Janeway mentally, and fail, while she watches. They hold a memorial for her, then release the pod with her body. But she refuses to leave. She realizes that her “father” is actually an alien creature trying to get her to go with him. She rebels, and recovers, on the planet. A powerful episode.

#16 “Blood Fever” They spot a kiloton deposit of gallicite, a rare and valuable mineral. B’Elanna is surprised by a Vulcan crewman Ensign Vorik’s proposal of marriage. She says no, but he insists, and she decks him with a punch. Tuvok says it is a seven year Vulcan cycle where emotion takes over. B’Elanna, Paris, and Neelix go for the gallicite, where things go wrong and B’Elanna throws a fit. Tuvok checks with Vorik, and concludes that Vorik’s touch transferred the Vulcan mating cycle to her, called Pon farr. She needs to be cured of it, as it could be fatal. But she and Paris wind up alone together in the tunnels, he trying to be proper, she increasingly desperate for sex. There are aliens there, the remnant of a colony destroyed by anonymous invaders. Then, following Vulcan tradition, B’Elanna and Vorik fight, he to win her as his mate, she to prevent that. She wins. And they discover that it was the Borg who destroyed the colony. Another potent episode. I see B’Elanna Torres as parallel to Nerys Kira in Deep Space Nine, and here she comes across exactly like that, even flashing some breast. As the saying of my day goes, I wouldn’t kick either of them out of bed.

PIERS

Dismember 2018

HI-

I have collaborated on a trilogy of fantasy novels with Kenneth Kelly, about the magic land of PAKK, a nice vampire, and assorted supernatural problems. Saturday, December 8th, at 11 AM Kenneth Kelly will be signing the first two at Barnes & Noble in Brandon Square, Sarasota, Florida. The novels are Virtue Inverted and Amazon Expedient. No, I won’t be there; my wife’s situation prevents me from traveling even that far. But you can meet at least half the team and get some good reading if you attend. The third novel, Magenta Salvation, is in the process of publication and should be along soon. Oh, if you’re wondering about that magic land, it’s the initials of Piers Anthony and Kenneth Kelly.

I watched U-Carmen, a modern adaptation of the classic story, this time set in South Africa with an all black cast. Almost everything is sung, per the way of opera. It starts with a discussion on the points which make a woman beautiful. Then it gets into a rundown neighborhood, trains, traffic, pedestrians. Five workmen singing “Check out the girls and watch their butts.” They approach a girl, but she is wary and sensibly departs. Then the shift ends and the female workers at the factory emerge, singing. It is familiar, marvelous music, with provocative lyrics. Carmen sings in the street, but a policeman in a car, Jongi, is reading, uninterested. That makes him a challenge. There is a fight among women. Who started it? Several are named, Carmen among them. She is arrested by the man who ignored her before. She is a solid woman, not a slender nymph; the others are similar, and the men are similarly solid, not handsome. She makes a play for him, impresses him, then picks the lock, escapes her shackle, and flees. He chases her but loses her. That costs him his position. The police raid and catch her. The officer strikes her and knocks her down twice, then propositions her: in return for sex he’ll let her go. She nods agreement, her lips bleeding from the blows. So she’s free. Jongi returns and says he loves her. She gets on the pool table and dances for him. But he is called away by a phone call, which annoys her. They argue, and fight, and make up. Staying with her will cost him his job. They gather with the neighbors and sacrifice a bull. Then he departs, but returns. She tells him it is finished. He begs her to give him a chance to save her. She refuses. He kills her and gives himself up. It is a bleak conclusion.

I read the Villard Graphic Novel Sampler. I attended a Romance convention in 2009; it’s not my genre but a publisher wanted me there. One of the books given to attendees was this one, so I took it and now, belatedly, got around to reading it. It’s not really a book, just a 90 page compendium of selections from other books, intended to introduce the casual reader to them and tease him into buying them. Why not; it’s as good a way to advertise as any. Modern comics don’t interest me the way the 52 color page Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse comics for a dime did when I was a child. Still, some of these are fun. For example. Wolverine Prodigal Son explains how Logan was found in a nearby forest with amnesia, so he gets stuck in a Canadian martial arts school. There is an elimination contest, and the two survivors are Logan and a pretty girl. He is stronger, but she is faster. It’s an even battle, until he anticipates her move and pins her to the mat. “Gotcha,” he says. She replies “So… what did you have in mind, tough guy?” He is suddenly tongue-tied, made aware of his close proximity to a lovely female. Then the master thanks them all for taking part, and adds “Logan, would you mind getting off my daughter?” Lovely! If I see that book around, I’ll buy it.

I read Whispers in the Dark by Denise P Jeffries. This is a Romance novel, another I got at the Romance convention in 2009. Just as science fiction and fantasy genres have many subdivisions, so does Romance; in fact I suspect it has more than any other. So this is a mystery story, between sessions of panting love. Dominique is a policewoman torn by guilt because her partner took the bullet meant for her. She takes time off and moves to a quiet house in the suburbs to recover. But next door neighbor Jericho spies her and insists on courting her. At first he is annoying, but soon she comes to like him. Then there is a clue about the man who killed her partner, and she is back on that case. Jericho insists on staying with her, which puts him in danger when the killer comes after her. But of course it works out in the end as justice is served and Dominique revels in new love. There are trace errors a professional copy-editor would have caught, but on the whole it’s a readable book and Dominique is easy to identify with.

I watched La La Land. It starts with a traffic jam, so Mia gets out of her car, is joined by men and other girls, and it becomes a huge dance among and on the cars. There’s even music from a stalled band. All in fancy, at any rate. I love it! Then she has to make an audition and collides with a man holding a cup of coffee and her whole blouse is stained. Ruins the audition. Then she and her three roommates do an impromptu dance. It is that kind of movie, of course, song and dance if you like that type, and I do. Meanwhile Sebastian gets fired as the pianist at a club; it seems his music is not going over. He runs into Mia; I think he was the one with the cup of coffee. It is as if fate is throwing them together. They take a walk at dusk, then start to dance. Another day they run into each other again, and hesitate when separating. The attraction is plainly growing. Another time they fly up into the night sky, dancing. They become a couple. He gets a job playing jazz, but his music is too conventional. But he adapts, and the band is successful. She protests it’s not his dream. They argue, and she walks out. Her prospective career as an actress comes to nothing. She goes home. Then he gets news that she’s wanted for a major audition. He tracks her down and takes her to it. She auditions. Then we jump five years into the future. She’s a big success, and he has his own successful nightclub. They both have achieved their dreams. They meet again, come together, and passionately kiss. They marry and have children. Or do they? It’s another dream, and in the end they don’t play it out. It seems that they can’t have both their dreams and each other. Damn!

I watched Dracula, which frustratingly has subtitles in Spanish and Korean, not in English. So I put on the Spanish ones, as I once lived in Spain and can get a bit of a feel for the language. Long ago his girlfriend was killed, and he swore vengeance even if he had to return from the dead to wreak it. The viewpoint character is a young man, Jonathan, here for a month to tutor Dracula in English ways. He is nervous about Dracula and the environment. Indeed, he soon realizes that he is a prisoner. When he lies on his bed, bare breasted young women appear and caress him, then bite him, eager for his flesh, until Dracula drives them off because they are not supposed to mess with his properties. There are also two young women, Lucy lovely and experienced with men, Mina virginal. Also other spooky characters, including a vampire with blue glasses. And Anthony Hopkins as a famous doctor. Lucy turns vampire. Jonathan and Mina marry, but Dracula swears it will not protect them. Lucy dies, but then her coffin is empty; she is undead. They must kill her again. They do so, in grisly fashion. But now Dracula may be coming for Mina, the reincarnation of his true love. A posse with torches goes after him, but meanwhile he is with Mina. He wants to bite her, make her a vampire, and have her join him as undead. He does bite her, and she bites him back. Then the torch men drive him off. They take a train to Transylvania, while he must take a ship, which is not as fast. They plan to intercept his ship and burn it, but he outsmarts them with a different route. Meanwhile the Doctor fights off the lady vampires and beheads them. There’s a wild melee at the end as the dead and undead fight. They stab Dracula through the heart, and Mina mourns him, then delivers the final stroke, and cuts off his head. It is over, maybe. But of course with Dracula you can never be sure.

I watched A Late Quartet, which features stringed instrument music and the people who play it. The cellist, Peter, may be coming down with Parkinson’s Disease, which is of course mischief. Who will replace him? It triggers other considerations. The second violinist, Robert, would like to play first violinist. Daniel thinks that’s an awful idea. Robert has sex with another woman, which upsets his wife, Juliette, who is part of the quartet. Nina will join the quartet. Daniel has been tutoring Robert and Jules’ daughter, Alexandra, in the violin; they fall in love. This also upsets Juliette. And Robert. Then Alex breaks it off, leaving them both desolate. The quartet still plays together. Then Peter stops, explaining to the audience that he can no longer keep up, and Nina comes in to replace him. They resume playing. It is lovely music and dismaying emotions that the audience does not see. I wonder if real quartets are like that? It seems possible.

I watched Temple Grandin. Temple is a slightly odd teen girl, because she is struggling with what would later come to be known as autism, and maybe also schizophrenia. She sees things differently, such as the changing geometrical angles as a gate opens or closes. She relates to animals, such as cows on a farm; it is people she has trouble with. She doesn’t like to be hugged or touched. Innocent things can spook her. She sees the animals calm down when closely caged, so she uses that to calm herself similarly, and it works. She spends summer at the farm, and wants to stay there rather than go home. She doesn’t want to go to college, but the family sends her anyway. Flashbacks show she has been odd since childhood. She turns out to have eidetic memory of the printed page. She makes herself a box to squeeze her, cow fashion, but the men throw it away. She returns to the farm and makes another enclosure. The Farmwife understands, and helps her. She takes it to college and the others girls try it. But she gets expelled. Then she goes to a special school where they understand people who are different. One teacher especially takes an interest, noting her amazing memory for visual things, while intangibles escape her. He helps her, and she starts catching on to things. She goes to a new college, and her roommate is blind. She learns how to help as well as to be helped, and does very well. She wants to do her master’s thesis on the mooing of bovines, as their moos differ according to their moods, but others don’t understand. She gets her article on good moos and bad moos published. She gets Press credentials and does a slew of articles. She designs a superior cattle dip channel because of her knowledge of how cattle react, but the ignorant cattlemen mess it up. Then the teacher who helped her dies. She goes on to design more humane slaughter systems that are now used by over half of the American industry. I am a vegetarian because I don’t like hurting animals, but this movie impressed me. If you are going to kill, do it in a humane manner.

I read Forest of Souls by Keith Robinson. This is Book 10 in the Isle of Fog series. Just as I have become known mainly for my Xanth fantasy series, I suspect Keith Robinson is known mainly for Island of Fog. And a fine series Fog is. If you are unfamiliar with it, you can start with this one and not be confused, and certainly not bored. For one thing, all the major characters of the series, ten Shapeshifters, are introduced at the beginning, so you need have no confusion about who is who or what. I think I suggested that to the author, a while back. The protagonist is twelve year old Hal Franklin, who can shift into a huge dragon, and his girlfriend is Abigail Porter, who becomes a fairie. Hal receives word that a dragon is attacking. Well, he can become a dragon, so this is abruptly his business. It turns out to be a small steamer, while he is a large fire breather, so he can readily deal with her. But he prefers to handle it peacefully. It turns out that she is out to recover a special gemstone that a child picked up. He makes a deal to recover the gem and the steamer departs. But soon he discovers worse: in the forest a female faun, you know, legs and hooves of a goat, top part human, but with horns, is issuing blue smoke from her hands and causing folk to implode into dust. The rest of the novel is about Hal’s struggle with the faun, who seeks to abolish all humans here and seems to be equipped to do it. After they implode, they return as other creatures, and have amnesia. A number of the shapeshifters get taken. The trick is not to incinerate the faun with a blast of fire, as Hal could do, but to get her to bring her victims back, which she doesn’t want to do. She is clever and devious, and it is a phenomenal challenge. Even when he succeeds, to an extent, she escapes. She has gone twenty years into the future, and if you are too impatient to wait twenty years for the continuation, you can go to Death Storm, where the shapeshifters’ children will have to tackle it. Regardless, try this novel if you have not read any in this series before, because you are bound to like it. I am now reading Death Storm, and you will like that too; I’ll review it next month.

I watched Klimt. A visitor comes and is led inside by a woman garbed as a nun. They come to a man and woman having sex. Then to the main studio, where three nude young women are swinging above the stage. One of his models is the notorious French dancer Lea de Castro. When he visits her she receives him nude. There are two of them, the real one and the false one, and the are ways in which the false one is more intriguing than the real one. He has an affair with the real one, maybe; he can’t tell them apart. He meets odd characters, male and female. And dies.

I watched Alien Planet, a Discover film. It imagines a journey to a planet called Darwin Four, six and a half light years from us. It takes over forty years to reach it, even at one fifth the speed of light. The first probe crashes, but they have two more. They conjecture a two-legged front and back grazing animal and a two legged side by side predator. They explore plants with a little four-legged spider robot. They spy a herd of two legged two tusked creatures. Also gigantic walking disk-like animals. Also weird plants, along with toadstools and trees. Birds. Balloon-like creatures. Scavengers like flying needles. The discovery of life on another planet would be phenomenal, whatever its nature. What about intelligence? The greatest discovery in the history of science! Meanwhile, our best chance to find life elsewhere is to listen for radio signals. Which of course we are doing, with no success so far. But we’ll keep looking and listening.

I watched The Amy Fisher Story. This made headlines in 1992, when Amy tried to kill the wife of her illicit lover, shooting her in the head. The movie starts without preamble on her 16thbirthday. She is pretty, but a mouthy, rebellious girl who dresses provocatively and appreciates nothing but her own convenience. They give her a car, which she hardly seems to appreciate. There are constant sparks between her and her father as her mother tries to keep the peace. Then she meets the handsome mechanic Joey Buttafuoco, age 36. She comes on to him openly as he services her car, which he does often as she seems to be a reckless driver. When he drives her home while her car is in for repair she invites him in, and seduces him. She’s one sexy creature, and already sexually experienced; she says her first time was when she was twelve. She is no fainting flower; she goes for what she wants with single minded determination, flaunting her sexuality. But legally it is statutory rape; later they call her the Long Island Lolita. Her mother visits her in jail, but Amy walks out of the room. Meanwhile Joey denies ever touching Amy, and his wife believes him. Back to the build-up. Amy sets about getting a gun, trading sex for it, open about what she wants it for: to get rid of Joey’s wife. Amy’s bond is set at two million dollars. She is jealous of the time Joey spends with his wife. Of his doing anything but being with Amy. She wants him to go to the prom with her. Then she rings the wife’s doorbell, talks with her, and shoots her. The rest are the legalities as they sort them out.

I watched Doctor Who: Twice Upon A Time. It starts in a war zone, where a Britisher faces off with a German in a shell hole, each aiming his pistol at the other, neither speaking the other’s language. Rather, they are at the south pole. They encounter a third man. They are different versions of Doctor Who. They enter the Tardis, which is larger inside than outside, and the most powerful space and time traveling machine known. Then a woman shows up, the friend of one of them. Or is she? They take the Tardis to the center of the universe. There’s a glassy female form stalking them, who may be a Dalek, or a girl named Bill Potts, or the young woman. They finally return to the shell hole and sing Christmas carols. They make peace, for one day. They conclude that life is like a battlefield, like this one. Doctor Who would like finally to retire, but concludes that he must give it one more lifetime. And that lifetime will be as a woman, already in trouble as the video ends.

I watched Call Girl. This is in Portuguese with English subtitles. Maria, a high class prostitute, is hired to seduce a married politician, Carlos, to get his permission to build a luxury resort on protected land. He likes it natural, especially the cork oaks, several of which would have to be cut down. The agent, Mouros, introduces Maria at a restaurant meal and of course she knows how to charm a man into bed, the whole sex scene secretly recorded. Meanwhile two detectives begin investigating him. They are watching as he meets Maria, who has told him her name is Vicki. Then one of the detectives, Vasco, recognizes Maria as one of his prior dates. She seduces him again. A wife comes to challenge her; she kisses the wife, unsettling her, and she goes. Carlos sees the way of it, and approves the luxury resort. It is indeed the only way he can afford her. He gets paid a rich sum. Maria plays Carlos off against Vasco, planning a foreign excursion with each of them at the same time. There is a commotion at the airport and both men get left behind while she disappears with the money.

I exercise regularly, as it is one of the keys to health, but it has its problems. Our drive from the house to the mail and newspaper boxes is .8 of a mile, the round trip 1.6 miles; it’s a nice distance for my morning run, as I fetch the newspapers. Back in FeBlueberry, as some fans may remember, I fell at Ogre Corner and smashed my face, limbs, and ribs; there is a picture of my scraped face with the Marsh HiPiers column. I don’t fall often, but the risk increases as I get older, so I resolved that if I fell again, I would stop running and start walking. Walking is not as good exercise, but it is safer. Well, in NoRemember I fell again. As befits the month, I don’t really remember it. I was jogging up the hill in sight of our house, and suddenly my face was bouncing off the rough pavement, and I had scrapes on knees and hands. I struggled to get back to my feet, and made it. Later I narrowed it down; my last memory before the fall was of a little red cedar tree I have been encouraging to grow. I was looking for it to the side, and not seeing it. So I think I wasn’t looking where my feet were going, and tripped and fell. These falls always happen when I don’t expect them. Of course if I expected one, I would see that it didn’t happen. At any rate it was not as bad as the prior fall, though I may have bruised my ribs a little, and my hands still hurt when there is too much pressure on them. My scrapes have fairly well healed. But that was it; I have not run since, just done a fast walk for the newspapers. I try to rev up my system, but walking is too efficient and my breathing and heartbeat hardly accelerate. Yet two falls in one year make the case, and I have to yield to experience. Aging is a lady dog.

Several years ago I discovered a sapling mulberry tree, and transplanted it to a better site. I was intrigued by its elegantly lobed leaves, which the young trees have. It lost its leaves, but recovered and regrew them. Then a damned careless driver cut through and broke it off. You’d think we’d be safe from that, hidden here here a mile deep in the forest, but drivers do get lost and manage to mess us up. So I put posts in, and that stopped the drivers; they many not care what damage they do to my plants, but they do care about smashing up their cars. Fortunately the mulberry regrew from the root, and today is a fine young tree. Well, I found another mulberry, evidently seeded from a bird dropping, but it was growing about eighteen inches from the house on the north side, and that just wasn’t a good place for it. So I dug it up and transplanted it to our back yard where it has plenty of room and sunshine. Again transplanting, like surgery, is brutal on the roots, and these were twining around buried concrete blocks. The tree had eleven leaves; five of them soon dropped off, then one more, but the last five held on and the tree seems to have survived. Just in time for winter. The larger mulberry has dropped it leaves for the season, and the little one will do the same, but at least I know that there is life in it, and in the spring it should start fresh and reach for the sky. Maybe some day we’ll see mulberries, though that depends on whether the trees are male or female. So now you what I am made of: falls and local trees.

I continue with my summer project, transcribing letters from Hilltop Farm in the early 1940s. I am now halfway through 1945, and it ended that year, but so far it is about 200,000 words. My parents were dedicated pacifists, something the US government did not understand. My father got classified as 4F for the draft, apparently because they thought he was crazy. Which reminds me how when Pete Seeger, a populist singer, gave a talk at my college, he told how they recorded a song which started “I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.” He got blacklisted, not just for that, but mainly for being a leftist, and the song could not be broadcast. I remain bemused that the very desire for peace was consider unAmerican. It seems there is too much profit to be made from war. There may have been crazy folk in those days, but I think they were not the pacifists. But no, I did not grow up to be a pacifist, though I respect their principles. When I receive appeals to contribute money to feed the starving refugees of a number of places in the world, I can’t help thinking that this is like trying to beat out a spreading forest fire, while ignoring the man with a blowtorch who is starting the fire. Isn’t that really enabling the culprit? Rather than struggle to help hurting refugees—remember, I’m a refugee myself, from fascist Spain as a child—my secret heart would not bleed unduly if assassins took out the power-mad bullies who are driving the refugees out of their own countries. Then the peaceful folk could continue their ordinary lives unmolested, and no outside help would be needed. Am I the only one who wonders about that?

Odd Notes: I read a review of a movie called Paywall; The Business Of Scholarship. It seems that much publicly funded research is turned into private profit, as folk have to pay to view the research. Get it? The taxpayers pay for it, but you have to pay to see it. Who the hell is stealing all that money? Article in NEW SCIENTIST says that in order to get climate change under control, we have to do whatever it takes. Such as flying less and cutting down on red meat. Would you believe, that stirs up serious opposition? The nerve of anyone suggesting that your excessive lifestyle should be crimped, just to save the world. Which is why I fear the world is not going to be saved. Folk want to eat their steak today, and the hell with tomorrow. If I knew an effective way to change that, I’d be seriously interested. A newspaper article lists ten ways to combat global warming. 1. Bike, walk, or take public transport. 2. Replace your fossil fuel car with an electric one using renewable generated electricity. 3. Choose a utility company that generates at least 50% of its power from solar or wind. 4 Caulk the cracks in your home to seal in the heat or coolth. 5. Update your archaic appliances. 6. Wash your laundry with cool water and dry it on a low setting. 7. Go vegetarian. 8. Get energy efficient LED light bulbs. 9. Stop moving your lawn. 10. Get your city to use native plants on public land. Okay, we already do some of these things, but I can see how they would be difficult to implement elsewhere. Cant you actually choose your power company? Will your city officials even listen to your suggestions, or write you off as worse than a peacemonger? From a published letter by Paul Wealing of Australuia, who quotes one William Lawrence Brnagg: “Everything in the future is a wave, everything in the past is a particle.” That is the unknown or undefined is a wave, and the known is a particle. Can it really be that simple? The biggest cause of wildlife loss is the destruction of natural habitats to create farmland. The second biggest is killing for food. 300 mammal species are being eaten into extinction. Item in THE WEEK says that we are drowning in a sea of porn. Oh? I wonder if it isn’t like weeds, the scourge of gardens. A weed, simply, is a plant where you don’t want it. Maybe porn is simply sexual awareness where some people don’t want it. Sex, like a plant, is natural and necessary; only our definition makes either wrong. An odd rock is tumbling through the solar system, 1,300 feet long by 130 feet wide. Is it a fragment of something or an alien probe? Astronomers don’t know. They have developed a way to convert old clothes into panels that are hard like wood, thus making building material out of waste. It seems that wombats poop in cubes, which makes their poop stack-able so they can build defensive walls. No shit! Item in the newspaper says that there are two definitions of racism: the failure to redress discrimination against minorities, and direct action against minorities. It says the two definitions can contradict each other. Oh? I see them as two faces of the coin, tacit and overt racism, and I agree with both definitions. And a letter in NEW SCIENTIST by Alessandro Saragosa in Italy discussing self awareness. He figures it is merely the result of having a multi-cellular body. There are all manner of signals from chemical, optical, and mechanical sensor cells, and there needs to be a way to filter those diverse signals so as to concentrate attention on what is relevant at the moment. You know, like not stepping off a cliff or petting the saber-tooth tiger. That could be the basis of our self awareness and consciousness. It’s a survival trait. That makes sense to me.

PIERS

Voyager

Season 3: #17 “Unity” Chakotay and a female ensign are returning to the Voyager via shuttle, but they seem to be lost. They receive a faint distress call. They land, and encounter armed men. Chakotay is shot but survives; the ensign does not. He wakes to meet Riley, who explains that her group was raided by aliens and the survivors dumped here. There are humans, Cardassians, Klingons, and many others, all similarly taken. But they mean to make a home here; all they need is some medicine and other technology. Meanwhile the Voyager discovers a five-year dead Borg ship. And Chakotay learns that this mixed colony are actually survivors of that Borg ship, now returned to individuals. They really do want to help him, because otherwise he will die. They merge, mentally, to save his mind. Now he is part of their link, and knows everything about all of them, and they about him. Riley wants one thing from him, which may be mating; it happens off-screen. The Voyager rescues them, gives medical supplies to the colony, and departs. But Chakotay is not free; the Borg mind takes him over. He goes to reactivate the Borg ship, but the Voyager folk stop him. Then the Borg ship self destructs. They all get a message: the colony regrets using them, but had to destroy the Borg ship, using them to do it. So the colony survives, enhanced. Will it remain uncorrupted?

#18 “Darkling” They enter the space of a friendly humanoid species, the Mikhal, and trade technology for information about their route. The Mikhal are dedicated travelers. Kes is intrigued by one, Zahir. She might want to stay with him and leave the Voyager. The Doctor is experimenting with his own program, adding elements from historical characters. But those had dark sides, and the Doctor may now have that darkness. Someone attacks Zahir, and someone resembling the Doctor tortures another man. Then he paralyzes B’Elanna to make her assist him. His subroutines are interacting and taking over. It is like evil insanity. Fortunately the others manage to halt his evil side and return his good side. Kes decides to remain on the ship.

#19 “Rise” They blast an asteroid that is headed for a planet. It should be vaporized, but instead it fragments, and two chunks collide with the planet. Analysis indicates they are not natural but artificial. Several more asteroids are headed for the planet. Tuvok and Neelix take one shuttle, but it crashes, and they must struggle to contact the Voyager. There are several natives, including one woman, with them, and they have agendas of their own. The asteroids have guidance systems; they are targeting the planet. The aliens are invading, but the Voyagerand shuttle manage to stop them. It’s a close call and tense situation.

#20 “Favorite Son” They are in dialogue with another ship, but Harry Kim is suspicious. He says they are about to attack, and precipitates a battle in space. Is he crazy? He may have an illness, but it turns out that he was right: the other ship had been about to sneak attack. His hunch saved them. He breaks out in a rash. There is more danger, but a Taresian ship saves them. They say Kim is one of them, and welcome him home. Pretty girls fawn on him. All have a similar rash. Their population is 90% female; males are implanted elsewhere, and return. They want Kim to stay, and they are making it extremely nice for him. The girls are beautiful and seductive. But he wants to return to the Voyager. He ties one girl up, knocks out the other, and flees. And discovers that they kill their men to get organic material for their children. He fights them off, then gets beamed out, and the ship escapes pursuit. As with the sirens of mythology, they are not to be trusted.

#21 “Before and After” Kes wakes, old, age nine, discovering she’s a grandmother, with no memory of the interim. Paris is her husband, and the rest of the crew are there. Then she jumps to a slightly prior time, and then again, seemingly traveling backward in time. Then she is in a shuttle, birthing her baby, and the Voyager is under attack. It’s their Year of Hell. Then back to before she married Paris; he is dating B’Elanna. Who is then killed, along with Janeway. Jes is able to help, as she knows things from the future. Then to a time before that, and she warns Janeway to avoid that region of space. Then to her childhood. Then to her own birth. Then back to the original present, and back in temporal synch. She concludes that there’s no time like the present.

#22 “Real Life” The Doctor has a loving family in the holodeck wife, son, daughter. Kes remains with her hair loose, dramatically more mature. The ship plunges into a space anomaly that looks like a weird nuclear explosion. B’Elanna says his idealized family is far from realistic. So they tweak it for realism, and soon it is a chaotic mess, just like real life. The ship heads for another space storm, hoping to harvest useful energy. The Doctor’s rebellious son decides to leave, and his daughter Belle is ill; she fell and hit her head, and can’t see, or feel her feet. She dies. The Doctor is learning the true emotions of Family.

#23 “Distant Origin” Two Voths in a cave discover a human skeleton. This may be the most important discovery in their history. They analyze it, wondering whether its species could indicate the origin of their own. But the local leader is skeptical. The professor is determined to pursue this, to vindicate this theory that the Voth originated long ago and far away. He gets charged with heresy. He learns of the Voyager. They zero in on it, hiding; their ship can’t be observed and neither can they themselsves when they beam aboard. But the crew does pick up an anomaly and discovers them. There is trouble. Two are discovered, but Chakotay is beamed to their ship and talks with the scientist Gegen. Then the whole Voyager is beamed aboard the huge Voth city-ship. The authorities don’t accept the Distant Origin Theory or the notion that saurians and mammals are related; that’s the heresy. The queen figure refuses to listen, until Chacotay makes the case. Then Gegen is condemned to anonymous imprisonment, along with the crew of the Voyager. So Gegen retracts his claim, and they let the Voyager go. This is a telling analogy to Earth’s religious history.

#24 “Displaced” Kes is exchanged with an alien, a Nyrian, who appears on the Voyager, neither of them knowing how it happened. Then other exchanges occur, at nine minute intervals, 21 of them and counting. More than a hundred. It seems to be a baby wormhole. Or is it? It turns out to be artificial. The Nyrians are doing it. The abducted ones, including Janeway, are in a very nice compound, one of ten, but meanwhile the Nyrians are taking over the ship. So Chakotay and the other survivor sabotage whatever they can. Then Chakotay alone. He arranges to get the Doctor there, then he too is exchanged. They meet Jarleth, of another compound, who has been here nine years. His crew was similarly abducted. The Doctor can perceive the technology, and looks for a porthole. He locates one. It has other windows; they now have access to all the compounds. There seem to be 94 environments total. [And the program froze with 13 minutes remaining. Resumed with Chapter 7 of 8, having lost two minutes.] The Nyrians discover the intrusion and pursue. Paris and B’Elanna hide in a snowscape. They get exchanged back to the human compound. Janeway bargains to recover the Voyager and they are back on their way. I must have missed something in the disc malfunction, but it’s a good episode.

#25 “Worst Case Scenario” Chakotay approaches B’Elanna, saying there is a mutiny coming, mainly the Maquis against the existing order, and he needs to know which side she is on. When Janeway and Paris depart for 24 hours, the mutiny happens, and the Maquis takes over. Chakatay and Ensign Seska (who has been dead for a year) govern. It turns out to be a holo-novel. They they play it through with Paris instead of B’Elanna. The program “Insurrection Alpha” is increasingly popular on the ship, but it is unfinished. Seska writes her own conclusion, which is deadly. Janeway tries to rewrite Seska herself, and Chakotay. Now there are constant warring revisions. But Tuvok programs Seska’s rifle to self destruct when fired, which takes her out, and the situation is saved.

#26 “Scorpion, Part 1” They find themselves in Borg space. Something has destroyed a number oaf Borg cubes. It is stronger that the Borg? That’s hard to believe. Chakotay, Tuvok and Kim beam aboard a wreck and discover piles of Borg bodies. A biomass seems to be taking them over. They enter a bio-mass. Something approaches them, but they can’t beam out because of interference. It is some kind of living creature. Kes had a premonition about them, and says they are telepathic. Kim gets infected; alien cells are consuming his body from inside. Borg records indicate five recent and devastating attacks. Over a hundred bioships from a parallel universe are coming. Does the Voyager risk traveling through Bog space, or does it turn back and give up ever returning home? Janeway considers making a deal with the devil: offering the Borg a way to win in return for safe passage. Do they agree? To be continued.

Season 4 changes the introduction, which now has pictures of four Borg cubes rather than spaceships, intriguingly. #1 “Scorpion Part II” Janeway makes the deal with the Borg: safe passage in exchange for a weapon against species 8472. Kes has a vision of an 8472 creature. Seven of Nine is the Borg representative they work with, a humanoid female. The Borg ship is attacked; it sacrifices itself to save Voyager, with Janeway, Tuvok and Seven of Nine beamed aboard at the last moment with a few other Borg. Janeway tells Chakotay to carry on while she recovers. He does, holding firm against Seven’s threats. There is an altercation and Chakotay opens a hatch and blows the Borg into space. But Seven survives and the stress continues. They learn that the Borg started the war with Species 8472, hoping to assimilate them, but underestimated their power. 8472 telepathically speaks through Kes; they regard our galaxy as impure. They shoot down 8472 pursuit and escape. Then the Borg terminate the agreement. But Janeway succeeds in severing Seven’s connection with the Borg. They escape, with Seven as a perhaps human guest.

#2 “The Gift” The process of restoring humanity to Seven of Nine is fraught with complication as the Borg implants war with the human immune cells. She was Annika as a human child. Kes helps telekinetically, removing a key Borg implant. Annika is an extremely shapely woman. Tuvok guides Kes in training her expanding mental powers. Seven tries to contact the Borg; Kes stops her psycho-kinetically. Kes continues to strengthen her weird powers, which involve subatomic structure. Annika also progresses, hating it. Things around Kes start exploding; she has to go before she destroys the ship. She boards the shuttle and transforms. Annika also progresses, becoming dramatically more human. Is she to be the replacement for Kes in the series? This could be interesting.

#3 “Day of Honor” Seven of Nine (Annika) is lonely and bored, and asks Chakotay for a duty assignment. He assigns her to Engineering, to work with B’Elanna, though B’Elanna is not pleased. Seven is now in a tight uniform that displays her outstanding figure. If Kes was the prettiest member of the crew, Seven is the shapeliest. B’Elanna undertakes a traditional Klingon ceremony, as she has Klingon ancestry, but changes her mind, understandably, as it is a brutal and seemingly pointless ordeal. There is an accident and they have to eject the tachyon warp core. Paris and B’Elanna wind up in space suits floating in space, running out of oxygen. Seven offers to go to the Caatari who want vengeance on the Borg, but Janeway refuses, as Seven is now a member of the ship’s crew. Then Seven provides technology that solves the problem. She is slowly learning human ways. The Voyager locates the two in space and beams them back aboard, after B’Elanna professes her love for Paris.

#4 “Nemesis” Chakotay’s shuttle is attacked and has to land on a planet. He is captured by troops who fear the nemesis. When they conclude he is not the nemesis, they help him try to locate his shuttle so he can signal the Voyager. They are soon attacked and take losses. He encounters a village which helps him, then walks on. He and the villagers are captured by the enemy. But things are not as they seem. He has been indoctrinated by his supposed friends to kill his real friends. The Voyager rescues him, but it may time time for his orientation to fade. “I wish it were as easy to stop hating as it was to start,” he says.

#5 “Revulsion” Seven of Nine is assigned to work with Harry Kim. The ship receives a distress call from a hologram, which of course interests the Doctor. He and B’Elanna take a shuttle to the other ship. They talk with the hologram, who says the crew of six organics got a plague and died. But there are strong hints he is not telling the truth. He is also somewhat deranged, expressing revulsion for organics. Meanwhile Kim is getting to know Seven, and is becoming romantically impressed by her. Paris warns him to be wary, as she’s a former Borg. She recognizes the signs and offers to romance him or copulate with him, to his dismay; she is too damned practical. The holograph attacks B’Elanna, then deactivates the Doctor. B’Elanna manages to deactivate him, in a close call.

#6 “The Raven” Janeway encourages Seven to try to learn artistry. It is not easy for her. She suffers alarming memories of being pursued by the Borg for assimilation. Neelix teaches her how to eat, but this triggers another flashback. She steals a shuttle and heads out into B’omar space. Why? That’s the mystery. The Doctor says that her Borg implants are regenerating, taking over again. Tuvok beams to her shuttle, but she overcomes him. Kim and Janeway translate Seven’s diary entries and realize that the bird she sees in her mind is a raven. Tuvok and Seven land on a planet where there is a spaceship wreck. This is where she was captured as a child and assimilated. The name of the ship is The Raven. The B’omar attack; they escape the wreck. The Voyager beams them back. Now Seven knows more about her past, and will adjust.

#7 “Scientific Method” The Paris/B’Elanna romance is now in full furtive swing. Seven of Nine is still adjusting to the human military protocols. Janeway is fatigued and irritable. Something is taking odd pictures. Chakotay gets a weird aging malady. Then so does Neelix. Then it spreads among the crew. Seven tunes in with the help of the Doctor, and discovers invisible aliens all over the ship, and two attending to Janeway, so she can’t tell Janeway. She shoots one, so that Tuvok sees the alien and cooperates with her. Now Janeway is on it. She interviews the captive alien, who explains they are experimenting, using humans as lab rats. If they don’t cooperate, the experiment will be terminated, which would be lethal. Janeway sends the ship into a pulsar field, likely destruction. The aliens depart. The ship survives, free at last. Another hard-hitting episode.

#8 “Year of Hell Part 1” The Year of Hell is chronicled day by day, from Day 1 on. The Krenim are manipulating time to eliminate what annoys them and return to power. Janeway has changed her hair style. They pass through Zahl space, and run afoul of the Krenim. Tuvok appears to be blind; Seven must guide him around the ship. The Voyager is shielded against temporal change. That messes up the Krenim campaign to eliminate whole species. The Krenim try to erase the Voyager from history. The crew takes escape pods before the ship breaks up, hoping that some will make it home. To be continued.

#9 “Year of Hell Part II” the officers remain on board, trying to salvage the ship as oxygen runs out. Then Chakotay and Paris are two months captive of the Krenim leader. He rescued them as their ship expired. But Janeway and the Voyager escaped. Paris will have nothing to do with Annorax, the Krenim leader, but Chaketay works with him to find a temporal route that will save the Voyager. Janeway goes into fire to save the ship, and succeeds but gets horribly burned. She carries on with scar tissue. Annorax explains how he accidentally eliminated Kiana Prime, and with it his wife and family. He is desperate to restore it, but so far has failed. Janeway now has allies. They attack Annorax’s ship but are disabled. Janeway crashes the Voyager into Annorax’s ship, destroying them both. Which restores the original time-line. The Voyager is back as it was—and Annorax’s wife also. A mind bending episode.

#10 “Random Thoughts” They take planetary leave on Mari. Then a man goes wild, and doesn’t know why. It seems that B’Elanna had violent thoughts because of an accidental collision, and these thoughts caused a man to attack another. On this telepathic world violent thoughts are a crime. Tuvok investigates. The man B’Elanna was talking with has buried negative thoughts. Tuvok exchanges violent thoughts with that man. He takes the man into custody, but is attacked by his friends. It is that man’s violent thought which caused the trouble. That saves B’Elanna from a procedure resembling lobotomy.

#11 “Concerning Flight” The ship is attacked by some sort of alien object thieves, and loses a number of items. Janeway and Tuvok visit a local planet anonymously, where a black market trader does business. Then Leonardo da Vinci appears; he was part of her holodeck program and now seems to have been activated in real life. To him she is Catarina, and he sees things in terms of the 16th century Earth. I must say that Janeway as da Vinci’s apprentice is appealing, as is da Vinci himself. Pursued, they take off in his glider, and are beamed aboard the Voyager. Da Vinci, inspired by what he has seen with “Katarina,” plans to go to France and invent new things. A delightful episode.

#12 “Mortal Coil” Neelix cheers a nervous child, Naomi, with word of the Great Forest folk can visit, where there are no monsters. Then he runs afoul of a beam and dies. But Seven of Nine says she can revive him, despite his being dead for 18 hours; the Borg have ways. She donates some of her blood to use, and applies the technique—and does restore him. He regrets that when he was dead there was no afterlife, no magic forest, just nothing. But the child says she visited the Great Forest and loved it. Then his tissues revert to necrosis and he collapses. They revive him, but he feels incomplete. Chakotay helps him go into a vision quest, a state of deep meditation. Therein he sees his dead sister Alexia, but she tells him it is all a lie, a fantasy to avoid the fear of death, that there is no afterlife. That there is no point in living. Then she decays into nothing. This depletes his will to live. Then Naomi needs him again, to banish monsters, and he decides to live.

#13 “Waking Moments” Several things are going on. Tuvok forgets to put on his clothing. Seven of Nine gets Kim alone, says “resistance is futile” and proceeds to seduce him. Paris gets in trouble on a malfunctioning shuttle. Neelix shows Janeway a dead crew he discovered, maybe it’s their own. Chakotay had a nightmare. So did Janeway. In fact everyone did, and in each dream was an alien. Kim is one of several who are now locked in sleep; Seven is not really with him. So Chakotay goes into a deliberate lucid dream to try to contact the alien there. He finds a deer on the ship, hunts it with a spear, and it becomes the alien. They talk, and the alien says that their space is six parsecs away, and to avoid it. They live in dreams, while others live in the waking state. Then the alien appears in the waking moments, and the aliens take over the ship. Then Chakotay realizes he is still asleep. He wakes, and the Doctor says they all fell asleep after he did. Now they are all having the same dream. They are all asleep at their duty stations. They realize this; Chakotay disappears from it when he actually wakes. Then the others start to wake, but Chakotay realizes that this is still the dream. He wakes again, and locates a neurogenic transmitter that is causing the effect. He makes the aliens turn it off, lest he and they be destroyed by the Doctor, who will fire if not contacted by a short deadline. Thus he wins, and they finally do wake up. I love this lucid dream type of adventure.

#14 “Message in a Bottle” B’Elanna doesn’t get along with Seven of Nine, who tends to give orders in the Borg manner. Seven discovers an alien network in space. They send the Doctor to make contact. He finds himself aboard a ship, the Prometheus, 60,000 light years away, crewed by Romulans who have taken it over. They separate the ship into three parts, then re-integrate it. He activates its human hologram doctor. It is up to him to re-take this ship from the Romulans. Meanwhile back on the Voyager Paris is filling in for the doctor, treating things like heartburn for a hot Neelix recipe. The Doctor has to take over the Prometheus as it comes under fire from Starfleet ships who think it is still under Romulan control. He blunders his way to success, and returns to Voyager with a message: he told the home fleet about Voyager, and they replied that they will notify families, and that Voyager is no longer alone. And B’Elanna and Seven may be starting to understand each other.

#15 “Hunters” They receive a garbled message from Starfleet Command, but it is incomplete, so they head for the nearest relay station. On the way they discover a gutted body on a ship. They discover letters from Earth. One is to Chakotay, informing him that the Maquis have been destroyed. He tells B’Elanna, who is furious with grief. Janeway learns that her fiance gave up waiting and will marry someone else. This of course changes her situation. Tuvok and Seven in the shuttle are captured by the Hunters who plan to disembowel them for trophies. The Voyager attacks and manages to rescue Tuvok and Seven, but the the relay station is destroyed.

#16 “Prey” Now the Hirogen Hunters are coming after the Voyager, regarding it as prey. Then it stops. Chakotay, Paris and Tuvok beam aboard, find one survivor, and beam him to sick bay. The Doctor treats him, but he says he must resume the hunt. It seems a prey species turned on them and wiped out the Hunter’s ship. But then alien gets aboard the Voyager. The rescued Hirogen Hunter joins them in tracking the alien aboard ship, making common cause. Chakotay, Seven, and the Hirogen search for it. They learns that it wants only to get home. The Hunter wants to take it as a prize. Seven wants to destroy it. Other Hirogen ships are attacking. Janeway punishes Seven for disobeying a direct order.

#17 “Retrospect” Janeway bargains with a man called Kovin for a new cannon that will significantly enhance the ship’s firepower. Seven is assigned to help install it. The man disrespects her and she socks him. The Doctor says she is suffering from the slow return of suppressed memories. Kovin violated her by stunning her, performing surgery on her and extracting Borg technology. But can they trust that recovered memory? They investigate, seeking corroboration, along with a local magistrate. The evidence grows, but it is not conclusive. They contact Kovin in his ship, but he fires on them, and then his ship explodes. So they may have caused an innocent man to die. May have. It is a lesson in human conscience for Seven, the Doctor, and Janeway.

#18 “The Killing Game Part I” Janeway loses a Klingon battle in the holodeck. This is being managed by the Hirogen Then she is put in another simulation, World War Two, with aliens and crew members playing roles. They are engaged in the allied Resistance, seeking information about German troop movements and plans. But things like bullets seem to be real, and they take real injuries. It seems the aliens are in charge and these are aspects of their hunts. Seven of Nine is a singer here in a nightclub run by Janeway. Tuvok is the bartender. The Hirogen are the Master Race, seriously discussing racial purity though they are obviously not human. It’s a lovely oblique commentary. Kim manages to disable the holo controls so the people recover free will. To be continued.

#19 “Tho Killing Game, Part II” Janeway and Seven of Nine reach the controls and start working to recover the ship. Chakotay is an American commander supervising undercover operations. They go together to take out a weapons lab. There is a question whether Seven is loyal or a German double agent. In the end she is loyal. Janeway bargains with the Hirogen commander and make a deal; the ship will be freed in return for the Holodeck technology. But a subordinate kills him and hunts Janeway. She manages to make the truce anyway, and the two sides separate.

#20 “Vis A Vis” They encounter a ship that may be able to travel instantly anywhere. Paris is evidently preoccupied with something, becoming unreliable, and other notice. The pilot of the other ship, Steth, may be a female in disguise. Or a shape changer. He is up to something. Then he shoots Paris and changes form to take his place. Meanwhile the real Paris wakes in the other ship. The female whose likeness Steth briefly assumed is there, saying he stole her body. Then Steth switches with Janeway. But they catch on and manage to set things right. They will try to unravel the chain of bodies “Steth” has used and set that right too.

#21 “The Omega Directive” Something odd is occurring and Captain Janeway won’t discuss it. Only Seven of Nine knows of it, from her Borg experience; it is the Borg’s holy Grail. It is a perfect molecule, wondrously complex. Any effort to obtain it must be stopped, Fleet orders. If an omega molecule explodes, they will lose the ability to go to warp speed, because it will destroy subspace. There is a story that an omega molecule existed for an instant at the time of the Big Bang that started the universe. There may be hundreds of them here. Millions, that an alien species synthesized. They have to be destroyed. They are destroyed, to Janeway’s and Seven’s mutual regret.

#22 “Unforgettable” They receive a distress signal from a ship. Chakotay rescues a woman, Kellin, from Ramor, and beams her to sick bay. She seems to know him. She says others can remember her kind only briefly. She was here before, and fell in love with Chakotay, and claims he loved her too. Two cloaked alien ships attack, but with her help they spot them and drive them off. Kellin tells him of their last night together, when she kissed him. As she does now. But a Ramoran man, a tracer, appears, and beams her with a forgetting ray so that now she won’t remember. She asks Chakotay to tell her when she forgets him. He does, but now she’s not interested. She goes home, leaving him with his temporary memory, which he records on paper so it won’t be erased.

#23 “Living Witness” Janeway has been asked to assist one side in a local war in return for information about a wormhole that might enable them to get home now. She is ruthless. This is out of character, so must be a simulation. Indeed all the crew are vicious and it is the VoyagerWarship. Seven of Nine is back as a full Borg. They destroy the Kirians. The simulation is a brutal lesson of local history, 700 years later. The Doctor protests that this isn’t the way it was. Then, historically, it is established that peace was made, the Doctor helped, and finally took a craft heading for the Alpha Quadrant.

#24 “Demon” That is a demon class planet with toxic clouds. But they need deuterium that is on it. Kim and Paris take a shuttle to the surface. It isl like the landscape of hell. Kim is drawn into a pool; Paris pulls him out, but his suit has been ruptured. They both run out of oxygen. So Janeway decides to land the ship, to rescue them and get the deuterium. Then Chakotay and Seven of Nine go out. They find Paris and Kim in good health, without suits, breathing the local air. Then they choke when returned to ship air. Their biology has been changed to make them adapt. Then they find another Paris and Kim, barely alive. A pool forms beneath the ship and it slowly sinks. They try to free it, and the two duplicates suffer. They are part of the planet, and now there are many others. This story can’t be finished.

#25 “One” They enter the vast Mutara nebula, and suddenly are struck by incapacitating headaches and burns. Only the Doctor and Seven of Nine are immune. So they go into stasis for a month, leaving the Doctor and Seven to run the ship. It is an act of considerable trust. Ten days into it they are getting on each other’s nerves. There is an emergency which turns out to be false. Then the Doctor starts malfunctioning and is confined to Sick Bay, leaving Seven to run the ship. She beams an alien aboard to trade supplies. He wants to linger, but she demurs. He disappears. The she hears voices of the crew, crying for help. The Doctor says they are hallucinations. Then the Doctor disappears. It gets worse. She has to cut life support to make it out of the nebula. She gets them safely through. In the process she learns what it means to be lonely.

#26 “Hope and Fear” Janeway is still trying to decode an encrypted message they received months ago. A visitor, Arturis, assists and she makes progress. They encounter another ship, the Dauntless, more modern than Voyager. Chakotay, Tuvok, and Paris accidentally travel in it. They might be able to take it home. But Janeway suspects it is too pat. She suspects Arturis, and he does seem to be guilty. Now Arturis is taking them to his home, aboard the Dauntless. He rails at Janeway and Seven. Janeway adjusts Seven’s eyepiece, restoring some of her Borg powers, and they cripple he Dauntless. Voyager pursues and attacks, and Janeway and Seven return to it while the Dauntless goes on into Borg space.

Season 5: #1 “Night” New introductory pictures; the Borg cubes are gone. The episode starts with a wild holo script, a parody of cheap “sci-fi” broken up when the Doctor demands the holodeck for his own use. Meanwhile Captain Janeway has retreated to her quarters and is not being seen around the ship, while they cross the Void, a bleak region, and are bored stiff. Chakotay has to run the ship. Then the power fails. They start to restore it, and a humanoid creature appears. Three alien vessels surround them, and 17 aliens are on board. Emck appears. Janeway plans to sacrifice herself to get through, but the others decline to follow her orders. The Malon blocks their way through the vortex. They destroy the vortex and continue their course. Stars appear; they have made it through the Void.

#2 “Drone” They approach a proto nebula. Something goes wrong with the Doctor’s mobile emitter the enables him to exist beyond sick bay. They leave it in the science lab overnight for repairs in the morning. Then it connects itself to other equipment. This is surely mischief. It is Borg technology. Seven of Nine conjectures that some of her implants infected the Doctor’s emitter. It forms a fetus, which quickly becomes a baby, then a man, within a day. Seven must educate him. He is named One. In a manner she is his mother. He makes excellent progress. Then the Borg pick up on him, and send a ship. This is a sphere rather than a cube. They mean to assimilate One and the crew. One beams to them, accesses their navigational controls, and directs them into the nebula, destroying them. He concludes that as long as he exists the Voyager is in danger, because the Borg will pursue him relentlessly. So in effect he suicides. This dismays Seven.

#3 “Extreme Risk” B’Elanna Torres makes a suicidal leap from a height over a planet. It is a holodeck simulation. She comes out of and says she is not feeling well. She puts Seven of Nine in charge of a spot task. That’s a surprise, as they don’t always get along. Meanwhile a Malon ship interferes with a Voyager probe. They decide to build a new more powerful shuttle. But B’Elanna remains distracted. She returns to the holodeck to fight enemy men. She takes more risks in the holodeck. She has injuries dating back months. Chakotay steps in. She says she can’t feel anything, when she should be grieving her lost Maquis friends. She joins the crew when they launch the new shuttle in an effort at recover their probe before the Malon do. There is trouble, but she is instrumental and saving them and helping the mission to succeed. She seems to be over her emotional nullity.

#4 “In the Flesh” Chakotay is at a training academy on Earth, only these are actually aliens assuming human form. Why this enormous effect? Are they preparing for an invasion of Earth? Chakotay returns to the simulation, and to the woman ​Valerie Archer. but she catches on and obtains he DNA via a kiss. They are from another galaxy, the species the Borg attacked and that fought back effectively. Janeway negotiates a truce, and shows that Earth is not planning an attack on them. Chakotay bids farewell to Valerie, both of them a bit regretful that it isn’t real.

#5 “Once Upon a Time” In the Forest of Forever little Naomi summons blue Flotter from the water of a forest pool to deal with brown Trevis, the man of the tree. Until her mother Samantha calls her back and she has to end the holodeck program. The ship receives a distress call. The Delter Flyer crashes on a planetoid and Tuvok, Paris, and Samantha are stranded beneath the surface. Naomi encounters the Ogre of Fire who burns the forest to the ground. They finally manage to save the Flyer and occupants. Naomi is reunited with her Mother. The Forest of Forever recovers.

#6 “Timeless” Chakotay and Kim land on a frozen world and locate a crashed and defunct ship. It’s the Voyager! Why are they here? To change history. It seems they tried a new quantum drive to make it quickly home. They crash and perish. Only Chakotay and Kim survive, in the shuttle preceding the ship. Now fifteen years later they have returned to locate the ship and animate the Doctor. But they are fugitives, having stolen the equipment they needed. Chakotay is now with a woman, his girlfriend who has helped them make this mission, though its success will erase their relationship. Kim sends the corrections through Seven of Nine, but they don’t work. He sends another message that boots them out of the slipstream drive, saving them. Kim receives a message from himself of the future, explaining.

#7 “Infinite Regress” Seven of Nine emerges from her regeneration cycle before it is complete, finds herself alone, tears up the kitchen until she finds meat. Her reflection shows a monster eating it. In the morning Neelix reports another kitchen raid. Then little Naomi follows her, they are talking, and suddenly Seven turns girlishly friendly, completely out of character for her. They play games together. Then Seven snaps out of it without memory of it. Then when on business with B’Elanna she sees a reflection of an Klingon male and seem to become him, wanting to mate with B’Elanna, fighting others, then becoming the little girl. Meanwhile the ship has encountered a Borg debris field. Something in it seems to be activating buried personalities, giving her multiple personality disorder. They must cure her, if they can. It ties in with the viniculum they salvaged from the debris. Tuvok does a mind meld. Then he shares the mayhem. Meanwhile an alien ship is determined to destroy the viniculum, and attacks the Voyager. They managed to salvage Seven and eject the viniculum. In a few days Seven recovers. Then she joins Naomi, making her her “bridge assistant,” something the little girl has wanted; she is thrilled.

#8 “Nothing Human” They encounter a massive energy wave that shakes them up. It downloads a message. They find an alien creature like a multi-colored lobster. It attacks B’Elanna, paralyzing her; they can’t separate it from her without injuring or killing her. So they make a hologram of a specialist doctor, Crell Moset, who is Cardassian. But B’Elanna detests Crell because of Cardassian atrocities on Bajor; she won’t let him operate on her. The Doctor is” concerned also; what about medical ethics? This is a relevant debate. Do they use information obtained by torture to save B’Elanna’s life? Does that make them complicit in medical crime? Meanwhile an alien ship appears, determined to rescue its representative. They manage to separate the creature from B’Elanna and beam it to the alien ship, which then departs. But does this success justify they action? The Doctor doubts it. Indeed, the ethics may never be settled.

#9 “Thirty Days” Tom Paris is reduced in rank to ensign and sentenced to 30 days in the brig. In a letter to his father he describes how it happened. As Proton he comes to rescue his friend Kim from the mistress of evils, Demonica, and her twin sister Megan. Then they get called back to reality and leave the hologram, the two women included. They encounter folk who live underwater but have spaceships. But their water ball planet is losing water, so they want to check its center. Paris and Kim and Seven of Nine take him there, they encounter a giant electric eel that shocks the ship and does some damage. They return and conclude that it is possible to make a change that will save the planet, but the bureaucracy won’t get around to it in time. So Paris and one of the locals dive down to do it, and Paris disobeys a direct order to halt. Thus his punishment. He serves it and is released.

#10 “Counterpoint” They are boarded for a formal inspection as they pass through foreign space, the Devore. They don’t like telepaths, but Janeway reports that their telepaths, including Tuvok, died months before. That is not the case; Tuvok and a number of telepathic children from a freighter are in suspension. Then the inspecting officer requests Kashyk, asks asylum as he is defecting. He knows about the telepaths and wants to save them too. They need to find a wormhole. Janeway and Kashyk seem to be getting interested in each other. Warships are on their trail. Kashyk will join one of them to distract it so them Voyager can reach the wormhole and escape. They kiss, and kiss again. Then he returns to his ship and becomes the inspecting officer again. But his defection was a ruse to get their secret information; he has betrayed them. Well played, Janeway tells him. But Janeway outsmarts him, and he locates neither the telepaths nor the wormhole. Rather than suffer the embarrassment of admitting defeat, he erases the incident from the record and lets them go. But he says her offer was tempting. Well played, he tells her.

#11 “Latent Image” The Doctor says Harry Kim had cranial surgery 18 months ago that neither of them remembers. There are other curious gaps in his memory. Files have been deleted. Seven of Nine helps him investigate. He took physical pictures, which are not subject to file deletion, and they show people and scenes unknown on the ship. Conclusion: there was an alien invasion, and all memories of it in the crew were deleted. The Doctor checks more ingeniously and discovers that it is Janeway who has been messing with his program. She says he is malfunctioning and needed to be reprogrammed. Seven feels Janeway is violating the Doctor’s individual rights. So they play the sequence over. Ensign Jetel, a young woman, is given a surprise birthday party. Then in a shuttle she and Kim are shot by an alien; only the Doctor survives unscathed. He does spot surgery, saves Kim, but not Jetel. He had done triage and saved one. But why did he sacrifice her? He is tormented. That’s why he had to be reprogrammed; he couldn’t handle sacrificing a patient, and it sent him into a spin that made him nonfunctional. Seven is a roughly parallel case, in effect reprogrammed from her Borg assimilation, so her advice is relevant. Maybe the Doctor is recovering in his own manner. This is another thoughtful episode.

#12 “Bride of Chaotica!” Another Captain Proton adventure. The evil Chaotica maroons Paris and Kim on Planet X and they face the Fortress of Doom. I love these wild parodies of bad science fiction! The Doctor participates, as President of Earth, and Janeway too, as Queen Arachnia, with her fleet of spider ships. She helps Proton to defeat Chaotica. All this to deal indirectly with real aliens who have mired the Voyager in subspace. More fun.

#13 “Gravity” Flashback to when Tuvok undertook training as a Vulcan. He thought he would be ineligible because he questioned everything, but that actually qualified him. Then a masked woman steals equipment from Paris’s crashed shuttle. She is Noss. Then two men attack her, and Tuvok rescues her and takes her back to the shuttle, where they feed her and treat her injuries. Then thirteen more men approach, and they flee to Noss’s ship. They manage to summon the Doctor, whose universal translator is built in and he establishes verbal communication with her. She crashed 14 seasons ago and has survived since. She catches big spiders for food. Jara was a fellow student with Tuvok; he loved her. They are caught in a gravitational sink hole. Months pass there during hours outside it. Tuvok gets injured and Noss cares for him. She plainly loves him, and it badly hurt when he declines to return the emotion. He tells Paris of his history with Jara, whom he loved, until he learned to suppress his emotions. They are rescued along with Noss, whom they take to her home planet. Her separation from Tuvok is painful, but now she understands. It seems that he does have some buried feeling for her.

#14 “Bliss” A man in a ship charges a menacing configuration in space. Meanwhile they discover a wormhole leading directly to the Alpha Quadrant, where there is great news for all the crew members including Janeway. Seven is skeptical; it smells like a setup. She receives a warning from an alien inside the anomaly: they are being deceived. But even Tuvok won’t listen to her. Only Seven and the child Naomi are immune to the blissful effect governing the others. Seven takes action, assisted by Naomi, stunning crew members. They nullify her, and take the ship into the same anomaly the alien warned Seven about. Naomi wakes Seven, and they take over the ship while the others are unconscious, put to sleep by the anomaly. They beam the man aboard; he says the anomaly is a creature, a monster that consumes whole ships. They activate the Doctor, who is also unaffected. He ascertains that the creature is 200,000 years old and has been assimilating others the whole time. But the Doctor has an idea: make their ships taste bad so they will be expelled. It works, and they escape. Seven, Naomi, and the Doctor have saved the Voyager. Then the old man’s ship is heading back into the monster, I think this time to destroy it.

#15 “Dark Frontier” This is a double-length episode. A Borg ship pursues them. Janeway warns them off, but they won’t quit. They fire, Voyager fires back and destroys the Borg ship. They decide to salvage what they can. Janeway tells Seven to study the records her parents made. She does, and relives it in her mind. Flashback to when Annika (later Seven of Nine) and her parents headed for the Borg. They also run holodeck simulations of their projected raid on a Borg cube, trying to perfect their coming raid. Then they sent a shuttle as bait, so an away team can sneak aboard the cube during the distraction. They obtain their prize, but Seven chooses to stay with the Borg. She meets an assimilated woman, who says the Borg put Seven on the Voyager deliberately. Janeway discovers that the Borg have been tracking Seven all along. The Borg want to understand the human psyche. It is uncertain whether the humans are eluding the Borg, or being deceived by them. Seven is rescued, with technology that cuts fifteen years off their journey home, and other data that may prove to be useful in the future.

#16 “The Disease” Harry Kim is making out with a brunette, Tul, not Seven of Nine. The Varro is another ship, she’s a member of its crew, and they are not supposed to be together. They are different species but on the surface she is entirely human. The Varro has been traveling for 400 years, and now the Voyager is helping it upgrade its technology. Kim suffers a brief glow. It’s an effect of his association with Tul, showing love. The ships have to separate, their business together completed, and Kim and Tul have to part with mutual regret. But Janeway understands, having lost her own love, and so does Seven, surprisingly.

#17 “Course: Oblivion” B’Elanna and Paris are marrying. She throws the bouquet and Seven catches it. What for? she wonders. “You may not want to know,” Tuvok says. Indeed. Then B’Elanna suffers a siege of cold; a malfunction in the equipment has affected several people and they are suffering molecular decohesion. They discover that the phenomenon dates from about nine months before. Something scanned their DNA and made duplicates of the crew. Now B’Elanna dies. But she is a duplicate. In fact they are all duplicates, subject to decohesion. They find a Class Y planet whose environment may help, but it is guarded by hostile forces and they have to back off. All are suffering. Chakotay dies. Janeway turns the ship around, to return to the Demon Planet where the duplicates may survive. Janeway dies. Kim takes over as acting captain. They make a time capsule detailing their personal histories. They spy another ship and drop out of warp. And fragment. The other ship is the original Voyager, unaffected. They don’t know what happened to the duplicates. This is painful.

#18 “The Fight” Chakotay hears alien voices in his head that he can’t understand, and it is driving him wild. Flashback to when it started: he was in a holodock boxing simulation, sparring with his opponent, and saw an odd distortion of space. He was distracted; then he got knocked out. And summoned to the bridge: they are encountering chaotic space that shifts about randomly. Seven of Nine says that the Borg encountered a similar phenomenon, and only one of their ships survived it. Then he hears voices describing the boxing match. He suffers sensory tremens, hallucinating in vision and hearing. Chaotic space seems to trigger it; another ship suffered similarly, and was lost. Then aliens communicate with him: they have entered another realm where the two intersect and need to get out. He goes back to the fight, and Kid Chaos has an empty hood. But he manages to understand, and guides the ship out of chaotic space despite the reservations of others.

#19 “Think Tank” They discover a planetoid with substantial deposits of dilithium, but the planetoid explodes before they can get it. The Hazari hail them, demanding surrender. They are bounty hunters, and the Voyager is their objective. Meanwhile the Think Tank offers things the ship needs; in return it wants Seven of Nine. It says it can enable her to realize her full potential, but she declines. Janeway proposes a liaison with the Hazari, as both sides are being manipulated by the Think Tank. The Hazari are the best hunters, and have a fleet here, while the Voyager has the best lure: Seven of Nine. She goes to them, and the Voyager uses her neural synapses to relay a disruptive beam that cripples the Think Tank and allows Voyager to escape with Seven aboard, as she prefers. Acceptance is better than potential, for her.

#20 “Juggernaut” B’Elanna lost her temper and caused mischief with the Doctor. Tuvok takes her into meditation so she can learn to control her temper. They encounter a Malon freighter that was disposing of dangerous waste and is about to explode, destroying everything within three light years. They need to stop it. There’s a legend of waste monsters that show up around contamination. Chakotay leads the dangerous away mission to the freighter, along with B’Elanna, Neelix, and the two Malons. It is ugly work. The creature shows up and kills a Malon. B’Elanna has to fight it off. It’s a contaminated crewman. She knocks it out and saves the mission. The contaminated ship is sent into a star.

#21 “Someone to Watch Over Me” Seven of Nine is observing B’Elanna, studying human mating rituals. B’Elanna takes offense. The Doctor gives Seven a class on human dating, playing the roles of her date. Then he has her try to strike up ant acquaintance with a hologram. Paris makes a bet with the Doctor whether she can handle a date in real life. They sing “You Are My Sunshine” together in a nice duet. I love that duet! Then she goes on a date with a crewman, a lieutenant, she garbed in a dress and with her hair loose. They dance, and she injures him. So the Doctor dances with her and that works better. Then she learns of the bet and is annoyed. The Doctor is ready to tell her how he has come to feel about her, but loses his nerve. So he misses his chance. Ever thus.

#23 “Relativity” Flashback to when Janeway took charge of the Voyager. Then Seven of Nine is there. It must be a holodeck simulation. Or is it? Seven is checking for a bomb, but seems to have been sent to the wrong time. Now she has to determine when. She is beamed back—and dies. They have to send her to a time when she’s alive. Then the ship is affected by temporal anomalies. Time proceeds at different rates in different sections. This messes things up. They have to abandon ship before it comes apart. Indeed, it explodes. It turns out that Seven has been recruited by Captain Braxton of the Relativity, 500 years in the future. She needs to prevent the bomb from being placed, two years in the past. And the saboteur turns out to be Captain Braxton from the future; it seems he had a change of heart later in his life. Then in a time jump Seven meets herself of the past, and tells her to stop Braxton. Now Janeway becomes the time traveler. She solves the problem, and the messed up timelines are eliminated. A mind-bending episode.

#22 “11:59” Actually this should come before the prior episode; I mistook the title for something else. A time warp, perhaps. Janeway stalls in city traffic in winter, in Canton Ohio, I think. She enters a bookstore run by Henry Janeway. An ancestor? It seems that Janteways were instrumental in the development of the space program. The Millennium Gate is a phenomenal project, but they need Henry to sell to clear the area, and he refuses. Kate heads for Florida, then changes her mind and returns to the bookstore. She persuades him to sell, and to reopen the store in the new complex. Exactly how this past sequence meshes with the present Voyager I’m not clear, but it seems that the Millennium project was a key to it. Maybe the project had to be completed for Janeway to have the ship.

PIERS

Jamboree 2019
HI- 

I read Death Storm, by Keith Robinson, a sort of sequel to Forest of Souls, because the situation started in that novel is concluded in this one. It is actually the fifth novel in a different series, Island of Fog Legacies. The protagonists are Travis, who is Hal and Abigail’s son, and Melinda, who is Robbie and Lauren’s daughter. They’re around twelve and eleven years old, respectively, and may become a couple in a few years. They have such strong immune systems that Miss Simone’s shape changing potions don’t last more than two days. That’s actually an advantage, because it means that each time they take the potion, they can become something new. The story starts with news of a horrendous storm made of blue dust. Where it passes, the people are gone. They encounter a creepy old man, Grimfoyle, who says he wants to help them. He does this by taking part of their souls. Then it gets complicated. They need to save the town from the magic of the storm. The thing is, only humans with whole souls are taken by the blue dust, so this makes them immune. But there’s a whole lot more to it than that. It’s actually a plot by the female faun who caused so much mischief twenty years before. She means to eliminate humans, changing them to other forms. Grimfoyle says they need to become something that flies and something that swims. Travis becomes a mothman, and Melinda a mermaid. There’s something about that form that really makes Travis pause, but he’s not sure what it is. I suspect he will figure it out in a few more years, though by then she won’t be in that form. It all makes sense in the end, but there’s a great challenge in the middle. This is another tense story.

I watched The Late Great Planet Earth. It was narrated in Spanish; I had to go to the disc menu and change the language to English. It is narrated by Orson Welles, who tells of the Babyllon exile of the Israelites, and how their holy temple was destroyed and had to be rebuilt three times. Babylon ruled the world, the source of evil. John suffered a vision of the apocalypse; the kings of the world were destined to come to Armageddon to fight. The biblical prophecies are now being fulfilled. The end of the world may be near. Or so the contemporary prophets are eager to claim. This is essentially a religious tract forecasting doom. I am a complete skeptic of religious prophecy, yet ironically I agree: the world is indeed doomed if we do not soon change our ways, and we are not changing our ways. Overpopulation, waste, pollution, ignorance and war are already wiping us out. They say that when Satan comes, the Antichrist, the Beast, he will appear to be an agnostic humanitarian, a good man whom the people will ardently support. How will we know him? His number is 666. He will be struck down, then raised from the dead, a miracle. He will become dictator of the world, and lead us to the end of days. There will be a ten nation confederacy; Israel will sign a pact with it, and this will begin the seven year countdown to the end. Armageddon. So there are the signals. Okay, I am watching.

I watched Knight Club. I got it in 2000 and couldn’t remember whether I’d watched it, so watched it again. Gary is a young unemployed actor who talks his way into an all night party in Los Angeles. Then he gets hired as a bouncer. When a man attacks him he throws him over his back. That impresses the head bouncer, and the job becomes regular. Suddenly he is in contact with all manner of illustrious folk, including sexy women. But there are also drugs and drunks and fights. Then he gets another offer for a fabulous salary. He is good as a doorman, but he gets corrupted by money, power, sex and drugs. He alienates old friends, loses his girlfriend, loses his job, and has trouble getting another. And finally gets shot dead. The moral must be don’t get corrupted.

I watched Bad Teacher. This is humorous wild sexy farce. Elizabeth got dumped by her fiance for good reason, and now has to scratch out a living as a seventh grade teacher. She drinks, does drugs, and is foul mouthed, no model at all for children; in fact she mostly shows movies in class. All she wants is to nab a wealthy man and escape the need to work at all. She is pretty, and seeks a boob job to further enhance her assets. When she washes cars to raise money, her way, she causes two police cars to collide. She even puts out a collection jar for “New Tits.” Another teacher, Amy, resents her, understandably, but doesn’t succeed is messing her up. There’s a remarkable sequence of her dry-humping the man she is after. (I watched the unrated version.) but she does care about her students in her fashion. And in the end she becomes the school guidance counselor, a position for which she is surely qualified.

I watched Sex Tape. When it started they had wild sex all the time. Then came marriage, babies, children, work, and it got squeezed out. After ten years they finally get a night alone—and it doesn’t work. Then they get a bright idea: make a video of them doing every position in the Joy of Sex book. They make a three hour tape, then agree to erase it, but he accidentally sends it out to his wider family and business mailing list. Now how do they get it back, without giving away its content, which the others may not realize is there? They have a wild night, but don’t succeed. They finally conclude that it doesn’t make much difference, because there are so many sex tapes out there already, so it’s okay, maybe. What else is there to conclude?

I watched The Sweetest Thing, third of a trilogy of movies featuring Cameron Diaz. Three girls have fun at parties. Then Christina meets who may be the man of her dreams, Peter. But next morning he has left town to attend his brother’s wedding. So Christina and Courtney drive to attend tho wedding. Courtney needs to use the bathroom, but they wind up in a men’s room. So she tries to pull up her skirt and urinate into a urinal, facing away and bending way over. Then they turn on some kind of shower accidentally and get soaked. So they travel on in bras and panties while they dry. Christina is trying to locate something on the car floor, her damp bottom elevated, when a motorcyclist passes and is wowed. They buy dry clothing at a passing store and are suddenly brightly outfitted. They reach the wedding, and it turns out it is Peter, not his brother, who is getting married. But midst the ceremony the bride says she doesn’t want to marry him, and he doesn’t want to marry her. So they kiss to the break-up. Christina doesn’t know it. Then he seeks her, and explains that he didn’t get married. They work it out.

I read Flying Saucers and Broomsticks by Jason K Albee. As the title suggests, this is a mixture of science fiction and fantasy. Amelia wakes at night to discover weird things happening; it seems that aliens are abducting her sister Molly. Trying to stop that, Amelia falls through an archway and finds herself in a desert. She gamely starts walking. Years pass, and Amelia is caught in a different realm, enrolled in a magical cooking school, still determined to rescue her sister if she can. Serious magic can be done in cooking if the right ingredients are found. Amelia has a certain eye for magic phenomena that others can’t see, which helps. Then it gets complicated, and she winds up in space, fighting aliens between cooking classes. There is plenty of action here, and the trade-off between cooking and space conflict is unusual, but I am concerned that the narrative seems to lack emotion; we see the events but don’t properly feel them. I understand this is intended as a juvenile; maybe young readers will be satisfied with a pretty wild story.

I watched The 2 Sides of The Bed, in Spanish with English subtitles. Well I watched part of it; I discovered that however clever the dialogue might be, it didn’t come across well translated and in subtitles. So I cut my losses and quit about 45 minutes into it. It is supposed to be about two men with two women, the men not knowing that the women are in love with each other. But I didn’t get that far.

I watched the Discover video How the Earth was Made: The Rockies. They were once twice their present height, rivaling the Himalayas of today. There are clam and ammonite fossils on them, which means this ground was under the sea, seventy million years ago. Now not only are they higher, they are tilted at sixty degrees. What caused that? Plate tectonics: the drifting of continents. Continents collided, so that the land buckled. They can tell how high by leaf fossils; leaves with jagged edges grow in colder weather than those with smooth edges. Higher is colder. Thus they know how high the mountains were at the time those trees grew on them. There were also huge volcanic eruptions depositing deep layers of ash, like blankets of snow. Then three million years ago came the Ice Age, when glaciers scraped the surface, eroding the valleys at geologic lighting speed. That ended ten thousand years ago: an eye-blink. Now a gigantic rift is opening up, the Rio Grande Rift Valley, advancing northward. The area is still rapidly changing, though we won’t be around to see it; it is as if we are at a frozen moment in an eternal process. I find it fascinating.

I read Radley’s Home for Horny Monsters, by Annabelle Hawthorne. If you like sexy fantasy, and I do, this is one great read. Some novels have virtually no sex, while others have sex but no real story. I like to have both together. This has plenty of both, and I enjoyed it throughout. Protagonist Mike has inherited an estate, and goes to learn just what is there. Monsters, in a manner, but they tend to be female, shapely, sexy, and expressive. When he takes a bath, the water spirit Naia manifests and eagerly has sex with him, her way of relating. Then he encounters Tink, the goblin girl, who relates similarly, only she’s small and tight, so they both have to struggle to get him all the way into her for the culmination. And Cecilia the banshee, who accepts sex rather than death for him. And Abella the stone gargoyle, who softens for his intimate embrace. Together they guard the premises. But there are others who want the estate, handsome women, and they use magic to nullify the guardians and ensorcell Mike. He fights them off sexually, and finally manages to prevail despite seemingly having no chance. For example, one puts him to sleep, and he can’t wake up until he has sex with her in the dream, when she can take his soul along with his orgasm. She can assume any form, and tries to seduce him in the form of Naia, but he catches on, I think, when she begs him to fuck her in the ass, and he knows the water spirit does not have an ass in that sense. If he declines to oblige her, she’ll wait years if necessary; he can’t escape. Only by making her climax instead of himself can he defeat her, and she is savvy and not about to allow that. He finally succeeds, essentially by outsmarting her, and his pleasant future here seems assured. So sex and action are integral, and it’s a fun story from beginning to end. I loved it, and recommend it for horny, I mean regular readers with a similar taste.

I watched Robot Revolution. A lady police officer, Constable Hawkins, and her android partner make a routine check on a high-rise apartment building. She wears a black left eye patch, and the android looks like a humanoid robot. They question a resident; then an armed man and woman come and there is an altercation and the visitors are killed. An elevator malfunctions, trapping a man. Two girls smoke a drug stick, and get knocked out. There turn out to be nano-robots, miniature robots, macroscopic, that can take over a human body and operate it. They control anything with a microchip. So the lady cop shoots the main control of the floor, meaning the equipment can no longer be controlled because it is inoperative. The next step is to disconnect the whole building from the power grid. They do it, but the nano plague is already spreading. The lady cop leads them down and out of the building. On the way they have to fight off the monster robot cleaning machine. They do, but it takes out the android. Or does it? The issue is evidently unsettled. Is the government behind the nano-robots? This is a low-budget effort.

I watched the Discover video Incredible Mysteries of the World: Atlantis. Legend says that 12,000 years ago there was an advanced civilization that crashed. Could it be true? There are six sites that have been called Atlantis. The legend has been told all over the world throughout history, and endlessly embellished. Plato told it, having heard it from his grandfather. It prospered, but then there were tremors, violent earthquakes, and a volcanic eruption that finally destroyed it. Other legends, such as that of the city of Troy, have been verified as true, but what about this one? Malta has prehistoric ruins; was it flooded by the sinking of Atlantis? What about Thera, near Greece? That volcanic eruption was one of the most phenomenal of history. Did it happen 9,000 years before Plato? No, 900 years, but that could be a typo. Thera had been a flourishing community before the eruption. And yes, I agree: Thera was surely what Plato referred to. But was it a civilization more advanced than others of its time? I doubt it. The legends, like the measurements of time, may be inflated ten fold.

I watched The Arrival. Zane, a radio astronomer, picks up a cosmic noise that just might signal alien intelligence. 42 seconds and it’s gone, and it does not repeat. He turns the tape over to his boss. Then things start going wrong. His boss says there was no signal. The recording disappears, and people get the backup tape and that too disappears. They pretend Zane imagined it, and he is fired. His girlfriend Char is transferred out. His partner turns up dead. Something is definitely up, and he means to find out what. He fashions an antenna array, and finds the same signal—but this time it’s from Earth. Impossible—unless they are talking. He goes to Mexico, and a wild accident almost kills him. He finds a man who seems to be tracking him, corners the man—who then leaps impossibly up to the roof and escapes. The aliens are no longer far away; they’re here. He meets Ilana Green, a young woman in similar business, and she’s getting the same brutal treatment. Deadly scorpions are put in her hotel room. So much for her. Zane sees a large antenna rise from underground, signaling something. He finds his way into the underground hanger and sees an alien with backward knees and prehensile hair, becoming a lovely woman. He manages to escape. But they are still after him, masquerading as people. Char shows up, but he doesn’t trust her. Then she sees an alien attack him, and realizes that he was not exaggerating. Now she’s on his side. He manages to freeze the aliens with gas, but their weird sphere whirls and generates dangerous effects. He and Char escape, but this is clearly not the end. The aliens say they are merely speeding up the destructive process that humans started. Earth is doomed regardless. They may be right. This is one hell of a disaster movie.

I watched 2035, Forbidden Dimensions. Jack Slade can time travel. But when he goes to the year 2035 he finds himself beside a corpse in a post apocalyptic wasteland. Doctors seem to run things, but they seem as crazy as the damaged people. There are flashbacks to other times, perhaps showing how this situation came about. Extended scenes showing not much. Detective Giger interviews him. Slade gets gorily gutted and beheaded. Another sequence sees him restored without explanation, and bloodily attacked again. In another scene he gets tortured by electric shocks. He encounters a grisly zombie woman. A man leads him through a weird maze of effects, then tells him to run, run run. He finds a nude woman he has been looking for. She kisses him and things go wild. And he dies of a heart attack. An odd low-budget effort, with its surprises, but overall not really comprehensible.

I watched Pernicious. Three pretty girls visit Thailand to teach English for the summer. Black haired Julia, the blondes Alex and Rachel. It is nice and scenic. But this is a horror movie, so you know it won’t stay nice. The house is nice, but has a life size golden metal statue of a naked eight year old girl child that is a bit eerie. They go into town and pick up three boys. The blonde is flirtatious; the black-haired Julia is far more cautious. Then visions of horror as the girls slowly and bloodily torture the boys, stabbing flesh, plucking out eyeballs, tongue, teeth. Killing them, licking off the blood. Horrible dreams, maybe a product of the local alcoholic drink. They they discover that the golden statue has been stolen. They call, and are told there is no statue. Then in town they see a little girl that age who leads them to the countryside and a weird establishment, where an old woman tells them the life girl is a spook, not real. They learn that a child was murdered, the body then cased in gold like a statue, maybe to protect the soul, per Thai custom. This may be what they are encountering. They start seeing the statue at odd moments, such as when they are trying to sleep, or take a bath. It appears and disappears. Then the old woman gets gorily murdered by a hooded grown female. The girls wake to find mud footprints leading to or from their house. They learn that the prior occupants were a family of man, woman pregnant with a son, and daughter. The woman was ill, so to save her and his son the man gave the daughter, Vanida, in sacrifice. But the woman hung herself, so the sacrifice was for nothing. They made an amulet to prevent the little girl’s soul from seeking revenge. But now she is free, and seeking that revenge. The old man gives the young women the protective amulet. Then the young man sacrifices himself to end it, to set right the wrong. But the ghost child still seeks revenge. It is not yet clear why she blames the three Americans, who had nothing to do it the murder. Then it seems she animates Alex, who then goes after the other two girls, to get their blood for the sacrifice. Because they have everything the little girl ever wanted. She drinks their blood and smears it on herself. Then the vengeful spirit lets her go, horrified, for just long enough for her to summon her boyfriend. Then, re-possessed, she will torture him to death. The revenge will continue.

I watched Starship Rising. Almost inaudible prologue, and the ensuing dialogue remains faint, with loud background music. The action seems jumpy. Aliens have conquered the planet. Now the Federation governs. A woman is abducted; a man is raping her when another woman knocks him out. Later the rebels need a pilot. John Worthy can fly a ship if he joins the uprising. A woman gives birth. A couple has somewhat violent sex. A spaceship lands on a planet. A pretty coworker kisses Worthy. The enemy gives Worthy an ultimatum: surrender or his mother and sister will be killed. He hesitates, and his mother is killed. They are afoot on a barren world when flying machines attack. They escape. A planet is attacked. Explosions all over. People die. Worthy and the woman kiss again. Good guy fights bad guy hand to hand. Bad guy says mother and sister weren’t really killed; it was an emulsation. Good guys finally win—I think. It is a stage in a lager war. To be continued.

I watched Devil’s Tower. A guy gets fresh with a girl, and she tears out his throat with her fingers, but she doesn’t seem to be a vampire. Sarah moves into a new apartment. It’s not much; trash lines the hallways. She has been abused, and this represent a new chance at life. Her mother is a vicious bitch. Sarah collects what meager belongings she has and moves in. She defends herself with a frying pan. Every so often a watching person appears on the TV, and causes that person in life to do horrible things. Sarah appears on it briefly, and goes briefly crazy. Something is viciously controlling them. Her new friend Sid is alarmed. Weird, bloody, and sexy things keep happening. People are brutally killed. It becomes a free-for-all brawl. There isn’t really a resolution. Not my kind of movie.

I read An Atheist’s History of Belief, by Matthew Kneale. This is not his own belief, but that of the world, religion. As an agnostic atheist I relate strongly to what he is saying; he truly exposes the foibles of religion. He explains how modern man developed a mental ability unknown to other creatures, the Theory of Mind, which is the ability to put yourself into the mind of someone or something else, see things from his (generic “his,” meaning his, hers, its) perspective, understanding how he might see things. Why did that ability develop? Surely because it aided our survival, and in the end made us the dominant species on Earth. If you are hunting an ox, it helps to have a notion how the ox thinks, anticipate its decisions, and be there for the kill. If you encounter a warrior from another tribe, your insight into his mind may help you avoid getting killed. If you spy a highly desirable mate, it may enable you to win that prize. Further, it enables the whole art of storytelling, which I, as a professional storyteller, believe is the very foundation of what makes us human. We put our minds into the characters, and see what they see, hear what they hear, feel what they feel. A story could begin: Joe Schmoe walks down the street. He sees shiny new car, a shaggy growling mongrel dog, and a lovely nude girl. You have a pretty good notion of his thoughts, don’t you? You’d like to drive that car, avoid that dog, and get close to that girl, because of your Theory of Mind. I could continue for some time on the impact of storytelling, but let’s move on. The Theory also enables religion, because you can enter the supposed mind of the storm that means to blow you away, the forest fire that wants to toast you, or the spirit of the ox you killed, that means to extract revenge. You appreciate the need for supernatural help to fend off vengeful spirits. You need a spirit on your side, a powerful one. You also need assistance from the spirits of the crops you are growing, so they will live long and prosper and feed you well. You need, ultimately, God. The author traces the signals of religion from places like Catalhuyuk, which I wrote about in GEODYSSEY; the cave painters, ancient atifacts, Stonehenge, and so on. The signals of the Theory are everywhere.

Then on into actual religion. Such as the biblical Book of Daniel, which he says was a forgery, adding a dream of foretelling the future. The dream was remarkably accurate—because the fakery was in the dating of it, pretending that actual history had been prophesied. It concluded with a bit of real prophesy: that after a period of non-violent Jewish resistance the Greeks who were oppressing them would be dealt with by the angels, and a new golden age would begin, ruled by the people of Yahweh. It didn’t happen, but the piece had impact that continues to this day, because people liked the idea of the end of the world and the final rewarding of the Chosen Ones—themselves, of course. He goes on to cover, sketchily, the whole of religion through the ages, concluding with the Scientologists and their trillion year insight into the past. He does it with a straight face, but you can see how ludicrous it is. I loved this book, but I suspect religious folk will not be so much amused. Maybe a devotee should write a similarly amusing refutation, A Theist’s History of Non-belief.

I watched Alien Dawn. Suddenly alien machines attack the world and there is chaos. The machines are slow flying things, and there are also three legged land giants. Targeted people are blown into dust. People fleeing them start fighting each other for simple things like food. Mercy killing of the seriously wounded. A woman, Melissa, and two men struggle to survive, then to fight back, though it seems hopeless. The men argue incessantly. They meet others, and head together for Paradise City. They make bombs. Melissa signals a three legged giant machine, getting it to chase her, so that it steps on a bomb, loses a leg, and crashes down. Their first victory! Others join them. Writhing nests of tentacled things consume screaming people. These must be the creatures that built the machines. The resistance becomes more effective. They are stopping the machines. But they will have to keep fighting until every alien thing is gone.

I watched Navy Seals V Demons. Mutilated bodies start showing up in Jack County, Texas. So the Navy recruits some out of luck Seals who were once a team to tackle the demons, off the record. Three of them cycle down. They visit a bar, where the barmaid shows how sexily she can dance. When a biker gang leader accosts her, the Seal takes him down, and his friends, impressively. Now they respect him. The Seals meet up with the Demons, and find them supernaturally strong. The local padre explains that his church is the only place left where demons can’t enter. The demons need virgin blood to purify themselves so that they can enter and destroy this last sanctuary on earth. So the girls stay here at night. The Seals make an alliance with the Bikers to tackle the menace. They raid the Demons’ hangout. They fight the Demons. With the aid of the Cross they manage to kill the chief Demon. The threat is over.

I watched Curse of the Dragon Slayer. Bloodshed the Orc fights an elf girl, Nemmit, who has glowing blue eyes when she fights. (Not sure of the spelling of the names.) She finally beheads him. Keltus learns that the God of the Undead will soon awaken. He must stop the orc before he sets free the God of the Undead. Then Nemmit gets arrested when she comes for promised payment for the orc’s head. Keltus has her freed in his company, promising to help her get rid of the cursed mark on her left arm. He then frees a bound warrior, Coliman, and the three move on in an uneasy truce, having a common enemy. They get waylaid, and Nemmit is captured, but Coliman rescues her. Then Keltus rescues them both. The go to break up a demonic ceremony involving the sacrifice of maidens. Keltus tackles a fiery four horned dragon. Nemmit dies, but Keltus draws on new magical power to bring her back, her curse gone. So all is well with the three, who have earned real respect for each other. Together they have thwarted the evil God of the Undead and the world is saved.

I watched March of the Penguins. The Emperor Penguins leap from the water and start marching seventy miles to their mating place. They have been feeding all summer—our winter—and are fat birds, at least night now. When they tire of walking they skid along on their bellies. There are fewer males than females, and the ladies may quarrel over desired males. The males don’t seem to mind. In due course they pair off and engage in slow courtship and lovemaking. Winter intensifies, and they huddle together to stay warm. They put the eggs on their feet and sit on them. The mother must go forage and eat, so entrusts the egg to the father. Some lose their eggs. The father safeguards the egg for more than two months. He must go without food for more than four months. The mother makes the return trip to the sea, in colder weather, and having lost about a third of her weight; she is starving. The temperature is now 80 degrees below zero, and the wind can be 100 miles per hour. The warmest place is in the center of the flock, but of course not everyone can be there. The females must search for the new shoreline, because ice has formed where the old one was; they can take days looking. Finally they find water. They feed on fish, krill, and squid. The males struggle to stay alive, and some don’t make it. It is dark almost all the time. Survival is truly a community effort. Sea predators, like sea lions, pursue the mothers. But July they make the walk back, in darkness. Finally spring comes and the chicks hatch. But the worst is yet to come. The chicks sit on their fathers’ feet. He feeds the chick with a milky substance from his beak, but that lasts only a day or two; if the mothers don’t return soon, the chicks will die. The mothers arrive, and sound off; the fathers recognize their voices and answer. The mother sees her chick for the first time. The chicks are passed to the mothers. The father and chicks sing to each other, so they will recognize each other when the fathers return. The males have lost half their weight, and must walk 70 miles; some don’t make it, which may be why there are fewer males than females. The chicks learn to walk alone. Mothers and daughters walk together. A storm comes, and many chicks will not survive it. They learn to huddle for warmth. Flying predators attack the chicks. In August the mothers must depart to feed again, leaving the chicks behind. The fathers return. By September the ice thins and cracks, allowing the parents to go back and forth more frequently. The parents will finally separate for the last time. The chicks will be on their own, growing and strengthening. In December the chicks go to sea, swimming and foraging for themselves. They will live at sea for four years, until they too will return to land and march, restarting the cycle. What a life!

I watched King Arthur Legend of the Sword. Evil Mage Mordred marches on Camelot. Giant elephants bash down walls. Townsmen flee. There’s a line of men to try to draw the sword Excalibur from the stone; Arthur draws it and collapses. He know nothing about the legend; he is the bastard child of a whore. He is arrested and slated to be executed while being ridiculed. He doesn’t want to cooperate with those who want to make him fight. When he touches the sword he sees supernatural monsters, flaming steeds, dark knights. He doesn’t like it. There’s an awful lot of waiting around. The lady mage tells him that the venom of a snake will show him things he doesn’t want to see, but he needs its protection. The snake bites him, and it is so. The bad guy treacherously kills his own daughter, I’m not clear why. At the end Arthur fights the evil spirit and defeats him in one of the few good action sequences in the movie. Then Arthur takes power as the new King. The movie has its moments, but overall is somewhat tedious.

I watched Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Three years after the original theme park was destroyed by escaping dinosaurs, the island’s dormant volcano returns to life. Now they have to rescue the dinosaurs from another extinction. A mission to fetch DNA samples gets caught; their man on the ground barely catches the rope ladder descending from the helicopter—when a mosasaur leaps up and gulps him down. Now the question: should the government intervene to save the dinosaurs, or let them be re-extincted? The government decides to stay clear. Claire receives a call. She meets Eli, who says a private corporation has prepared a new sanctuary, but they need an expert. Maybe Claire can convince that man, Owen, whom she used to date. They especially want to save Blue, a new species, the most intelligent of the dinosaurs, but that will be a challenge. They go with Zia and Franklin to capture key dinosaurs for the transport. But the soldiers on the mission tend to be trigger happy and mess things up. Blue is shot, and needs treatment. Meanwhile the volcano is leaking lava, working up to a full eruption. Owen, Franklin, and Claire barely escape. They have to get blood from a carnisor to help Blue. The child Maisie overhears men plotting to sell the dinosaurs, but her grandfather won’t listen to her warning. Then Grandfather dies. The auction for the dinosaurs proceeds. This of course is not the way it was supposed to be. The main attraction is the new Indoraptor, the ultimate carnovore. The bad soldier collects teeth. He shoots it wish anesthetic dart, clips out a tooth, and gets chomped himself. But now the indoraptor is loose. It chases Owen, Claire, and Maisie. It is quite a chase. Much smaller Blue attacks it, distracting it long enough. Then Maisie presses the button that frees them from the building. It has turned out that Maisie herself is a genetically made creature, so she feels for the dinosaurs. Now they are loose on the mainland. Blue departs after showing she remembers Owen. There will surely be more, in due course.

I watched Paddington 2. Paddington is a little talking bear living among human folk in London. His aunt Lucy Bear is turning 100, and Paddy wants to buy a fancy pop-up book for her, so he gets a job as a barber to earn the money. Naturally he messes it up. So he tries being a window cleaner. He has a unique messed up way of doing it. Then he gets a job making marmalade for a prisoners’ meal, as he has a special formula. Meanwhile we learn more about the pop-up book, which is very special, as it’s twelve scenes of London may be clues to where a treasure is hidden. The marmalade is a big success with the prisoners, who then remember other old good recipes they can make. But now Paddington is in prison, where he can’t clear his name. They stage a breakout, and fly a balloon away. Paddington catches a train. His friends catch another. This leads to about as wild a chase as may be imagined, with the prisoners saving the day from an airplane. All finally ends well. The story continues during the credits, showing the dispositions of key characters, good and bad.

I finally completed my viewing of Star Trek Voyager, and it is my favorite so far. I like feisty Captain Janeway, and urbane Chakotay, and temperamental B’Elanna, and shapely Seven of Nine. The other series had women in tight costumes, but Seven really carries it best. I think bringing her in and showing her slow humanization strengthened the series, and my favorite incident is when the Doctor and Seven sing the duet “You Are My Sunshine.” Another I like is when obviously alien figures playing roles in the Holodeck animation, seriously preach the Nazi gospel of the pure master race. I started 2018 watching original Star Trek episodes, and proceeded on through the several series, liking each series better than the last. In 2019 I will be watching Enterprise, and the animated series, and a non-Star Trek series recommended to me, Orville. Of course I understand that another Star Trek series is running now; eventually I’ll have to catch up with that. Stay tuned.

Incidental notes: in Brazil they have discovered a colossal complex of more that 200 million termite mounds, covering more than 88,000 square miles, dating back as long as 4,000 years. They can be up to ten feet high and thirty feet wide. The amount of soil excavated is equivalent to four thousand pyramids of Giza. All this accomplished by termites only half an inch long. Plants do more than we may think. A scientist suspects that plants can learn and remember. She set up a fan so that the wind blew toward where light would be. Soon they learned to follow that signal, and grow where the fan went. They have no brain; the entire plant is the brain. Rats are social creatures, helping each other, exchanging favors. When a rat-sized robot on wheels was there, the rats helped it too. Maybe it is similar to the way humans get to like dolls or machines. Cave art sometimes shows outlines of hands. Some of those hands show missing fingers. Does this represent sacrifice or accident? Or merely fingers bent over to make the effect? We wish we knew. A study finds that most folk are okay with a person paying a lifelike humanoid robot for sex. Indeed, robot brothels are being set up. They have found that bouncier running shoes lead to more leg injuries, not less, because the springiness causes runners to change their pace. There are ways to halt global warming, but they require daily sacrifices, like using less fossil fuel, or eating less meat, that few people actually want to do. So it is my regretful belief that the world really will go to hell, in the sense of becoming too hot for long term survival. The charity RIP Medical Debt uses its money to pay off medical debts so that people can get on with their lives. But of course if America had the kind of medical insurance other nations do, there would be no medical debt. Green burials are gaining popularity: no embalming, no concrete-lined caskets, no big headstones. just let nature absorb the remains as it does for any other creature. Use it or lose it: if you use your brain late in life, you are likely to live longer and better. I have been doing that all along, and at age 84 I seem to have most of my mind with me. I also eat right and exercise. Speaking of which, an article in NEW SCIENTIST says that the benefits of dancing go far beyond enjoyment or exercise. People are born to move, and to move rhythmically. When they dance, their attitudes towards one another are better, their creative thinking improves, and their mental skills remain later in life. Damn! That’s one thing I have not been doing. Women are still underpaid, and it’s worse than thought. Theoretically they make 20% less than men for similar work, but a more careful long-term study indicates it is more like 50% less. And we call ourselves an advanced culture? Workers are starting to improve the ethics of tech giants. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple have felt the impact, and are starting to reform. The human epoch, starting about 11,000 years ago, is called the Anthropocene. Something about the first four letters of the word appeals to me; eventually I may figure it out. Too bad this epoch has not been kinder to the natural world. And the spacecraft New Horizons that gave us our closest view of Planet Pluto three and a half years ago is now passing Ultima Thule, four billion miles from Earth. Light takes ten hours to reach us from there. It’s just a tiny ball of ice, I think only about twenty miles in diameter, but we should soon know much more about it.

Semi-personal notes: we value rain, here on the tree farm, and there isn’t always enough of it. But normally dry Dismember changed that. We had two rainy fronts come through, bringing almost ten inches between them, and the month is our best of the year and highest Dismember in our thirty years here. The TAMPA BAY TIMES revised its comics pages, deleting in its typical fashion two of my favorites, “Holy Mole” and “Lio.” Maybe the problem is that you need an IQ above 85 to appreciate those. Where the latter used to be is now “Breaking Cat News,” which I suspect you need an IQ under 85 to appreciate. It has been an interesting year for tame plants. Deer had eaten down our Turk’s Cap Hibiscus so much that though they used make a hundred flowers a season, last year they made none. Once after a freeze I was removing dead stalks and discovered I had just pulled out one that had new little roots growing. So I hastily replanted it and took care of it. This was the only one that managed to survive the deer. So this year Daughter Cheryl and I put up a children’s climbing dome, and buttressed it with chicken wire, and that lone Turk’s Cap sent out new shoots from the root and flowered. We also planted new single hibiscus flowers, and they were lovely, until maybe caterpillars denuded them; I say maybe because I never saw one in the act. Only one plant survived intact; another is trying to recover, and two seem to be dead. I spread Sevin powder around them, but maybe too late to save them. Our Christmas Cactus had flourished in our pool enclosure for years, until a raccoon or opossum got in and wiped it out. We managed to save only fragments, which we grew indoors on the kitchen window sill, but indoors is not great for that plant to flower. So this year I transplanted the three plants back outside, protected by a total chicken wire enclosure, and thus protected they produced about sixty flowers, a real success. And I discovered a small Mulberry sapling growing about two feet from the house, where it couldn’t stay. Probably a bird perched on our 40 foot TV antenna—we don’t have cable or satellite—and pooped, and the seed grew from that. Years ago I found one and transplanted it to a safe place; it is is now a fair size young tree. So I transplanted the new one, regretting the damage done to the orange roots in the process. It had eleven leaves, lost seven, but today four remain in good order and it should survive to become a second nice tree. So that should be another success. Those who wonder what I do when not writing, reading, or watching videos, well, caring for local plants is a significant part of it. They are living things too, just trying to make their way, and I care about them as I do about animals. We have many palmettos around our house and yard, and they are Sable Palmettos, which I leave alone. So what? you ask. Well, that just happens to be the State Tree of Florida. I think of them a wickerwork basket plants, because of the way their fronds impressively cross-hatch around the trunk. Eventually they shed those and become pretty much indistinguishable from traditional palms. I’d like to find a book that identifies all the palms and palmettos; they are fascinating.

Next month I will start writing Xanth #45 A Tryst of Fate. We’re working on getting the prior three published; it should happen any year now. The big Xanth movie that went bust really messed up the schedule. Yes, movie interest continues to flirt with Xanth, but like a cruel tease it has never solidified.

I conclude with a question I received from “Endev42” http://www.endev42.com: “What is the meaning of Life?” This is problematical, because I doubt life has any inherent meaning. Life is merely a process, like fire burning or a river flowing; it has meaning only if we live for meaning, and many don’t. It is evident that I was not among the first or second round of folks they questioned, or the first hundred or thousand; I am a late afterthought. So here is my formal answer to their question form, which I suspect will not much resemble their other responses:

What is your religious affiliation? Agnostic
What is the meaning of life? Life has no inherent meaning. It is a process, like Fire, or a River, or Thought. When that process is complete, there is only meaningless refuse. It is like asking “Is this statement false?”
Life has meaning only if we live for meaning. Few do. We can try to shape our refuse into something worthwhile, at least in our fancy, by calling it Accomplishment. Such as a changed environment or a beneficial philosophy. We know processes by their refuse. Fire leaves ashes, or a cleansed environment. A river leaves flooded devastation, or the Grand Canyon. Thought generated this statement, which may be false.
The meaning of life may be false.

PIERS

Voyager

Season 5, #24 “Warhead” Harry Kim is at the helm, assisted by the female Jenkins, night shift. He gets a distress call. He beams to the planet with the Doctor and a crewman. They find a machine sending the automated signal. It asks why it can’t see, or feel its arms or legs. Apparently it doesn’t know it is a machine. It is damaged, and suffers memory loss. They conclude it is a weapon of mass destruction. They try to transfer its intelligence to a holo like the Doctor, but the bomb takes over the doctor himself and threatens to destroy them if they don’t cooperate with it. They talk with it, and learn that its orders were rescinded. But it doesn’t trust this, and decides to proceed to destroy its target. Kim talks it into changing its target, now that it understands that the war is over. It beams to space and destroys the other missiles. But this was one close call.

#25 “Equinox Part 1” Flying things are attacking the science ship the Equinox. The Voyagergoes to the rescue. They beam aboard and find a few survivors in the wreckage, including Captain Ransom. Another officer is one B’Elanna date ten years ago. The other ship is stranded. They make common cause, but the creatures are still attacking and all may not be quite as the other captain says. They want to get home, and may be willing to sacrifice theVoyager to accomplish that. It turns out they were using the aliens to facilitate their journey home, and the aliens were trying to protect themselves. Now they’re trying to do the same to the personnel of the Voyager. They take off, leaving the Voyager to fight off the aliens. To be continued.

Season 6, #1 “Equinox Part II” Really strange ships, like giant insects, introduce season 6. Betrayed by the ship they tried to help, they must fight off the alien attack. The Equinox has captured Seven of Nine, who refuses to cooperate with them, and a copy of the Doctor. Ransom deletes the Doctor’s ethical subroutine so he will operate on Seven to obtain her codes, though this will destroy her mind. Janeway is angry, and means to hunt Ransom down. Chakotay disagrees, but follows her orders, until she relieves him of command. They ambush the Equinox away team on a planet and capture it, but it refuses to cooperate. Tuvok objects, but Janeway refuses to change her course. She talks with the aliens, and agrees to deliver the Equinox to them if they cease their attacks. Ransom is relieved of duty. The Equinox is destroyed, but Ransom survives on the planet. They capture several surviving members of the crew and will take them home, but as crewmen, not as officers. This was one rough engagement, ethically as well as physically.

#2 “Survival Instinct” The Voyager is taking shore leave time at a planet. A trader brings Seven of Nine a set of Borg synaptic relays. This is some kind of campaign whose object is not clear, but it could be a Borg plot to recover Seven. Raiders try to abduct her, and are fought off. The units are Two Three, and Four of Nine, others in Seven’s group. Eight years ago she forced them to return to the Borg collective. She refuses to make that mistake again. They are free, though it seems they do not have long to live.

#3 “Barge of the Dead” B’Elanna gets shaken up in the stuttle; it picked up a Klingon artifact. Then it leaks blood that vanishes. Is she hallucinating? Tuvok thinks it is a psychological manifestation of her objection of her Klingon heritage. Other visions occur. She finds herself on the Barge of the Dead, her soul being ferried to hell. She tries to fight her way clear, and wakes back on the ‘Voyager; she’s been in a coma throughout. So the Doctor put her into a trance that duplicates the conditions that sett her off before, and she’s back in the Klingon realm, on the Barge of the Dead. She talks with her Klingon mother Miral. She takes Miral’s place, trying to save her mother. They try to bring her out of it, but it only modifies the vision. Until at last she does wake, having perhaps rejected the violence in her soul.,

#4 “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy” The Doctor has a vision sequence of him singing while saving Tuvok from his mating siege. A Borg sphere attacks. Borg units assimilate other members of the crew. The Doctor takes charge and destroys the sphere. Comes out of his daydream and goes into another. Pig men are trying a sneak attack; they are the ones behind this. The Doctor is now in continuous daydream mode. He paints a duplicate Seven nude. A dream B’Elanna comes on to him while the real B’Elanna watches. The alien Hierarchy thinks the Doctor commands the Voyager. So Janeway sets it up so that the Doctor does seem to be in charge, to fool them. He says to activate the photonic cannon, a mythical weapon the aliens think is real. They retreat. The crown has a ceremony to honer him for his performance, this time not a daydream. But Seven tells him not to expect her to pose for him.

#5 “Alice” They discover a junkyard of ships and pieces of ships. Among other things they trade for Alice, a special small ship in need of repair. She responds directly to mental commands and seems to be conscious. Paris works on her. Alice assumes human form, a pretty girl who tries to persuade him to depart with her. Then Alice tries to kill B’Elanna. Alice takes Paris to space. It becomes a struggle between Alice and B’Elnna. Alice wants him and freedom with him being a part of her. The little ship is destroyed and Paras comes out of his waking nightmare.

#6 “Riddles” Neelix and Tuvok are on a mission on the Delta Flyer. Something rays Tuvok and wounds him. It may be the Ba’Neth, a highly secretive species. Tuvox is unconscious in sick bay. Neelix tries to get through to him, and somehow succeeds. But he still doesn’t talk. Finally he does, but his memory is foggy and his convalescence is slow. Seven suggests that Janeway helped her not by restoring her to the Borg but by helping her to become something new. So Neelix tries that with Tuvok. Now Tuvok can smile, and turns out to be a fine chef. He makes a pantry design that emulates a cloaking frequency. Now Janeway is able to bargain with the Ba’Neth. Now they can restore Tuvok, but he doesn’t want to be restored; he’d rather have fun. But he agrees, and returns to his normal cold self. Yet now he does have a thin streak of illogic.

#7 “Dragon’s Teeth” There has been an accident, and folk must put themselves to sleep for five years, to start again when it passes. I note how most aliens, including these, are totally human except in their heads. Then to the Voyager, sucked into a subspace corridor midst debris. Aliens attack, the Turei, and they hide on a highly radioactive planet 900 years dead. They revive a sleeper, a Vaadwaur, and with his help scare off the attackers. They have access to numerous space tunnels that could significantly help the Voyager move toward home. But they mean to betray the Voyager. Seven and Neelix catch on, and the Voyager escapes. But this may not be the end of it.

#8 “One Small Step” Near planet Mars, ancient Earth history 2032: something appears in space and closes rapidly on the ship. John Kelly sees it. Then on Voyager signals get mixed up; Seven is upgrading the system. Then hey encounter a graviton ellipse, a rare phenomenon. Chakotay, Seven, and Paris take the Delta Flyer into the ellipse. Chtakotay is determined to recover the ancient module despite the risk. They find the old Mars module, tractor it, and depart, barely in time to avoid a collision with a dark matter asteroid. But they remain locked in the anomaly. Seven beams to the module to obtain a distributor they need. Meanwhile she receives the ancient captain’s last transmission. She gets the distributor and they escape with the downloaded recording. They commit Kelly’s body to space with due honors.

#9 “The Voyager Conspiracy” Naomi wants to help Seven of Nine but has to depart. An alien is experimenting with a catapult that might hurl a spaceship a thousand light years. Alien fleas are infecting things. Seven is suspicious of the technology, and makes a case to Chakotay that Janeway has a conspiracy to establish a presence in the Delta quadrant. Then she tells Janeway that Chokatay is conspiring to take over. Janeway and Chakotay get together and realize that something is going on. They trust each other. Seven is malfunctioning, paranoid, maybe from the fleas. Janeway finally talks Seven into trusting her, and her malfunction is fixed.

#10 “Pathfinder” Lt. Reginald Barclay, once of the Enterprise, now of Earth, is trying to establish communication with the Voyager, but his idea is rejected. He talks with Deanna, a psychologist, frustrated because no one believes in him. He makes a holodeck simulation of the Voyager and tries to send a message to it via a micro wormhole. He finally succeeds and they do establish brief contact, that may indicate future contacts. It is a phenomenal breakthrough. The Voyager sends its history to Earth, and is encouraged. There may be more, in due course.

#11 “Fair Haven” Paris and Kim are in a holodeck simulation of a quaint nineteenth century Irish town, Fair Haven. Then the ship encounters an energy wave it must ride out. Thus the holodeck setting, maintained full time and folk can wander in and out whenever they want. Janeway visits, likes a man, so has him modified to be more interesting and not married. It becomes a romance. She departs, and he is heartbroken. He loves her, but he’s only a hologram. But she may visit him again.

#12 “Blink of an Eye” They visit a planet, but their presence generates disruptions. The Voyager must depart, but is locked in orbit. Time there is accelerated, so that when the Doctor beams down, a few seconds become three years for him. Soon they achieve space technology, and reach Voyager. They board, and the personnel are frozen—until they adapt to the slower time frame. The woman dies, but the man survives. He returns to the planet to tell them what he has learned, and in due course two ships come up and tractor the Voyager out of orbit so it can resume its journey home. But their visitor is now centuries out of his own time frame.

#13 “Virtuoso” There’s a minor collision with another ship, and the Qomar take several of the others aboard to treat their injuries. The Doctor sings as he works, and they are intrigued, not being familiar with music. Thus the Doctor becomes the performer. He revels in being a celebrity. He wants to stay with the Qomar. Janeway allows it, though she has reservations. Seven of Nine is not pleased. Then Tincoo creates a superior replica of the Doctor. Now she no longer needs him. It’s a comedown. So he stays on the Voyager. But Seven says she’s a fan of his. That is a considerable consolation.

#14 “Memorial” Paris return from a successful away mission. B’Elanna has made a 1950s TV replica for him, complete with vintage programs and commercials. He loves it to the exclusion of his attention to her. He finds himself in the battle action sequence. B’Elanna wakes him; it was a dream. Meanwhile Kim, who was also on the away team mission, suffers collapse; the Doctor suspects he was overworked on the away mission. Then Neelix suffers a siege of paranoia, and Chakotay finds himself in the battle action, in a nightmare. So does Paris. Now they discuss it, remembering the details of the action. They had been days without sleep, on a mission to evacuate a village. Things went wrong, and they wiped out the village instead. Then Janeway hallucinates being part of that dreadful scene. They all have the same vivid memory. It turns out to be a 200 year old memorial that triggers memories of what occurred there, so that such an atrocity would never be repeated. They repair it and move on.

#15 “Tsunkatse” It s a gladiator type show with two men brawling before an audience. Crewmembers on shore leave are watching it. Meanwhile Tuvok and Seven of Nine take a shuttle to watch a collapsing nebula. Something happens to their shuttle, and Seven finds herself slated to compete in Tsunkatse, in order to save Tuvok. She hesitates during the match, and loses. A former fighter trains her so that she will have the proper reflexes for the next match. And her match turns out to be her trainer. Meanwhile the Voyager attacks the alien ship and manages to beam them out just as Seven is about to win the match. Now her trainer will get a chance to find his lost son. A powerful episode.

#16 “Collective” Paris, Chakotay, Kim, and Neelix are in a shuttle. Suddenly there’s a Borg cube. They get taken into its assimilation chamber. The Voyager negotiates, and Seven is beamed aboard the cube. She learns that five children are running it, all that survive of 5,000. A pathogen is responsible. The children make demands. Seven persuades all but one of them to make their lot with Voyager, and four are beamed aboard. They will be assimilated—in Voyager.

#17 “Spirit Folk” Paris is in old Ireland, riding an early motorcar. They tell stories of a haunted town that disappeared. Kim is there too, and Janeway. The Doctor is a priest. Paris plays a practical joke, turning Kim’s date Maggie into a cow just she was about to kiss him. Katie (Janeway) dates Michael Sullivan, resuming a relationship they had in Episode #11. But the holo characters are becoming self aware. To them, the Voyager folk are interfering spirits. Paris and Kim get caught, and the Doctor. Michael gets to Voyager, and Janeway shows him around. Now the folk of Fair Haven know about Voyager. Things will continue on a new basis.

#18 “Ashes to Ashes” A woman is being chased in her starship. She contacts Voyager. She turns out to be Ensign Lyndsay Ballard, a former member of the crew who died in an accident, a friend of Kim’s, reanimated by the Kobali and made to look like them. The Doctor treats her to make her look human again. Meanwhile Seven of Nine is training the rescued Borg drone children, in fits and starts. Then Lyndsay starts to revert. The Kobali want her back, and she wants to go, and does, to Kim’s regret. Meanwhile progress is being made on the Borg children.

#19 “Child’s’ Play” The four children rescued from the Borg are working on individual projects, supervised by Seven of Nine. They are impressive. Especially the eldest boy Icheb, who is already materially enhancing the Voyager’s galactic sensors. But they have located his parents and he should return to them and their way of life. But he doesn’t want to; their life would prevent him from exploring advanced science. Seven us not eager for him to go either, fearing it is wrong. But finally he decides to go with them. So he goes. Then inconsistencies are discovered; all was not as the parents said. In fact they are using Icheb to fight the Borg, sacrificing him to save their planet. The Voyager rescues him again; now he remains aboard, having been betrayed by his family. A thoughtful episode.

#20 “Good Shepherd” Janeway selects three imperfect crew members for an away mission she commands, hoping to bring them up to snuff. The female, Celes, feels inferior, incompetent. Something hits them and they lose thrust power. Then something gets into one of the men, Billy. They get it out. It’s an alien creature, not necessarily hostile. Then there is pursuit. They barely escape. Janeway says the good shepherd—her—went after some lost sheep, and ran into a wolf. Fortunately she found the sheep.

#21 “Live Fast and Prosper” Two people saying they are Janeway and Tuvok negotiate with aliens for an ore trade. They cheat the aliens, and Voyager gets the blame. It turns out that the swindlers tricked Neelix into giving the access to Voyager’s database, so they could emulate crew members. They manage to catch Nala, the swindler woman. She breaks free, steals the Delta Flyer, and escapes. But she doesn’t know that Paris and the Doctor are on the flyer; Janeway has outsmarted them. Then the Doctor emulates Nala. They take over and set things right with the seven other ripped-off worlds.

#22 “Muse” A group is animating Voyager stories. Kelis the Poet narrates. B’Elanna is caught on the crashed Delta Flyer, and Kelis needs to get information from her to write his next play. B’Elana then plays herself in the story of her rescue. Harry Kim turns up; he made it to the planet and had to walk for ten days. They re-power the Delta Flyer. B’Elanna enters the ongoing play, bids Kelis farewell, and beams back to the ship, leaving the audience amazed. This is an interesting merging of fiction and reality, the reality being the Voyager itself.

#23 “Fury” They receive an Ocampan distress call from a woman Janeway knows. It’s Kes, once a member of the crew, before Seven of Nine. She beams aboard just before her ship collides with Voyager, and walks down a hall as explosions pace her progress. Others accept her presence as she goes to suck power from the central power unit. She is up so something, and they seem to be living in the past. Only Tuvok is aware that something is strange. She replaces herself of the past, then later means to take her past self away. Then Janeway of the past catches on, and kills the future Kes, the one who is betraying them. They work to change time. Back in the present Janeway faces Kes again. This time Janeway persuades Kes to take a different course, saving the Voyager and her own life. Another weird time travel episode.

#24 “Life Line” Doctor Zimmerman, who made the Doctor holograph, is having problems. At once point he is being massaged by a lovely alien female, but she turns out to be the Doctor of another time, the holograph created in his image. Barclay of Earth is there, the one who succeeded in sending a message to the Voyager. Back in the “Pathfinder” episode. Then Deanna Troi, empath counselor of The Next Generation, shows up. She gets a tour of a simulated Voyager. Zimmerman reprograms the Doctor, who now is able to treat him effectively. I lost some sleep the night before viewing these last two episodes; I think it affected them, making them at least partly nonsensical.

#25 “The Haunting of Deck Twelve” They shut down for several hours as they pass through a nebula, as a precaution. It is nervous business. The Borg children ask Neelix about the haunted Deck Twelve. Flashback to several months before, when they passed through a nebula, and their presence destabilized it. There is a jolt with minimal damage, and they move on. But it seems something came aboard. They find themselves back where they were an hour before. Problems occur, such as Chakotay caught in a plunging elevator, and Seven of Nine attacked by an alien creature. An alien thing has taken control of the ship. Janeway manages to establish communication, but understanding is difficult. She finally gets control of the ship back, and makes a place for the alien on Deck Twelve. Or maybe it is just Neelix’s story to divert the children during the power outage.

#26 “Unimatrix Zero, Part 1” A Borg setting. The Borg Queen needs information. Then Seven of Nine is dreaming as she regenerates, and meets Five of Twelve—Axum—in a primitive planet setting. He says Seven was part of their lives for eighteen years. Here Seven is Annika, without Borg implants, her hair loose, and she is one pretty girl. She and Axum were lovers for six years, at least during the regeneration dreams, but she does not remember. Janeway takes B’Elanna and Tuvok in the Delta Flyer and goes on a mission to a Borg cube, to release a virus that will nullify the Borg. They beam aboard as the Flyer is destroyed. But the Queen is watching them. The Borg overpower them, to the satisfaction of the Queen. Or do they? They may have assumed Borg identities. To be continued.

Season 7 #1 “Unimatrix Zero Part II” The regular ship is back for the opening pictures. Janeway is captive, but Tuvok and B’Elanna head for the central plexus. They find Janeway, who looks like a clone but seems to be herself. Is she? They deploy the virus and it starts having effect. The Queen has Janeway captive and demands the antidote. Janeway says there is none. Seven and Axum interact, and kiss. They are falling in love again. Janeway gives an order to Chakotay, but it is not the one it sounds like. They destroy Unimatrix Zero, but the revolution continues. They return to the Voyager, where the Doctor managed to remove most of the Borg implants and they begin their slow recovery. Seven hopes that somehow she can be back together with Axum.

#2 “Imperfection” They find a home for three of the rescued children; only Icheb remains aboard. It is a sad parting, but surely for the best. Seven of Nine is suffering subtle malfunctioning. Her cortical node is shutting down. Janeway takes Tuvok and Paris in the reconstructed Delta Flyer to the Borg debris field, hoping to find a replacement node. Scavengers intercept them. There is a fight, but the away party manages to return, with the node. But the node doesn’t work, having been inactive too long. B’Elanna helps Seven cope; the animosity between the two is thawing. Icheb offers to donate his node to help her; maybe he can survive without it. But Seven declines, because of the risk to him. So he removes his node himself, to prove that he can survive without it, and makes a good point to Seven she should not refuse to be dependent on anyone else. So finally she accepts his node. In six days they know: the node has saved her, and he is recovering. This is a powerful emotional episode.

#3 “Drive” Paris and Kim are trying out the rebuilt Delta Flyer and encounter another small craft. They race, and meet Irina, a pretty pointed eared girl, who tells them of a big race coming up. They modify the Delta Flyer so it can participate. B’Elanna had planned a three day holodeck excursion with Paris; this squelches that, to her chagrin. So she replaces Kim as his co-pilot, thus getting time with him doing something that turns him on. The race begins, but is halted because of an injury. Someone is trying to mess it up, and provoke war. Irina’s co-pilot is the one injured, and Kim replaces him, thus getting to be with her. But it turns out she sabotaged her own ship, and others, and there will be will be mass destruction at the finish line. Meanwhile Paris and B’Elanna stop racing and talk out their relationship. Kim and Irina also stop. Kim messages Paris about a sabotaged warp core, and Paris saves their ship just in time, and proposes marriage to B’Elanna. Kim and Irina obviously will not have a relationship.

#4 “Repression” Paris” and K’Elanna discover a crewman in a coma in the Holodeck. He was attacked. Janeway puts Tuvok in charge of the investigation. Another crewman is attacked. A suspect is Crewman Jor. Five people are attacked, all former Maquis. Tuvok is perplexed. Then B’Elanna, and Chakotay. There is something odd about Tuvok; he seems to be involved. He investigates and uncovers this. He says he must be confined to the brig. He has visions of a stranger who gives him orders. Victims start recovering on their own. Chakotay recognizes the vision of Teero, a Bajoran vedek. Then Tuvok relays a coded order to Chakotay, who in turn relays it to B’Elanna, and the two of them take control of the ship. But Janeway talks to Tuvok, and he reverts to normal, and the takeover unwinds. Tuvok frees Janeway.

#5 “Critical Care” An alien shop proffers a device, which turns out to be a way to summon the Doctor, who is bewildered to find himself here. It turns out that the alien, Gar, stole the summoning device, substituting a poor replica. This society uses T. C., Treatment Coefficient, a number for the importance of any patient, and those with low numbers don’t get treated. Meanwhile Janeway is on the trail. Both the Doctor and Janeway hardly hesitate to use coercive methods to gain their ways as they deal with an obstructive bureaucracy. The Doctor finally is rescued.

#6 “Inside Man” Voeyager now receives monthly packages of letters from home. This time instead comes Reg, a holographic fixit man deriving from Barclay, who promises to improve things. Such as taking Voyager home. Reg meets Deanna Troi on a beach. His girlfriend Leosa has left him because she finds him boring. It turns out the Ferengi want to get hold of Seven of Nine’s nanoprobes. That plot is foiled, but the Voyager does not get home.

#7 “Body and Soul” Kim, Seven of Nine and the Doctor on the Delta Flyer are captured by an alien ship that claims they have contraband, such as the Doctor. To avoid capture the Doctor takes over Seven’s body; thus the actress is assuming the Doctor’s mannerisms. He/she gobbles food, relishing the new experience. The real Seven is left with the food hangover and is not pleased. Meanwhile on the Voyager Tuvok is suffering the stages of the seven year Vulcan mating urge. The alien captain gets a yen for Seven. She plays on that to get the information and access she needs to get them back to the Voyager. That, and Janeway’s hard-nosed attitude, get them free. Then Seven shares a nice meal with the Doctor, describing the gustatory experiences for him. He loves it, maybe not just for the description. Seven is continuing to mellow.

#8 “Nightingale” Neelix, Seven of Nine, and Kim are aboard the Delta Flyer, loking for dilithium. They happen across a fight between two ships. They nullify the attacking Annari ship and help the victim ship, the Kraylor, which is carrying medicines for their people. Janeway allows Kim and Seven to help them, cautious about interfering in alien affairs. Kim renames the medical ship he captains Nightingale. His inexperience shows, but he catches on that there is more here than shows. This is not a medicine cargo, but a cloaking test. Under attack, he has to get clever and tough. He does, and saves them. He has come through.

#9 “Flesh and Blood” This is a double length episode. Two aliens are hunting in a forest, until humans ambush them and kill them. Voyager gets a distress call and comes to the planet, and finds the two dead Hirogens. Then a live one. Then holodeck controls. They turn it off and the forest disappears, revealing a number of bodies. It is technology they got from the Voyager. The Hirogen modified the holo technology, and the result is prey that is better at fighting than the original. The Doctor works with the leader Iden and woman Kejal. The Doctor helps the holograms because he is one of them. Then they abduct B’Elanna because they need her technology. The holograms are of many forms, including Cardassian, Bajoran and Klingon. They want to develop a culture of their own, not organic. They also want to liberate allholograms, and they will kill organics to accomplish that. They want to become the hunters. In the end Iden in destroyed and the hologram threat is ended, but there remain things to think about.

#10 “Shattered” The ship enteres an anomaly and off things happen. Chakotay finds himself seven years in the past, and Janeway doesn’t recognize him. Then he’s five years in the past and Seska is after him. In fact different parts of the ship are in different time zones. He manages to recruit Janeway before the ship gets stranded across the galaxy, by taking her thorough one of the time warps. Then, together, they set about restoring the ship. In the process they visit the future 17 years after they die, when little Naomi is a grown woman and Icheb her companion. Seska tries to take over, but Seven from the past stops her. It finally gets resolved, but necessary mysteries remain. Another wild episode.

#11 “Lineage” B’Elanna turns up pregnant. Immediately everyone knows. The baby has a congenital curvature of the spine, which the Doctor fixes. What will they name her? B’Elanna suffers mood swings. Old issues are evoked, such as her relationship with her father. She blames herself for what went wrong in her family. Finally Paris persuades her that there well be no repeat in this generation of that problem, and all is well again.

#12 “Repentance” They receive a distress call. It turns out that the other ship is transporting prisoners. The one beamed to sick bay quickly revolt, and one holds a knife to Seven of Nine’s throat. That threat is nullified and the prisoners secured in a cargo hold. But the guards seem to be as brutal as the prisoners. The prisoner Joleg seems rational. He is a Bentkarian, whose people are punished ten times a much as others, just for being of their species. It is evidently modeled on the American treatment of blacks. Is this right? Also, an injured prisoner is treated with Seven’s nanoprobes, which in effect provide him a conscience; he is not the same person who committed the crime. Should he still be executed? These are difficult questions.

#13 “Prophecy” A cloaked Klingon ship attacks the Voyager. Their captain meets B’Elanna, who is half Klingon. They believe that her unborn daughter will be the Klingon savior. They destroy their ship and are beamed aboard the Voyager. 200 violent tempered visitors makes for a challenge. B’Elanna tries to satisfy them that her child is the one, because only in this manner will they accept relocation to a suitable planet. Paris must engage in combat with a Klingon warrior. He does, and the Klingon falls to a virus. Now B’Elanna and her baby have the virus. The Klingons stage a takeover attempt that is barely thwarted. Then the Doctor uses the fetus’s antibodies to cure the Klingons of the virus. So the child does save them. That defuses the situation.

#14 “The Void” Something is pulling the ship in. The stars disappear. Other ships approach and attack. There are 150 ships, but life on only 29. They contact the one that does not fire on them, and learn from Captain Valen that all the ships are caught in the Void, and the only source of supplies is to raid new ships. That’s why other ships are attacking. Janeway insists that they follow ethical rules. Captain Garon accepts her offer of an alliance. They befriend the folk of the Void, the Fantome, who communicate by music. The Fantome help to disable the weapons of attacking ships, and the Voyager escapes with its allies. Cooperation has indeed worked.

#15 “Workforce Part I” Janeway is a worker in a busy city, reporting for a new job. Seven of Nine, now Annika, is the efficiency manager. Tuvok is there. Paris gets a job cleaning up at a bar. B’Elanna is there. An Away party returns, but Voyager is not there, stranding Chakotay, Neelix, and Kim. The Doctor is alone on the Voyager, because there was radiation and the crew had to abandon ship. Then other ships attack, seeking salvage. Flashback shows how Janeway and Tuvok were treated for injuries when rescued, but seem also to have been given amnesia so they don’t remember Voyager at all. Paris and B’Elanna don’t remember they’re married. Chakotay locates them, but the authorities block direct contact. So he and Neelix, after reconstructive surgery, go for jobs there. Tuvok begins to remember, but they treat him again. Neelix abducts B’Elanna and they beam back to the ship. But there’s a major challenge remaining to extricate the others.

#16 “Workforce Part II” Janeway tells Chakotay that she has decided to move in with her local friend Jaffen. On the ship Neelix works on enabling B’Elanna to recover her memory. Jaffen helps them. They work to shut down the shields as the ship comes for them, but it is under attack. They manage to beam them in, and the conspiracy to recruit workers by erasing memories is exposed. Jaffen gets promoted and the ship resumes its journey.

#17 “Human Error” A celebration honoring B’Elanna’as baby turns out to be holo program. In that, Seven of Nine was free of her Borg implant, but outside that, she is as before, trying to learn to be more social. So we know which is which by her face. In the holo we see her as a more lustrous creature, showing some breast as she interacts with Chakotay. She kisses him; he kisses her back. They wind up in bed. But it’s only her fantasy. Then she collapses. The Doctor says she has overloaded her stimulation as she tries to improve her social responses. But she decides to stop the simulations for now.

#18 “Q2” Q appears with his son Q2. This is of course mischief. Q2 is immediately making trouble. Q wants help straightening the teenager out. Janeway says the boy needs to learn the consequences of his actions. So Q deprives Q2 of his magical powers. He has one week to reform, or will be confined to a dull petri dish as an amoeba. So he tries, at first by cheating, then more seriously as Janeway sternly warns him. He works with Icheb and does make progress. But Q wants him to exhibit “Qness.” In the end Q2 does learn manners, and in appreciation Q takes several years off Voyager’s journey home.

#19 “Author, Author” Direct video contact has been established between Earth and the Voyager, at least in eleven minute segments. Meanwhile the Doctor plays a series of holo sequences featuring people similar to the regular crew members aboard the Vortex. He makes a deal to publish his collection on Earth. Janeway makes a persuasive case to the Board, which concludes that while he may not be a Person, he is an Artist. That he does have the right to control his own creation.

#20 “Friendship One” A probe was launched 300 years ago, before the modern order existed. Voyager may now be in its vicinity. An away team of Neelix, Paris, and crewman Joe lands, and gets captured by diseased people. The ancient probe caused the destructive radiation. Chakotay in the shuttle takes one of the others to the ship. The Doctor is able to treat him. One of the captors is pregnant, about to birth her baby. Paris helps, and saves the boy, but he needs treatment, so they beam him up, treat him, and return him. They treat the planet to eliminate the harmful radiation and depart on fair terms.

#21 Natural Law” Chakotay and Seven of Nine take the shuttle to a conference, but encounter a barrier and have to beam to the planet as the shuttle crashes. Chakotay fractures a bone in his left leg, and it get infected. Seven goes alone to check the debris for anything that might help them. Chakotay gets captured by natives, the Ventu. Fortunately they are friendly, and Seven joins him and them. Then she goes alone on a trip of seven kilometers for another item, falls, and loses her communicator. A native woman joins her, helping and guiding her. Janeway learns that aliens placed the barrier to protect the Ventu. The Voyager departs, after removing all the debris and restoring the barrier so the Ventu can continue without being assimilated by the modern culture.

#22 “Homestead” They detect Talaxian life forms inside an asteroid. Tuvok, Neelix, and Paris take the Delta Flyer. They crash on the asteroid and Neelix wakes being tended by Dexa, a pretty lady Talaxian. Her young son Brax becomes Neelix’s friend. There are 500 Talaxians who have made he asteroid their home, but the local dominant species wants to mine it and is forcing them out. Neelix assumes leadership and they set up a shield to keep the others out. Neelix has to leave Voyager to become Ambassador to the Talaxians; he will finally be with his own kind. And with Dexa and Brax.

#23 “Renaissance Man” The Doctor and Janeway are on a shuttle, returning to the Voyager. This region of space is controlled by a superior species, the R’Kaal, that has banned warp travel here. It turns out that Janeway is a clone, a replacement, not the real captain. It was the clone who returned with Chakotay. The aliens want to steal and sell the warp core, hence their story about the master species. However, the Doctor catches on, and receives a communication from the real Janeway. And starts emulating and nullifying other crew members. Until Tuvok catches on and fights back—until shot and stunned. The Doctor does this to rescue Janeway, but the aliens renege. They mean to keep the Doctor for future missions. But finally things are disentangled and returned to normal.

#24 “Endgame” introduction says Voyager returned to Earth after 23 years in space, and this is the tenth anniversary of that return. It is a double length episode, unsurprisingly. The Doctor is married to one Lana. Janeway is an Admiral. Paris and B’Elanna remain married, their daughter now an Ensign. Tuvok seems to be insane. Janeway declines to discuss Seven of Nine. Janeway is about to take a trip from which she may not return. Chakotay is dead. Then a flashback to life on the ship, when Tuvok has an illness. And back to the present, when the Doctor is concerned about Janeway, who may be in danger. And the past, when the Voyager encounters a Borg cube. Chakotay and Seven are dating. In the present, Janeway takes a device from the Klingons. Kim reluctantly helps her. Chakotay and Seven kiss. Janeway of the present contacts Janeway of the past, and beams aboard. The Borg queen visits Seven during regeneration and says if they enter the nebula again, she will destroy them. The Admiral says her technology will enable them to handle the Borg. It seems that if they take that shortcut, not only will they save about fifteen years, they may save the life of Chakotay and Seven, and the sanity of Tuvok, and more. The two Janeways consult and conclude that maybe there is a way they can both destroy the Borg hub and get home, though it is risky. Janeway Senior faces off with the Borg Queen, trying to make a deal. The queen tries to outguess and betray J Senior, but fails and loses. Voyager makes it through intact, and the lives at risk are saved. B’Elanna’s baby is born. Of course Janeway Senior will no longer exist as she did, and the lives of the others will be significantly changed, but clearly she was prepared for that. This is one wow of a finale! And yes, this is my favorite Star Trek series so far.

PIERS

FeBlueberry 2019

HI-

The Xanth novels #38-40, that’s Board Stiff, Five Portraits, and Isis Orb, will be on sale for $2.99 on FeBlueberry 11, 2019 in BookBub, Kindle Daily Deal (KDD) and Early Bird Books all over the Internet. So if by some ill chance you are missing them, here’s your chance to catch up cheap. As I have said before, characters are introduced in them that appear in later Xanth novels, such as the Goddess Isis, and Squid, the girl child who is actually an alien cuttlefish and the protagonist for the 44th novel, Skeleton Key, not yet published. You’ll like Squid when you get to know her.

Fake News: I started receiving congratulations from readers, and investigated. Someone using my name ran a Facebook announcement that there was to be Xanth movie and TV series. Alas, that’s not true. I have no personal presence on Facebook, never did, and don’t know who is pretending to be me. My only direct personal presence is here on my own HiPiers site. The movie notice turned out to be one that was run about a year and a half ago, that since expired unfulfilled. My agent is still looking for a movie, and there are prospects, but nothing has jelled yet.

Back when HiPiers was a source for my books, so that readers could find any or all of them before the Internet giants existed, we published a couple of Xanth calendars, as there was reader demand. We took a heavy loss, because the bookstores refused to carry them; it seems that they were locked in to their suppliers and anything outside was banned, even if the readers wanted it. If you wonder why I am cynical about the publishing process, this was one of the reasons. We were losing about fifty thousand dollars a year and finally shut down HiPiers except for this web site, which is now mainly a promotional and reader contact site, a place for general information about my books, and my monthly opinionations. But we discovered something: the Xanth 1991 calendar matches 2019 for dates. So it could be used this year, apart from the “wrong” year itself. The repeating calendar link iswww.timeanddate.com/calendar/repeating.html?year=2013country=1

At the turn of the year I received a surprise: a 1977 DEL REY Challenge Coin. My history with this publisher has been mixed, to say the least. It started when I had two novels at Ballantiyne Books, and when they cheated me on royalties I protested and got a lawyer, and they never paid more than a fraction but blacklisted me for six years, spreading lies about me that I think still circulate in dusky corners of the publishing scene. They were trying to wash me out as a writer for my temerity in objecting to their violation of their own contract. It seems it is bad form to protest when a publisher does that, and they make sure to discipline those unruly serfs who violate that unwritten rule. It was the main reason I left SFWA (later SFFWA); they stalled when I tried to lodge a formal protest, I was rebuked in their bulletin, and some of their officers spread false stories about me. They knew where their bread was buttered. But not every publisher honored the blacklist, and I survived. I fought back in part by getting an agent: the one who represented Robert Heinlein, the leading genre writer of the day. Publishers knew that if they screwed with one his clients, they wouldn’t get access to Heinlein’s material. I was learning to play the game. Later that agency morphed into the one that handled Stephen King. You might think I would resent being in King’s shadow. Nah, not much; that shadow helped protect me from the ghouls that still haunt publishing, and I did well. Besides his daughter was a fan of mine. Then the publisher, as I understand it, screwed one too many writers, and got sued (I had lacked the money to sue, then), and the proprietors had to depart in haste. Random House took it over, and put in a new administration, and to be best of my knowledge their accounts have been completely straight. I received an invitation to submit material to them. I wrote back don’t you know you’re blacklisting me?! They replied that things had changed. Indeed they had; Lester del Rey, the new Fantasy editor, had looked up the real figures on his own books there, and discovered that when they listed 69,000 sales, it was actually 169,000 sales. So he understood my situation. I think they were cheating most of their authors, abetted by a writer’s organization that seemed to prefer siding with the errant publisher rather than with its own abused members. I wrestled for three days, making the hardest decision of my career, whether to give the blacklisting publisher another chance, and finally decided to submit a Fantasy genre novel, A Spell for Chameleon. That turned out to be also the best decision of my career. They then effectively promoted my works there and put me on the national bestseller lists. But later Lester made the mistake of growing old, and started doing meat-ax editing of the type he himself would not have tolerated as a writer, chopping out a whole chapter (because it had too many puns—from Xanth?!) and trying to chop out the Author’s Notes, and I had to leave, I understand being one of four top authors departing for that reason. I have not been welcome there since, even after Lester died. Uppity writers, remember? So I was surprised when I received the Challenge Coin, given only to valued Del Rey authors. But I’ll take it; it’s a nice piece.

I read Beyond Mere Threads by M A Hickinbotham. That is, the threads of a magic tapestry. This is a 160,000 word fantasy. Fifteen year old Graham is restless. His beloved grandfather died recently, and Graham suffers nightmares and inability to properly focus on life. Then his friendly librarian gives him a private place to read, where a tapestry hangs. Somehow when he sees that cloth in a reflection, it animates. He finally backs into it, and finds himself in another realm, a fantasy land. Thus the main adventure begins. There seem to be friends and enemies here, the two not necessarily easy to tell apart, and magic. Graham himself learns he can do some magic, growing plants. He can grow anything in seconds, including dangerous thorny vines that mess up his pursuers. He has to flee the castle he finds himself in, because an evil figure wants him for some nefarious purpose. His original librarian friend turns out to be using him, and he finds another friend, and the chase continues as he discovers more about this dangerous world. A pretty girl approaches him, but she turns out to be the nymph of a tree who wants to incorporate him into the tree, not exactly what he had in mind. In contrast a fearsome wyvern becomes his friend and helps him return to his own realm. Adventure galore, and there is surely more to come, because the fantasy world hardly seems to be through with him.

I read Tamar and PJ—One Giant Adventure by Mark F Geatches. Young PJ hears a faint voice singing and goes into the wilderness to find it. He shouldn’t have. A monster is stalking him. Then Tamar, the last surviving giant, steps in to save him, and the adventure starts. In much simplified summary, the two become friends, but the monsters are the Vorteh, whose prince gets slain, and they are out for revenge. PJ gets scratched by their deadly poison, and Tamar struggles valiantly to save him, but it’s an awful struggle, because Tamar can’t risk contacting the humans. So this is a tale about an unlikely friendship surviving formidable threats. It’s not really a children’s story despite the age of the protagonist; the Vorteh are too vicious, and the details too hard-hitting. But it’s quite a story.

I read Dragon Flute, by Jordan Zlotolow. This is the sequel to Dragon Blade, which I reviewed three years ago. In that novel Jim, an office worker, and co-worker Summer are starting a romance when a supernatural enemy from another realm stalks them. It turns out that Jim was in that other world the fantasy hero Jalen, taking a break here on Earth. But when the lord of evil sends a minion to take over Summer’s nice body so she can be his cohort, Jim/Jalen has to act. They manage to defeat the evil for a generation. Well, now it is a generation later, and their fifteen year old son Ralius is coming up on manhood when the evil strikes again. Ralius must find and win the Dragon Flute, which is a phenomenal weapon when correctly played, but there are constraints: it is in several pieces kept well apart, and each playing reduces its store of energy, so it has to be saved for the most vital occasions. What follows is a continuous action struggle, with numerous friends battling endless ugly enemies of every type. The narrative is marred by what are called saidisms, which is the well meaning effort to break up the monotony of he said, she said. But that leads to the distraction of endless alternates, such as he confirmed, he revealed, he whispered, he wondered, he clarified, he corrected, he explained, and so on. The best advice for writers is simply to use “said” and let it disappear into anonymity after serving its purpose, the way words like “the” “a” or “and” do. Regardless, if you like fighting monsters, this novel has them galore.

I may have gotten suckered. My wife smoked for fifty years, and it was a stone age form of vaping that got her off it, Nicotrol, that provided the nicotine without the other pollutants. So she has been clean for fifteen years, though same damage remains and I expect to outlive her, as I never smoked after trying it once as a child and puking out my guts thereafter. I do learn from experience. I approve vaping as a way to quit smoking, and agreed to add a link to our links page. But it seems that this is not an anti smoking site so much as a pro vaping site, hooking nonsmokers. I am not for that. A recent study shows that vaping is about twice as effective in getting people to quit smoking as are other remedies. Still, that’s only 18 percent, and it seems that teens are abusing it. Ever thus.

I read the weekly Ask Marilyn column, being interested in smart things and considering myself an original thinker. Theoretically Marilyn has an IQ of around 230, the smartest woman ever, and on occasion she has confounded the experts by being right when they are wrong, as with the quiz show opening doors question, but sometimes she does something stupid. I remember when she calculated the total mass of the Great Wall of China, all three thousand miles of it. But that wall never existed. It is a line of some walls interspersed by guarded spaces, a much smaller thing. I wrote to her, citing my source, but never received a response, and as far as I know she never ran a correction. Okay, she’s not interested in corrections. So this time I am making my correction here. Her column published January 13, 2019, addresses the question of whether it is possible to put 50 coins into 10 envelopes such that each contains a different number of coins. She says no, it is impossible, because by the time you get to the tenth envelope, having put one coin, two coins, etc in the others, you have five coins left, which will duplicate your fifth envelope. Okay, I say it is possible, and here is my solution. You have to use 0 as a number, a breakthrough the Romans lacked but the Arabs had, enabling much more sophisticated math. Imagine trying to do modern math with no zeroes! You also don’t have to limit any envelope to under ten coins. Think outside the conventional box. So here are my ten envelopes; 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14 = 50. If you have a refutation, I will run it next month, as I do honor corrections.

The January/February 2019 issue of THE HUMANIST (remember, I am a humanist; I subscribe) has an article “Why the Catholic Church Is So Conflicted About Sex.” It asks, in the wake of the latest sex abuse scandals involving Catholic clergy, what is their problem with human sexuality? Why is the church so fixated on controlling people’s sexual behavior, often to traumatic ends? Why is celibacy (by that I think they mean no sex) the ideal state? Why should folk get married if there is no sex in Heaven? If every viable sperm cell has to become a new baby, should wet dreams be classified as involuntary manslaughter? Why do they object to contraception, other than abstinence? The article has excellent questions, but I have more. The fact is that with overpopulation being one of the major threats to the continuing viability of the world, I ask isn’t the Catholic attitude a kind a treason against the world? Regardless, this article does not address a reason I read elsewhere some time back. And have commentced on before: the peoples bordering the ancient Israelites featured goddesses who celebrated worship via sex with lovely priestesses. Unable to compete against that allure, the Israelite hierarchy decided to make sex itself a sin, unless sanctioned by them in limited cases, such as purely for procreation. It is that anti-sex attitude that carries through into Christianity and leads to much mischief.

AUTHORS GUILD has been coming alive recently. It is not perfect, as I have remarked before, but overall it does good work. This time they address the issue of the need for society to provide free access to books, and the right of authors to be remunerated for their work. These principles should not be in conflict. But the income of writers is declining, and more of them have to subsidize their books with secondary sources of income. It’s the don’t quit your day job syndrome. I had the fortune to escape from it when my bad luck almost magically became good luck, as mentioned earlier in the column, and made me a best seller. I am no longer a best seller, but I didn’t waste the money when it came in, so I am financially secure. But I represent maybe one percent of one percent of writers. So what about the outfits that claim that information should be free, including copyrighted work of authors? Who think that the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker should be paid, but not the writer? Libraries are eager to circulate ebooks as widely and freely as possible, and are resentful when publishers object. But what about the creator’s right to earn a living from his creations? To a writer this unpaid circulation smells of theft. In other countries there exists a Public Lending Right, or PLR, where authors receive payments on their books in the system. So Author’s Guild is entering the fray, and I support their effort to find a reasonable compromise. The arts do need support. What do we remember or care about the ancient Greeks, other than their arts, such as architecture, philosophy, literature? They are not memorable for their butchery, baking, or candles. Neither are we.

An obit of interest appeared in the newspaper. Michael S. Edenfield wrote: “If you are reading this, I am dead. I died on January 5, 2019. I was not ‘called home’, I did not ‘go to be with the Lord’. I died. Get over it, I have. I never believed in life after death. I hope that I was right. But if not, then remember what Mark Twain said, ‘Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.’ I was born March 7, 1951, in Dade City, FL. I was preceded in death by my loving parents, Cleon ‘Ed’ and Margaret Agnes ‘Marge’ Edenfield. They were very loving parents. They had to have been loving, otherwise they surely would have either drowned my brother, Mark and myself, given us up for adoption, or sold us to the CIA for lab experiments. … To quote the rock band Blood, Sweat and Tears: ‘I swear there ain’t no heaven and I pray there ain’t no hell. I’ll never know by living, only my dying will tell.’ As one of my law professors used to say, ‘This world is a risky place, and very few of us get out of it alive.’ I didn’t. You won’t. Enjoy life a little each day. I liked to live by the theory: ‘I would rather regret the things that I did rather than the things that I did not do’. I think I accomplished that. Sometimes to the chagrin or embarrassment of my friends. If my wishes are followed, I have been cremated and my ashes tossed off the dock at my home on Cindy Lane. Personally I do not believe in burial. Cremation makes much more sense. My only true regret in having my body cremated is that there are a certain few people whom I would like to have be able to invite to apply Chap Stick to their lips before kissing my you know what. But it’s the thought that counts. … Remember: life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather, it should be a wild ride skidding in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, loudly proclaiming: ‘Wow! What a ride’.” I understand he was a good man, a lawyer taking pro bono cases, helping to deliver tens of thousands of teddy bears to sick and abused women and children. Every Father’s Day he would take orphaned children out to dinner. I did not know him in life, but he certainly wins my respect in death.

News flash: Saturn was not always ringed. The rings may be only ten to a hundred million years old, compared to four and a half billion years for the planet. About five percent, or down to half of one percent of its time. Also, people don’t realize that Jupiter has rings too, less visible, and Earth may once have had them, as detailed in my novel Rings of Ice.

As you know, I support substitutes for meat, as it is as bad for the environment as smoking is for us. Now the meaters are getting worried. They don’t like to have plant or lab grown burgers called meat, as that cuts into their business. They want it called something else, or at least clearly labeled as fake. They say consumers have the right to know what they are buying. I agree; I would not want to buy slaughtered cow meat by accident. I am fine with labeling it Synthetic or Fake Meat.

Speaking of synthetics, here’s another: synthetic pornography. The faces of real women put on the bodies of other women engaged in nefarious deeds. How would you like to see your girlfriend’s face in a pornographic video? You know it’s not really her, but do your friends? How about your mother’s face? If you are female, about your face? This is a growing problem for celebrities. What does a porno scene do for a rising clean girl actress? It seems that for about twenty dollars you can get anyone’s face grafted onto a porn actress in action. Now I don’t object to pornography; I think it is a legitimate form of entertainment. But to fake it to embarrass individuals, or to ruin a career, is wrong. It may be called weaponized technology, yet some are defending it as free speech. New artistic creations, making images that did not exist before. I believe in free speech, but does it include the right to destroy the reputation of an innocent person? I think a person should have control of his or her own likeness, and have legal redress if that likeness is abused.

Item from THE WEEK suggests that physical exercise can make you happier, especially if you do it outside, in a green park or a forest. Makes sense to me. I exercise regularly for my health, and there are hints that exercise also makes you live longer. Another item is about loneliness, which is not determined by the number of friends or social contacts you have. It’s the emotional state deriving from fewer meaningful relationships, the ones that make you feel known and understood. If you feel lonely, you are lonely. One of two Americans now falls into that category. It is reaching an epidemic state. It makes people sick. It can shorten life by 15 years, as bad as smoking or being obese. Why? Because loneliness is stressful, and chronic stress is a killer. This is not just for the old; young folk are more at risk. Generation Z, ages 18-22, and Millennials 23-37 (Generation Y?) score the highest for loneliness. Online social sites don’t seem to help much; the top 25% of social media users are twice as likely to report feeling lonely as the people using it the least. Wow! I’m glad I’m not on the social media. But of course it may be that the loneliest people seek the media, seeking help. Maybe they do help, but not enough. Maybe that explains the anonymous bullying that occurs, because lonely folk are more likely to become radicalized. I don’t know.

We may be largely unaware of the major life on Earth. Seventy percent of the microbes seem to live in the subsurface, that is, underground, and many of these organisms are unlike anything above ground. Some breathe uranium and expel the wastes as crystals. Others live in deep-sea hydro-thermal vents at 250 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hotter than boiling. Considering this, it seems reasonable that the subsurface of other planets and moons is habitable. These creatures do fine far away from sunlight. We think our form of life is all that counts, but we’re more of a fringe effect, living in the water and air that real life forms avoid. Maybe they’re waiting for us to pollute ourselves to death so they can live without the nuisance of our presence.

Incidental items: The New Horizons mission that put the landscape of Pluto on our map has now passed Ultima Thule, pronounced to rhyme with Julie. I think of the song, “I’m not Lisa; my name is Julie.” Only this variant is “I’m not Pluto, my name is Thule.” It looks like an unfinished snowman. Why we need universal medical insurance, with teeth to prevent gouging: the biggest hospital in San Francisco sends out bills of more than $24,000 for a broken arm and $113,000 for a broken ankle. So if you’re going to have an accident and be ambulanced to a hospital, try to do it somewhere other than Sand Francisco. I comment the editor’s letter by William Falk in THE WEEK for January 8, 2019, for remarking on the growing bipartisan conviction that virtually anything—lying, cheating, spying, is justified because, well, the others side is so evil. When Senator Mitt Romney called out Trump for divisive rhetoric, lack of “honesty and integrity,” and low character, Republican colleagues chastised him for being too truthful. And here I thought that when I got blacklisted for protesting that sort of thing in publishing, that was an anomaly. Evidently not. NEW SCIENTIST for 12 January 2019 has a lovely history of Earth chart covering the first four and a half billion years. Life emerged in about half a billion years, grew, diversified, and in about two and a half billion years came the key breakthrough, the evolution of complex eukaryotic cells, with nucleus and mitochondria, capable of forming multicellular organisms like plants, insects, and us. Maybe the subsurface microbes have a different take on it, however. In South Korea young nurses are being hazed to death, literally, by the senior nurses, until some commit suicide. Hey, maybe they should go to work for that San Francisco hospital, as they have to understand about top-down bad treatment. A sample of the Wit & Wisdom feature in THE WEEK: “Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.” Franklin P Jones. And another article reprinted in THE WEEK for January 25, 2019, describes the secret war behind Amazon’s reviews. This is dirty trench warfare, where a person can receive five star reviews, then be punished for faking them, with effectively no recourse, despite being innocent. That’s how anonymous enemies get at you, with seeming favor. I’m surprised that Amazon can’t seem to clean up this act. Just so my readers know: I don’t do fake reviews of my books.

In Jamboree I mainly watched Star Trek episodes, two a day, as I gain on the complete series, and tried to gain on a four novel backlog of reading while keeping up with correspondence. When I am writing my own novel, my reading gets squeezed, and my movie watching stopped for the month. Bear in mind that I do the meals and dishes and such, so don’t have all day. But I wrote the first half of Xanth #45, A Tryst of Fate, about 51,000 words, where the girl Squid learns that her future self was brutally murdered on a parallel time track, and she has to solve that murder by taking the place of that self and tempting the murderer to try again so he can be nabbed. Then she requires that murderer to become the protagonist for the rest of the novel. Critics who claim Xanth is all rehash obviously don’t bother to read the novels, as my fans know. As I like to put it, some critics are finely crafted from spoiled fecal matter. I hope to complete the novel in Marsh, fate permitting. And yes, we are working on getting #42, 43, and 44 published. And still hoping for a Xanth movie, so far in vain. More anon, when.

PIERS

Star Trek: Enterprise

Season 1, #1 “Broken Bow” The intro for each epislode is a nice song about Faith of the Heart. Shape changers are chasing a Klingon man, and he is finally shot. Then to the Enterprise ship, which is still being constructed. The authorities plan to let the Klingon die, as this would be honorable, but Captain Archer is disgusted, since he can be saved. It is his job to return Klaang to the Klingons, alive or dead. Then Klaang, the Klingon, gets stolen. The Suliban female Sarin approaches Archer in the form of a beautiful woman and kisses him, because she needs direct contact to establish his integrity. Then she reverts to her natural form, which roughly resembles a zombie. She gets killed, but her last words as “Find Klaang.” When a shuttle lands in snowy weather they are attacked and Archer is injured. T’Pol assumes temporary command until Archer recovers. They recover an enemy ball-shaped shuttle, and Archer uses it to raid the enemy ship. He rescues Klaang, but he himself remains on the other ship. His image is curiously doubled. They manage to beam him back to the Enterprise. Star Fleet decides that Enterprise is ready for its larger mission. Archer asks T’Pol to remain as Science Officer. She accepts. She is evidently to be the sightly female for this series, parallel to Seven of Nine in Voyager.

#2 “Fight or Flight” their first alien contact is with a giant ailing worm. Then they find a ship with fifteen dead crewmen hanging on hooks. They were killed in different ways. Then the killer ship returns. It fires on them. Then another ship comes, of the victim species. They manage to communicate and translate, and the new ship destroys the killer ship. Hoshi, the lady communicator, evidently the nice girl of this series, has confidence issues, but she does manage to come through.

#3 “Strange New World” The away party lands on an earth-type planet. The dog Porthos loves it. They camp out overnight and tell ghost stories. Then a storm comes, so they move into a cave. There is no humanoid life on this world, yet people seem to manifest peripherally. Archer tries to join them, but the storm prevents. One person is dying. The others are affected, becoming hallucinatory. T’Pol the Vulcan is affected too, but in better control of herself. They manage to get through.

#4 “Unexpected” Archer is taking a shower when gravity quits and the water floats up in bubbles. The Bridge says gravity should be restored any minute. Then it returns and Archer plops down on the shower floor. At breakfast T’Pol orders a glass of water from the machine, and gets black glop. Another malfunction. A cloaked alien ship is near, Xyrillian, accidentally messing things up. Commander “Trip” Tucker shuttles across to it. The environment sickens him. A shapely alien female Ah’len, feeds him some of their food, and it makes him feel better. She shows him a holographic environment, planetary scenes that seem real. She plays a game with him that enables telepathic contact. Now he likes that environment. Back on the home ship, Tucker learns that he is pregnant with a baby girl. They track down the Xyrillian ship and discover it in the wake of a Klingon warship. After some dialogue they manage to forge a deal that frees all parting and gets Trip un-pregnant.

#5 “Terra Nova” Earth colonized Terra Nova, nine years’ travel away, but lost contact for 70 years. Now Enterprise has found it. An away party of Archer, T’Pol, Travis, and Malcolm Reed lands. They encounter humans who are halfway hostile. They believe that Earth humans inflicted the illness on them that drove them underground. It was radiation from an asteroid strike. An older woman has cancer; Doctor Phlox cures her. The radiation did not extend to the southern side of the planet. The water in the northern cave is becoming polluted; the people need to move south. But they don’t trust the ship personnel. Finally there is enough trust, and the natives are saved.

#6 “The Andorian Incident” They visit a Vulcan sanctuary planet. But something is wrong. They spy armed aliens evidently holding the Vulcans hostage. They are Andorians, highly suspicious. They capture the away party of Archer, T’Pol and Tucker. They beat up Archer, trying to make him confess to a nonexistent threat. Archer and Tucker go into the catacombs to find a communicator. They contact the ship, so now it knows about the hostage situation. Archer gets hold of an icon. A ship’s party beams in, maybe orienting on the icon. Now they have a fighting chance. Then they discover a hidden laboratory that is spying on the Andorians. So the aliens were right; the Vulcans are spying on them. They are allowed to go, their mission accomplished.

#7 “Breaking the Ice” They spy a huge comet fifty miles across. They do a classroom question and answer session for an Earth children’s class. T’Pol receives a coded message that she doesn’t share with the captain per protocol. Trip Tucker decodes and reads it, and apologizes to her. Captain Vanik of the Vulcan ship says something cryptic to T’Pol. She talks with Trip: she must go to Vulcan to get married to a man she hardly knows, or lose the marriage. She evidently would prefer to remain on the Enterprise. Tradition vs. preference. Trip says she should do what she prefers. In the end, she stays. She is learning to gratify some of her personal preferences, whether emotional or gustatory.

#8 “Civilization” They discover a civilized planet; the Akaali are pre-industrial. They look close to human. But there may be an antimatter reactor there. This should be investigated. They prepare an away party of Archer, Hoshi, T’Pol, and Trip. Rian intercepts them, naturally suspicious. T’Pol stuns her with a beam. Next day they talk with the shop owner, who turns out to be an alien. They learn that an industrial lubricant is contaminating the ground water, hence the illness. Archer kisses Rian so that a passerby doesn’t know his purpose. An alien shuttle descends and hauls up the crates. Archer and Rian go to the basement and see the reactor. They beam it to space and destroy it. Archer kisses Rian again and departs. Kissing is of course what a pretty girl is for.

#9 “Fortunate Son” Admiral Forrest calls. They need to go to the aid of a distressed freighter, the Fortunate. It was attacked by Nausicaan pirates, fought them off, but took some hits. While doing repairs they get to know the crew, including some children. But something is amiss. There is another prisoner aboard they are not talking about. They are trying to make him divulge information. Then the prisoner’s ship returns to reclaim him. There is action. In the end the erring freighter officer is demoted and things are back to normal.

#10 “Cold Front” They meet an alien ship, there to observe a neutron star plume. They give a tour to the visitors. One visitor quietly does something, and the ship starts suffering problems. Later it turns out that a separated conduit prevented a charge that would have destroyed the ship. Then a crewman, Daniels, tells Archer he is from 900 years in the future, here to capture that visitor. There is a time war going on. Can this be believed? But he does have remarkable special powers. An alien visitor says the agent was sent to kill him, and wants to know the agent’s identity. Daniels. The alien stuns Archer, then kills Daniels. I am not clear exactly how the ship gets through this crisis.

#11 “Silent Enemy” A green ship appears and does not respond to their hails before it departs. Malcolm Reed’s birthday is coming up and Archer wants to get him something he likes to eat, but there doesn’t seem to be anything. Hoshi tries to find out but fails. Aliens board and depart in their shuttle, then in their ship. The warp drive is out of order. What is going on? They try to contact the Vulcans, but can’t reach them. The green ship returns, demanding surrender. They manage to cripple it, and it departs. They finally figured out that Malcolm’s favorite food is pineapple, and present a pineapple cake for his birthday.

#12 “Dear Doctor” Doctor Phlox starts his day. He’s a Denobian, whose emotions differ from humans, and he is still learning human ways. Pretty crewwoman Cutler may be romantically interested in him. Hoshi offers advice. Archer decides to try to help a planet besieged by a plague. Phlox enlists Cutler to assist him. He discovers that the illness is genetic, and the species may be extinct in two more centuries. There are two humanoid species here, the Valakians and the Menk, working compatibly together. That’s unusual; usually there is only one humanoid species. But it seems both can’t survive; to eliminate the plague, one must go. Archer decides not to give them warp technology; they must work it out on their own. Hoshi tells Phlox to get out of sick bay, socially, to improve his life. So he asks Cutler for a date, though it will not be romantic.

#13 “Shadows of P’Jem” The Andorians destroyed the Vulcan sanctuary visited in Episode #6. T’Pol has been reassigned; a Vulcan ship is on the way to pick her up. She is the scapegoat for what happened. Archer is outraged; no way was it her fault. Archer and T’Pol are taken hostage by a radical faction. They are tied back to back in a cell. They manage to turn to face each other and undo each other’s bindings. But they are discovered. Meanwhile the Vulcan ship, the Ni’Var, arrives a day early, and takes over the investigation. But Tucker and Reed take a shuttle to the planet—and get captured by blue aliens who owe Archer a favor. They join forces to rescue Archer and T’Pol, but T’Pol gets shot when she takes a beam intended for Archer. Archer makes a case to the Vulcans that she deserves to stay with the Enterprise.

#14 “Sleeping Dogs” Malcolm Reed is drilling Hoshi on the use of a new pistol; it is tricky to get it just right. She fires at a dodging glowing globe. Reed has a cold. There is ant alien shipwreck they decide to investigate. The away team is Reed, Hoshi, T’Pol. They board the derelict and find breathable atmosphere, but it turns out to be Klingon. A Klingon female attacks Tucker and takes off in the shuttle, stranding the away party on the derelict, which will collapse within an hour. The Enterprise grapples the shuttle and draws it in. the captive female is hostile, but they convince her to cooperate, and manage to save the Klingon shuttle. They depart before two Klingon warbirds arrive. A good tense episode.

#15 “Shuttlepod One” Reed and Tucker were checking out a wreck and got stranded. They report that the Enterprise got blown up. Now they have only ten days to survive. Then Reed dreams that he and T’Pol are about to kiss. Alas, not so. A meteorite punctures the shuttle and now they have only two days left. They get snappish at each other. Reed wants to record messages for those who will eventually find their bodies. Tucker clings to the hope they’ll be saved. Reed says he never got really close to anyone, personally, until the Enterprise. Then they hear from the Enterprise. It’s all right! It will rendezvous in two days—but all they have is one day. They jettison and explode the engine, and that makes a signal the enterprise can see. They do survive, barely.

#16 “Fusion” they are haled by a Vulcan ship of an archaic design. They need some assistance with repairs. It turns out they are Vulcans who do not repress their feelings; they feel that logic and feeling should complement each other. T’Pol seems wary of them. They join in observing a rare nebula. Admiral Forrest calls: could Archer contact a Vulcan crewman Kov, who is alienated from his father. But now the father is dying, and would like to have contact. Finally Kov does make contact. T’Pol spends much time with Tolaris, starting to experience emotions. She is not at all comfortable with them. Tolaris almost assaults her. Archer intervenes on her behalf. Indeed, Vulcan emotions should not be played with.

#17 “Rogue Planet” They discover a solitary planet, not part of any system. There’s an alien ship there. They take a shuttle and land, to investigate. Archer, Hoshi, Reed. They encounter humanoids, the Eska. It is amicable. A woman calls Archer in the night, then vanishes. Scanners don’t find her. Then she appears again, saying she needs him. He knows her from somewhere. The others come, and she vanishes. Who or what is she? He goes alone into a cave. She is there, a long haired blonde in a blue dress. She’s telepathic. She says she is not human. Shes a wraith. A shapeshifter. That’s what the Eska are hunting. How to stop them from killing a sentient species? She assumed the form of a woman he imagined as a child when he heard a poem, so that he would heed her, and he knows that, but he’s damned if he’ll let someone shoot her. They develop a masking agent that conceals the prey from the hunters. So Archer has indeed saved his phantom woman, and she thanks him, then shifts into giant snail form and slithers away. She never pretended she was human; she just needed to contact him in a way he could understand, and get his help. My favorite episode of this series. So far.

#18 “Acquisition” The Enterprise encounters a Ferengi ship. This is surely mischief. Somehow they have rendered the entire crew unconscious, strewn across the floors. Except for Tucker. The Ferengi board with gas masks. They revive Archer and make him load their haul into their ship. They want to know where the Vault is, with more treasures. So he talks their language: he’ll show them, if he gets 35%, Meanwhile Tucker find a hypo and wakes T’Pol. In due course she takes out one of the Ferengi. Finally they overcome the Ferengi and all ends well. A humor relief episode.

#19 “Oasis” There’s a crashed ship on a planet. The away party of Archer, Travis, Tucker, and T’Pol check it out. It is said to have ghosts. They encounter a whole crew; they were attacked, crashed, and used a dampening field to hid from the raiders. Hydroponics feeds them. Tucker meets pretty Liana and associates with her. Then they learn that the other ship wasn’t attacked; it suffered calamitous depressurization, 22 years ago, not 3. They died. Something is very wrong. There is a fight. Tucker persuades Liana to act. She removes two cells from a machine, and the ghosts who turn out to be holograms disappear. Only Liana and her father remain; he made the holograms replicating the crew so she could grow up among them. But that’s not real. They repair the crashed ship, and Tucker bids farewell to Liana, who kisses him. She’ll be going to her home.

#20 “Detained” Travis wakes beside Archer, who is unconscious, discovering that they are captives. Archer wakes and they see about escaping. They are among a number of prisoners, most of whom are Suliban. Then they are taken to see the commandant who says they trespassed into a military zone. They will have a hearing on Tandor Prime in three days. The Enterprise is notified; they can have a representative there. Reed sneaks in to help Travis and the Suliban, bringing weapons. They arrange a breakout. Archer, Travis, and Reed return to the ship. Will the Suliban revolt succeed? We don’t know.

#21 “Vox Sola” First contact with another species, whose emissaries depart immediately, furious. Meanwhile something translucently gelatinous infiltrates the ship, surely the cause of the mischief. Parthos the dog senses it. It attacks crewmen with prehensile tendrils, including Archer and Tucker, who are soon cocooned in strings of gelatin. They are getting linked inside the creature. T’Pol and Hoshi work to translate the creatures’ mathematical language. Reed develops an electronic barrier that can stop the creature. They do manage to communicate. They will take it home. It slowly dissolves, letting the captives go. They return it to the much larger main organism, and so it recovers its lost parts.

#22 “Fallen Hero” T’Pol expresses concern that the men are sexually frustrated, so she advises them of the planet Risa for shore leave. Sounds good. Then they have to pick up a Vulcan woman V’Lar, who must be immediately taken from the planet where she is an an ambasnsor. She is being expelled for criminal misconduct, if that can be believed. She is an older woman. Then a ship asks for her back. Archer demurs, needing authority. They fire on the Enterprise. This is weird. V’Lar won’t talk. So Archer decides to return to Mazar. T’Pol pleads with him not to take V’Lar back there. This is remarkable; T’Pol never pleaded before. More ships attack. V’Lar confides that she’s not a criminal; she is gathering information on a criminal element that is taking over Mazar government. The enemy wants to kill her. There is a tense standoff before the Vulcan warship arrives and takes over, saving V’Lar. A tense episode.

#23 “Desert Crossing” Archer and Tucker visit a desert planet. They participate in a competitive game somewhat like Lacrosse. Then T’Pol gets a call: their associates are terrorists. But their host says that the others are the terrorists, and they need help to survive. They think Archer is a desert warrior. There is an attack, and Archer and Tucker must hide in the cellar. But it’s not safe from the bombardment. Then Archer and Tucker have to cross the burning desert alone. They reach an empty building and try to endure. But enemy craft fire on them. An Enterprise shuttle lands and rescues them.

#24 “Two Days and Two Nights” They finally make it to Risa, the vacation planet, and Archer, Tucker, Hoshi, Travis and other crew members selected by lot are going ashore, leaving T’Pol in charge. Porthos the dog is also along. They meet Keyla and her dog Rhylo, but the dogs don’t get along. Hoshi meets a handsome man and they wind up in bed. Travis and Tucker meet Dee’Ann and Latria, who turn out to be transformed aliens intent on robbery. Keyla gives Archer something to knock him out; when he wakes she is long gone. Meanwhile on ship the Doctor has been estivating and is hardly in condition to treat patients, but is determined to try.

#25 “Shockwave Part I” The shuttle encounters an explosion. 3,600 natives died in it. What went wrong? The mission is canceled and the Enterprise is recalled to Earth. Archer is distraught. Then he wakes ten months in the past. He meets Daniels, who is involved with the timeline. He says that malign interference caused the disaster, not the Enterprise. Someone wants the mission to fail. Then Archer is back in the present, with new information; he halts the return to Earth. The Suliban are involved. They raid a cloaked Suliban ship: Archer, T’Pol, Tucker, to get some key data discs. They confirm that the explosion was caused by the Suliban to frame the Enterprise. But now the Suliban ore striking back. They demand that Archer go to their ship, or they will destroy the Enterprise. Archer disappears, somehow going to a wrecked city in the 31st century, where he meets Daniels. This is more mischief.

STE Season 2 #1 “Shockwave Part II” In the 31st century all is wreckage, and a monument was never built. Meanwhile, as it were, the Suliban board the Enterprise and search for Archer. He’s not there. Where is he? They interrogate T’Pol. Meanwhile in the future Archer and Daniels work to send a message back to the past. T’Pol gets a message. They sent Hoshi through the conduits to Dc. Phlox’s room to get a recorder, and to other rooms to free Tucker and Reed, who go to Daniels’ quarters. They stage an insurrection, fake a core breach, and escape. Something they do enables Archer to return to the present, and the crisis is handled. T’Pol makes a case to the Vulcan high command that they should learn from their mistakes, and they listen. It is clear that Archer and T’Pol are drawing closer socially.

#2 “Carbon Creek” some time back T’Pol visited Carbon Creek, Pennsylvania. Why? She says it was the real, as apposed to the historical, site of first contact between Vulcans and humans. She tells the story. Her great grandmother was involved. The Vulcans were gathering information on the humans, but had a malfunction and had to land. They dress as humans, cover their ear points, and go into town. (T’Pol is playing the part of her ancestor in this narration.) They win money playing pool. They get menial jobs while waiting for rescue. An associate lady, Maggie, kisses a male Vulcan, Mestral. There is a cave-in at the mine, and the Vulcans help free the trapped miners, though interfering is against their guideline. They rescue twelve miners. Maggie’s son Jack has scientific aspirations but can’t afford the tuition. G-Grandma earns the money for that. They are rescued, but Mestral stays behind; they report him dead, and the incident is never known.

#3 “Minefield” They encounter a habitable planet, so investigate—and something blasts a section out of the ship. It’s a mine, and there’s another on the hull. And other mines all around the ship. An alien ship appears, but they can’t understand the language, and Hoshi suffered a concussion so can’t translate. Reed gets caught by a spike from the mine; Archer works with him. Hoshi recovers enough to translate; the alien ship said go away or be destroyed. It is a Romulan ship. The mine rearms; they must detach the hull section and jettison it from the ship, so the mine can detonate without affecting the ship. With them on it. But they have shields that protect them from the explosion. They are saved.

#4 “Dead Stop” Four days later, repairing the ship. They need help. They send a distress call and receive a suggestion that they try an alien repair station. They go there. It is automated and highly competent. The repairs will be made for agreed compensation: 200 liters of warp plasma. The work in progress is marvelous, but Archer smells a rat. Tucker and Reed sneak into the center of the station via a duct. They get boosted out. Travis discovers something, and gets killed. But the body is an almost perfect duplicate. The real Travis Mayweather may have been abducted and this copy substituted. Tucker distracts the station computer while Archer, and T’Pol sneak in to investigate the primary data core. They discover a cache of stored live bodies, Travis among them. They rescue him, then escape as they destroy the station. The station had used his brain to enhance its computing power. The other bodies had been similarly used, and were now beyond repair. An interesting episode.

#5 “A Night in Sickbay” Archer, T’Pol, and Hosthi are in underwear decontaminating. They came to visit the Kreetassans, and were told to leave with no explanation. Last time the dog Porthos picked up a pathogen that has him in trouble. Archer is furious. He spends the night in Sick Bay so as to be close to his pet, but has trouble sleeping. Weird things happen that turn out to be routine, such as the doctor’s pet bat escaping and needing to be netted. Dr. Phlox thinks Archer and T’Pol are sexually attracted to each other; he is surely correct. Archer dreams of getting together with her. Porthos finally recovers. Archer does a fancy ritual apology to the Kreetassans and all is well.

#6 “Marauders” Archer and T’Pol land on an agrarian planet, wanting to trade for deuterium. It turns out that the Klingons are cruelly exploiting the natives here, to mine the mineral. They need to fight back. T’Pol teaches them evasive techniques against Klingon weapons, and others drill them in ray weapons. When the Klingons arrive the natives fight back with beautiful finesse, guerrilla techniques, tricking and strafing them and finally driving them off. So the Enterprise gets the deuterium it needs and the natives are much better off.

#7 “The Seventh” A call wakes T’Pol, telling her they have located Menos, three days distance. Admiral Forrest calls, telling them to divert to a rendezvous with the Vulcans at Pernaia Prime. T’Pol and Travis have a mission. She asks Archer to join her, so that she is accompanied by someone she can trust. This is instead of a Vulcan man. They must apprehend Agaron, the last operative to escape their group. He mentions Jossen. He says she killed Jossen, but she doesn’t know who Jossen is. Now she remembers: he was the seventh in the party. She killed Jossen in the course of duty, and suppressed the memory. It finally turns out that Menos is guilty of the equivalent of drug running; he is not the innocent man he claimed to be. Archer enables T’Pol to do the right thing. She appreciates it. She and Archer are clearly getting closer, emotionally.

#8 “The Communicator” Malcolm Reed’s communicator is missing. They have to find it. Did is slip out of his pocket, or did someone pick his pocket? They use a scanner to locate it on the planet. But when trying to recover it, they get arrested. When Archer and Reed won’t talk, because this is a pre-space world, they are beaten up. T’Pol is in charge during their absence. The natives catch on that the weapons are beyond their technology. T’Pol, Travis, and Tucker adapt cloaking technology and take a shuttle to the rescue. There is a firefight but they make it and escape. All is moderately well, but the memory will still contaminate the culture.

#9 “Singularity” The crew is unconscious as the ship heads for a black hole. T’Pol is the only one awake, reporting that they are unlikely to make it, and help is too far away. Two days ago they set course for the black hole. Tucker works on the Captain’s chair despite pressing other business, Hoshi takes over the cooking and is irritable about interruptions. Dr. Phlox insists on checking out Travis beyond all reason. Everyone is preoccupied with trivial matters, at the expense of more important ones. Tempers are short. Something is wrong. T’Pol determines that the black hole is emitting radiation that is affecting the crew. She must steer the ship out of the field, with Archer’s almost unconscious assistance. They make it out, barely. People recover. Things are back to normal, maybe.

#10 “Vanishing Point” they have to move out quickly, interrupting important projects. Hoshi discovers things wrong; it is as if others can’t properly see her. Her hand passes through some solid things. Her mirror won’t reflect her properly. Then she disappears entirely to the others; they literally walk through her. She’s a ghost. Then she sees aliens interfering with the ship. They are planting bombs. She manages to send an SOS with light signals, but though Archer and T’Pol see it, they don’t get the message. They finally readjust the transporter and get her back and she’s okay again. But there is no mention of the aliens or the bomb. This bothers me.

#11 “Precious Cargo” They rendezvous with a ship with a problem: they are transporting a beautiful young woman whose life support failed and they had to put her in stasis to complete he delivery safely. Then she wakes and is suffocating, so Tucker has to open her casket. But one of the visitors knocks him out, and they take him and her to their ship and depart. When Tucker wakes and gets his translator going, he learns that she is no ordinary passenger; she is a monarch, abducted for ransom. Kaitaana reluctantly cooperates with him to get to an escape pod. They land on the only suitable planet in range, and are in a steamy jungle. They argue and fight, and kiss, and maybe more. The enemy finds them, but then the Enterprise party comes and they are rescued. She will return home to be monarch. She suggests that he visit her, in due course. A nice forbidden love story.

#12 “The Catwalk” they orbit an uninhabited planet. Another vessel hails them. They say a dangerous wave is approaching and they should flee at warp 7. But warp 5 is their top speed. They must batten down under shielding in Sick Bay or the adjacent catwalk and ride it out for eight days. The close quarters are like a coed barracks. People get edgy. Another ship connects to them. It seems that the three people they took in are deserters from a corrupt administration out to recover them and probably kill the humans. The pursuers don’t know the home team is hiding in sick bay. Archer contacts them and pretends to be ready to destroy the ship rather than let it be captured, and the aliens depart. They make it safely on out of the wave.

#13 “Dawn” Tucker is in a shuttle testing equipment when a small vessel appears and fires at him. He has to make an emergency landing on a moon, one of 62. An alien attacks him there. Meanwhile Archer gets in touch with the hostile Arkonian commander who says they lost a man too. Trtip and the Arkonian Zho Kaan have to work together to try to fix a transceiver, but their languages are unintelligible to each other. They fight. Then Trip throws away the weapon and the message gets through: together. He finally contacts the Enterprise but won’t accept transport out until they can save Zho also. The temperature is rising toward 130 degrees; dawn is deadly here. The two are rescued, and friends in a manner.

They attend a medical conference. They meet Phlox’s second of three wives. She is very friendly with Tucker. Not only do men have three wives, women have three husbands. T’Pol turns out to be suffering from a Vulcan illness, Pa’nar syndrome. There is a stigma attached, so she didn’t tell the Vulcans. She got it when she was attacked by an infected Vulcan; it wasn’t her fault. The Vulcans mean to take her back to Vulcan, where she will live under a shadow. Archer is annoyed, and tells them that they are bigoted. He’s right, but doesn’t move them. T’Pol refuses to defend herself. But another Vulcan speaks out, and TPol is not recalled to Vulcan.

#15 “Cease Fire” Andorians with head antenna are warring with the Vulcans, and can’t trust them in negotiations. But one, Shran, knows of a “pinkskin” who has proved to be evenhanded; his name is Archer. Paan Mokar is a world both sides claim and have warred over it for a century. So they ask for him, and the Vulcans reluctantly acquiesce, provided a Vulcan accompany him. He chooses the one he can trust: T’Pol. The Andorians expect them but are hardly friendly. They want to negotiate with the Vulcan leader, Ambassador Soval. Archer gets them to release one of the three Vulcan hostages they have in exchange. They bring him—and are fired on and crash land. They make their way toward the meeting site. Shran’s female assistant caused the mischief; when Shran learns that, he negotiates a compromise. So the mission is a success, of a sort. A good episode.

#16 “Future Tense” They discover a metal container in space and bring it in. It contains the remnant of a human being. Could it be Zephram Cochran, an early experimenter in a one man ship? It has a hatch that leads farther inside than outside. Curious. All kinds of space in there. Meanwhile a Suliban ship demands the artifact, claiming salvage rights; it turns out to be a vessel from 900 years in the future. The person aboard seems to have human, Vulcan, and other species DNA. The Suliban attack. The Enterprise shoots back. Another force attacks, the Tholians, and the Suliban fight them. The artifact disappears. Crisis over, maybe.

#17 “Canamar” The shuttle is drifting in space and not answering calls. Archer is in it, with Tucker. They may have been abducted. Yes, they are in a prison ship, captive of the Nausicans, bound for a penal colony with other prisoners, manacled by the wrists and punished for speaking out. Then there is a prisoner rebellion and they take over the craft. Archer pilots it, but the new masters don’t trust him. He manages to message Enterprise and they are rescued together with a number of other prisoners. A violent episode.

#18 “The Crossing” A huge ship opens its maw and takes in the Enterprise. Archer, Tucker, and Reed take the shuttle to the interior. A vapor infiltrates Tucker. He says he’s all right, but there’s something odd about him now. The wisp has taken him over. Then the wisp departs. Tucker is back in good condition, but with memories. Then one takes over Reed. He approaches T’Pol, wanting to mate with her. She alerts Archer, and Reed is arrested. But people all over the ship are being possessed by the wisps. One takes over Hoshi. T’Pol believes that she as a Vulcan can handle a wisp. Then one possesses her; she freezes, and it departs. Now she knows that the wisps need living bodies and mean to take over every person on the ship, then find other ships. Phlox follows Archer’s instructions to vent gas into the ship, but Tucker, possessed, tries to stop him. He succeeds and the CO2 spreads throughout the ship. That takes out the wisps. They escape and blow up the wisp ship.

#19 “Judgment” Archer is on trial for conspiring against the Klingon Empire. The audience chants Jagh! Jagh! Presumably Death. Dr. Phlox visits him. Then in the trial there is testimony that the Enterprise sided with rebels and fired at a Klingon ship. That Archer himself was arrogant. Untrue, but they don’t care. Slowly the real story comes out. The Enterprise received a distress call from a disabled ship whose occupants were starving. The Klingons had annexed their world, promising food and fuel, but did not deliver. The assigned Klingon lawyer makes a pretty good defense, showing that Archer has in the past acted to help Klingons, but he is condemned to life imprisonment on a lethal frozen mining world. Along with his Klingon advocate. But they manage to rescue him, thanks to Vulcan connections. I saw no explanation how Archer was captured alone by the Klingons.

#20 “Horizon” They detour to observe a volcanic planet; they will take pictures. Helmsman Travis Mayweather asks for leave to visit his ailing father, on a nearby planet. Archer sends Phlox with him. His father dies, but he does visit his mother and brother Paul on a cargo ship. Then the freighter is attacked. Travis does some upgrades, which annoys Paul. But by the end of the visit he and Paul are reconciled.

#21 “The Breach” Hoshi brings Dr. Phlox a message, which makes him pause. Also, the Enterprise is asked to pick up scientists being evacuated from a planet for political reason; the Xantorians will kill any who remain. But they are in a network of caverns; first they have to be found. Meanwhile they rescue the personnel of another ship close by, also a victim of the new political order. An away party of Tucker, Travis, and Reed enter the cave. The rescued scientist refuses to be treated by a Denobulan doctor, because their species have been at war with the Antarians for centuries. In the cave they have an accident in the treacherous footing and suffer injuries. And the Denobulan scientists in the cave are rescued. The patient finally decides to accept treatment. This episode is an exploration of the problems of bigotry.

#22 “Cogenitor” They are scanning a developing supernova up close. Another ship is there, also studying the phenomenon. Their humanoid people have three genders, the third being the cogenitor. They are about three percent of the population, going from couple to couple as needed. They are not educated, and treated like tools. That bothers Tucker, who feels she should be treated more like a human being. He shows her a movie, teaches her to read and she beats him in a game of Go. She is really smart when given a chance. She wants to stay on the Enterprise. Archer can’t allow it, and she goes. And commits suicide. So what was the right thing to do? This bothers me, as it does Archer.

#23 “Regeneration” A crew of three are at the Arctic Circle checking a site, and find it wrecked and the people frozen in ice. The two people found are of different species. The severed mechanical arm of one starts animating. They have been frozen a hundred years. The crashed ship was a sphere a hundred meters in diameter. Then the bodies revive. They abduct the personnel, enhance the technology, and take off for space. Enterprise is assigned to look for it in space. They get a distress call. They stop the aliens, and are treating them when they revive and escape. They are immune to regular phasars. Archer has them blown out of the ship. They were making significant changes in the equipment. Archer and others beam aboard the alien ship. They are attacked. More come. They look like Borg. This suggests a future attack.

#24 “First Flight” They encounter a dark matter nebula, well worth exploring. Archer receives bad news: a man was killed climbing Mt. McKinley on Earth: an old colleague known as AG. as Archer and T’Pol explore the nebula there is a retrospective on his relationship with AG. He gets the first flight that Archer wanted, but they are friends. The mission goes wrong and the ship is lost but AG survives. It seems there remain some bugs in the engine. Archer’s father designed the engine; when AG blames the engine, they fight. But they get together to prove that with a slight modification the engine can do it. They sneak out together in the second engine to prove the point. They prove it. But are in trouble with the command. They are punished, but in time continue in the program. And Archer and T’Pol see the splendor of the nebula.

#25 “Bounty” A Tellarite ship is by a planet. They act friendly, but then abduct Archer. This is of course mischief. Meanwhile T’Pol has picked up a virus that Phlox treats. She is restricted to sick bay for the nonce. Archer has been caught by a bounty hunter; he is wanted for a trumped up infraction and may get executed. Then comes another bounty hunter, who attacks. Archer winds up piloting the shuttle, taking evasive action. They manage to disable the pursuit and land on a planet. Meanwhile T’Pol has been put into Pon Farr, the Vulcan mating cycle, and comes on strongly to Phlox. She is like a wild animal, in her underwear. She escapes and comes on to Reed. Archer is turned over to the Klingons. He gets free and escapes in a pod, and is rescued. T’Pol recovers, and Phlox says patient privacy will keep him silent. That spares her embarrassment, and means that other episodes don’t have to refer to it.

#26 “The Expanse” So the Klingons are after Archer again, really determined. Captain Duras will go after him. The ship is recalled to Earth. Suliban attack, and beam Archer aboard their craft, and have news for him. The Xindi attacked Earth, because it will destroy them 400 years in the future. The Vulcans say that in the Delphic Expanse there may be an answer, but it’s dangerous; few ships that enter it ever return, and those that do may be weirdly changed. Meanwhile part of Florida, Earth has been devastated. T’Pol is recalled to Vulcan, but resigns her commission so as to stay on the
Enterprese. No one will say it, but she must have a thing for Archer. They head for the Expanse. Duras pursues them, demanding they surrender. Archer takes them into the Expanse; Duras pursues. They destroy the Klingon ship, and head on in. End of Season 2.

STE Season 3 #1 “The Xindi” The Xindi attacked Earth because 400 years in the future Earth will destroy them. It seems the Xindi are in the Delphic Expanse, so the Enterprise is gong there. The Xindi see them coming, and mean to deal with them. They have a contingent of marines along in case there is combat. There are gravitational anomalies in one of the cargo holds. Archer and Tucker talk with a Xindi captive, one of five species of Xindi. He demands his freedom in exchange for the coordinates of the Xindi home planet. T’Pol has to give Tucker a Vulcan nerve treatment, in the course of which we see parts of her breasts. The Xindi are preparing a weapon to destroy the Enterprise.

STE 3 #2 “Anomaly” Weird things occur on the ship, gravitational anomalies. They board a dead alien vessel, trying to find out what happened to it. They find a cloaked Osaarian ship in orbit. Archer, Travis, Tucker, and a boarding party board it. Archer tortures an Osaarian captive to make him provide key information. They engage an alien ship in order to be close enough to read its Xindi database. They start reading that database. The level of violence and sights of T’Pol suggest to me that this series is having a problem holding its viewership, unfortunately.

STE3 #3 “Extinction” Space suited men pursue a fugitive through a jungle, catch him, and burn him with flame throwers. Tucker reports for his massage session that enables him to sleep well. T’Pol is starting it when Archer calls her: Xindi to check out. They locate the body of the man scorched to death. Then something starts altering them, making them become beast men. They capture T’Pol. She uses the translator to make them understand each other. They find and eat live maggots. The ship captures Reed and studies the virus that changed him to a different species. T’Pol remains with what were Archer and Hoshi. Two alien ships come and board, and explain about the virus; the Enterprise is under quarantine. The planetary species lost the ability too reproduce, so they made a virus to transform other species into theirs. Archer and Hoshi are rescued, and Phlox’s new antidote restores them. This will solve the problem for the other species too. But Archer has Phlox save one vial of the virus. The extinction of a civilized species is at stake.

STE3 #4 “Rajiin” Archer and Tucker visit a local planet to see a man about a formula to convert Trellium A to Trellium D. They get it, but also rescue a pretty concubine, Rajiin, who begs to go with them. Later she visits Archer and is well on the way to seducing him when he blinks and she hasn’t touched him. She says she has certain skills. Evidently so. She impresses Hoshi. Then T’Pol, who resists, and gets knocked out. Rajiin is more than she seems; she is working with aliens. The Xindi? Archer puts her in the brig, but boarding parties come for her and there are firefights. They escape witch Rajiin. There will surely be more, as the Xindi use her to zero in on human biology.

#5 “Impulse” T’Pol is being restrained, screaming in protest. An emotionless Vulcan? Then we go to one day earlier. The tension of the Xindi mission is getting to the crew; they need R and R (military for Rest and Recreation). Then comes a Vulcan automated distress call. They answer it. It is the Seleya, drawn into the Expanse some time ago. It seems derelict, but there is life aboard. Archer, T’Pol, Tucker, and a crew go aboard. They find a live crewman but he attacks them. Then others, all violent. T’Pol gets infected; she feels her control slipping away. Something is eliminating the Vulcan emotional control, so that their underlying violence takes over. They have to fight their way off the ship, with T’Pol more of a problem than an asset. The ship blows up. Trellium poisoned them. T’Pol has bad hallucinations as she recovers.

#6 “Exile” Hoshi is in her room when someone unseen speaks to her. She calls security, but they find nothing. She is sure she did not imagine it. A man approaches her. He says he is three light years away, and she is a rare one who can receive his telepathy. He sees through her eyes. Archer directs a slight detour. They visit the alien Tarquin, at his planet. He may be able to help them with the Xindi. He insists on Hoshi’s company while he works. He has thoroughly read her mind and personal history. Obviously he likes her. Meanwhile aboard the Enterprise anomalies multiply. Tarquin projects himself as a handsome human man, hoping to make Hoshi his next companion, but she’s not interested. She threatens to break the crystal that enables him to contact others telepathically. The Enterprise discover a third sphere, and more. Fifty man-made spheres, each one the size of a moon. Hoshi obtains information where the Xindi are building part of their weapon.

#7 “The Shipment” Archer, Tucker, and a crewman land on the planet whose coordinates Hoshi obtained. They find a major Xindi complex for refining kemocite, a key ingredient in their weapon. Archer talks to Gralik, an alien chemist, and learns that there was a sixth Xindi species, the Avians, now apparently gone. Archer recruits Gralik to help, as Gralik did not know his work was being used to kill people. They sabotage the shipment of kemocite.

#8 “Twilight” Archer wakes as the hip is being attacked. The others have orders to keep him confined. What? They fire at a planet, and it breaks apart. This is really strange. He wakes again in a different setting, with T’Pol housewifely in a ponytail. She says his last memory was twelve years ago. She reviews the intervening history. Which is that then he wakes in Sick Bay, and Phlox tells him he is infected with a virus that prevents him from forming long term memories. Earth was destroyed, and other Earth colonies. Tucker has been captain of the Enterprise for nine years. Archer was settled at a refuge with other survivors. His relationship with T’Pol has evolved. Phlox has finally developed a treatment; maybe now at last Archer will be able to retain his memories. It may even be retroactive, as the virus exists outside of time. The ship is attacked by the Xindi. Things are desperate. The ship is destroyed. Then Archer wakes back when this started. The treatment has been effective, and none of the twelve years happened. We don’t know just how far Archer and T’Pol’s relationship evolved, but it was evidently close.

PIERS

Marsh 2019
HI- 

The Cluster series will be featured in Early Bird Books on 3/13/2019, down-priced to $2.99 in the USA, and Open Road will promote it via social media. Cluster is my framework of star empires that are hi-tech in their centers but get lower tech the farther out they are, because of the slowness of lightspeed that delays information catching up. Earth’s empire extends to the stone age at its rim, where Flint of Outworld knaps stones for weapons. But he is also very smart, and he has one of the highest auras known, which means he can travel to instantly inhabit other bodies on far systems. So they recruit him involuntarily as a human agent, which annoys him because it means losing his lovely girlfriend and visiting weird places. The sequel novels carry it farther. This is a lively science fiction series, if I do say so myself, and you should enjoy it if my fantasy has not rotted your brain too far.

FeBlueberry was another month spent writing Xanth #45 A Tryst of Fate. I spent the first five days catching up on reading and viewing, then got to work for three weeks, writing 38,150 words, bringing the total to just under 90,000 words. Marsh will complete it at 100,000 or more words. This is where Squid, the protagonist of the prior (as yet unpublished) novel, gets brutally killed in another reality track, and makes her killer, Goar Golem, serve as protagonist for this novel. He can’t let it go until she forgives him for killing her. Would you forgive your murderer? He’s got a tough row to hoe. Then I’ll be free to catch up again on reading and viewing; I have books and DVDs piled up galore.

A year ago my wife was in the hospital and I had a bad fall. Fortunately we got through the month this time without either problem, though my wife does remain on oxygen and has to be careful about getting around. It was another warm month, with many days’ highs in the 80s. Passing aggravations were when my computer decided that my day’s novel text files no longer existed. I mean when I tried to call up one from the list, it flashed the message that it did not exist. The listed file did not exist? I managed to restore one from the backup flash drive, and another by copying my text file to a new title and copying sections from that, but it was a nervous hour. So what had the machine done? I don’t see how simple miskeying on the regular screen, not the file handler, could have abolished a file from the hard disk, or made the backup copy a day more current than the hard disk copy. As I told my paralyzed correspondent Jenny in 1989, your computer is out to get you, whoever you are. That remains true thirty years later. I back up each new file three times a day and print out at the end of each day, being paranoid about loss of material, so my losses are small, but the ghost in the machine keeps trying. This sort of thing didn’t happen with my manual typewriter.

I watched Red Sparrow. Dominika is a former Russian ballerina. She is banged into and falls when dancing, and badly injures her leg. Three months later she walks with a cane. Was she deliberately injured? She catches her boyfriend having sex with another ballerina, and clubs them both with a golf club. Now she’s in trouble. Her uncle sets her up with a man who rapes her and gets killed in the act by a completely shrouded man who takes her off on his motorcycle. It turns out that her uncle set it up, to get rid of the rapist. Now she must enter Sparrow School, a secret government espionage program during the Cold War. They teach their students to discover a person’s deepest desire, often sexual, and cater to it, controlling him. It’s an ugly business. She is sent to Budapest to figure out an American operative who has baffled them so far. Then her roommate Marta is murdered and a man threatens Dominika. She talks with the American, Nate, who understands her situation and promises to do everything in his power to help her if she works with him. So she goes back to work as usual, but her allegiance has changed. The Russians catch her and torture her. She persuades her uncle that she is playing it straight, and that surviving torture is part of it. They let her go and she returns to Nate. Then they torture Nate, making her watch. Until she gets the chance to kill the torturer and call the Embassy. But it is still not over. She learns the identity of the mole they seek; can she trade that information for her freedom? She does—and frames her vicious uncle as the mole. Does she finally get together with Nate? That is unclear. This movie is too bloodthirsty for my taste, with torture shown with too much detail and perhaps relish. The nudity and sex seem mainly to lead into the ugliness. Not my type of film despite the appeal of said nudity and sex.

I watched 28 Days Later. Raiders free chimpanzees from a laboratory. The attendant warns them that the chimps are infected with rage; one bite transmits it. 28 days later a man, Jim, wakes naked in a lab to find himself alone. He goes out into the city, London I think, finding strewn debris, stalled or wrecked cars, no people. He enters a church and finds the people dead, except for a priest who attacks him. Then others appear, and attack. Then he meets Mark, and a woman Selena, who tell him how it started with riots and the loss of power, of government. Jim is the first uninfected one they have seen is six days. He visits his parent’s home, and finds them dead. Selena says that when an infected one is encountered, you have between ten and twenty seconds to kill them. Any uninfected are immediate allies. Jim and Selena meet Frank and his young daughter Hannah, who have a nice apartment. They hear a recorded broadcast giving a place where soldiers say they have a cure. So they find a working car and start driving. They get a flat tire in a tunnel. Then a swarm of infected come, but they manage to get moving again just in time. They reach the place, but there’s no one. Then Frank gets infected. Soldiers appear and kill him. So the message was true. Selena gets emotional, and Jim kisses her. But the soldiers want women. That makes Selena and Hannah prizes. Sure Hannah is underage, but this is post-civilization. Question: is England the only place where the infection occurs, and it has been quarantined by the rest of the world? Meanwhile they chase Jim out and prepare to have at the girls. They are required to dress nice, to be attractive, like dates, or else. Jim survives and gets a rifle. The three fight their way free of the compound. 28 days after that they use a giant cloth HELLO to attract the attention of a foreign airplane. Now they really will be saved. This is blurbed as a horribly frightening film, but actually it is a good taut adventure with a more or less happy ending.

I watched Cinderella Man, based on a true story about a boxer, Jimmy Braddock. It starts in 1933. He’s a family man, with wife Mae and daughter and other children. He has been injured often, so has failed to live up to his early promise. A fight is stopped by the referee, because Jimmy can’t fight well injured. He is not paid, and is decommissioned as a boxer. He has no money for food for his family. Jobs are scarce. It’s the recession. Things are bleak for everyone. He gets welfare, and donations from friends. Then his manager gets him a fight, because a boxer got scratched and they needed a fast replacement. And he wins by a knockout! That gets him back in the game, and he gets another fight, against a man who beat him before, and he wins again. He gets to fight for the title against max Baer, who has killed two men in the ring. He meets Baer at a restaurant and they pose for pictures while trading gibes. Then comes the fight. It goes to the 12th round. And the 15th. It’s a decision. And he wins! Two years later he loses it to Joe Louis. He and his wife live happily thereafter. I never heard of this boxer before, but this is a compelling history.

I watched Joyeux Noel, which means Merry Christmas. This is the story of a remarkable incident in World War 1, 1914. This was largely trench warfare; French and Scot troops face Germans. It is grueling for both sides. The Scots break the monotony by playing bagpipes and singing. Then a German tenor enters the zone and sings “Silent Night” in German. They play for him. He walks out into the no man’s land between the facing trenches, singing. Scots join him. They propose a ceasefire just for tonight, Christmas Eve. Then both sides lay down their rifles and come out of the trenches. The tenor’s friend, a woman, Anna, a soprano, joins them. They talk. They share liquor, chocolate. Anna sings in a Christmas service for the seated troops on both sides. Then they disperse to their trenches. Next morning they continue the truce so that both sides can bury their frozen dead. They play soccer on the snow. The Scots position is about to be shelled, so the Germans give them shelter in their own trench. The German couple ask to be taken prisoner by the Scots, so they can be together, as they can’t be in Germany. The Scot priest who conducted mass is being recalled to his home parish. The units who participated will be broken up and spread among other units. But the priest feels he followed the course of Jesus, as surely he did; Jesus preached peace among all men. His superior gives a sermon requiring them to shoot every German. The hypocrisy is painful. The Germans are punished similarly, sent to the Russian front. (Was there a Russian front in World Warn One?) It is plain that the war was made by rulers, not the people. Ever thus.

I watched Going Clear–Scientology and the Prison of Belief. I never have liked Scientology, despite my admiration for L Ron Hubbard’s Fear, which I regard as a classic of psychological horror, so this interests me for negative reasons. This is one hell of an expose. Their stated goals are a world without war, criminality, or insanity. They talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk. They recruit people who believe in such noble things; no wonder they have a formidable coterie of disillusioned former members. L Ron Hubbard, the founder, claimed to be a war hero. He wasn’t. He said the only way to make money was to make a religion. He did, his interest clearly in the former. He wrote Dianetics in 1950, about engrams, essentially memories of traumas, causing mischief in your life. Get rid of them, and become “clear.” Thus auditing, to clear them. His marriage broke up. The real money was in the higher levels. But by the late 1960s several nations were after them for tax evasion, so they went literally to sea: the Sea Org. Hubbard believed that he remembered his prior lives, when he was a Phoenician prince and such. Later he secretly went ashore and remained in hiding the rest of his life. They set up a shop in California to recruit celebrities, such as John Travolta and Tom Cruise. The upper level converts believe that 75 million years ago people lived in a realm very much like America of the 1950s. Never mind that primates did not exist then, let alone modern mankind. Wild science fantasy concepts. Galactic overlord. Spirits from A-bombed volcanoes called Thetans. Hubbard was after all a science fantasy writer. When he died they said he moved on to better research as a spirit. Then David Miscavige moved in to take over. Scientology regarded anybody who criticized it as fair game; it was a deeply paranoid and dangerous organization. It sees itself as the salvation of mankind, so lies and criminal acts are okay to discredit critics. Such as the IRS, that claimed a billion dollars in taxation. But Scientology fought until it won and became tax exempt. Now they are worth billions. How they set up a girlfriend for Tom Cruise, but when she privately expressed a doubt, she was abruptly out, and erased from their records. The top Church environment became poisonous, and those who erred could be physically beaten up. When the news came out, others were coerced into lying, claiming it never happened. There were daily beatings. Critics could be blackmailed. Families broken up. They brand some “squirrels” and harass them continuously. There are lawsuits, which they defend vigorously. Opposition is growing, but so far it hasn’t toppled this outfit. I have to say, however, that their science fiction contests do seem to be honestly run, without coercing participants to join the club. It is possible that their efforts on war, criminality, and insanity are also honest. I don’t know.

I read Cydonia 6 by Matt Sylvester. This is not your usual science fiction. Cydonia 6 is a prison for about ten inmates, half male, half female. Conditions are brutal, and the slightest infraction is punished by immediate beating. The genders are separated, except once in a while the prisoners with matching numbers are “married” and get to spend a week together in the Marriage Hut, eating well and doing whatever they like with each other. At other times they must eat exactly what they are served, the same thing constantly, no variety. One gets broccoli, another onions, others particular kinds of meat, always the same for each one, along with colored pills. It is deadly dull. Once in a long while one finishes his or her term and is released; sometimes one escapes. “Nothing new ever happened in camp unless there was a reason, and the reason was always something bad, frightening, or both.” Gradually the reasons come out. There are monsters, and they have special tastes in human flesh, such as broccoli, so each prisoner is shaped to a particular taste. Those who are theoretically released are actually fed to the monsters. Those who escape may encounter the same fate. They are all doomed, not knowing it. Eventually Jonah and Barry make their break, climbing down into the refuse pits below each cell and following the stinking tunnel out. That’s when the real surprises occur. It all makes ugly sense in a way that completely surprised me. This is not fun reading, but worth it regardless.

I read Manifest Destiny by J T Buckley. This is what I might call a novel of manners. That is, it is concerned with the protocols of the establishment and those who run it, rather than with the gut fighters in the trenches. Primus Aaron Richardson, who amounts to a prince of the Terran Space Empire, is about to marry the beautiful light blue skinned Queen Amalthia of Carnoria. They are very much in love. But they have to put down a rebellion by one Malkainis that threatens to seriously destabilize things. In the course of the next few months they maneuver to stop the rebel fleets and to safeguard pregnant Amalthia from attacks on her life. In they end they are successful, and she births their healthy baby. All is well. The story seems well enough done, but I did not find it compellingly exciting, perhaps because I identify more with the trenches than the aristocracy. Your taste may differ.

The February/March 2019 issue of the Secular Humanist magazine FREE INQUIRY has an article titled “The Science of the Evolution of Morality” by Doug Mann. I am reminded of Theodore Sturgeon’s comment that ethics is prescribed by the individual for himself, while morality is prescribed by the society for the individual. Maybe that’s why I tend to look down on morality; I have seen too much slop in lieu of ideal behavior. I mean, for far too long America regarded slavery as moral, and even today some regard impoverishing the majority to enrich the minority as moral. But this article has a higher standard. It suggests that human morality is explained by the competitive and reproductive advantages of a cooperative social life. Obviously we need standards, or we won’t get along with each other very well. It draws an example from the animal kingdom; “Today ants and termites represent less than 2 percent of the total number of current insect species, but ants and termites constitute more than half of the world-wide body weight of living insects.” From two percent to fifty percent; that makes them about 25 times as successful as your average insect. Because they have a true social structure, as do humans, who are similarly successful among mammals. “Warm-blooded mammals have the advantage over cold-blooded reptiles of being able to move and feed at any time of the day or night, but they also require about ten times as much food as a reptile of the same size.” Which is one helluva challenge, and we had better get along well and cooperate with each other, which morality facilitates. Over the course of about two and a half million years our complex brain tissue multiplied about eight fold, the most rapid such progress known. “Across species of primates, brain volume positively and strongly correlates with average social group size.” And “ The emergence of effective groupwide rules was intertwined with three major developments; the emergence of culture about 250,000 years ago, intensive social selection for altruistic behavior, and the evolution of the human conscience.” That certainly makes sense to me. My private theory is that Neandertal man lacked that social conscience, or at least did not have it to the extent we did, so could not form groups as large, and was defeated in the competition for supremacy.

Letter in the newspaper by Geanne Marks published 2-16-2019 says she is proud to be a Democrat, the party that cares about women. “If the Republican Party is pro-life, why aren’t they fighting for pre- and post-natal care, nutritional benefits for the newborn and mother, paid maternity leave, domestic violence education, and raising the minimum wage? They fight, fight, fight for the fetus, but ignore children that are born in poverty. That is hypocrisy.” I have wondered the same myself, and conclude that the real agenda is anti-sex, because those who oppose abortion also typically also oppose contraception. To them a baby seems to be punishment for the sin of sex. Actually assisting in the care and health of that baby would diminish that punishment. Yes, I don’t like abortion, but yes, I do support contraception; I think sex is a healthy human interaction, not just for procreation, and I don’t need somebody else’s church telling me when and how to have it.

Article in the February/March 2019 issue of THE PROGRESSIVE by Bill Lueders starts off “To say that Donald Trump is a racist is to state the obvious but miss the point…Of course he’s a racist. But what’s more troubling, is that his racism is strategic. It is intended two secure a political advantage…Trump’s racism is integral to his success, a lesson not lost on other members of his party. The appeals are not even subtle anymore.” It concludes “We are better because of, not despite, our differences in race, religion, and sexual orientation. Out of many, one. And no politician is ever going to take that away,” Well, I hope that confidence is justified. I hate seeing so much ugliness in our supposedly enlightened society.

Daughter Cheryl found a cute picture book titled P Is For Pterodactyl, the Worst Alphabet Book Ever. Theoretically it is for children to learn spelling and pronunciation. This is humor of course, but there’s a point. Our spelling is way overdue for simplification. How many years of schooling could be saved if only words were spelled as they sound? We are hobbling ourselves and I suspect it could be a reason why Americans tend not to be the top scholars on the global scene. Pterodactyl is pronounced tair-o-DAC-tell and it identifies a huge flying reptile of about seventy five million years ago. On the back cover is T is for Tsuntami, pronounced sue-NA-mee, a huge deadly wave in the ocean that can destroy shore communities. Others are A is for Aisle, pronounced I-yell, B is for Bdellium, prconounced DEL-ee-yum, a resin burned as incense, and C is for Czar, pronounced Zar, the title of the old Russian rulers. There’s a whole alphabet, with only a couple of letters like I and S actually pronounced where they belong. Fabulous!

Betty Ballantine died. She was around 100. She and her husband Ian are credited with changing the face of publishing by being among the first to publish paperbacks in the USA. They started Bantam Books, and later Ballantine Books, my first publisher. But I will tell what you may not find elsewhere: they were cheating their authors. I got blacklisted for six years because I protested. After they left, and accounts became honest, that same publisher made me a bestseller. So yes, they did good, but they also did evil. As long as the literary community tolerates dishonesty in publishing, and even punishes the victims instead of the wrongdoers, we have a problem.

Stray notes: 30 to 40 percent of Catholic priests in the US are gay. When are they going to reform and allow clergy to marry, as most other churches do? Gouging in drug prices like insulin is generating rage. I have remarked before my annoyance at the tenfold increase in the price of generic levothyroxin I take, which surely costs the same as before for them to make. Back in 1996 one brand of insulin cost $21 a vial; today it is approaching $300. People are dying because they can’t afford the $5,700 per year cost. Where is the law when you need it? The Republican tax cut last year is now adding one trillion dollars per year to the national debt. This is fiscal responsibility? Probiotics, which are beneficial bacteria in the gut, may improve mental health. Yes, I have taken them for years; I can almost hear my critics chanting “So there!” figuring that is proof they don’t work. The 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the 150 million adults who make up the bottom 60%. Meanwhile it takes $478,000 in annual income to make it into the top 1 percent of US earners. The sixth mass extinction is well under way, caused by the devastating impact of the burgeoning human population; it is extremely fast, as these things go. There are morning people, and night owls. As a poem goes “By some peculiar quirk of life/ They always wind up man and wife.” I am morning, my wife is evening. The latest news is that morning folk are happier and mentally healthier than evening folk. Arbitration clauses are hidden in many contracts these days, and the boss always wins. Avoid them if you can. I participated peripherally in one once, and noticed that two thirds of the arbitrator’s written decision related to his own payment for the service. That gave me pause for thought. Sure, arbitration is cheaper than the regular courts, but I am not at all sure they represent better justice. I read somewhere that robo calls now outnumber genuine calls. Now they tell me? At our house, it is about 90% robo, cluttering up our phone when we do have important calls to handle. This is one of those things the authorities could stop—if they wanted to. Why don’t they want to? I have been concerned for some time about whole-body anesthesia, where they put you to sleep and you wake two hours later with the procedure done, because I understand it can harm memory. I can’t be sure the things I have forgotten are because of old age or my dental surgery. Newspaper article by Jason Gale says the new research indicates disturbing side effects ranging from delirium to immune suppression. “…it makes sense that your brain circuitry is actually not the same after the anesthetic as it was before.” That’s scary.

The comic Non Sequitur by Wiley ran on 2-10-2019. I noticed nothing special. Then a week later the newspaper dropped it. Why? Because it had a bad word hidden in it. I dug out the comic of the week before and re-examined it, and after a struggle located what looked like 400-UCK. To my wife it looked like LUCK. It seems it was part of a message suggesting that Trump do it to himself. Well, the artist apologized and said he wouldn’t do it again, but hell has no fury like that of an editor whose inattention is exposed, and Non Sequitur is out of this newspaper and a number of others forever. This is not reform, this is punishment for a wounded ego. At present I don’t have a viable alternative to this newspaper, but at such time as I do I will ponder. I consider it as much of a black mark against the newspaper for its overreaction as against the artist for his dirty joke. They are both like six year olds, and it is the reader who suffers. They have substituted the inane comic Nancy, instead of restoring one of the good ones they cut before. No, I’m not a Trump fan, but I agree the message should not have appeared. It is what followed that bothers me. Sort of like executing someone for giving you the finger. I would prefer better from the media, though I can’t say I expect to see it.

Article in NEW SCIENTIST dated 2 February asks “What is Life?” Damn good question. It asks how living matter can do things far beyond the reach of non-living matter, though both are made of the same atoms. “…life is an enigma. Most strikingly, its organized, self-sustaining complexity seems to fly in the face of the most sacred law of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, which describes a universal tendency toward decay and disorder.” What about the genetic code, a four letter alphabet that is mathematically encrypted, which must be read out, decoded, and translated into a 20 letter amino acid alphabet used to form proteins? How can chemical hardware write its own software? The laws of life include feedback loops that make the flow of information depend on the global state of the system, and the whole is greater than the sum of ts parts. I believe that is also the key to consciousness: key feedback loops. I have mentioned before that the three great mysteries I would like to understand before I die are existence, that is why is there something rather than nothing, life, and consciousness. Maybe we are getting there.

PIERS
Star Trek: Enterprise

Season 3 episode #9 “North Star” A western. They hang a man for murder. Ship personnel are in costume, checking out the human settlement and the nearby alien settlement. Archer encounters a gun toting bully in the bar, then talks with the dead man’s widow, Bethany. They are called skags, skagorans, brought here 300 years ago to work. It is illegal to teach their children to read. Beth is jailed, facing a ten year imprisonment for breaking that law. Archer rescues her. She is shot, and he takes her to the Enterprise. Back on the ground there is a firefight as they mop up the bad guys. There will be reforms in this colony, and later these folk will be returned to Earth.

#10 “Similitude” They are holding a wake for Trip Tucker. How did he come to die? Flashback to find out. Trip is injured working on an engine and needs a transplant to survive. So Dr. Phlox uses a special technique to generate a clone whose lifespan is 15 days, to harvest tissue for the transplant. The clone is soon a boy called Sim, smart. Then a young man. He likes T’Pol but can’t be sure if the feelings are his own or Trip’s. He helps free the ship from a bad cloud. But it turns out that taking the transplant organ will kill him. Must he die to save Trip? When he has a possible chance to live out a normal life? He decides to do it. T’Pol kisses him. He is the one being honored in the wake. Interesting situation and emotions.

#11 “Carpenter Street” A man drives to his bachelor apartment, gets a phone call: made his decision? Don’t overdose the next one. His caller is an alien. He picks up a street prostitute, drugs her, takes her to a barracks, sets her up with a IV infusion. There are several other drugged people there on beds. Then to Archer, meeting with Daniels, learns that three reptilians, Xindi, are in 20th century Earth. What are they up to? Archer and T’Pol will go there to try to find out, in 2004. He figures out by trial and error how to drive a car. They call on the procurer, and learn that he had to collect 8 blood types. He still needs a B negative. That’s Archer, volunteering. T’Pol stays with the procurer as he searches for an AB. Archer, safely inside, wakes and goes to another room, spying the three Xindi. He shoots one. But the other two escape. T’Pol shoots one. The third one has the virus, which is effective so far on the tested blood types. They finally stop the third one and save Earth.

#12 “Chosen Realm” Tucker and Travis are on a mission. Meanwhile Enterprise rescues a distressed pilgrimage ship. But in the name of their religion they may be a danger to the Enterprise. In fact they tell Archer that they will destroy the ship unless he turns it over to them. Yarrik’s wife wants to end her pregnancy. It seems that a crewman must die, so Archer volunteers for that. There is a firefight and the home team wins. The religion that wanted to bring peace instead had brought the death of millions. Ever thus. They don’t call it social commentary, but it’s there.

#13 “Proving Ground” The ship is in trouble, but another ship tractors it out. Their savior is an Andorian ship. Their Commander Shran says that they don’t like the Xindi either, and if Earth’s friends won’t help, maybe others can help. Lieutenant Talas is a pretty Andorian female who helps with technical matters, and knows her stuff. This system seems to be a proving ground, like Bikini Atoll where Earth tested nuclear bombs. So the two ships coordinate uneasily to recover the weapon being tested. But then Shran plans to take the weapon to Andoria. So Archer activates the weapon, and the Andorian ship barely has time to jettison it before it detonates. Someone aboard the Andorian ship helped the Enterprise; the suspicion is that it was Talas.

#14 “Stratagem” Archer in anonymous costume is piloting a craft with another person, Degra, who does not remember how this came about. Archer says they shared a cell chamber for three years and made the break together. Archer tells him the weapon was successful and destroyed Earth; that after that the Xindi alliance started breaking up, and the insectoids captured them; that the two of them were put together to see who killed the other first. But finally they made an alliance to escape. It is of course a ruse to gain information; the craft is aboard the Enterprise. Then a three day flashback. They capture Degra and plan the subterfuge to gain key information from him. Thus this fake shuttle and story. But Degra catches on. Back to square one. But maybe they have a lead.

#15 “Harbinger” Tucker is giving the pressure point routine to a buxom lady Representative of another group, Amanda Cole, so she can relax and sleep. She kisses him. But later turns up with headaches. Maybe his technique is wrong. The ship encounters a monstrous bubbling sphere, maybe clustered anomalies. It envelops them. They rescue an escape pod with one humanoid aboard, but he is ungrateful. They conclude he is a canary, there to signal dangerous conditions by dying. Tucker and T’Pol accuese each other of jealousy. The she kisses him and strips. Next day she says she was experimenting with human sexuality. They agree to forget it ever happened. The alien tries to destroy the ship, then expires before Archer can get the truth from him, other than that when the Xindi destroy Earth, his people will prevail. Reed and a fellow officer have rivalry that finally becomes a physical fight. Archer tells them to fix it or else.

#16 “Doctor’s Orders” Dr. Phlox chats with the dog Porthos. The crew is in a coma as they take four days to pass through a dangerous region. Now it is two days into the trip. He hears distant crashing. Something is on the ship. It turns out to be T’Pol. So only the non-humans are active. But there is something else. Phlox is lonely, but T’Pol is happy for the solitude. He keeps hearing things, seeing shadows. He believes the Xindi are somehow on board. He hallucinates seeing Hoshi in awful sickness. Then the captain. He realizes that he is hallucinating. Then something shakes the ship. They manage to go to Warp 2 and get out of the region. He walks T’Pol back to her quarters, and discovers her sleeping there. She as his companion had been another hallucination. Wow!

#17 “Hatchery” They visit a planet and discover dead Xindi insectoids. Also a weaponized shuttle, and a hatchery, which will expire in another day or so. The others want to destroy it, but Archer says to save it. He labors desperately to save the Xindi hatchlings. When T’Pol balks he confines her to quarters. Then he confines Reed. Should Archer be relieved of command? Major Hayes is left in charge during Archer’s absence. Tucker and T’Pol take over. There is a tense showdown among the officers. Archer is shot. They discover that an egg that hit him imprinted him with the desire to protect the hatchlings at all costs.

#18 “Azati Prime” They spot Degra’s ship. Tucker and Travis fly a captured shuttle inside the Xindi protective grid. They explore a Xindi base that is under construction. Then Daniels, the time traveler, appears; he and Archer are 400 years in the future. [The episode reset and went to the beginning. So I tried to find the place again.] Daniels wants Archer to make peace with the Xindi, as both are being manipulated by the sphere makers. But Archer is concerned about saving Earth. He takes a dangerous mission himself rather than send anyone else to likely death. T’Pol is obviously moved though she can’t say so. Archer goes to nullify the big Xandi weapon, captured by the Xandi, Archer is violently interrogated. He insists on talking with Degra, whom he knows from episode #14. he begins to make and impression. But the Enterprise is under attack, and being destroyed.

#19 “Damage” The attack on the ship breaks off, maybe because Archer convinces the Xindi that it’s the inter-dimensional species building the spheres to make the Expanse habitable for their kind, which is what destroys the Xindi, not Earth. A shuttle brings Archer back to the Enterprise. T’Pol is evidently suffering from something. She has nightmares. Meanwhile the XIindi summon an alien female representative who phases in and out; they don’t get along well. T’Pol has become addicted to Trillium; her emotions can be hard to control. Archer decides to steal the alien ship’s warp core because the Enterprise needs it. This is unethical, which he regrets, but he believes the need overrides ethics. Others are dubious, including T’Pol. They get the warp care and are back in business, but this is hardly over.

#20 “The Forgotten” Degra gets in touch. He is an uneasy ally, wanting to save his people. He needs more evidence that what Archer says is true. Archer provides what he can. Tucker, under orders to sleep, has painful dreams. He remembers his sister, who died in the alien strike against Earth. He has to do a message of consolation to a lost crewwoman, and finally manages that. Meanwhile Archer, Degra and others organize to convince the Xindi council of the real danger they face. His is still far from over.

#21 “073-E2 ” Two others talking, saying the probe is on its way to Earth. That everything is happening the way it did before. So they must find Jonathan Archer. A ship intercepts theEnterprise. It is the Enterprise of the future, with Captain Lorian. Its first officer is a woman named Karen Archer, T’Pol’s daughter, Archer’s great granddaughter. The captain is the sun of Tucker. There’s a mixture of human, Vulcan, and other species on that other ship. The two Enterprises disagree on how to save Earth, and wind up fighting each other. They call a truce and decide to work together. T’Pol talks with her much older self. They go to a rendezvous with the other Enterprise, but it doesn’t show. With the hundred year vault into the past abolished, it may never have existed. A mind bending episode.

#22 “The Council” Archer and Degra attend the Xindi council meeting. The Reptilians and Insectoids refuse to listen. The Aquatics believe them. The Guardians are organizing them. Meanwhile something on a long extension attacks. They fight it off. A Reptilian kills Degra. That breakus up the Xindi alliance, dissolving the Council. The Reptilians and Insectoids seize control of the weapon that will destroy Earth. They are launching that strike.

#23 “Countdown” Hoshi has been captured by the Reptilians, who mean to get the weapon launch codes from her one way or another. They inject her with parasites that will destroy her ability to resist. They succeed, but she is later rescued, though Major Hayes who heads the action unit dies in the rescue operation. The Weapon is armed and launched. They set about neutralizing Sphere 41, which is the reason the Aquatics support the humans. The Guardians says the balance of power is shifting to the humans.

#24 “Zero Hour” Daniels talks with Archer, telling him that he is destined to help form the Federation of Planets, essential to history. But Archer means first to save Earth. Commander Shran of the blue Andorians comes to help. They implode Sphere 41, and the other spheres follow. Then Archer goes to the Weapon. He fights the Reptilians and blows it up. The Expanse returns to normal space. Did Archer escape in time? Apparently not. They orient on Earth, but there is no response. It seems that Archer survives—on a twentieth century Earth.

Season 4 episode #1 “Storm Front Part 1” Trip and Travis in a shuttle find themselves in World War Two. Archer is in Nazi hands, 1944. He makes a break and is captured by the resistance. The Nazi officers are aliens; they recognize Archer’s communicator as being from the future. He wakes to find Alicia Travers taking care of him, in Brooklyn New York. The Nazis have taken over eastern USA and are advancing west. Daniels turns up at sick bay on the Enterprise. He says the temporal war has expanded to all fronts. Each faction is trying to eliminate the others. Archer insists on meeting the alien in the neighborhood. He says the Nazis are helping them build a conduit so they can go home. Archer manages to contact the Enterprise and the beam him and Alicia up. Archer talks with a dying Daniels, who says that the most dangerous faction of the temporals is led by Vosk. He says they must find and destroy the conduit. This is the time when the conduit can be destroyed, to restore the original timeline.

#2 “Storm Front Part II” Archer meets with Vosk to rescue Tucker and Travis. They return to the ship. And Tucker turns out to be an alien impersonating him. He is Silix, a Suliban. The real Tucker remains a captive. Silix doesn’t want Vosk to succeed either, so they become allies. But Silix gets shot and dies. Archer activates the sequence to blow up the conduit. And the timeline reverts to the original. They return to the right time. All is well.

#3 “Home” They are back on Earth, and Archer addresses a meeting, saying it is good to be home. But he has trouble at the debriefing, as the Vulcans are uncertain he did enough to save one of their ships. He is required to take time off. He goes climbing with a lady associate he knows. Tucker is uncertain what to do with his time off. T’Pol invites Tucker to visit her home planet with her. Her mother greets them formally. T’Pol receives a letter from Koss, her former fiance. Reed and Phlox and Travis visit a bar and get into a brawl. T’Pol meets Koss, who is still interested in marrying her; she is not. But she decides to marry him to save her mother’s position. Archer suffers a nightmare sleeping on the mountain. His associate, now a captain herself, kisses him. Archer kisses her. But these stories are unfinished.

#4 Borderland” Two humans are captured by Klingons. Annoyed, they fight back quite effectively. They are genetically enhanced humans, called Augments. A criminal researcher, Soong, knows how to do such enhancements. Archer takes him aboard when the Enterprise goes to investigate. The Orions beam T’Pol, Hoshi, and seven others out of the Enterprise to their own ship, to be slave workers. Archer has to buy them back at auction, but T’Pol has already been sold. He manages to recover them anyway. But the Augments now have recovered Soong, who made them, and plan to become a new force in the galaxy.

#5 “Cold Station 12” Reprise, then to 11 years earlier, when Soong tells the children of their illustrious future. Back to the present. The Augments are setting about increasing their domain while the Enterprise hunts them. They take hostages. Archer interviews Smike, the failed Augment left behind. The Augments hardly hesitate to torture or kill hostages to get the information they need. There is an encounter—to be continued.

#6 “The Augments” Archer is racing to stop the process that will release multiple pathogens. A woman helps Soong escape. Malik kills her. He means to deploy the pathogens and destroy a Klingon colony, which will bring Klingon retaliation directly against Earth. The Klingons close on the Enterprise. The Enterprise deploys a grappler and disables the Klingon ship. The Augments destroy their own ship. But Malik beams to the Enterprise. Archer kills him. Soong is returned to Earth prison. His attempt to perfect humanity evidently failed.

#7 “The Forge” Vulcan planet. A man finds an artifact, dusts it off, reads its pictorial identification, and says “Surak.” Then an Earth admiral talks with a Vulcan reader—and the embassy is attacked. They believe it is the Andorians. Syrrannites are a rebel factor causing mischief on Vulcan. T’Pau Vulcan DNA is on a bomb that kills more humans and Vulcans; she’s a knowt Syrrannite. T’Pol’s husband Koss visits her and gives her a locket from her mother T’Les. It turns out that T’Pol’s mother is a Syrrannite. Archer and T’Pol go to Vulcan’s desert The Forge to find her mother. They meet a pilgrim, Arev. He is later killed by an electrical charge. It turns out that the DNA evidence is false. Arev, Archer and T’Pol are chased by a sandfire storm. Vulcan ambassador Soval does a mind meld to obtain evidence. That shames him before the Vulcans. Archer and T’Pol are captured by Syrrannites. To be continued.

#8 “Awakening” It turns out that Arev was the Syrrannite leader. T’Pol meets her mother again. Archer talks with Surak in a vision. T’Pau does a mild meld with Archer, and confirms that he has the key spirit. A katra. Archer now has the living spirit of Surak inside his mind. T’Pau is determined to transfer it to another person. Archer agrees. But Surak chooses to remain with Archer. He tells Archer to find the Kir’Shara artifact. He zeroes in on it. The Vulcans attack the Enterprise, trying to force it to depart. Archer finds the artifact, an inscribed four sided pyramid. The Enterprise heads for Andoria, which is being framed for mischief. To be continued.

#9 “Kir’Shara” Summary of the rationale for Vulcan to invade Andoria, which actually looks like corruption of a high Vulcan official. The Enterprise is heading for Andoria to try no avert mischief there. Meanwhile Archer, T’Pol, and T’Pau are trying to deliver the Kir’Shara to the Vulcan Council, because it represents the original words of the founder. The Andorians manage to beam the Vulcan ambassador to their ship and use a device to question him about the location of the Vulcan fleet. T’Pau tells T’Pol she can cure T’Pol’s malady, and she does. The Vulcan fleet faces off against Andorian fleet. The Kir’Shara brings truth to the Vulcan command. War is averted and the corrupt leader removed from power.

#10 “Daedalus” Dr. Emory Ericson in a wheelchair and his daughter Danica beam in. He his working on a transporter that will operate between planets, obviating the need for starships. But there is something they are concealing. Something attacks a crewman. The presence of Ericson and Dani is somehow responsible. It turns out to be Emory’s son, Quinn. They came here to the Barrens to recover Quinn. They finally succeed, but he dies. The new transporter is flawed; it will never work. T’Pol, now cured, is reexamining her underlying philosophy. She breaks it off with Tucker, amicably.

#11 “Observer effect” Reed and Travis are playing chess. Reed always wins, but Travis always sees it coming many moves ahead. Tucker and Hoshi return in the shuttle from a trip. Tucker is overcome by something and Hoshi brings the shuttle in; then Hoshi gets it. They are isolated until the nature of the illness is ascertained. It is a silicon based virus. They may have five hours to live. Hoshi breaks out of quarantine. They have to seal off a larger section. The two are given knockout doses, but then alien spirits occupy them and they revive. The spirits occupy other members of the crew, passing from one to anther briefly. They could stop the illness, but won’t. Archer and Phlox work on Hoshi. Organians, spirits, come to observe. Archer talks to them and persuades them that they need to to do more than observe if they ever want to understand humans; they need to explore compassion. And suddenly everyone is cured of the virus.

#12 “Babel One” The Andorion Shran’s ship was attacked by the Tellarites. The Enterprise is assigned to mediate a long-standing dispute between the two cultures. The Tellarites like to speak in insults. Then a seeming Andorian ship attacks the Enterprise. It may be a fake. Shran and his sexy female companion Talas break out of their restricted quarters and go after the Tellarites. Archer says the two cultures are being set up; it was not a Tellarite ship that attacked the Andorians. To be continued. Incidental note: I love the blue lips on those blue Andorian women. In fact all the colored women are beautiful.

#13 “United” There is Romulan involvement. But why would they stir up trouble so far from their domain? The Marauder is a robot ship sent by the Romulans to provoke a war in this sector. Tucker and Reed board it and turn off the auto control. But the Romulan commander releases radiation that will kill them if they don’t obey his directives and restore control of the ship toe him. Meanwhile Talas dies. That sets Shran off. He insists on meeting the Tellarite leader in combat, because the Tellarit shot Talas. Archer and Shran must fight, though they are friends. They are chained together by their left arms. Archer wins and cuts off one antenna, legally ending it. Thus he respects Andoran tradition and keeps the alliance without killing Shran. They rescue Tucker and Reed. And it seems that a pale blue Andorian is controlling the Romulan ship. To be continued.

#14 “The Aenar” The Romulans have a second drone ship. They mean to hunt down and destroy the Enterprise. The drone pilot is an Aenar, a blind telepathic subspecies of Andorian, who are pacifists. This one is a captive telepath. Planetside, Archer and Shran traverse ice caves. Shran slips, falls, and gets run through the leg by a spike. The pale blue folk Aenir help him. The captive Gareb’s sister Jhamel is tending Shran. She is blind and telepathic, like them all. On the Enterprise, Jhamel volunteers to run the drone, rather than let T’Pol try to do it, as T’Pol’s telepathy is not as strong and the effort is dangerous for her. Jhamel destroys the other drone, and her brother with it, to his abiding regret. She departs with Shran; they will evidently be a couple. Tucker asks to transfer to another ship. That may be because he still has feeling for T’Pol and needs to get clear of her.

#15 “Affliction” Several story threads here. The Klingons are executing one of their number, though he says his death sentence was commuted. Phlox gets abducted when he walks with Hoshi in San Francisco. Trip Tucker transfers to the Columbia. T’Pol asks him if it is because of her, and he avoids answering. T’Pol does a mind meld with Hoshi to reenact the abduction: the abductors are Rigelian. They take him to the Klingons; he is to work for them, or die. Tucker and T’Pol meet in a blank space when both are meditating or daydreaming. Reed is being forced to do something behind Archer’s back, and he doesn’t like it. Archer relieves him of duty. The Klingons need Phlox to counter a virus that is destroying them. It started when the Augments wiped out a Klingon crew. They are also working on Klingon Augmentation. Reed and a Klingon captive talk in the brig. To be continued.

#16 “Divergence” The Klingons compromised the Enterprise warp field; if they go below warp 5 there will be destructive mischief. They rendezvous with the Columbia, captained by Archer’s former associate the lady Hernandez (they climbed a mountain together, made love, agreed not to talk about it, as fraternization of officers is discouraged: what happens on the mountain stays on the mountain), arranging to get Tucker back on board to try to fix it. This is a very tricky operation. Reed is released from the brig to handle the transfer. The two starships fly in tandem, one a few feet above the other. That is one of the most memorable scenes int the series, to my mind. They succeed in fixing the warp drive. Phlox succeeds in stopping the plague, but that will also stop the Klingon augmentation. Klingon Ships attack the Enterpriseand Columbia. Archer volunteers to be the subject to test the virus cure, in the interest of speed. It works. Reed tells the agent who required him to deceive Archer to get lost. All is well, for now.

#17 “Bound” They are checking out a world for possible development. It is uninhabited, but does seem to have 600 foot long flying dragons that breathe fire. Can this be accurate? Then an Orion ship hails them and tells them to deactivate their weapons or it will open fire. They compromise, deactivating weapons together. Archer and others visit the other ship and are given food and shown a sexy dance by three green Orion girls. The girls visit the Enterprise, and their presence disrupts things because men can’t take their eyes or their minds off them. Some of the ship’s regular women get headaches. One of the Orions, Navaar, sets about seducing Archer, and he is hard put to it to interrupt that. In fact these women seem to have more power over men than mere sex appeal, and are using it. This is mischief. Pheromones are doing it, affecting men and women. Only T’Pol and Tucker are immune, she because she’s Vulcan, he because of his connection to her. It is a ploy by the Orion captain to disable theEnterprise and capture Archer. It turns out that the men are the slaves, not the women. Tucker and T’Pol take over and save the ship. Tucker transfers back to the Enterprise. The thing between him and T’Pol remains; she admits it.

#18 “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part I” Montanaa, 2063. a Vulcan ship lands. The natives shoot the captain and raid the ship. Then Enterprise, torturing a captive. Archer seems to be captive himself, and not normal. This appears to be an alternate reality,with the regular crew in similar roles, but different personalities, mostly darker. Hoshi is sultry, kisses Archer, and tries to stab him, but later she is in bed with him. T’Pol frees the prior captain and they set about re-taking the ship. Archer is tortured, then returned to duty because of higher orders. But he is marked for death. Tholian ships arrive. A containment net forms in space, catching the Enterprise. Then the Enterprise is destroyed. Archer and his crew are on another ship. To be continued.

#19 “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II” In this alternate universe even the intro song is changed. They are aboard The Defiant, which in another series was a warship. But they have only 47 people to try to run a ship designed for 400. There is a reptilian Gorn aboard whose purpose is to sabotage the ship. They hunt for it and find and kill it. But Archer is a paranoid alienophobe, planning to get rid of all non-humans. T’Pol opposes him. Archer plans to become Emperor. Then Hoshi betrays him, serving him a loaded drink. She declares herself Empress. I must say Hoshi as a sexy conspirator is intriguing.

#20 “Demons” Back to the regular intro song. There is a female baby, the child of Tucker and T’Pol. But she has never been pregnant. How can this be? A woman was killed; how was she connected? Tucker and T’Pol investigate. Travis and a former girlfriend have an affair. A man of Terra Prime takes over a Mars facility and can target any ship in the Solar System. He demands that all non-humans be exiled. A demon indeed! This seems to be building toward a destructive end to the series.

#21 “Terra Prime” Reprise of the situation: Paxton, an alienophobic man is holding the system hostage to his bigotry. All channels are jammed or carrying his message. He is targeting Starfleet as a leader in alien intrusion. The baby was made from cells taken from Tucker and T’Pol. T’Pol takes care of her, and will not let her be harmed. Names her Elizabeth. But the Vulcan and Human genes are incompatible, and the baby will die. However, with a different technique the two can be compatible. The Enterprise manages to stop Paxton and save the existing situation. This is a powerful argument for enlightenment.

#22 “These are the Voyages.” Personnel froam The Next Generation, Riker and Deanna Troi, are reviewing the situation via the Holodeck. Shran the Andorian tells Archer his daughter has been abducted. Tucker and T’Pol admit they will miss each other. Shran and T’Pol meet the abductors, and pay the price, a giant gem. T’Pol takes the girl. Then hell breaks loose. They survive, and Shran’s family is reunited. Except that the other ship catches up and they take Archer hostage; they want Shran. Tucker manages to knock them out, but is injured himself and dies. Archer has to give a major speech for which he feels ill-prepared. He hugs T’Pol and goes. Will they finally get together? We aren’t told. End of episode and series. I like the series Enterprise, but I think not as well as Voyager or Deep Space Nine. It tends to get too wild, farfetched, and violent, and the personal relationships are not as satisfying. Too bad T’Pol didn’t go mountain climbing with Archer.

Star Trek Animated #1 “Beyond the Farthest Star” this is the original Star Trek cast, drawn neutral. The animation is primitive, with characters not speaking frozen in place. Half hour episodes. They track mysterious radio emissions near the outer edge of the galaxy. They encounter hyper-gravity. It’s a giant beautiful starship, dead for three hundred million years. The crew of it seems to have destroyed it themselves. There is a message saying they are protected only for this moment. Then things blow up. An alien mind takes over the Enterprise. They go into warp and leave it behind. The story is there, but the presentation is not much.

STA #2 “Yesteryear” They enter a time vortex, and others no longer recognize Spock; they have a different first officer, Sarak. The report is that Spock died at age 7. So he goes back to restore the broken timeline. We see his past, as a Vulcan/Human crossbreed, ridiculed by other children for it. He must undergo the ten day ordeal of survival in the desert, the kahs-wan. His beloved pet dies, and he must accept that. It seems that is the fix needed. Spock is back.

STA #3 “One of Our Planets is Missing” A huge cosmic cloud is approaching; Enterprise is sent to investigate. It is matter and energy combined, and seems to consume planets. A member of he crew is an orange alien, Arex, I didn’t notice before. They get drawn in and trapped in the cloud. It may be a living thing. They find themselves in its small intestine, with antimatter villi exploding matter and assimilating its resulting energy. They tractor beam one in to use for the antimatter drive. Spock talks mentally to the cloud, and convinces it to depart so it won’t destroy other life.

STA #4 “The Lorelei Signal” Star ships have disappeared in one sector over 27 years, human, Klingon, and Romulan. Enterprise investigates. It encounters a bevy of lovely women. The nectar knocks them out and ages them significantly. They all now wear red bands around their heads. Uhura takes over the ship in the absence of the men. Spock gets to a communicator and signals Enterprise to request an all female rescue party. Uhura heads it. She learns the history of the people here, where only the women survive. They are immortal but unable to reproduce. The transporter restores the men to their prior condition, and they arrange to transport the women to a safer planet.

STA #5 “More Tribbles, More Troubles” They are taking grain to a starving planet when they see a Klingon ship pursuing a smaller vessel, a scout ship. The Klingons hit the Enterprisewith a stasis field that puts it largely out of action. But it uses robot ships to get out of it. They rescue Cyrano Jones with a load of tribbles. These ones don’t reproduce. He also has a tribble predator, a glommer, that eats them. The stasis field drains the energy of the target, but also that of the host ship. The Klingons hate tribbles. These one eat and grow, soon becoming large. The Klingon ship returns and immobilizes the Enterprise, but the Enterprise beams tribbles to the Klingon ship, messing it up. They also devise a treatment hat breaks the big tribbles down into little ones. So all their tribbles are little ones (their pun).

STA #6 “The Survivor” They assist a ship near the Romulan border. Carter Winston, the foremost space trader of their time. Then Winston changes to an alien creature, who knocks out Kirk and assumes his likeness. Then he does the same to Bones. He is a Vendorian, banned from regular planets. Now he’s loose on the ship, capable of assembling any identity. But he assumes the form of a deflector shield, and saves the ship. So they will surely be lenient with him, and Winston’s girlfriend is now his guard. She knows he is the alien, but may decide to be his girlfriend too, because she remembers and respects Winston and he likes her. There is another alien crewman; it seems there are a number of them accepted routinely.

STA #7 “The Infinite Vulcan” They survey a newly discovered planet on the periphery of the galaxy. They find people puffball plants that are mobile. There are intelligent plants here on Phylos, and flying ones. They have science beyond anything known elsewhere in the galaxy. They capture Spock. They want him to help generate a new and superior species. They make a giant Spock; the old one is dying. But in the end the giant does a mind transfer to the original Spock, restoring his consciousness and identity.

STA #8 “The Magics of Megas-Tu” They investigate the center of the galaxy to see if it is still generating matter. They get caught in an energy whirlwind. Fortunately there is calm at its center. But everything fades and they are dying. Until a big a faun, Lucien, appears, with horns and hooves. His universe operates by magic. He is a Megan. Belief is as potent a force here as matter and energy are in the regular universe. Then suddenly they are in stocks in 1691, the Salem witch trials. Spock conducts their defense. But Lucien is actually Lucifer. Kirk defends his right to exist and be free. That satisfies the Megans that humanity has progressed since the prior contact. So they let the Enterprise go.

#9 “Once Upon a Planet” They set course for a shore leave planet for rest and recreation. They see a white rabbit and Alice in Wonderland. The point is to make their dreams come true. Then an army of playing cards attacks them and they beam back to the ship. Uhura loses her communicator. A search party looks for her. They follow signs saying UNDERGROUND ENTRANCE. They encounter pterodactyls. Also a two headed fire breathing dragon. They persuade the governing computer that they are not slaves to the ship, and it relents and resumes entertaining them.

#10 “Mudd’s “Passion” They look for old friend Harry Mudd, who practices fraud, swindling, and illusion. They arrest him. Now he is selling a love potion. Nurse Chapel tries it on Spock. It works, but she thinks it doesn’t. Several crystals get into the air of the ship, affecting crew members. Chapel is delighted with Spock’s attention when they rejoin. In due course things return to normal.

#11 “The Terratin Incident” they are on a mapping mission, but investigate radio signals from a star with one decipherable word: “Terratin.” Something weird happens. They may be shrinking in size. All organic matter is affected. They drop to two inches high and are not done. But the transporter beam restores them to full size. They have a macroscope! (Readers may remember that my major 1969 novel was titled Macroscope, about a phenomenal telescape; I wonder if that gave an episode writer the idea?) They rescue the miniature terratins by beaming up their whole city, which they will take to another planet for settlement.

#12 “The Time Trap” They enter the Delta Triangle, a vast area where odd things happen. They become trapped in a field that slows them greatly. They pick up Klingons who are similarly caught. There are also lovely green women. The nasty Klingons place an explosive that will go off when they reach Warp 8. They find it, defuse it, and escape.

#13 “The Abergris Element” Argo is a largely water covered planet they are studying. They land the aqua-shuttle on water and get caught by a giant red creature. Kirk and Spock get changed to water breathers with webbed hands. What did it? There must be intelligent life here. Kirk and Spock encounter sea folk, the Aquans, who don’t want to associate with them, having had bad experience with air breathers. Then they find an underwater city. They manage to change back to air breathers so they can return to the Enterprise.

#14 “The Slaver Weapon” They find a Slaver stasis box, a relic of a culture that existed a billion years ago, but was later exterminated. Their relics have profoundly affected contemporary culture, such as the gravity fields for spaceships. Kzinti capture Sulu, Uhuru, and Spock. They find what may be a weapon. The Kzinti find a setting and adjust the object. It blows up and destroys them. That’s a kind of message from the past.

#15 “The Eye of the Beholder” A six member science crew disappeared here on Lactra six weeks ago. What happened to them? Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to check on the Ariel. They encounter a fire breathing dragon, then a dinosaur. Spock says that a rain forest next to a desert is illogical. Then they get caught by odd tentacular snouted monster snails and taken to a kind of city. This may be a kind of interstellar zoo. They become specimens therein. They find three of the
Ariel’s crew there in good order. Then a snail child reads a human mind and tells the adult all about them, and they decide to let the humans go so they can develop naturally.

#16 “The Jihad” Vedala, the oldest culture known, sends Kirk and Spock on a mission; they are joined by several smart aliens and Lara, another human. The Skorr will attack and launches QuhaD, a holy war on the galaxy soon. They must get the Soul of Alar from a challenging planet. On the planet they encounter a volcano with flowing lava. They escape that only to encounter a snow storm, then an opening crevice. Mechanized sentinels attack. They realize that the birdlike Tchar the Skorr is an enemy agent. They stop him and beam back to the ship with the Soul of Alar, mission accomplished. This animated series, so far, is okay, but the cartoon figures lack the potency of the real ones.

PIERS

A-Pull 2019

HI-

I read Chasing Freedom by Kambry Ellis. This is a sequel to Escaping Paradise, which I reviewed last year. In that one Alyssa falls for handsome Jon, but he turns out to be trapped in a cult, and also has an alter-ego Jonah who is sadistic and beats her up. They manage to escape the supposed paradise, and Alyssa is now trying to heal from her physical and emotional wounds. But there are complications. One is that the bad guys put out a contract on the life of one of her friends; another is that she finds herself slowly falling for Jonah, whose idea of love is a kind of sadism. She may be softening him, while he is hardening her. The details become complicated, and lives are lost. Now she loves both Jon and Jonah, and they love her. I haven’t seen that romantic twist before. The story will be concluded in the third novel, Claiming Salvation, next year. Hard hitting, and perhaps not for every reader’s taste; it’s no gentle romance.

I read The Hole In The Universe, How Scientists Peered Over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything, by K C Cole. I read it as research for my novel A Tryst in Time, which is ado about Nothing, but it is fascinating in its own right. The essence is that nothingness is the perfect original state, and imperfections in it account for the universe as we know it. Empty space, of course, is not really empty; it has dimension and forces traversing it, and from it are constantly popping up pairs of electrons and positrons that normally dissipate immediately, but not always. You might think of space as a giant rug, and where there is a kink in it, that’s what we perceive as matter. There was once a bigger kink that we call the Big Bang, the origin of the universe we see around us. Along the way this book discusses everything from phantom limbs on people to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, seen from the perspective of nothingness. Relativity has been amply verified, and so has Quantum Mechanics, yet the two are incompatible where they overlap, so String Theory labors to meld them. The main String is M, for Magic, among other things; I like that, considering my reason for reading it. There’s so much in K C Cole’s book that I can’t cover it in any detail, but I heartily recommend it to anyone with any intellectual curiosity about the ultimate nature of reality.

I watched 45 Years. Kate and Geoff Mercer are getting ready to celebrate their 45thanniversary. A woman’s body is found in Switzerland, Katya, frozen in a glacier, and fifty years later Geoff is notified as the next of kin. Why? Because way back when, they were dating, and pretended they were married so that they could share accommodations. She even had a wooden ring on her finger. Then Katya died, maybe slipping off the path, and fell in the glacier, and was gone, until now. Then he met Kate. He would have married Katya, had she lived. That upsets Kate, all these decades later. She checks his old papers, trying to learn more about Katya. But in the end they are glad to be married to each other. As a long married man I relate.

I watched the Discover video, Mount Saint Helens. In 1980 the volcano developed a bulge, some 400 feet. Then it subsided somewhat. Then on May 18th let fly. 57 people were killed, and 230 square miles of forest were destroyed. Nearby observation stations disappeared as the north flank became a giant landslide. It was a rare sideways eruption. It tore a gap in the mountain two miles wide and two thousand feet deep, leaving a horseshoe shaped crater. The magma beneath expanded outward. Then it was quiet for half an hour. Then the eruption resumed, forming an immense mushroom cloud. The snow on the mountain was melted and became a torrent of water and mud. It dumped more that 65 cubic miles of mud. Then it was quiescent for twenty years, then formed a new dome inside the empty cone. Three and a half thousand years ago the mountain erupted with four times the mass of magma. There have been different types of eruptions in the course of its history. Scientists learned a lot from Mount St. Helens that enabled them to save many lives when similar patterns occurred later elsewhere.

I watched From Time to Time. In 1944 Tolly is thirteen. He is sent to spend Christmas with his grandmother. Tolly’s father is missing in the war; he clings to the belief that dad survives. He is intrigued by the old house. At night he sees the ghost of Susan. Grandma doesn’t doubt it. Her father gives Susan a companion, Jacob, a runaway black slave boy, for Susan is blind. Then Tolly encounters Susan by day. Her brother makes Jacob clean the chimney, then lights the fire under him. A cruel joke, while their father is away. Now Jacob can see Tolly, and Susan can hear him. One servant girl can see him; she helps him and covers for him. He takes food to a fugitive. But then when the house is burning, Jacob knows a route through the chimney to reach and rescue Susan. Then they appreciate Jacob. Back in the present, Tolly’s mother comes to visit. It seems that Grandma, father, and Tolly are all alienated from her, but she knows something. As does Tolly, from the visions of the past; Susan tells him. He finds the lost treasure. This saves the estate. But Tolly’s father is dead. That tragically unites him with his brother. But they see the ghost of his father, who tells him he will be all right. Also the ghosts of Susan and Jacob, who died of an illness while still young.

I watched Aftermath, a Schwarzenegger movie. Roman goes to meet his wife and daughter at the airport. Instead he receives the news that the plane crashed, no survivors. Jake, the air traffic controller inadvertently caused the accident because of a phone malfunction, is obsessed by guilt. Roman goes to help at the cleanup site. He finds daughter Nadiya literally in a tree. Jake’s house gets painted with the words MURDERER and KILLER. He separates from his family and buys a gun. The airline offers Roman $160,000 reparations for his wife and daughter. If he doesn’t sign the deal, he probably gets nothing. He just wants someone from the airline to say they’re sorry. They don’t. Jake tries to suicide with pills. One year later is the anniversary of the event. Jake is now Pat, in another city with another job. Roman wants to find him, to look him in the eye. He hires an investigator to get the name and address. He goes and stabs Jake to death, when Jake’s wife and son are there. He serves prison time. Ten years later Jake’s son is about to shoot him in revenge, but changes his mind. So the cycle ends. I think I like Schwarzenegger better in a role like this, though this is not my kind of movie.

I watched The Greatest Showman. It’s a musical. As a child, P T Barnum makes a girl laugh, and her father smacks him on the face and tells him to stay away. But she sneaks out the window at night to join him. She gets sent away to finishing school. They correspond. When they are grown they marry and go together. They have two daughters. Then he gets fired because the company is abruptly bankrupt. He puts together his show of wonders using a bank loan for which his collateral is invented. He recruits “freaks,” a dwarf, a bearded woman, a really fat man, a really tall man, Siamese twins, and so on. It’s a success. Then his family lives in a mansion. But critics object to the supposed indecency of the show. Then he gets an invitation from the Queen of England. They take the whole cast along. Then he imports Jenny Lind, a Swedish singer, who really can sing, and she wows them. Then he walks with his trapeze girl, and other condemn him for fraternizing with the help. He goes on a tour with the singer Jenny. She evidently wants more of him, and when she doesn’t get it, she publicly kisses him and quits. It’s a scandal headlined across the world. His wife goes home. The theater burns down. But the members of the circus act say this is their home; they were freaks, but here they are players. He and his partner try again, but can’t afford to rebuild the building, so they go for a tent. The greatest show is back.

I watched Patterns of Evidence Exodus. This is an exploration of the Israelite captivity in Egypt: did it actually happen? For centuries no one questioned it, but now they do. It was supposed to be in the time of Pharaoh Ramses, but there is no archaeological evidence of Israelite presence there then. Could it have been at another time? What about the earlier Middle Kingdom, 400 years before that? What about the names of the dead? There they found Israelite names. So maybe there were Israelites in Egypt, then. But what about the rest of the story? Does the biblical narration have to be literally true? Or can it be approximately true? Some experts dismissed it because they were fixed on Rameses. I think experts can be idiots; I have seen it elsewhere. There was a report of a series of calamities, as described in the Bible, but this may be a fake, as there was only one, when real plagues should have been widely noted. Yet if it referred to the time of the Middle Kingdom, it could be accurate. Then there was the invasion of Egypt by the Hyksos. What about the conquest of Canaan? There was no evidence of the destruction of the city of Jericho. It was destroyed, but centuries earlier. Adjust the chronology—and the story matches that of the Bible. The conclusion: the Bible may be essentially correct, only some details misplaced, and the close minded historians wrong. Fascinating.

I read Xanth #45 A Tryst of Fate, by Piers Anthony. Yes, my own novel; when I do the editing reading I count it as a read book. The prior three novels have been placed and should start appearing soon. This one picks up immediately after Skeleton Key and has the same protagonist, twelve year old Squid. She is outraged, figuring she has done her time and it is the turn of somebody else. For one thing, the protagonist has no privacy; every obscure reader knows her most intimate secrets. She’d like to do some naughty things with her boyfriend, but not when the world is watching; she’d quickly get in trouble with the dread Adult Conspiracy. But there is a reason: she has to go solve a nasty murder mystery. Why her? Because she is the one murdered, seven years in the future. Uh-oh. So she and her boyfriend cross reality tracks to get to the scene; it’s not time travel, which is dangerous because of the risk of paradox, but an alternate reality that runs a few years ahead of her own reality. She finds the murderer, Goar Golem—and requires him to become the new protagonist so she can retire. He must stay with it until she forgives him for killing her, which she won’t lightly do. Then it gets interesting. There’s a lot in this story, and it is no retread of old ideas. There’s an exploration of the real mechanism of the spread of cancer, a little known carnivorous dinosaur called Spinosaurus, a BEM invasion, and the threat of a New Clear blast wiping out a hundred thousand Mundanians. I believe this novel is up to the Xanthly standard, and should satisfy readers while making humorless cri-ticks wince at the puns. What more can you ask?

I watched Memory Hackers, a Nova presentation. Without memory we would be prisoners of the present; it largely defines who we are. Jake has HSAM, Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. Maybe 55 people in the world have it. They can instantly remember every detail of every day of their lives. What exactly is a memory? That has flummoxed researches for decades. They have discovered that there are different kinds of memories. Sometimes skills can be remembered, but not events. The hippocampus is crucial for forming new memories. They experimented with sea slugs, because they are one of the simplest of creatures. Find out how a sea slug remembers, and that should suggest how more complicated creatures do. There are physical changes in the brain as memories are formed; new neurons grow. Consider the first kiss: where is that memory stored? We don’t know. Is it like a book in a library, stored away unchanged? What happens when we evoke that memory? It seems that memories are constantly being rephrased. It is not a book; the act of remembering changes it. This means that memories of fear can be retrained and eliminated. Fear of spiders can be eliminated. It is called reconsolidation. Because of this, memory can become unreliable. Imagination can create a false memory. This can really mess up eye-witness testimony. DNA testing has shown this. Experimenting with mice, they can use laser light to turn memories on and off. The special ones who can remember everything can’t turn off the bad memories. Why did evolution give us changeable memory? It allows us to select the memories we really need.

I watched Android Cop. Two cops chasing the bad guys run into a trap and one gets killed. Raids in the Zone, the forbidden section of the city, can wind up disastrous. They request backup and a robot comes. Both the bad guys and the police don’t know what to make of it. Then the robot is assigned to partner with our main cop, Hammond. They have to locate the android aspect of the mayor’s daughter, Helen, whose living body is unconscious but whose android body is not aware it isn’t real. They must find her before the bad guys do. What they don’t know is they are set up to fail, so the police can retaliate. They find her, but are not allowed to tell her her nature. She knows this area. She says people are not getting sick because of radiation, but from something else. They are attacked from different directions, unaware that the police are tracking them and betraying them to the enemy. But they make a .pretty good fighting team, the girl included. She gets injured, and sees that her hand is not flesh. “I’m like him,” she says, indicating the robot. And it seems that so is Hammond; he was badly injured in the prior trap that killed his partner. Now they are attacked by an armored helicopter. They are finally killed, in their fashion. But at the hospital Helen wakes when they thought she wouldn’t. The bad plot is revealed. At the end Hammond and the android are still partnering, only now both are androids, one controlled by a human mind. Presumably Helen is around also. This is not exactly a conventional humanoid robot story.

I watched In Defentse of Food. Some children try to eat right, but still get fat. Childhood obesity and diabetes are increasing. Diet connects four of the top things that will kill you. Potato sticks and fruit loops may taste great, but. High fructose corn syrup. Highly processed white flour. So we get hooked on tasty food, salt, sugar, and fat. The vitamins have been processed out. So companies started selling vitamins separately. Omega 3 fatty oil used to be in the food, but now has been replaced by omega 6, which has a longer shelf life but nullifies Omega 3 when out of proportion. And sugar—we consume ten times as much as we used to. Soft drinks are saturated with it. Carbohydrates convert to sugars too. The modern diet generates a lot of misery. Milk is an ideal food for babies, but not every mother can breast feed. Then came the formula. But much of it is indigestible. Why? Because one indigestible bacterium fills the baby’s digestive system and prevents other bacteria from attacking it. Checking a primitive African tribe that is generally healthy, we find that they eat healthy. So what can we do? Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants. So go to the produce section of the supermarket; the healthiest foods are there. Beware of “nutritionism.” Beware of the priesthood of nutrition. Original good ideas tend to get hijacked by commercial interests. Such as reducing saturated fat in the diet, leading to consuming more sugar. Moving from butter to margarine. Uh-oh. So how do you know what is really healthy? Eat food cooked by humans. Avoid foods you see advertised on television. Red meats lead to TMAO and generate plaque leading to heart attacks. So eat less meat. Seventh Day Adventists lead healthy lives, and the vegetarians live longer. Fiber is good, as it feeds beneficial microbes. Different kinds of gut bacteria can make a profound difference in health even with a similar diet. Use smaller plates and glasses. Eat the healthier food first. Attempts to reform food marketing result in law suits by the food industry. In America we eat fast; in France they eat slowly. Thus the French Paradox: they are healthier on similar foods, because they actually eat less. All things in moderation—including moderation. As a lifelong vegetarian who is a health nut, I appreciate this confirmation of my lifestyle. I seem to be doing things right.

I watched MILF, billed as a new sexy comedy classic. Four young men want to get laid, but are clumsy with girls. One is named Anthony, and he accidentally walks in on his newly divorced sexy mother in a lesbian bondage tryst. He is horribly embarrassed. His friend Brandon dreams of an encounter with Anthony’s mother, who is also intrigued by him. The girls their own age are not so much interested in boys their age. Then Anthony’s mom visits Brandon with seduction in mind. She of course succeeds. Then Anthony returns. She hides, then departs quietly, complimenting him on his performance. And visits him again for more, in bed, in the pool, anywhere. It becomes an ongoing affair, as she really likes him and craves the sex. Hormones, she explains. Then Anthony’s father is in town and they have a meal together. Dad is friendly to Brandon and snide to his ex wife. And Dad catches on. He says he’s gay, not stupid. But how will this affair affect Brandon’s closest friend Anthony? Meanwhile the others have found MILF partners too. But they start feeling hemmed in; the MILFs are too possessive. Then Anthony finds mom and Brandon together and is furious. But Anthony has been screwing Brandon’s mom. They fight. Anthony’s mom breaks it off, not liking the consequences, and Brandon gets together with a nice girl his own age. So all ends well. It’s a hell of a sexy movie, with many flashes of full bare breasts, pantied bottoms, and much simulated sex. But unlike the porno movies, it does have a story line and some human emotion.

I watched The Killing of America, a 1981 film that was suppressed for decodes. America is the only major nation with a higher murder rate than countries in civil war. More fatalities than in all her wars. Even presidents got shot, like Reagan and Kennedy. I remember. Martin Luther King. Kent State, 1970. George Wallace crippled. Robert Kennedy 1968. After the Jack Kennedy assassination the murder rate tripled. A new kind: random strangers being killed. Sniping became a fixture of American life. But the sale of rifles increased, averaging two guns per family. Why do snipers kill random folk? Out of boredom, bigotry, the colors of their clothing. Charles Manson. God tells them to do it. Reverend Jim Jones, with Jonestown in Guyana. He killed more than 900 Americans. A man enraged because his loan application was turned down, so he abducts the banker and holds a news conference to state his grievances. There are so many that killers are allowed to plead guilty to lesser charges and eventually be released. Most mass killers have an IQ over 125. They just keep killing. Ted Bundy was maybe America’s worst sex killer, killing more than 40 women and girls. A public vigil for John Lennon, people crying as one of his songs is played. And two people were shot during the vigil. The killing continues. And of course it has continued since the movie, to this day. I am bemused that the authorities, instead of heeding its warning, suppressed it. Which side are they on? Ah, but those killings are good for gun sales.

I watched Bad Girls at Play. Featuring Stormy Daniels, the porn star President Trump had a fling with and paid off for silence. Slow simulated sex, simulated ecstasy, ballooning breasts double the mass of natural ones. Music plays during the prolonged sex sequences. Male-female, then two girls make out. Standard diluted softcore porn with almost full female nudity but not for male. Barely any plot. Indifferent acting.

I read The Domain of Sagas, by Brian Clopper. This is the fourth novel in the Irving Wishbutton series. The dean of the characters school, Harmstrike, has nasty plans for everyone else, and it seems to be up to Irving to stop him. Then it gets complicated, as Harmstrike magically sends Irving into an alternate story, evidently hoping he will get hopelessly lost in it. But Irving sees parallels between this story and his own, and starts identifying equivalent characters, though they don’t know it. He has to follow their story line while retaining his own identity; it’s a challenge. Then he gets thrown into a third story. Bit by bit he does handle their situations while orienting on the larger picture, and slowly making them understand that all the stories are by one writer. The action is continuous, with threats galore. I have to say that there is more sheer imagination here than I have seen in some time, with every kind of creature and person. It’s a wild ride.

Our dull lives were interrupted in Marsh as we saw to house repairs. Our original kitchen sink was replaced maybe twenty years ago, but the new one had a tap that leaked a bit when used, and that drip had made a nice damp cabinet below that fostered black mold and even mushrooms. So this time we replaced the whole sink and cabinet, done mainly by a handyman with Daughter Cheryl supervising. My wife and I, octogenarians, are trying to go gently toward that good night, and don’t tackle the big stuff on our own. One day with the kitchen sink gone I had to take leaves of lettuce to the bathroom to rinse as I made supper, and wash the dishes in the bathroom sink. We are getting through, but will be glad when things are back to normal.

I remarked in the Marsh column how the comic Non Sequitur sneaked in a derogatory reference to President Trump, and got banned from the local newspaper. So then they held a referendum among readers to choose which other comic to replace it: Sherman’s Lagoon, Nancy, Candorville, or Rubes, the new strip to start Monday, April 1. Indeed, it turned out to be Sherman’s Lagoon. All nicely democratic, no? No. I remember the political adage, to install your man, don’t rig the vote where folk are watching, rig the ballot. Here is how this is rigged: they did not solicit nominees from the readership, they proffered ones they selected. Thus they excluded my choices, to restore the better ones they deleted in a prior purge, or to restore Non Sequitur itself after this warning. No, that might open the door to the embarrassment of the readers concluding that the editorial overreaction was wrong. They made damn sure that couldn’t happen. Now we have seen this process in action. The newspaper, like the nation, is not a democracy, whatever they might prefer you to believe. Now you know.

The March/April 2019 issue of THE HUMANIST has a couple of intriguing articles. One is titled “Lots of Love: Exploring Polyamory in Portland.” Polyamory means many loves, or having more than one romantic relationship at a time, with the knowledge and consent of all partners. Just as friendship is not exclusive, here romance is open. It has been estimated that almost ten million adults practice it in the USA. Because it is not listed as an option in the census or similar surveys, and there may be some stigma attached, this is hard to verify. So would polyamory alleviate problemn in conventional two party marriages? The article indicates no; if you have social or sexual hangups, this might merely complicate them. “Relating well with just one person is a serious challenge—relating well to many takes for more skill, yet can be far more rewarding.” So a person should consider carefully before getting into something like this, not because of morality but because it may be more of a challenge than he can handle. Religious rules can be forbidding. Which is why this article appears here: humanists are not as hung up about conventional morality, and may be in a better position to explore it.

The other item is a book review of 21 Lessens for the 21st Century, by Yuval Noah Harari. This has some intriguing thoughts. One is that as AI—that’s Artificial Intelligence—comes to the fore it may dominate our decisions on what to study, where to work, and whom to marry. We may come to “see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms, and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system—and then merge into it.” That is, to stop thinking and deciding for ourselves. Ouch! Another relates to God, secularism, and free will. “From an ethical perspectives, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history.” So if you don’t go to God for your ethics—let me pause here to recall how Theodore Sturgeon remarked that morality is what society dictates for the individual, while ethics is what the individual decides for himself—where do you go? Harari suggests that the most important virtues of a secular person are commitments to truth, compassion, equality, freedom, responsibility, and courage. That makes sense to me. The author also remarks on free will. “If by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to do what you desire, then yes, humans have free will. But if by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to choose what to desire, then no, humans have no free will.” Oh, my; that will keep me pondering for some time.

Article in NEW SCIENTIST Titled “Let the Sun Shine.” For years we have been told to slather on sunscreen to prevent skin cancer. This interests me because I don’t use sunscreen, and did have a pie shaped wedge cut out of my right ear to remove basil cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer, and for the past quarter century have worn a hat to keep the sun off that ear. My elder daughter died of melanoma, a more dangerous skin cancer. You bet I am aware. But I do try to get a daily brief dose of sunlight on my arms and legs. So am I being hopelessly confused? Not according to this article. It turns out that direct sunlight does cause skin cancer, but those who get more sun live longer on average than those who don’t. Sunlight overall does more good than harm for the human body. Sunlight helps the immune system, lowers blood pressure, aids wound healing, and produces Vitamin D. So what about sunscreen? It’s not really healthy. Your best protection against burning is sunglasses and clothing, apart from staying mostly in the shade. Which is what I do. Sunlight in moderation.

Another NEW SCIENTIST article is titled “Welcome to the Age of Wood.” It starts off with a joke: Did you hear about the wooden car, with wooden wheels, a wooden chassis and a wooden engine? It wooden go. But future wooden cars are no joke. They have developed a wood based material called cross-laminated timber (CLT), densified wood which can replace both steel and concrete. Sounds like plywood to me, but it has steely strength, lasts long, weighs less, and is surprisingly fire resistant. They plan to start building skyscrapers out of it, and yes, cars. They can even make it transparent so that it can be used like glass, but with better insulating properties. I am looking forward to the age of wood.

Cheese: as an ovo-lacto vegetarian, meaning I don’t eat meat but do eat eggs and milk products, my rational being that those products don’t hurt the animals, I eat a lot of cheese. An article in NEW SCIENTIST by Graham Lawtotn, dated 16 February 2019, shakes me up. It indicates that cheese is not the kind-to-animals product I had assumed. They drive dairy cows hard. The natural lifespan of a cow is about 20 years, but most dairy cows are slaughtered at age 5. That is, when they can no longer produce milk at a super-cow rate. So the dairy industry is intimately connected to the meat industry. This business of milk from contented cows is hogwash. A cow must birth a calf in order to freshen, that is, start producing milk. The male calf is killed immediately, or raised for six months and slaughtered for meat. The female calf is separated from her right after birth, de-horned and ear-tagged usually without anesthetic, raised until 18 months old, then artificially inseminated. Nine months later she births her own calf, which she can’t keep, and is milked several time a day, until her production declines and she is slaughtered. Cheese is essentially concentrated milk. Because of that, it requires a lot of milk to make a pound of Cheddar cheese, putting more cows at risk. This is not at all what I support. So what can I do, after a lifetime of innocently eating cheese? Well, I think I need to support alternative milk that doesn’t come from cows, goats, or whatever. The article has a subsection devoted to cheese alternatives. There is ethical cheese, where cows and calves are more humanely treated. But that addresses only part of the problem. What happens to the male calves, and to the cows when their production declines? Then there is vegan cheese, using no animal product. NEW SCIENTIST convened a panel of staff to sample five brands for taste, texture, etc. Prosociano Wedge is not great but might do grated into a pasta dish. Original Flavor Slices, not great but inoffensive. Mediterranean Style Block. Some rated it the best, others the worst. Mozzarella Flavors was nothing like real mozzarella. Those four were by Violife. Smoked Gouda Style Slices, by Follow Your Heart. This was rated the best of a bad bunch, quite like real gouda, but not gourmet. So at least an alternative exists. But I think what is needed is a way to grow milk without the cow, that looks, feels, and tastes like milk, and has the same nutritive value, at a cheaper price. That could be made into the same kinds of cheeses, butter, or yogurt. Then it could start replacing milk so that the dairy industry could fade out of business. Of course I’d like to see artificial meat also, that could do the same to the meat industry. Get the semblance right, the nutrition, at a cheaper price, and economics will do the rest. It could be a giant step in the salvation of the world, because of the horrendous damage the meat and dairy industries are doing to the global environment.

Shorter notes: you know about medical surveys, where individuals are anonymous? Don’t believe it; your DVD identifies you regardless. You think the internet is anonymous and free? Not any more. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the scientist who created the technical standards that made the web possible, is distressed by the uses to which it has been put. Now he is working on a new platform called Solid,whose goal is to re-decentralize the web, returning ownership of data to the users who generate it. But it is doubtful that he will succeed,in the face of the dystopia generated by a few big companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Women have younger brains than men by an average of 3.8 years. But long working hours stress women more than men. The cultural police are now trying to decide what novelists can write about, according to an editorial by Theunis Bates in THE WEEK, for March 22, 2019. It concludes “Readers should be the ones with the power to decide whether a novel fails or succeeds, not cultural police who punish writers for using their imagination.” Amen. Experts say the current US economy is booming, but the truth seems to be that there is no boom. Sometimes it seems that if you want a wrong answer, go to an expert. Children who grow up with greener surroundings have a significantly lower risk of developing mental disease later in life. Yes, I grew up in a forest, and saw that my own children did too. Book: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming, by David Wallace-Wells. It starts “It is worse,much worse, than you think.” I believe it. Everything alive today can be traced back to the Last Universal Common Ancestor, LUCA about four billion years ago. Then it split into bacteria and archaea, which today make up the majority of all living species. LUCA may have lived in an alkaline vent on the sea floor. Fossil evidence suggests that our species arose in east Africa, and it is suspected that it is the changeability of conditions that drove the evolution of our big brains. Yes, that was my assumption for my GEODYSSEY series. I think mankind was prodded by living in the highly volcanic Rift Valley there; volcanic lava can provide rich soil, but volcanoes are dangerous. It helps to be smart to live there. Binge drinking changes DNA, as do cocaine, cannabis, and methamphetamine. I suspect the mechanism is epigenetic, but it is scary anyway. Letter in the TAMPA BAY TIMES March 14, 2019, by Richard Golden, remarks how legislators want to fine people $500 for using uncertified emotional support animals, and maybe even throw them in jail for two months. “How about going after businesses that ignore the do not call list, or drug companies that sell us prescription medications containing known carcinogens? Which do you think would be more useful?” I suspect he will wait a long time for the answer. But I can offer one: people in need of support animals generally don’t have large resources to pay off legislators, but those errant companies do. March 16 column by Graham Brink says that our Florida partisans are among the most politically prejudiced in the country. That an analysis in the ATLANTIC magazine ranked each county in the nation for political tolerance, shading the least prejudiced in white, the most prejudiced in dark green. The whole state of Florida is dark green. No other state matches that. Meanwhile the conservative Florida Citizens Alliance wants to ban books they object to in public schools. This of course is mischief, as what a liberal sees as lovely a conservative may see as obscene. It reminds me of a passage in what I remember as an L Sprague de Camp historical novel where a time traveler got arrested in the Roman Empire. “Why send him to Rome for interrogation?” an official demanded. “We have a perfectly good torture chamber right here.” And I received an email from one Benji Stein telling me he’s a hacker who has cracked my device and set up a malware on an adult porno site where he intercepted my passwords, uploaded all my data, and will send out an obscene message in my name to all my contacts if I do not pay him $650 within 48 hours. Sigh. I fear he will be disappointed. I work offline, have never been to a porno site, and do not have a Facebook account to be hacked. So if you receive an obscene video purportedly from me, it really is fake news.

PIERS

Animated Star Trek

#17 “The Pirates of Orion” Spock keels over. He has an illness that causes the blood to stop processing oxygen. They must find a planet where a treatment drug, Strobolin, is available, or rendezvous with a ship that has it. A weird Orion (which they pronounce with the accent on the O; in real life it is o-RI-on) ship intercepts the Huron that is bringing the drug. The Huronseems dead; its cargo has been taken. Kirk, Scotty, Nurse Chapel and Uhura beam over and find it empty. They arrange with the Orion captain to get the drug, but he doesn’t want the incident reported lest it compromise Orion’s official neutrality, and tries to wipe them all out, but they manage to defuse that and get the drug, saving Spock.

#18 “BEM” The green alien Ari ben Bem from Planet Pandro is traveling with them as an observer as they explore a planet. Bem is actually a colony creature, capable of separating into parts. He messes with their communicators and phasers, substituting fakes. He, Kirk, and Spock get captured by natives, thanks to Bem’s mischief. A planetary intelligence informs them that it does not want them there. It regards the natives as its children. They agree to depart and quarantine this planet.

#19 “The Practical Joker” They are cataloging asteroids. Romulans attack, claiming they trespassed into Romulan territory. They escape through an energy field, but then suffer a plague of practical jokes, like dribble glasses or bending forks, flying pie in the face. McCoy, Uhura, and Sulu visit the holodeck, walk in a somber deep forest, and can’t be reached by others. The main computer is the jokester, evidently infected by a virus. The air has nitrous oxide or laughing gas. They pass through the energy field that started it, and this time it reverses it. But now the Romulans are caught in the practical joker syndrome. Kirk plans to wait a bit before informing them how to get out of it. Why spoil their fun?

#20 “Albatross” They help Planet Dramia, but then Dr. McCoy is arrested for slaughtering hundreds of people on Dramia 2 nineteen years ago. They investigate. They get the plague; crew members change colors. Spock takes over, as he is immune. They need to get McCoy so he can discover a cure, but the Dramians refuse. Spock stages a jailbreak to get McCoy. The plague is caused by an aurora; McCoy didn’t do it. McCoy finds the antidote in one man who survived the prior plague. He saves the ship and the Dramians, who duly honer him. All is well again, and they agree to forget prior infractions.

#21 “How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth” An alien space probe scanned Earth, sent out a signal, then self destructed. Now an alien spacecraft appears. It encloses the Enterprise, then beams it. It looks like a flying dragon. It is a Mayan god Kukulkan, a flying serpent. Kirk, Scotty, McCoy and crewman Walking Bear are beamed to the alien ship, where they face a kind of animation test to see whether they can figure out a riddle. If they fail, all mankind will be destroyed. But they free a vicious creature, who disrupts the museum, and satisfy Kulculkan that they deserve to go their own way and find their own destiny. He departs.

#22 “The Counter Clock Incident” they will honor commodore April, the enterprise’s first captain, now 75 years old. They encounter another ship whose captain speaks backwards. They increase speed to impossible levels, like warp 20. They find themselves in an alien universe with black stars against white space. Things run backwards here. Two novas overlapped and created a connection between the opposite universes. But they have become younger, in fact children. April takes over and gets them out. The children age back into their original roles. All is well again.

The Orville season one

Episode #1. “Old Wounds” Ed Mercer discovers his wife in bed with a blue man. So much for that marriage. One year later he is promoted to captain of the exploratory ship the Orville. He takes his friend Gordon as his helmsman. They set course for Epsilon. Then he learns that his ex-wife Kelly has been assigned as his first officer. She promises to depart at the first opportunity. At the station they learn that a fabulous new aging device has been invented, and the enemy Krill want it. The Krill attack, demanding the device. Gordon uses the “hugging the donkey” technique to balk it, zooming around and around it close up so that it can’t fire at them. They give the device to the Krill, but set it off so that in minutes it grows a giant redwood tree on the Krill ship, destroying it. Mission successful. Then Kelly arranges to get replaced as first officer, but Ed reconsiders, as she has performed really well and saved the ship, and asks her to stay. Then at the end she talks with the Admiral, and we learn that she was the one that arranged for Ed’s promotion. She is really trying to make it up to him, but kept that secret. I haven’t yet gotten all the characters straight, but already I love this series.

O#2 “Command Performance” Bortus has laid an egg, and requests a 21 day leave of absence to hatch it. His species is all male; this is how they reproduce. Then Ed and Kelly visit his parents on another ship, leaving Alara in charge. She is cute and possesses inhuman strength, but deeply uncertain and wants to quit, but can’t. Meanwhile Ed and Kelly find themselves seeing New York City, in their old apartment, two years before. It is as if the last year never happened. He sleeps and wakes in a Calivon zoo. They are in one cell, seeing the others; the specimens can see and talk with each other but can’t leave their cells. Alara decides to disobey orders and try to rescue Ed and Kelly, to the delight of the crew. They borrow Calivon illusion technology to masquerade as a Calivon ship so they won’t be attacked. They rescue Ed and Kelly by trading crappy old TV series for them, which are great exhibits. And Bortus’ egg hatches a female, which is impossible in their society. Another wild adventure.

O#3 “About a Girl” Everyone is admiring the new baby girl. But her father wants to make a her a male. They refuse. A Moclan ship comes to take the baby, to perform the procedure. Burtus changes his mind and decides to raise her as a female Moclan. But his partner and the Moclans are determined to take the baby. Kelly will be his advocate as she had a year of legal training. The planet is a weapons manufacture industry, horribly polluted. Ed scans the planet and locates a female—they do exist–and brings one to the hearing, Haveena. She turns out to be the planet’s greatest writer. But the panel decides to do the procedure. So the baby becomes Toap, male. Damn; I was hoping otherwise.

O#4 “If the Stars Should Appear” They encounter a monstrous city ship in space, 2,000 years old, drifting, 780 kilometers across. They board it. It is huge inside. They find a living landscape, with hills and trees. The find a cabin in the forest. The family there does not know it is aboard a spacecraft. Kelly and Alana walk in the field and are accosted by two men who demand their identification, and shoot them when they don’t understand. The Orville gets called away on an emergency. Meanwhile Kelly gets tortured and interrogated before the others rescue her. They access the control room. It is a generation ship, but got messed up on the way and now is drifting, its people no longer knowing. But they will be able to fix it in a day.

O#5 “Pria” A comet is heading into a star. But there’s a mining ship crashed on it whose female captain says she’s in trouble. You bet! They send the shuttle to rescue her. But the star’s gravity draws the shuttle in. They catch it with the tractor beam. She is captain Pria Lavesque, from a town near Ed’s home town. She kisses him on the cheek. Kelly does a search and fails to verify Pria. She may be an impostor. Kelly and Alana search her room and find an odd device. Then the ship encounters a dark matter storm, big globs of darkness. Pria guides them out of it. Ed and Pria visit a holo scene. They kiss, then make out. Then they learn Pria is from 400 years in their future. The dark matter storm was supposed to kill them, historically. She’s a dealer in rare antiques, saving this ship from destruction without changing history. She takes them to her own time. Then Kelly tackles her, they fight while the ship returns via the wormhole to the present. Then they destroy the wormhole. Pria is captive here, assuming she will continue to exist, as it seems that history has been changed.

O#6 “Krill” they learn that Bortus can eat just about anything. They they receive a distress call. A Krill ship is attacking a mining colony. They challenge it, and it orients on them. They fight. They manage to null the Krill ship; it is dead in space. To handle the Krill they need to find a copy of the Krill bible, the Anhkara. They have a holo device that can make them look like Krill. They visit the Krill ship and photograph pages of the text of the Anhkara. They manage to wipe out the entire Krill crew, but save a female and several Krill children. This may not be over.

O#7 “Majority Rule” Girl waking up to TV, phone. Prisoner trying to escape, gets shot, then executed as the vote goes against him. They visit a 21st century Earth-like planet where a research group stopped communicating a month before. They have to don contemporary clothing. Alara, medical officer Clair, Kelly, and navigator Lamarr go there. Everyone there has two badges, green and red. Push the red one, negative. Push the green one, positive. Over 500,000 negatives may lead to execution. Lamarr dances with a statue and gets in trouble for obscenity. They find the surviving researcher, who has been “corrected,” and he is almost a zombie. They bring Lysella aboard and she helps them promote Lamarr to survival. An interesting warning against absolute popular democracy.

O#8 “Into the Fold” Clair Finn and her two sons go for a spot vacation. But Isaac comes along, to her dismay. The two boys Ty and Marcus, are constant disruption. They fall into a gravitational fold, nicknamed a glory hole, and are suddenly a million light years away from where they were. They land on a planet. They crash. They are in a rocky forest. Clair is knocked out. Something drags her away. Robotic Isaac looks for her but doesn’t find her. She is captive of a local man, Drogon, who says she is safe here. Isaac leads the children. They are attacked by three men. Isaac shoots and stuns the men. We learn that there was a war, and the enemy put a drug in the water, and few survive, turning to cannibalism for food. Clair escapes, recovers her communicator, get in touch. But is pursued by hungry natives. Ty is sick, having drunk the water. She reaches the boys and Isaac. Two dozen natives attack, and are fended off with lasers. Another shuttle arrives. They are rescued. Isaac appreciates learning so much about the dynamics of family life.

O#9 “Cupid’s Dagger” Two cultures are chronically at war over who first colonized a planet. Now an ancient artifact has been found that may settle it. The Orville will host the parties as the decision is made. The forensic archaeologist is Darulio—the blue man Kelly cheated with. And she winds up doing it again. There’s just something about him. Then Clair comes on to Yaphit, the intelligent green blob, who always liked her. They make out by his enclosing her bare body like a green mud plaster. And Ed gets romantically interested in Darulio. It is because Darulian’s annual hormones cause folk to become sexually obsessed. Meanwhile the two cultures are starting to war. But Darulian’s touch makes the two leaders fall for each other, defusing the war. Now Ed begins to understand about Kelly’s cheating: the hormones made her do it. A wild episode.

O#10 “Firestorm” They are caught in a space plasma storm. Their chief engineer gets hit by debris and dies. Alara blames herself, because she was afraid of the fire; there was an episode when she was eight months old. Then she sees a clown, and thinks she’s losing her mind. But security cameras verify that the was a clown. Then it appears again and attacks her. Then Kelly almost falls into a gulf. Then Claire tries to operate brutally on Alara. Claire now is the crazy one. Then a swarm of tarantulas attack. And vanish. Maybe the plasma storm did it. A giant insectoid kills Gordon. Only Alara is left as the ship reenters the plasma storm. Isaac shows up; they are the only two. Then she catches on that he is an impostor, the enemy. They fight. But this turns out to be a program Alara is in. A simulation, where they collected fears from the other officers to throw at her, and she survived them. So she is capable of doing her job.

O#11 “New Dimensions” As a joke, Gordon and Lamar hide a piece of the green alien blob Yaphit in some cake, and Bortus ate it. Both report to sick bay, the one for missing a piece of himself, the other for indigestion. Yaphit extends a tentacle into Bortus and recovers the lost piece. Problems solved, except for the question of officer judgment. The ship runs afoul of a space anomaly. It leaves a quantum wake that kills plants. They try to warn another ship that is heading for it, but its captain tells them to shove it up theirs. Then passes through the anomaly. Its captain winds up aboard the Orville, and its cargo turns out be be stolen rifles. Yaphit and Lamarr have to work together to investigate, and they have trouble getting along; for one thing, both are in line for the same promotion. But they gradually learn respect for each other. The anomaly turns out to be a two dimensional doorway. They shield themselves in a quantum bubble and enter, and the other side is a phenomenal array of colored lines and shapes. A two dimensional civilization. They make it through, thanks to Lamarr’s insights. He is promoted. My favorite episode so far.

O#12 “Mad Idolatry” the ship encounters a space anomaly and suddenly is coming to a planet. Kelly, Gordon, and Isaac take a shuttle to investigate, and crash. Kelly helps a child heal. Then the planet disappears. Isaac thinks it is orbiting between realities. So they wait for it to return in 11 days. Meanwhile Ed and Kelly get back together romantically. The planet returns, now far more advanced. 700 years have passed there. They visit and don native clothing. They discover that Kelly has become a goddess. There’s a statue of her. But people are being executed in her name. She tells them to stop. Isaac takes her place for the next cycle. Now the planet is highly advanced. They send up a ship to return Isaac to them. And Ed and Kelly have to break off their romance lest it jeopardize the mission. They both hate doing it, but see the necessity.

Doctor Who

Episode #1 “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” Ryan Sinclair in Scotland is trying to learn to ride a bicycle, but can’t keep his balance. He throws it over a cliff, then has to go try to recover it. And something flashes. A giant blue freezing cold teardrop. He calls the police. They send Yasmine Khan, “Yaz,” a lady cop who wants to do more than fender benders. They know each other. Then on a train a weird mass of wires descends, chasing a woman. She is Dr. Who, who fell from the Tardis as it exploded. They take her to see the cold blue teardrop. They give Dr. Who shelter. She says they have all been infected with a genetic bomb, including Ryan’s step-grandfather Graham; they have glowing spots on their collar bones. A big robot attacks and kills a man. Then another. They have to stop it. The robot is collecting teeth from trophies. Dr. Who finally manages to nullify it and sends it away. But Ryan’s grandmother Grace is killed in the course of the struggle. Then Dr. Who manages to summon the Tardis, bids farewell to the three—but somehow they get picked up too.

DW#2 “The Ghost Monument” Ryan, Yaz, and Graham find themselves on a spaceship with Doctor Who. Then they are on an alien planet, with alien folk: two ordinary people, a man and a woman, trying to escape the ruined planet. They can talk with them because universal translators have been implanted in them. They meet a hologram man, apparent but not really there. Now they must race across the surface to the Ghost Monument, which looks like the Tardis. The four of them plus the local couple set out. Thy trek across a virtual desert. They come across stone ruins and robot guards attack. This is a shooting range; everything is a target. Doctor Who manages to null their power source and they all go inactive. For a while. Things like flying blankets attack. They make it, and declare the two natives as joint winners. All disappear, leaving the original four back in the desert. But the Tardis comes. It has been reorganized inside, which is of course much larger than it is outside. They are on their way.

DW#3 “Rosa” the seamstress Rosa Parks, a black woman boards a bus, but is kicked off for not properly honoring the racist seating. Historically she’s the one who got arrested for sitting in the white section of a bus. They meet her. Ryan is black, and Yaz is taken for Mexican (she’s actually Pakistani), so Mongomery, Alabama in 1955 is awkward. There are Artron signals whose source Doctor Who has to locate. She discovers a case of future hi-tech instruments; that’s the source. A young bearded man owns them and is hostile. Why is he messing with time? He is Krasko, a former prisoner. They meet Martin Luther King. Krasko is trying to nudge history in little ways to change it so that the great revolution doesn’t happen. So they start nudging it back in place. Krasko damages the key bus to it can’t be there, but they find another bus to replace it. There aren’t enough passengers to make seating an issue. The four of them ride it to fill it up. So Rosa’s demonstration goes as history dictates, and the revolution is on. In a year segregation is ended. Rosa changed the world. A painful but excellent episode.

DW#4 “Arachnids in the UK” This opens with a man telling his niece’s wife that he wants to make this all go away. Then in England the Doctor is ready to separate from her three new companions, having brought them home, and it is evident that none of them are keen on doing that. Yaz checks on a friend—who turns out to be encased in spider silk. There’s a giant spider, dog size. It’s happening all around England. A horse-sized man-eating spider appears. So they lure the lesser spiders into the hotel panic room by playing modern music, the facet the mother spider—who is dying for lack of oxygen, her breathing system being ill adapted for this size. Problem solved. The three decide to stay with the Doctor.

DW#5 “The Tsuranga Conundrum” They are searching through a giant dump. But what they find is a sonic mine. It detonates and they wake in a hospital. Only it is actually a ship, the Tsuranga. She works with Aston, the doctor in charge, but he gets caught in an escape pod and jettisoned. Then they encounter a little sort of demon that eats anything. A pting. It will destroy the ship if they don’t get rid of it. In fact the ship will destroy itself. The pting feeds on energy, so they feed it the detonating bomb. Meanwhile a pregnant man births his baby.

DW#6 “Demons of the Punjab” in Pakistan, Grandma gives Yaz her late grandfather’s watch. Now the Doctor uses that watch to take them to Pakistan in the time of her grandfather, 1947, the time of its partitioning from India. They get a ride on a horse-drawn cart. The line between Pakistan and India is separating the couple about to marry. The idea of a Muslim marrying a Hindu is anathema, and people are getting killed for such. They learn that her grandfather Prem must die the day he marries; Jasmine’s existence depends on this. And so it plays out, tragically.

DW#7 “Kerblam!” the Doctor gets a special delivery of a box. It’s a fez type hat. Also an invitation to visit Kerblam. They go there. 90% of the workers are perpetually smiling robots, so they join the 10%, and are handling the boxes being shipped. They meet Kira, another living worker. They have to toe the line, or there is trouble. But there are frequent power outages, and not all the robots are powered by the main system. Something is going on. Then Kerblam itself asks for help. They discover that the bubble wrap around packages consists of tiny bombs. The Doctor manages to prevent all those packages from being teleported out, saving things. Overall, this seems to be a parody of Amazon.

DW#8 “The Witchfinders” The witch trials. Becka Savage at Pendle Hill supervises as they dunk the accused witch under water. If she drowns, she’s innocent. If she survives, she’s a witch, and will be hanged. There is no record of this town; it seems it was saved from Satan by killing all residents. Then the Doctor’s party sees figures rising from the muddy gravesite. They are alien spirits using the recently dead bodies. And the Doctor gets arrested for witchcraft. King James (the role a witch hunter is playing) sets up to have her dunked. But when they lift up up again the chains are empty. She held her breath and escaped the chains. The witch-killing Becka becomes the alien Morax. The aliens plan to take over and occupy the bodies of all the people. The Doctor manages to stop them, and all is well again.

DW#9 “It Takes You away” The Tardis parks in Norway. They take a walk in the woods and find what looks like a deserted house, but someone is in there. They find the child Hanne, who is blind. Her father departed four days ago. Something took him away. They check around. Something roars. They go inside. In the attic is a mirror that doesn’t reflect. It is a portal to elsewhere. Doctor, Graham, and Yaz go through it into a nebulous realm. They meet a sort of man creatures they call Ribbons, and make a deal to trade the sonic screwdriver for his lamp, once he shows them where Hannah’s father is. They encounter flesh eating moths. They find Erik. And Trine, his wife. She had died, but here she is alive. Then Graham encounters his own dead wife, Grace, Ryan’s grandmother. They think they’re real, but they aren’t. This is the Solitract plane, an alternate reality. A conscious universe. In the form of a frog. The Doctor persuades it to let her go. It’s a wonderful, friendly universe, but not reality.

DW#10 “The Battle of Ranskoor av Kalos” I had a bit of trouble following all the details of this one. Brief sequence from 3,400 years ago. Now they encounter Paltraki, who is told to return what he took. the Doctor meets Ux, one of only two in the universe. The Doctor knows the Creator, Tim Shaw from 3,400 years ago. Stenza technology can create anything. They have to stop the takeover of the universe. They do, and depart in the Tardis.

PIERS

Mayhem 2019
HI- 

Having completed my novel last month, I went on a video viewing spree. Those not interested can skip over the “I watched” paragraphs until they get to my personal opinionations on That & This. The first DVD is an erotic video, you know, porn; go ahead, skip it.

I watched Fallen, an acclaimed erotic movie, said to be one of the 30 greatest adult movies of all time. This genre is fantasy, of course, with men taking twenty minutes of pumping to finally achieve orgasm, and shapely young women genitally shaved and utterly and continuously thrilled to have all their orifices penetrated by penis, fingers, tongue or objects, done singly or multiply. That is, vaginal, anal, and oral all at once, with the cameras inches away. The movie starts with an extended sex sequence. Then the girl departs. The man has a ring, but lacked the nerve to ask her to marry him. She gets in the elevator—and something attacks and kills her. She had a guardian angel who did not get there quite in time to protect her. That mistake cost Angel and she is no longer an angel except in name. She has fallen, and is now mortal. She wants to be loved, and since Heaven is now closed to her, she visits below. Plenty of sex there, not love. She is free to join in on the ongoing sex, and does. Then she goes outside and makes out with a policeman who puts a baton in her rectum while having vaginal sex. She figures it’s a good idea to have the police on her side, just in case. Then Angel meets a man called Keith and is intrigued by him; he seems somehow familiar. They go on a date and dance, and kiss. Soon they are having sex in all the standard positions. Then she sees a picture of him with the girl who died in the elevator, the one Angel had failed to protect. He was her boyfriend! This messes her up; how can she ethically benefit from that failure? It isn’t right. She tries to move on, making out with other men and women. But all Angel can think of is Keith. She meets a girl with wings tattooed on her back, and just has to make out with her. Then she gets larger wings tattooed on her own back. Keith gets robbed; Angel rescues him, then tells him everything, not knowing how he will react. They go on a drive in the desert. She falls asleep in the car and dreams of visiting the angels, wings and all, and having more sex, including a threesome with her tattooed friend and the male angel. She wakes to find them parked and Keith pitching a small tent. They bike together, to a small airport where they take a little two passenger plane for a flight. He lets her take the controls for a while. She loves flying this way and is thrilled by this date. At night by a fire, outside, they have more sex. In the morning, ready to go home, they take one more bike ride, and two thugs in a car deliberately run Keith down. He winds up comatose in a hospital. Angel goes to a chapel and bargains with God: she will do anything, to save Keith. Then she comes upon a man taking a nurse hostage. Stops him, but gets shot herself. Keith dies, and Angel dies. So now they are together, if not the way she hoped. So this does have a story; it is a romance, and tragedy, apart from being 90% sex. I have the sequel, Fallen II, but suspect it will be a while before I watch it.

I read If You Can Read This The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers, by Jack Bowen. This is a fun book of unusual bumper stickers, together with the author’s commentary, and it can become incidentally profound. First the fun part: some of the stickers themselves. CACCA OCCURRETH, and its English translation SHIT HAPPENS. Then there’s GOT SOUL? And FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE. And HOW CAN SOMEONE BE “PRO-LIFE,” PRO-DEATH PENALTY, PRO GREED, PRO WAR?…STOP BEING A HYPOCRI+E. And RELIGION IS WHAT KEEPS THE POOR FROM MURDERING THE RICH. And “GOD IS DEAD.”— NIETZSCHE. “NIETZSCHE IS DEAD.”—GOD. And RELIGIONS ARE JUST CULTS WITH MORE MEMBERS. And INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS NEITHER. And FUNDAMENTALISM STOPS A THINKING MIND. And MY KARMA RAN OVER YOUR DOGMA. And THE LESS YOU KNOW THE MORE YOU BELIEVE. And EVOLUTION IS A FACT. GOD IS JUST A THEORY. And I FAILED THE TURING TEST. And AT LEAST THE WAR ON THE ENVIRONMENT IS GOING WELL. And CLONES ARE PEOPLE TOO. And I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH EUTHANASIA. THE YOUTH IN ASIA MADE MY TENNIS SHOES. And IF A MAN SPEAKS IN THE FOREST AND THERE’S NO WOMAN THERE TO HEAR HIM, IS HE STILL WRONG? And HELP STAMP OUT BUMPER STICKERS. And ALL EXTREMISTS SHOULD BE SHOT. And ALL GENERALIZATIONS ARE FALSE, INCLUDING THIS ONE. And ALWAYS REMEMBER YOU’RE UNIQUE, JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. And VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS. And I BELIEVE IN LIFE BEFORE DEATH. Then the text: the author uses the bumper stickers to set off deeper commentaries about life and meaning, which can be pretty sharp. Such as how a study shows that the drivers of cars displaying bumper stickers exhibit more Road Rage than those without. And if you can’t get something from nothing, then how could God come to exist? And the statistics: over a third of people believe in astrology, over half in ghosts, 75% in angels, and over 89% in miracles. One third of Americans believe that aliens have already visited earth. He defines the different kinds of love, some of which go beyond my dictionary: Eros is passionate, Agape is pure love, Philia is non-passionate love such as that of friends, Storge is natural affection such as parents for children, and Xenia is common love and hospitality. And the riddle of Theseus’s ship: over the course of time so many parts were replaced that in the end none of the original parts were there. Is it the same ship? If you answer no, you have a problem, because the water in a river constantly changes, and your own body does too. And the problem of quality: Van Gogh didn’t sell a single one of his 900 paintings in his life, but later they became phenomenally valuable. Was he a better painter in death? And on feminism gone extreme. One feminist argues that Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica is a rape manual, as science is a male rape of female nature. Another says that Beethoven’s Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music because it depicts the throttling rage of a rapist incapable of obtaining release. And what about the mathematical symbol “i”? Isn’t it phallic? And the question that if it were proven that no God exists, would people start stealing, murdering, raping and so on? He mentions secular humanism as sort of a code name for atheism. I find that interesting, being an agnostic humanist myself; I don’t think atheism needs any code, as it is a legitimate belief in itself. He remarks how no one shows up for anarchy meetings. And how Scientology threatens to sue anyone who calls it a cult. He says that one characteristic of cults is their willingness to abuse members, especially sexually. There was Raelism; the wife of the founder said that her husband had sex with hundreds of his young cult members. “I begin to think that the whole Raelian movement was a trick to have more sex.” The Branch Davidian leader married girls as young as twelve. But the Catholic Church’s record of priests having sex with young children hardly diminishes that opinion. He wonders about the Flying Spaghetti Monster religion, though my impression is that they are mainly into pasta. On the efficacy of prayer: the knowingly prayed for patients suffered more complications than the un-prayed-for ones. And virtual reality: if a married man makes out with a virtual partner, has he cheated? And Pascal’s Wager, that it is safer to bet on God and the Afterlife, because if you are wrong you might spend eternity in Hell. But there are hundreds of religions, each of which claims to be the only right one; your odds of choosing the right God are decidedly against you. And on; this book is a remarkable stretch of the imagination, apart from the fun of the bumper stickers. I recommend it to anyone with a mind.

I read A Spell For Chameleon by Piers Anthony. Yes the first Xanth novel, first published in 1977, with I think over a million copies sold. Why now? Because they are publishing a trade paperback edition. So I proofread the galleys, to catch the errors introduced by the scanning. Last month I read Xanth #45, A Tryst of Fate, so it’s a nice contrast to see how my current writing compares to that of over forty years ago. I find the two equivalent, allowing for a complete change of characters and largely complete shift of background. I did know how to write then. Today I would make only a few changes, nuances of style that no one else would notice. It remains a powerful novel, winner of the August Derleth Fantasy Award, and the introduction to the Xanth fantasy series. I wrote it because I wanted to work with editor Lester del Rey, and he then edited fantasy, so I wrote a fantasy novel, sort of converting Florida into the Xanth peninsula only with magic added. I had not been much impressed with the usual type of fantasy in that day, which was typically a mundane novel with just a suggestion at the end that maybe there was magic in the conclusion. So I made the magic obvious and plentiful from the beginning. But I couldn’t at that time take fantasy really seriously, so in came the humor, the puns and such. And lo, it turned out that other readers liked it. I had thought it would be a singleton, then a trilogy. Then the readers weighed in. I was on my way to bestsellerdom and wealth as a writer, with repeated if jinxed movie prospects. It really did change my life. My wife refers to our place on our little tree farm as the House that Xanth Built. The essence of the story is that the protagonist with the stupid name, Bink, is the one person in the Land of Xanth with no demonstrable magic, so he is ridiculed and faces the threat of exile. So he travels to see the Good Magician to learn whether he does after all have any magic. Along the way, at different times, he meets three young women: one beautiful but stupid, one average, one ugly but genius smart. They turn out to be the same girl, Chameleon, who changes a little each day, in the course of month. That’s her curse, and she wants a spell of make her average all the time. Some folk seem to think it is sexist to have a woman like that; maybe some day one of them will explain why, as I find Chameleon intriguing, sort of all things to all men, in due course, and that’s how Bink feels about her. Bink does get exiled, gets captured by the Evil Magician Trent, and the two of them plus Chameleon wind up back in Xanth. They rediscover Castle Roogna, named after a correspondent of mine, Martin Roogna, in Lithuania. It was once the capital of Xanth, but 800 years have lost it in history. In the end all is well, with Castle Roogna restored to prominence and Bink marrying Chameleon. Rereading this novel over forty years later was a profound experience for me, like a visit to past history, Xanth’s and mine. Xanth lifted me forever out of the rat race of survival that is the fate of maybe 99% of free lance writers. As literature it may be a joke, but financially it is a heavyweight. Without it, I would be just another genre writer you might once have heard of and forgotten.

I watched Dragon Day. Duke Evans is on vacation with his wife Leslie and young daughter. They discover a Mexican living there, who speaks Spanish, not English, and says he has a deal with Dale’s grandfather to rent it. The police agree. Then planes crash, all around. The TV says there’s has been an attack on America like none other. All the planes in the air have crashed. Cars stop running. Dale drives out to find his sister Rachel with their other daughter Emma. But his car stops also, and he is stranded. They finally do make it back, but the country is in chaos. China has attacked, because America reneged on a trillion dollar debt. Every microchip made in China has been infected by a virus that shuts down all modern technology. They are soon out of food, water, and power. He makes a battery out of potatoes for an old transmitter. A band of men raid the neighbor’s house, killing the neighbor. The sheriff takes over, killing the raiders and anyone else who resists. They must join the People’s Republic of China, wearing red bands, or die of thirst and hunger. But the bands compel compliance to the conqueror’s will. Rachel tries to violate the curfew, to get food, and her band kills her. The resistance needs Duke; when he refuses to go without his wife and child, they abduct him. His friend Phil saves him, but in effect holds the lives of his wife and daughter hostage against his using his expertise to fix a problem they have in a key program. So he cooperates, perforce, and they free him and give him water and food for his family. The sheriff then tries to take it away, and means to shoot the Mexican. So Duke shoots the sheriff. Then they and the Mexican go to Mexico. They sneak through the wall on the border. Then his red band starts killing him, and he has the Mexican cut off his hand to free him from it. They meet the Mexican’s wife and children. This will be their new home. I also watched their bonus featurette about the making of the movie. Instead of bombs and soldiers they have this cyber attack, just as effective.

I watched the Discover video, How the Earth was Made: Asteroids. It starts by discussing Meteor Crater in Arizona. Was it volcanic, or a strike by an asteroid? The issue wasn’t decided until the nuclear tests, which left some similar craters. It is an impact crater. What about others? One clue is iridium, far more common in space than on Earth. There are shattercones, formed only by such impacts. Also giant rings on the surface of the earth. Could there be another? Did such a strike eliminate the Clovis culture, along with the mastodons? Observing a meteor impact on Jupiter, they conclude that a similar blast on Earth would eliminate all life here. It just might happen someday. Stay tuned.

I watched White Bird in a Blizzard. In 1988 Kat is seventeen, with hormones. She comes home and her mother Eve is gone. Her father is distraught. Kat visualizes Eve lying nude in the snow. They talk to the police, but there’s no sign. Dad and Kate seemed like the perfect couple, but she never loved him. The women at his office were all into him, but not Eve. Meanwhile Kat is dating the boy next door, Phil, and Eve did not seem to approve. It is almost as though Eve was coming on to Phil. Then Kat comes on to the cop who is working on the case, and seduces him. Memories of her mother’s increasingly odd behavior before she left continue. Kat goes off to college, and catches up with her friends, including the cop, when she returns for a week between semesters. Her father has a new girlfriend, May. Kat dreams that
Eve returns without her hands; they just disappeared when she put them in the water in the sink. Two years pass. The cop thinks Kat’s father killed Eve. Kat doesn’t want to believe it, but it seems her friends do. Their cellar freezer is padlocked, and there’s an awful smell. But the body is not in the freezer. It had been there, but then he buried it. He got drunk, confessed, and killed himself. Eve had caught him in bed with Phil, and laughed uncontrollably, and he choked her to stop it, and killed her without meaning to. Wow! I admit I had suspected things, like Eve maybe having an affair with Phil, but that variant caught me by surprise. It does make a weird sense of things.

I watched Desiree. Eric wakes in police custody, with amnesia, and a painful burn on his left arm, accused of things. He has three days to find Desiree, but he’s not sure what she looks like or even whether she’s a person. He tries, but he doesn’t remember the people or the situation. But others remember him, and want information or they’ll beat him up or worse. A doctor tells him he OD’d on a dangerous drug. There are women, one of them his lawyer. He gets some disconnected flashes of memory. Then he remembers more, and starts fighting back. Now he’s pushing around folk who were pushing him around. Finally he remembers it all. He had panicked and swallowed a handful of the dangerous drug he had developed as a chemist. That wiped out his recent memory. Desiree is the drug, maybe named after his girlfriend. This is a confusing story and I may not have the details right.

I watched Thale, a Norwegian film, in English, with English subtitles. Two crime scene cleaners, Elvis and Leo, come upon stair leading down to a closed cellar door. Inside is a tub containing a live naked young woman. A recording says she was found eleven years before. She doesn’t talk, but does sing. She had a tail, but her rescuer cut it off so she could hide from her kind. She is desperately hungry. It seems she is a faun. She can heal heal plants. Then armed, cloaked, men take our two cleaners captive and evidently mean to execute them. But female fauns kill the captors instead. Elvis and Leo are rescued, and Thale escapes. There is a hint that she may remain in contact with them, secretly. It seems today’s “normal” humans are determined to extirpate this surviving offshoot; that’s why the fauns hide. An unusual movie, which I like not just because of Thale’s beautiful bare body.

I watched Playing for Time. This is Paris during the Nazi invasion. Fania is a Jewish musician, sent to the Auschwitz death camp along with thousands of political prisoners. They are stripped and their hair is shaved off. Their numbers are tattooed on their arms. She remarks that her boyfriend wouldn’t let her join the resistance he was in because it was too dangerous. They laugh, tearfully. The ovens are in sight and burning. Then a question: who knows Madame Butterfly? Fania does; she can sing. There are tryouts, and a group is assembled. They are bald, bruised, and largely shapeless in their prisoner rags, and they can no longer menstruate, being too lean from hunger, but they are an orchestra of a sort. Food is at a premium, and of course they are hungry. Some seem to be losing their minds. They must perform or die. But it is hard to strive to improve, to please the Nazis. They see children taken from their mothers. Hangings. The notorious Dr. Mengale takes some. 12,000 people are gassed every day. But the music continues. News of the allied advance circulates. Airplanes pass overhead. Their conductor is reassigned, and dies; I’m not clear whether her reassignment was a euphemism for her execution. Things fall apart as the bombing comes near. Tanks roll in. Their guards are arrested, and mobbed. The women are finally rescued, for what it’s worth at this point. This is not the kind of movie I enjoy, but I appreciate its validity. History can be brutal, and the Nazis were among the worst.

I watched Black Beauty, the famous story of a horse, narrated by him in a human voice. It begins with him being born, black with a white spot on his forehead. learning to stand on four feet, frolicking in the pasture, meeting other colts, learning the distasteful bit in mouth, learning to carry his master. Then he goes to a new master, and there is an ill-tempered brown filly, Ginger, in the next stall, but he likes her. He tries to win her interest, but she rejects him. There is also a white pony, Merrylegs, in the opposite stall. Their master’s boy is Joe, who really likes BB. Then, hitched to a wagon, he balks at a flooded bridge. The humans don’t understand, until a plank gives way and one falls into the rushing river. BB stands firm so that the man can cling to the rein and not be washed away. Then they understand, but now BB is ill. He recovers, and Ginger now accepts him. Then a pipe starts a fire in the barn, but the humans are oblivious. The barn burns down, but the horses are saved. Then BB and Ginger are moved to another owner. They put a harness on Ginger that she can’t stand; she bolts. A drunk man rides BB, falls off, and BB’s front knees are badly scraped. Others use Ginger in a race before she is mature enough, and that ruins her. BB is rented out to strangers. It’s a bad life. He is put up for sale. His next master, Jerry, is a kind man, but drawing a cab on cobblestones is hard on the feet. Then he meets Ginger again, but her spark of vitality is gone. She dies. Then Jerry sickens, and BB has to move on. He pulls heavy carts for two years, until he gives out. Then he encounters Joe, and at last it is good again.

I read Chaos, Making a New Science, by James Gleick. This tells me more about chaos that I really care to know, tracking many people who contributed to the burgeoning new science. One of them is Mandelbrot, of the famous Mandelbrot set, something that has fascinated me for decades. I contacted him when I was writing my novel Fractal Mode, as he coined the term Fractal, seeking permission to use it. “Why not?” he asked. “Everyone else does.” I appreciate his frustration. But he was just one of many. It turns out that what folk used to think was sheer chance may not be at all; rather it is finely developed effects stemming from sometimes simple initial conditions. For example, the smoke rising from a cigarette: it flows smoothly upward, then bursts into turbulence. Why? Is there a transition that can be analyzed? Maybe, but they are still working on it. Simple things can become suddenly complicated. I am increasingly suspecting that true chaos does not really exist; instead merely complicated effects that we don’t properly understand. The science of that understanding is parallel to Einstein’s Relativity, and to Quantum Mechanics, really a third branch of science. There will be a lot more about this in the news as that science is slowly worked out. Maybe the formation of the universe relates, a complicated cosmos stemming from supposedly simple nothing.

I watched Red Dragon, a Hannibal Lecter film with Anthony Hopkins. (Something about that actor’s first name intrigues me. Maybe some day I’ll figure out what it is.) A detective, Will Graham, visits Hannibal to consult, as he has a disturbing insight into recent killings: the killer is eating parts of the victims. Hannibal tries to kill Will; he fights back. Hannibal is captured, and imprisoned in a facility (I think) for the criminally insane, but killings resume. They call the murderer the Tooth Fairy. Will is called out of retirement to help on the case. He investigates the last murder scene. Children were killed, and pieces of a broken mirror put in their eyes to make them seem to be watching the proceedings. He goes to see Hannibal for his input. Hannibal says the two of them are much alike. Then a young man who calls himself D–for Dragon?–picks up a pretty blind woman, Reba, and takes her to her home. She senses something different about him. Is he the killer? Lecter receives a fan letter, probably from the killer. Hannibal sends him Graham’s home address. That’s mischief; they have to evacuate. But Hannibal helps the investigation, because he doesn’t like a lowlife like the Tooth Fairly thinking he is in the same league as Hannibal. The Tooth Fairy kidnaps a reporter, Lounds, and shows him his tattooed back, giant horns: the Red Dragon. There’s a 200 year old picture of the Red Dragon he emulates. Then bites off Lounds’ tongue. Then D man takes the blind woman to pet a sedated tiger. He takes her home and has sex with her, and sleeps. He likes her and doesn’t want to hurt her, but the compulsion is growing. He takes her safely home, this time. Then he tears up and eats the Red Dragon painting. His real name is Dolarhyde and he works for a company where he has access to key information. He kidnaps Reba, sets fire to the house, and is about to kill her, but can’t do it, and shoots himself. The police rescue her. They read his journal; he was an abused child. But the bones in the fire are not Dolarhyde’s. Then D comes after Will’s family and there is a bloody showdown.

I watched Hannibal. I watched it in 2001 but it is possible I have forgotten some details in the interim. The package says it has subtitles, but it does not. That’s a nuisance, as in my senescence I have trouble hearing some movies, not to mention a weakening memory. Indeed, I have no memory of the opening sequence. Special Agent Clarice Starling, a thoroughly assertive, competent and nervy woman who is directing a dangerous mission, sees it is too risky and calls it off, but gets overruled, with the result that five people die. Naturally she gets the blame. She gets assigned to an ugly case involving Hannibal Lecter, who has escaped incarceration. He is tracking her, and even writes her a friendly letter. It is a battle of wits from the start. Meanwhile Commander Torre is also on the case, for the reward. Hannibal catches on and kills him, after taking his phone and talking briefly with Clarice. There is also one of Hannibal’s former victims, surviving cruelly maimed, determined to get revenge. He has a pig farm, with the pigs trained to eat men. Clarice’s boss learns of a letter to her from Hannibal, concludes that Hannibal has a crush on her, and takes her off the case. Hannibal visits her as she sleeps, then calls her. He is watching her as she searches for him. She is being followed, the authorities hoping she will lead them to Hannibal. He starts taking them out. Somehow the pig farmer captures Hannibal (maybe dialogue I didn’t catch?), and means to feet him to the pigs. Clarice also goes there. She frees Hannibal, but gets shot herself. He picks her up and carries her out while the pigs eat the pig farmer. Three quarters through the movie I finally encounter familiar scenes. Clarice wakes with her wound repaired and she is in an evening gown, looking sexy. She joins Hannibal, who is serving a captive some of his own brain to eat. Then Hannibal kisses her—and she claps the handcuffs on his and her wrists, locking the two of them together. But he cuts off his own hand to escape without hurting her. He does like her. Thus he escapes, again. So I really remembered only the last quarter of the movie, and that imperfectly. But it’s one powerful film, worth watching again.

I watched Final Girl. This one, too, says on the package it has subtitles, but doesn’t. Why the misrepresentation? Should there be penalties, so folk like me don’t get had? It starts with Veronica as a child, as her father teaches her how to protect herself. That training continues into her maturity. Because four young men like to trick young blondes into the forest so they can hunt and kill them. Veronica will be prepared for that encounter. She befriends the brunette girlfriend of one boy, then sets herself up to get picked up by another of the boys. She gets a date for Saturday. It is on. Her date picks her up, and the four boys drive her to the forest. There they play a game of Truth or Dare, telling the worst thing they have done, or a penalty of eating a live worm, or kissing someone. They also drink, not knowing the she has spiked the flask. Then they tell her she will die in five minutes. She screams persuasively and flees. They don’t wait five minutes before pursuing her. Then, one by one, she takes their weapons and kills them as they hallucinate from the drink. We see their visions, adding to the interest. She uses ax, bat, rock, strangulation, whatever. She sets the last one up to be hanged, and he sees the ghost girls from the prior victims coming for him as he dies. Dad joins her. It is done. Ultimately nonsensical, but compelling.

I watched 2021, a romance. John Cooper is a computer programming genius trying to reverse-engineer intelligence based on the human genome. To design a program that can pass the Turing Test, fooling folk into thinking it is a living person. That’s one of my buttons; I expect there to come humanoid robots with consciousness, in due course, and they populate my fiction. But he is frustrated, not getting anywhere, and feels as if he is imploding. His therapist simply prescribes more anxiety drugs. Then he meets Emily Christiansen, a shy English teacher. It is awkward, but they seem to be two of a kind. That relationship changes his life. He breaks with the therapist, stops his medication, and pursues the relationship. In his imagination it proceeds to marriage. Her life was disturbed so she started writing, and has written eight and a half novels so far. Another of my buttons; I at one point had seven unpublished novels, thanks to being blacklisted for protesting getting cheated by a publisher. They wind up in bed, but they both have emotional hangups that interfere. She breaks off their relationship because she is unable to carry it through. That leaves him in limbo. He sets up to commit suicide, but changes his mind. He sends Emily a poem he researched. It moves her, as it is one of her favorites. She sends him a message that she would after all like to keep seeing him. He sets up to kill his boss, but changes his mind. Then he gets her message. Movie ends; we know it will work out. Trite, maybe, but I remember experiencing similar, if less extreme, reactions when the girl I loved broke it off. Then she changed her mind, and it became a lifetime together. It does happen. Nevertheless the movie, after setting them up as genius programmer interacting with a novelist, does no more with that; it’s just background. It’s too bad, as it could have been so much more than it is.

I watched Dragon Hunters, an animated movie. It even comes with a glossy little 48 page color comic book. The setting is a mass of floating debris; they jump from piece to piece. some pieces contain sheep; others bats. And of course the dragon. Zoe is a little girl who believes in fairy tales. A dragon is ravishing the land, and there’s no hero to stop it. So plucky little Zoe decides to do it herself. She meets Lian-Chu and Gwizdo, who consider themselves wandering knights and dragon hunters, who are pretty good with magic knitting needles. But Zoe believes in them, and the king is blind so doesn’t see how inconsequential they are. Lian-Chu has enormous arms and tiny stick-figure legs; the others have more ordinary proportions. The three of them and a blue dog set out to stop the dragon. They have various wild adventures along the way. The dragon turns out to be a huge dinosaur skeleton with wings, rather like a building-sized bat. It has suction breath that hauls them all in, but Lian-Chu takes it out with his knitting needles. They return victorious to the castle, but Zoe’s father the king rejects her as a runaway. So she goes to join the others on the little farm they will buy with the gold she filched from the treasury. Cute girl, cute story, happy ending.

I watched Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold. A famous magazine has a contest for Centerfold of the Year. Angel Grace is desperate to win it. She is one of three candidates. It starts with them at a photo shoot, stripping to their underwear, then going topless as they pose. She gets into a program to enhance her body, though the medication is risky. They try it on a rat, and it grows overnight to dog size. Angel, Betty, and Linda go the publisher’s estate for a weekend. The publisher’s shapely girlfriend, being used as a servant, is jealous. The photographer Mark gets Angel drunk and seduces her; she oversleeps for the next beach shoot. So she takes several doses of the medication, hoping to compensate. She starts growing. She joins the shoot half a head taller than the other two. Then she grows to about twelve feet tall, nude because no clothing fits her. And sixty feet, though she doesn’t look it. She’s not eating, just growing, magically. No problem of mass or balance or proportions; she’s the same as ever, only about eleven times as tall. Mark’s main interest is in exploiting her. The assistant loves her, but she refuses to believe the truth about Mark. Meanwhile they develop a spray that makes the rat small again, but then it collapses. Then the redhead Betty, jealous, discovers the medication and takes it. Now 60 feet tall herself, she attacks Angel. The struggle takes them into the city so everyone sees the two giant girls fighting. So they blast them with the reduction vapor and they shrink back to normal size. Then Betty bursts into fire. It is not clear why the same doesn’t happen to Angel. She realizes that the assistant is the only one who has been true to her, and kisses him. All is well again, maybe.

I watched The Adventures of Mark Twain, an animation film, clay-mation I think. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are in a raft. They go to see Mark Twain as he takes off in a balloon. He associates with Halley’s Comet, as it passed by the year he was born, and came again the year he died. Then they get caught on the balloon as it takes off, along with Becky Thatcher. The balloon is like a river boat with a paddle-wheel propelling it through the sky. Twain tells of the celebrated jumping frog. Then of Adam and Eve. She eats the apple and God is wroth. Other Twain notions pass through. They sail to the moon, then on to different alien Heavens. Adam and Eve have a baby, but Adam doesn’t know exactly what it is. Then another baby; soon they have a big family. Our folk chase and catch the comet. Then Twain merges with his darker self and they vanish into the comet. The balloon sails home with the three children and the green frog. This is a cute adventure. I was surprised by how well the animation via clay works.

I watched Earthsea, based on the work of Ursula LeQuin. A blacksmith’s son Ged and neophyte wizard girl Tenar are wrestling in the meadow, but they are also in love. He has visions of disaster, as invaders come. Meanwhile King Tygath is bent on conquest. He craves the help of the Nameless Ones, but the high priestess refuses to set them free of their imprisonment, as they are dangerous. A wizard tells Ged that his secret name is Sparrowhawk. Tenar says she hopes Ged finds the girl he has been dreaming about. Not her? Ged trains with the wizard, slowly learning his powers. He can summon mist. Then he goes to study at a school of magic. He learns to change into a hawk and flies away. The teacher warns about the dangers of toying with irresponsible shape-shifting. Then, challenged by a rival, he summons the dead. It goes wrong, but the wizard manages to stop the specter in time. Ged is sent away from the school, as he has misused his formidable power. A seeming friend becomes an enemy monster, but Ged escapes by becoming the hawk. The wizard tells him that he must reverse course and face the monster pursuing him, so as not to be driven into doom. Meanwhile the conquest proceeds. Tenar becomes the new high priestess, to the dismay of the one who wanted it. Ged faces his nemesis and they fight. End of Part I.

Part II. This picks up where Part 1 left off. Ged survives the fight, but the battle is not over. He and his friend encounter a fire breathing dragon, which then answered three of their questions. Murders continue. So does the invasion. But all is not as it seems. The evil conqueror thinks he has won, but the Nameless Ones destroy him. They find the pieces of the Amulet of Peace, put them back together, and peace is restored to Earthsea. There were details I couldn’t follow, because the movie lacked subtitles and I had trouble understanding the dialogue, but I think I have the simplified essence. I understand that Ursula LeGuin was severely disappointed in the movie made from her series; I have not read the original material, but suspect it is a good deal more sophisticated than this rather standard sword and sorcery rendition. Movie makers tend to follow their preconceived notions of fantasy, missing the nuances and degrading the narrative; I have had some limited experience with them. Don’t get me started.

I watched Patlabor 2, Japanese animation. A well coordinated terrorist attack occurs in Tokyo of 2006, this being the future when the movie was made in 1993. Secret surveillance reveals that an American airplane was involved. America is not attacking Japan; the terrorists have managed to co-opt American equipment. There is a question: is a just war better than an unjust peace? Each seems to give rise to the other. There is a question of infiltration of the defense command, though it is possible they are merely incompetent. While they dither, the attacks continue. Three mysterious airships float over the city. A secret mission takes out the conspirators. The cover blurb claims this is one of the very finest anime films ever made. I doubt it, but there are thoughtful aspects. What about the ultimate nature of war? I have read elsewhere that war is really a racket to enrich the big corporations, and that may be so.

I watched Melancholia. Part One is “Justine.” Justine and Michael go to Justine’s sister Claire’s home to marry. Things start going wrong. First they are delayed two hours arriving; the guests are not pleased. There is a banquet, with the toasts and speeches. Justine’s cynical mother says she hates marriages and says to enjoy it while it lasts. Family tensions mount. Brother in law John resents the amount the wedding costs. Justine feels the tensions, which make her tense. Meanwhile the planet Melancholia is heading toward Earth; if they collide, mankind could be wiped out. The experts say they won’t collide, but experts do make mistakes. Relationships continue to fray. The forms are there, but it’s really not a happy occasion. Part Two is titled “Claire.” Michael is not in evidence. Justine is ill or perhaps severely depressed, and Claire is taking care of her. She mends. The planet looms closer. Justine lies naked on a hill slope and watches it. Closer yet. A child makes a wire loop to tell how close it is: if it expands beyond the loop, it is closer. Clever. Then it seems to get smaller; it is moving away! Claire sleeps, then wakes, and John is gone. She finds him in the horse stall, dead, overdosed on pills. Why? Is the planet still approaching after all? Maybe he enlarged the wire loop to hide the truth from her? She, Justine, and her son make a tent frame of poles and wait in it, holding hands as the vision and sound of the planet grows. Then explosive oblivion.

I read Classic Playground Games from Hopscotch to Simon Says, by Susan Brewer. This is a compendium of mostly British girls’ diversions, but I remember a number from America. On occasion she misses one, such as the second verse to “Michael Finnegan”: “He had a wife called Mrs. Finnegan/ She grew fat and then grew thinagain/ Wished she had her double chinagain/ Poor old Mrs. Finnegan.” But it’s a pretty thorough survey. One girl’s chant startled me: “I lost my bra, left my knickers in my boyfriend’s car.” Maybe it’s a tease by pre-bra, pre-boyfriend girls, because when they come of dating age they lose interest in playground games. There are many pictures. She even covers paper folding, such as making airplanes, water bombs, and a variant of what we called cooti-catchers, but seems to miss one of the most popular of my day, the popper, which you could snap through the air to make a pop! Overall, this is a nostalgic reminder of a bygone day. Today children are more into electronic devices.

In A-Pull I wrote two stories. “Walk the Walk” is a 2,300 one about a lonely little girl who sees a lost little walking skeleton, so befriends him and helps him find his daddy skeleton. That not only wins her a friend, it pays off significantly in her life at a new school. I wrote it for a thirteen story anthology Little Girl Lost, which I expect to review here in due course. “Crossing the Line” is 6,400 words about a man who applies for a job and finds himself in a weird interview. If he can figure it out, he gets the job. It is with a young woman who is oddly evasive on certain questions, and who never asks him a question herself. He finally realizes that she is an android, and his new job is to train her to pass the Turing test so that no one else will know her nature. He takes her as his girlfriend, immersing her in the tricks of human semblance. She is an extremely apt student, becoming more human by the hour. He succeeds perhaps too well: he falls in love with her. That is of course folly, as she is a machine. Then comes the test. If she passes, she may not need him any more. Then she surprises him as she achieves consciousness. I wrote this one to start off my next volume of stories, Relationships 8. These days I write because I want to, not necessarily for a market.

My hearing is slowly fading. I have resisted getting a hearing aid, in part because they cost something like four thousand dollars per ear and it seems to me that money like that can be better spent trying to address the problems of the world. Beep beep beep, and I pushed a button when I heard it, but the repetitions got fainter. The chart shows that I still have fair hearing in the normal human voice range, but not in the upper ranges, and I may be missing nuances. That’s probably why I have trouble following movies unless there are subtitles, and many don’t. One with subtitles, ironically, was absolutely clear on the the voices. But most are not. I worry about my daily life. Suppose I am walking the street and someone calls, “There’s a safe falling on you, run!” and I don’t hear it? Or a BEM (Bug Eyed Monster) is about to grab me from behind, maybe mistaking me for a woman because of my long hair, and I am unaware? Or a pretty girl screams “Eeek! My clothing has turned transparent!” and I don’t hear her in time to look? You can see that the world is fraught with dangers. So I will check out what’s available, at what price. I can get amplifiers at a tenth the cost of regular hearing aids, but my doctor pointed out that they may simply amplify the frequencies I can already hear, when what I need is balanced amplification of the ones I don’t hear. Sigh; age is a lady dog.

Cases of measles have reached numbers not seen in decades, because folk aren’t getting inoculated. Measles is a serious disease. I had it in high school, circa 1951, the second worst case there, with a peak fever as I recall of 105½ degrees. They had to give me intravenous feeding. I had a cough, but I didn’t cough, because I lacked the strength to take a deep enough breath. It was like a descent into Hell. Every hour I would wake with ravenous thirst, and a nurse would be there with water, expecting it. Those nurses must have been run ragged. Another boy needed to go to the bathroom, so he got up, took maybe ten steps, then carefully lay down on the floor for a few minutes to recover strength, then got up and resumed his trip. It was no joke. I survived, thanks to round the clock care, and slowly recovered. It was like emerging from Hell. Yes, measles can kill. Folk who object to vaccination are putting not only themselves and their children at risk, but others in their neighborhood. Freedom of choice is fine, but what about when it endangers others? It may be akin to the gun debate: do you make guns so freely available that any nut can get them and mow down a school or religious service?

I remarked last month about learning how badly the cows are treated, so that now I question whether I should continued using milk or milk products like cheese. I am an ovo-lacto vegetarian, and have been for over 65 years. Well, Daughter Cheryl did some spot research and discovered a Vegan newsletter. Veganism is the next step up from vegetarianism, not using milk, eggs or other animal products. They are really into it, all over the world, developing viable substitutes for milk, cheese, eggs, leather and all. I suspect it will not be long before I join them.

I remain concerned about the state of the world, and what our human species is doing to it. Meat is one problem, part of ranching, hunting, fishing and such, wiping out animals by eating them. Agriculture is another, as it destroys the habitat of the creatures who live on the land. Waste is another, as garbage piles up on the land and plastics pollute the sea. Energy is another, as its generation pollutes the air and warms the world. But mainly, there are simply too many of us, so that other species are being driven to extinction to make room for us. I think it would be a good start to cut the human population to a tenth what it is now. But I don’t want to hurt people any more than I want to hurt animals. How can our burgeoning population be reduced nicely? If there were neighboring planets to colonize, so that nine tenths of the people emigrated to them, that might help. But maybe not. I explored that in my novel But What of Earth? where civilization declined along with the population. Regardless, we have found no suitable other planets to go to, or economic means to get them there. So we are stuck with Earth. I fear it is doomed, because there are too many Joe Blows who fight for their right to maintain a globally destructive lifestyle because they don’t want to make any personal sacrifices at all. I’ve seen it in meat eaters: why do they do it, knowing the horrors of damage to the environment, wholesale slaughter of helpless animals, and destruction of the prospects of their own descendants? They like the taste. They really will let the world go to hell, almost literally, to please their taste buds.

THE PROGRESSIVE is a radical magazine. “The Progressive tackles the forces distorting our economy, corrupting our democracy, and imperiling our planet, and champions peace, civil liberties, equality, and justice.” See what I mean? Joe Blow doesn’t buy that crap. Their April/May 2019 issue is dedicated to Dump Trump Now! Because waiting even two more years to get him voted out means that much further destruction of the environment, and America. “If we want to save the planet, Trump needs to go. Fast.” Because the United States government is not going to act on climate change while Trump remains in office. I appreciate their concern, but there will be no removal via impeachment as long as Republicans control the Senate, so that effort is pointless. Better to wait until 2020 and vote him and the Republicans out, then set about halting the damage they have been doing and see about repairs. Because Trump is not just a madman; he heads a mad party. They all have to go if the world is to be saved.

Some folk suffer incapacitating pain and seizures, but tests indicate no problem in the body. What gives? The conclusion is that it is all in the mind. It is nevertheless real. They figure that if a person can think himself into pain, he can think himself out of it. I am wary of that. Back in 1962 I came down with depression and chronic fatigue. The worst day of my life was when I lost my job, my wife lost our third baby, and my doctor told me that my concerns were imaginary. He called it neurasthenia, and my health insurance then ridered (excluded) me for “all mental diseases” apparently on the theory that I must be crazy. Obviously my concerns about my job and my wife’s pregnancy were real despite the doctor’s denial. But that dark day marked a change, the passing of the nadir, and subsequently my wife carried our first surviving child and I became a best selling novelist. We had a family and were free from financial stress. Everything had changed—except my fatigue and depression. I stayed alert, got a new doctor, and finally got a new diagnoses: hypothyroidism. A simple daily levothyroxin pill abolished both fatigue and depression. The fact was that the original doctors had missed the proper diagnosis, so figured it was imaginary, and I was considered crazy for not just wishing it away. So I distrust this imaginary illness business; I suspect that there are other conditions that are being missed, also.

FREE INQUIRY the other Humanist magazine, for April/May 2019 has a shocker of an article. St. John’s School for the Deaf, a Catholic institution in St. Francis, Wisconsin, near Milwaukee, had a scandal that finally closed it down. Priests and nuns had been abusing their charges. One example: a girl in a dormitory was pretending to be asleep when a nun entered, walked to one of the sleeping young boys, pulled down his pants, and kissed and licked his penis. The boy lay still, staring blankly at the ceiling. When the nun finished, she pulled his pants back up and he rolled over on his cot and fell back to sleep. Apparently the children were used to this sort of thing, and knew better than to protest. Two days later this girl and another boy were yanked from the playground and taken to the bathroom. There four nuns stripped them from the waist down and gave them cold water enemas. It was a warning punishment; obviously there would be worse if they talked. Another time this girl peeked through a crack in the bathroom and saw two nuns kiss each other on the lips, then, naked, kiss each other’s genitals. The nuns evidently suspected she had seen, because the girl later got paddled on her bottom. Nothing was said to the parents, of course. What I get from this is that it was not just the priests who sexually abused children; the nuns did it too. I remember things from my childhood that I did not tell my parents, because I knew they would not believe them. Nothing on this order, fortunately. At least today nanny-cams are exposing some of what happens.

The Hightower Lowdown is a radical newsletter by Jim Hightower. I’m using “radical” again in the sense that truth is being told here. The March/April issue is titled “The People are revolting! (in the best sense of the word).” It tell how in 1999 more that 50,000 democracy rebels of all kinds came to Seattle to confront a secretive group of corporate and governmental elites who had gathered behind closed doors to consolidate provisions of corporate global governance implemented by the World Trade Organization. Neither the public nor most Congress members knew much of it, but a coalition of activists was alert. They physically took control of Seattle’s streets for the entire week, managing to shut down the meeting. They knew that global corporate power is out of control, and is attempting to enthrone itself as the world’s supreme decision maker. You think elections decide who governs? That it is the people’s choice? You are naive. “Too few people control too much of the money and power, and they use that control in a relentless effort to grab more for themselves at the expense of the rest of us.” Now you know, if you care to.

Shorter notes: Trump averaged 5.9 false or misleading statements per day during his first year in office. He averaged 16.5 per day in his second year. So far in 2019 he is averaging nearly 22 a day. Evidently practice is making perfect. The stretchy, formfitting tights women wear these days are stirring controversy as mothers of sons object. Others respond that women are entitled to display their buttocks if they want to, but if they don’t want to be sexualized, they need to stop sexualizing themselves. Yes, as a man I feel that I am entitled to look at anything a woman cares to put on public display. Do the critics really believe that a woman’s body, as God made it, is obscene? I regard that as twisted. Do we have free will? There are those who believe that we don’t, but an article in NEW SCIENTIST suggests that the human brain is complex and does have free will. I am in between. Cause and effect suggests that we are ultimately programmed, so that true free will is an illusion. But if my illusion of free will allows me to improve my life, more power to me. Another NEW SCIENTIST article asks whether religion has been good or bad for humanity. I as an agnostic atheist have wondered about that for most of my life, being uncertain of the answer. Religions have sponsored bigotry and human sacrifice, but also sponsored the rule of law and led to larger and better societies that enabled mankind to take over the world. I suspect the balance is positive, though maybe not by much. And another NEW SCIENTIST article, this one on a project to send a spacecraft to Proxima Centauri, working up to a fifth of light speed, using light itself as the propulsion. It’s like sailing a ship in the wind, only the wind is light. So it will take more than twenty years to get there, but let’s do it anyway. A recent study indicates than poor diets kill more people than smoking does. Too much salt, not enough whole grains, fruits, and vegetables may be shaving years off lives. This is true across the world. They estimate that eight million deaths a year result. In terms of the least number of diet related deaths Israel is #1. France #2, Spain #3, and the United States #43. Of course that may not be deaths per capita of population, so small countries do better. Still, it is suggestive. I, as a vegetarian sharing my wife’s low salt diet, seem to be surviving nicely. Counties that hosted campaign rallies for President Trump in 2016 experienced a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes compared with counties that did not. When a California man was forced by neighbors to lower his six foot fence to three feet, he got even by posing naked mannequins having a lewd party in his back yard. They wanted to see inside his fence, so they got to. I think I like him. The annoyance of robo-calls continues. Theoretically Congress is finally taking aim at robocallers, but not making much progress. A letter in the local newspaper by Tom Yacko says that if the phone companies reduced the monthly charge and charged a modest amount for each outgoing call it wouldn’t hurt the average consumer but would financially cripple the telemarketers. Exactly; I have said before that they can stop those calls if they want to. This is one way. Why don’t they want to? Here in Florida the voters passed a constitutional amendment that gives felons back the right to vote once their debt to society is paid. So what are the legislators doing? Trying to make it harder for citizens to get constitutional amendments on the ballot. It seems they are not only largely indifferent to the popular will, they are actively subverting it. It seems that the supposed representatives of the people really don’t believe in democracy. Spot news: veggie burgers are starting to displace real meat burgers in sales. Not a lot, yet, but the tide may be turning. A new cache of fossils has been discovered in China that shows the sheer diversity of life 500 million years ago. Many of the species there are new to science. Republicans claim to have a spectacular plan to provide better, cheaper health care for everyone, to replace Obamacare. But they aren’t saying what it is. Yeah? If it really is that good, why are they hiding it? I won’t believe it until I see it. Local news: three naked women ages 18, 19 and 19 were spotted at a rest stop on I-175. When police challenged them they got in their car and led a wild chase. One of them jumped out and tussled with an officer, hitting, kicking, and scratching him, while another tried to drive the car over him. They were finally corralled and arrested. If I were a policeman on a case like that I’d be wary of struggling with a naked nineteen year old girl; suppose she played dirty, such as by kissing? Florida’s concealed weapon permits are increasing; 12% of adults have them and 17,500 are being added every month. King Charter School in Pinellas County wants to become the first vegan public school in the nation, if they can get past regulations that require cow’s milk. A new study indicates that the universe is expanding faster than they thought, and is younger than they thought, maybe by a billion years, unless the rate of expansion is accelerating. What would explain that? CENSORSHIP NEWS reports that LGBTQ (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transsexual Queer) books remain among the most censured in US schools and libraries. The First Amendment, the newsletter reminds us, guarantees the right of all young people to read and learn, absent bias or viewpoint restriction. Yet challenges to such literature are constant. “If speech is to be free, it must be guilty,” columnist Vanessa Place says. “Guilty of its freedom, its anarchism, which is less a matter of being dead-set against and more a matter of being against being dead-set.” Nicely put. The Mafia still exists in America, merely operating less obviously, governed by five families. Mainly in New York, cargo theft, extortion of port workers, and drug smuggling. Are video games a dangerous addiction? There is evidence that they can be. US households are taking on record levels of debt. At the end of 2018 it was $13.54 trillion. This could be mischief. The gender pay gap for UK scientists or engineers is widening. Is it any better in America? A bill introduced to the Georgia state legislature would require men over 55 to report to the nearest authorities every time they ejaculate, bans vasectomies, requires men to obtain permission from their partners before getting prescriptions for erectile dysfunction, introduces a 24 hour waiting period for men wanting to buy pornography, and makes sex without a condom punishable as aggravated assault. One co-author posted a “testicular bill of rights” on Twitter. “You want some regulation of bodies and choice? Done!” I suspect this is in part a reaction to similar restrictions placed on the sexuality of women. I could be wrong. Back in the old days, circa 4,500 years ago, neolithic Europe was subjected to a devastating conquest. Men were slaughtered and women taken for sex, so that now 60 to 90 percent of men now living in the area can trace their paternal lines to the Yamnaya immigrants. They originated north of the Black Sea. How did they do it? I suspect they were the first to tame horses for steeds, and it was a telling advantage.

I was eating an egg salad sandwich I had made for lunch on Tuesday, the last day of the month, when I crunched on something hard. Uh-oh. Sure enough, I had lost a tooth from the center of my upper denture. Sigh. I thought that problem had been fixed. I had to get it repaired, at a cost of $412. Dentures aren’t free to maintain. I think my problem is that I actually use my dentures to chew, and they wear down and break down. Natural teeth are better, if you can keep them.

PIERS

JeJune 2019
HI-

I finally saw a notice (the publisher didn’t bother to inform me) that Xanth #42 Fire Sail will be published in NoRemember, and can be pre-ordered now. This one is about a young man and a widowed grandmother who are jointly assigned to deliver a very special boat to its new owner. It has a sail made of fire, and it flies, and it is considerable larger inside than outside. In fact it’s like a yacht inside, a rowboat with a single sail outside. It is crewed by animals and children from prior novels. Naturally the delivery gets complicated, and the man’s quest for a girlfriend and the woman’s for an older boyfriend don’t help. One is a mermaid, a nice girl, but she lives in the sea while he lives on land; that won’t do for a long term relationship. Others are similarly problematical. There are also nasty folk who want to steal the boat. This leads off what is in effect a trilogy within Xanth, featuring the Fire Boat. The following novels are #43 Jest Right and #44 Skeleton Key, with #45 A Tryst of Fate waiting and #46 Six Crystal Princesses now being pondered. The publication pipeline may finally be getting unclogged.

As usual, if you don’t want the reviews, skip over the I Watched and I Read paragraphs to get to the hard stuff.

I watched The Mummy Resurrected, a horror flick. Archaeologists uncover a long lost pyramid in the Egyptian desert. Maggie’s long lost father rejoins her to visit that pyramid, in the Valley of the Sorcerer, but they are warned that anyone who goes there will never return. It’s an ancient curse. They hire a guide anyway and go. Six young pretty women, father, and the guides. They enter the pyramid, but their guides come under attack by soldiers. The seven of them have to hide sealed within it. Dad discovers a plaque, which he can translate. Then a monster appears, and kills one girl who is separated from the group. Then a mummy appears. Dad and one girl are one group, and the four other girls in the other. Dad speaks an incantation that wakes the mummy. One of the four vomits blood and dies. The mummy kills the girl with Dad. Three girls remain. They find a way out. The blonde stays outside while the other two return to seek Dad. One falls into a pit and can’t get out. Meanwhile Dad continues his invocations. The mummy sucks the life breath out of the girl outside. The girl in the pit gets buried in falling sand. Maggie, evidently possessed by the spirit of the ancient queen, kills the girl with her, and walks away. End of movie, too much unexplained. It all adds up to nonsense.

I watched Uncommon. It seems the family has lost a child. Grief stricken, they move to a new town, and their teen son Erin attends a new school, Rosewood High. Erin is religious, which leads to some friction with an atheistic teacher, Stevens. He is also obsessed with his dead brother. Budget cuts eliminate the school’s drama department, to the chagrin of many students. So they set up to form their own drama department. Erin works with the girl Haley, whose boyfriend resents him. But they have to find a faculty member to chaperon the group. They manage to recruit the janitor, Garcia. But he requires them to help him, too, in his social work. They can’t agree on a play to put on. Finally Erin assembles one from the stories in the Bible. They like it. Then the principal shuts it down on the ground that it is religion in the school. They appeal to the school board, and lose. Then Garcia contacts the head of a legal firm, a friend, which takes up their case. They make their arguments and the judge rules in their favor: separation of church and state does not mean that a religious play can be suppressed. They can put on the play. But there is little time. They scramble, and the local church helps with props. They put it on, with a lot of singing and dancing, a clear success. I, as an agnostic who never believed the mythologies of the Bible, nevertheless find this appealing. The students do what they have to do, and the principles of America are upheld, especially the First Amendment.

I read Starsight II by Minette Meador. I reviewed the first novel in 2007. I have to say that I did not remember it after a dozen years. I fear my memory is not what it used to be. There is a thorough synopsis in the sequel volume, for those who want it, but I decided to read the sequel straight, on the theory that sequels should be intelligible on their own. This worked okay; I was able to follow the story well enough. One main character is Trenara, a queen; another is her son Joshan, the new king. This is sword and sorcery fantasy, but with strange bypaths, unusual twists, and savage conflicts. Few things are exactly what they seem to be. Very generally, the world is being invaded, but the troops are only part of it; devious enchantments subvert key figures and threaten disaster. There are deep loves and hatreds, and the magic can be ugly. Leading characters are not spared; they suffer heartbreak along with passion. A blurb by Spider Robinson says “A Typhoid Mary of a book from a writer to watch…” This is a pretty good description. Be prepared to have your innards twisted as you read. There was a time when women wrote gentle fantasy; this is not at all that kind.

I watched Why Are We Fat? Obesity is rampant. There are now more fat people in the world than thin people. The health complications cost about fifteen billion dollars a year. It has happened within the past fifty years. Why? Diabetes is now common, and it can take ten to fifteen years off your life. But even if it didn’t, you are living unhealthy, which is hardly ideal. Our narrator John Himes in New Zealand gets diagnosed with diabetes, and resolves to learn about it and do something about it. Leptin is the I’ve-had-enough-to-eat hormone. It worked for maybe a million years; why isn’t it working now? Sugar. Sugar is in just about everything we eat. 74% of foods are spiced with sugar. Sugar is addictive; folk get a craving for it, wanting more and more. Is it a food? Not really. The body can metabolize only so much; the excess becomes fat. Fat is a necessary part of our diet, but too much fat is mischief. There’s a strong correlation between fat and heart disease. The famous food pyramid turns out to be wrong; it’s not healthy. Processed food makes up about 60% to 80% of what we buy in the supermarket, and it is unnatural. But it tastes good. Rats fed processed food soon get fat, get diabetic, and die. Visceral fat around the vitals organs of the body is especially dangerous. The narrator learns that over one third of his liver is fat. That shocks him. So he takes three months to try to get that down. He learns that diabetes can be deceptive; folk live with it without serious complications—until the damage nudges into real trouble and it’s too late. He has to get into exercise. Exercise is medicinal, improving the body’s self-help mechanisms. We have to use our muscles to be healthy; it’s our nature. Why do we eat wrong? The brain is hard-wired to get enough calories, but today with plenty of food available, it’s a problem. Junk food has addictive qualities. Dopamine rewards us for seeking calories. But if we abstain, that temptation will gradually fade. Eating right can improve mental health as well, and alleviate depression. Sleep is important too. And the microbiome in the gut. Stress also leads to a worse diet. Dietary fiber is healthy. Protein helps. A school that cut out the sugar and make a healthy diet shows significant improvement in the children. So how did he do after three months of fitness training? Much improved. Not there yet, but getting there. This is a good video, because it takes a man through the problem and the process of recovery in a manner we can understand. He went from the lower 15 percent of health up to the 40 percent. His liver fat dropped 8%, a very good result. The process is not finished, but he is on the way.

I watched The Note. A flight is coming in, but there’s a problem. It’s an emergency. The plane crashes. Meanwhile newspaper columnist Peyton MacGruder faces declining readership of her column and has to get it up, or lose it. She realizes that the folk on the plane must have known they were going to die. What were their thoughts? She visits the site and finds a note written by one of the doomed passengers. It is addressed to T, signed Dad. It is to a son or daughter. But who wrote it? She mentions it in her column, and gets immediate and widespread interest. So it’s a project: discover for whom the notes was intended. There are a number of parents who died in the crash. Her co-worker, Kingston Danville, who likes her more than passingly, encourages her to go for it, and her boss, and her boss’s boss, are swayed. Her first contact turns out not to be the one. Ditto for her second. But the contacts are nevertheless meaningful in their own ways, as we learn more about the people who lost a parent, and about Peyton herself. Each column covers one of the contacts. The interest becomes national. Peyton suffers a flashback to when she tried to commit suicide. The third one says the note was for him, though the initial doesn’t quite match. But is that the truth? Then a young woman approaches her. She lost her father in the accident, and though her name is Christine, her nickname was Tag. She’s the one. And she may be Peyton’s lost daughter, given up for adoption as a baby. The note has brought them back together. And King’s alienated son wants to rejoin him. A phenomenally potent impact.

The Note II is the sequel. One Eve Miller tells Peyton she’s in trouble. Peyton runs for exercise with daughter Christine, and remains close to boyfriend King, whose son David is quitting baseball despite it being his passion. King proposes to Peyton, but she demurs, uncertain how it will affect Christine. Peyton talks with David, and learns he quit baseball for art school. So they each have a problem relating to their child. Meanwhile Peyton interviews Eve, who didn’t take a chance on love, long ago, and regrets it now. So she didn’t marry Ben. Peyton researches and locates Ben, living only 200 miles away. He is interested, but says it remains Eve’s choice to make. Peyton talks her into talking with Ben. She does, and they make up. Moved by this, not wanting to sacrifice her own life by doubting love, Peyton agrees to marry King, to his surprise. And King talks with his son, accepting the decision to go into the art of photography, so that’s okay too.

The Note III. Violet is a single mother who simply can’t manage with her baby son Charlie. She loses her job, has to leave home, is broke, and desperate. Meanwhile Peyton is signing copies of her bestselling book, on the first anniversary of her marriage to King. Violet leaves Charlie on Peyton’s doorstop, and someone steals her car. She is truly bereft. Peyton doesn’t want to care for someone else’s child, but remembers how she had to give away her own baby, and sympathizes with the unknown mother. Violet meanwhile comes down with pneumonia and winds up in a woman’s shelter. Peyton gets a line on Violet, who flees the shelter before they can meet. Then she does meet Peyton. Violet is arrested for child abandonment, though she desperately wants to take him back. She needs to demonstrate that if she gets Charlie back, she won’t abandon him again. Peyton gets Violet to meet Charlie’s paternal grandfather, who had blamed Violet for his son’s death, and Grandfather has reconsidered and welcomes them into his life. So Peyton and King do not keep Charlie, though they would have liked to; they did the right thing in restoring him to his mother. This is a heartwarming movie trilogy.

I watched Heavy Petting. This is a collection of sexy scenes from the 1950s when kids hardly knew about sex, or so the adults thought. Celebrities tell of their coming of age experiences. To boys, girls were largely a mystery. To learn how to kiss, girls practiced on each other. Dating was complicated, largely a matter of getting up the nerve to ask. For a girl it helped to be cute. What about the one with no breasts yet? High school dances: how to say good night. Do you try to kiss? Whatever you do seems wrong. Meanwhile the elders preach that much of teen music and dance is sinful. The sexual impulse must be controlled, like a frisky horse. Parents didn’t understand their children. Boys wanted sex, but did not respect the girls who allowed it. The rule was that all boys were bad; some girls were good, some bad. And venereal disease, VD; the problem of tracking down its source. Protection? Use a rubber (condom). A mother told her daughter that she would prefer to see her get run over by a car, than to get pregnant. But when she did get pregnant, what then? Marriage? Now as it happened I did progress from teen to marriage in the 1950s but I wasn’t really part of this scene. I never dated in high school. In our small college we didn’t date, we just went together. Today is a whole different world, but I wonder whether things have really changed.

I watched Hot Bot, comedy and farce about a realistic female robot designed for sex. It starts with a bang, as a TV interviewer tries to observe the robot and she soon is well on the way to publicly seducing him, to his embarrassment. But she slides out of the car when being transported and is lost. Scruffy teens Huffy and Nard accidentally hit Bardot on the road and think she is an unconscious real woman. They take her home. Next morning she recovers consciousness and seems like a real live woman, until she turns off again and they realize she’s a robot. Meanwhile Senator Biter who owns her is desperate to recover her; she costs $300,000. They read the instruction manual and begin to learn how to program her. They hide her in a sister’s large almost life-sized doll house. The young sister comes to preach the Bible to her, not realizing she’s a robot. Now Bardot is into Jesus. The Senator’s men track Bardot down, and there is a car chase, but the boys escape with her. The Senator talks with one of the boys. The Senator is a character. Bring her back tomorrow, or else. It becomes a hostage situation, with Bardot the hostage. The Senator’s men charge in to take her, but she fights back, knocking them out, and walks away. A man, Rodney, picks her up and takes her dancing. Then, defending the teens, she knocks Rodney out and goes with them. But the Senator’s men recover her. Huffy has fallen in love with Bardot. The teens go to rescue Bardot. Her brain has been wiped, but she does spot mental research and then remembers them. They get thrown out, but then she rescues them. Huffy gets her a ticket to far away and bids sad farewell. She kisses him, tells him she loves him too, and departs. Then his sometime girlfriend takes over his life, so it’s a happy ending after all.

I watched Warriors of Terra. Ali’s father runs a bio-tech company that has been criticized for cruel animal testing. So she and four friends in an animal rights group called Warriors of Terra decide to infiltrate it to free the animals. They wear animal masks and have a video connection to their HQ. They find themselves in dark metallic tunnels and chambers, pipes and cables throughout. Then armed security personnel come to deal with the intrusion. They use tear gas and bullets. The kids need to get out of there, but there’s only one entry, so they wind up deeper inside. A guard comes across what appears to be an unconscious woman—who abruptly comes to life and chomps his throat. Then one of the Warrior boys encounters her, a naked woman with hideous strength and a taste for blood. He is soon dead. The others find his body. The guards shoot her, but she heals fast and isn’t stopped. The teens and security have to join forces to try to stop the creature. Ali, about to escape the building, turns back to help her father. Her friend Kate follows, and gets taken out by the creature. Ali fights it desperately, gets roughed up, but manages to get it trapped for the moment. Ali’s boyfriend seems to have changed sides, but then gets kissed by the creature. An office girl helps her get out before the lethal gas floods the building. End of movie. So this is a slasher horror flick, not my type.

I watched Alien Armageddon, the first of an AREA 51 triple feature. It says that aliens once ruled Earth, but eventually mankind rose up and drove them out. Now the aliens are returning, first as UFO sightings, then as spaceships bombing our cities. The setting is California as the authorities surrender and agree to make the Los Angeles area an alien base of operations. The region gets walled in with little if any communication with the world beyond. The aliens are like humans in spacesuits; cheaply made movies are like that. There are resistance fighters forming impromptu groups. Some scientists collaborate with the aliens. The food provided makes people vomit, literally. The aliens seem to be saving only people with Type AB negative blood, maybe for hosts for alien creatures. Jody, trying to escape, encounters a woman giving birth—to what look like huge meatballs. They get the news that the meat they are served is human flesh. The aliens put big slugs into the bodies of humans. They inject a virus into people, that will in time take over their bodies. One captive is a cowboy with a black hat. Two women manage to escape. The find a car and drive it away. They get attacked but the cowboy rescues them. But one of them is infected. Then so is the other. The slugs eat them. But it seems that via the slugs they have managed to spread a plague to the aliens, who start dying in droves. So in time humanity will arise again. This is essentially a horror flick.

I watched Alien Uprising. This evidently a British movie. It starts witch a teen dance with flashes of flesh, and the boys getting into a fight, and couples getting into sex, one boy getting sick, while mysterious lights in the night sky signal something odd. Next day some things seem to be falling from the sky. Some clocks stop. Five friends are alarmed. Electric power fails. They steal food from a dead supermarket. There seems to be a huge flying saucer hovering low overhead that no one notices. There’s an extended individual combat sequence that seems designed to take up movie space. Violence and female flashes make up much of this movie. Toward the end we see flying alien craft looking like large Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish, fighting other flying machines. The humans are too busy fighting each other to even try to stop the aliens, while an injured child watches. We never see any grown aliens, only their weird machines. Overall, a washout of a movie.

I watched Total Retribution, the third on the Area 51 disc. It starts with the discovery of a naked woman lying on the desert sand. Then a jump to 200 years later, that woman, Helen, wakes on a space station, still naked. She’s not voluptuous, being lean and small breasted. She can talk, but has no prior memories. There is a standoff with two of the station personnel, who back away from her. She finds clothing and dresses. She sees crew members killing each other. Some are undead, and there’s an alien rat-like robot on the prowl too. Helen frees an imprisoned woman who says they are not on the same side, but they work together to survive. Helen doesn’t react much to things, just observes them. Other personnel come on the scene. They conclude that Helen is an android. That means she’s on their side, because the enemy doesn’t have androids. There is a big gun in orbit that this party is here to destroy so the alien invaders don’t get it. Helen is physically competent to handle the rats or the undead, and primed with key technical knowledge. Artificial gravity is horrendous near the gun, so Helen goes alone to tackle it. Then she is back with the others; was the prior sequence out of place? They have to destroy the gun before it destroys Earth. It seems that when Helen activated the gun’s self destruct sequence, it was actually set to destroy Earth. So it needs to be destroyed again, as it were. Helen plunges to Earth, to land on the desert, and the opening sequence is reenacted, only now she is clothed. Movie ends. I am not clear whether this somehow saves Earth. Even with the hearing aid I could not make out all the dialogue, so I may have missed something important. Regardless, this is the best movie of this bad lot trio.

I read 13.8 by John Gribbin, subtitled “The quest to find the true age of the universe and the theory of everything.” This was published in 2015 and even in the last four years there have been significant advances in that quest, so it’s not quite current, but there’s a lot of good information here. Originally they had trouble figuring out the age of planets and stars and did not even know about galaxies and galactic clusters. But bit by bit as equipment improved and astronomers observed and theorized they pieced it out, coming to the conclusion that things have existed for just under fourteen billion years. This book clarifies the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Very briefly, galaxies are rotating at a rate that should hurl their stars into space, because there does not seem to be enough matter in them to generate enough gravity (okay, curvature of space) to hold them together. Since they are not flying apart, the conjecture is that most of the matter in the universe is there but detectable only via its gravity. I am a skeptic here; I suspect that they simply don’t fully understand the nature of gravity as it operates on the galactic scale, and that there is no physical dark matter. There are other theories, which this book does not mention; obviously something is operating here. It summarizes the problems of theories, such as Hoyle’s Steady State Universe versus the Big Bang. I had been a believer in Steady State in the 1950s, but as the evidence accumulated I had to change sides. One question I had hoped to have answered here was about the cosmic microwave background radiation that is so important to the calculation of the history of the universe. That’s left over from the Big Bang itself; what I don’t see is why that radiation hasn’t long since disappeared into the farthest fringes of the universe or beyond. Why is it still hanging around here? Obviously I am missing something. Sigh.

I watched Goodbye World, an end of the world story. A cyber attack shuts down the internet and cripples civilization. James and his old college friends retreat to a home in the forest. They’re not taking it really seriously. But it is serious, and they feel the increasing pressure of it. There are arguments. They do group entertainments. And quarrel. A marriage is breaking up. The ties of the group are fraying. The neighbors need what they have, like medicine. The neighbors raid the supplies. It turns out that one of them was playing a kind of game, devising a goodbye message to go to every computer in the world, with a virus embedded. He backed off, but someone else got hold of it. There is violence with the neighbors. Interpersonal emotions, positive and negative, become strong. The phones come back. Civilization is recovering. And so are they, at the end. This as way short of a true end of the world story, but has its points.

I watched BloodRayne. In 1943 Germany during World War Two, the Holocaust, when Jews are being systematically exterminated, a new resistant movement arises, intercepting the death trains, freeing the captives. They are joined by a woman showing truly impressive breasts: Rayne, the daughter of a live woman and a vampire who raped her. So she is half vampire, but on the human side. The Nazis discover how to revive dead soldiers by making them an undead army. This becomes her greatest challenge: to stop these vampires before they reach Berlin to give Hitler immortality. Rayne carries two swords, which she uses effectively when necessary. But she has nightmares. The Nazi leader is Ekart Brand, himself a day-walking vampire who recruits key personnel by biting and converting them. Rayne falls for the resistance leader, and makes love to him. The movie is a hybrid WWII/vampire/Amazon woman story with bare breasts and splashing blood galore, but it does have a story line.

I watched After the Dark, the third post apocalypse movie. It starts with an interesting class in Indonesia, exploring ethical decisions. Save one person, or save several? Then nuclear bombs detonate nearby and they have to take shelter underground. Twenty students. But the shelter can support only ten. How do they decide who is to be saved? They draw lots for designated positions; which are needed for survival of the group? They vote on each person. Then the teacher shoots the losers, rather than let them die in the agony of radiation poisoning. And the chosen survivors shut the teacher out. Now they have a year before they must exit—if they can figure out the exit code. Otherwise they will die in the bunker, as supplies run out. They all die, in the thought experiment. Then they play it again, with additional information about their designated skills. Some take a truck and drive off, but the shock wave blows it over. The others go to the bunker. Six males, four females. What about repopulating the world? Two girls are in their periods, leaving two fertile at the moment. Two boys are gay. One fertile girl chooses a boy to mate with. But the tension makes them infertile. Since the highest priority is reproduction, to continue the species, this is another failure. One of them opens the bunker door and the fire comes in, killing them. Another failure. They do a third round. This time they focus on the arts, which were previously considered non-survival. Class finishes and the students depart, except for one girl who stays to be with the teacher. Does he take her, or leave her and perhaps shoot himself alone? I regret that even with a hearing aid I missed too much of the dialogue to pick up on key nuances. Even so, a fascinating study.

I watched Puppet Master, This is not the movie based on the Heinlein novel, but a story of real, live (as it were) puppets. It is set in 1939. Two FBI types march to the old puppeteer’s house to investigate rumors that he has discovered the secret of life. He shoots himself as they break in; so much for that. Meanwhile others are checking out aspects of the estate. Some are psychic and can pick up on events of the past if they are in the right places. A dead man in a suit keeps appearing elsewhere. A puppet climbs out of a dead man’s casket. It seems that the Egyptians developed a way to give life to inanimate objects; that may be in play here. The puppets are about eighteen inches tall, and secretive. And murderous. Miss Leech spits out killer leeches that suck her victims dry. Pinhead has vice-like hands to strangle people. Blade has a hook for one hand and a knife for the other. They start killing people. Weird things happen, some of which turn out to be bad dreams. The dead man seems alive, and murderous. He renews his life by killing others, becoming immortal in that manner. Then the puppets attack him. He has no fear of them, but they persist and finally manage to bring him down. Tunneler bores a hole in him with his drill-head. Miss Leech has at him. So he is stopped, but they aren’t. There will be more to this ugly story.

I watched Puppet Master II. The nasty puppets want to get the special fluid that keeps them alive, so they exhume their creator. It turns out that it is to be found only in human brains. Fortunately a new team of paranormal researchers comes to the hotel by the sea, complete with two attractive young women, so they have prey. The investigators set up recording equipment, and spy Tunneler, but not before he kills one of their men by tunneling into his head. One down. Miss Leech takes out an older hotel resident. Blade attacks another. But an older woman fights back, putting Leech into the wood-burning stove. Then a new puppet appears, Torch, who throws flames. The puppet master, cloaked and bandaged so that no flesh shows, sees to restoring the battered puppets. A little boy beats up Torch, and gets burned. Two investigators make love, then get taken out by Blade. Or is it just a nightmare? The puppet master captures a woman and makes her watch as he cuts his own throat and lets the blood flow into a dead man, who then revives. But the puppets attack him before he can make the woman drink the potion. So she survives. But the puppets remain for future mischief. I didn’t watch the third movie.

I watched Calendar Girls. I saw it before, fifteen years ago, but it is worth re-watching. The ladies in England want to raise money for a nice sofa, but their normal annual calendar raises only a small fraction of what they need. Until one of them gets a provocative notion. These older women will pose for the months, nude, shielded by incidental objects so that it’s not complete. It’s a social challenge in several ways. The photographer is a man. So he sets up the camera, leaves the room, and one of them will click the shutter. But that doesn’t work, and they have to bring him back in for his professional expertise. They get the pictures, mainly upper torso. They get the calendar. Speaking as a man who likes the look and feel of young women, I have to say they are pretty effective pictures, age not withstanding. But they need financing. The Women’s Institute under whose auspices this is being done withdraws its support, and they may have to wing it on their own. But they finagle a way. The calendar is a success. A huge success. A shop reordered 50. What happened to the prior 50? They were put out on sale at 9, and at 9:10 they had sold out. But some husbands and children are outraged. Hollywood is interested. The publicity could sell more calendars, so they go. They receive celebrity treatment. But Anne, the one of them who is the widow of the man who died, hates all this, as if she is profiting from his death. But the success of the calendar means that they can buy the nice sofa, plus phenomenally more for charity. As I recall, we bought that calendar too; it was a nice notion.

I watched Stranger Things, a Nexflix TV series on discs. Chapter One: A boy, Will, bikes into government restricted territory at night, the Hawkins Laboratory, gets knocked off his bike, runs home fearing pursuit but finds only his dog there. Next day Will is missing. His mother Joyce is desperate. Meanwhile a hungry eleven year old girl with close-cropped hair and special powers encounters the cook Benny Hammond. Sheriff Hopper finds Will’s abandoned bicycle. A social services lady comes to Benny’s door, about the girl—and shoots him. It seems to be some sort of hit squad that evidently doesn’t fool around. The girl flees, and shows up before three friends looking for Will. End of first episode.

Chapter 2. A boy asks the girl’s name and she shows him a tattoo on her arm, 011. Her name is Eleven. She can talk, but doesn’t say much. She doesn’t want the boys’ mom to be told about her, or to get help. Men in hazard suits check around for radiation. Eleven remembers being forcibly separated from her parents and thrown in a cell. She begins to demonstrate some of her telekinetic power. This may be why the bad guys are after her: for her special power. Will’s older brother Jonathan also searches. Joyce gets a phone call that seems to be from Will, but it is indistinct and an electric shock cuts it off. Teens are having a party that seems to be leading to sex. Jonathan is taking pictures from the darkness. End of episode.

Chapter 3. “Holly Jolly” Nancy Wheeler, Micheal’s big sister, is having sex with Steve while a monster is after her friend Barbara. Nancy goes home and doesn’t tell her mom what happened. Jonathan tries to reassure Joyce that Will is just lost, but she is freaking out, thinking Will is somewhere around. Eleven, alone for the day while the boys are in school, explores the house. And remembers being tested for telekinetic power. Joyce is putting up Christmas decorations. Sheriff Hopper checks with the personnel of the government facility, and is satisfied that they are lying. Nancy wonders where Barbara is. Jonathan develops his pictures. Hopper researches the government facility. The little girl Holly encounters the same sort of odd manifestations that Joyce did. Bullies rip up Jonathan’s pictures and destroy his camera. And we see how Eleven fights back at the laboratory, using her power to smash doors into her tormentors. Nancy looks for Barbara, and gets scared off by a manifestation. And Joyce finds a way to communicate with Will: she holds a handful of Christmas lights, unconnected, that flash. Blink once for yes, twice for no. that works, but she doesn’t know the right questions to learn enough. Hopper zeroes in on Hawkins Lab. That must be where Eleven escaped from. Joyce marks the alphabet on the wall, with lights, so Will can spell out answers letter by letter, light by light. And he spells out RUN. Indeed, the monster is coming. Through the wall. Meanwhile they find a body, and think it is Will. The horror is growing. Hopper thinks Joyce is losing her mind.

Chapter 4. “The Body” Joyce fetches the ax, determined to fight the monster. Eleven convinces Will’s friend Michael Wheeler that Will is alone and trying to get in touch. Michael calls Lucas, their black friend, on the walkie-talkie. The boys put Eleven in a dress with a blond wig, making her into a pretty girl. When the bullies cruelly mock Will, Michael tackles one, and Eleven makes the bully freeze, then pee his pants in public. Joyce continues to zero in on Will, while so do the boys and Eleven. Nancy and Jonathan talk, and he is coming to believe as they see detail on one of the pictures. Hopper goes to the body, cuts it open, and finds cotton stuffing. It a fake. Now he is cutting through the wire fence, about to investigate the Laboratory grounds directly. End of episode.

Chapter 5. “The Flea and the Acrobat” Jim Hopper sneaks into the complex. Two men stop him, but he knocks one out and moves on. He searches for Will. Joyce’s ex believes she is making it up, unable to face their son’s loss. Hopper finally gets captured, after seeing highly suspicious things. They hold a funeral for Will, though neither Joyce nor Jonathan believe Will is dead. Hopper wakes back home, checks his house and finds a bug, a mike spying on the occupants. The boys talk with Mr. Clarke about alternate realms. Then they use compasses to orient on the gate between realms. Jonathan tries shooting at cans, but misses. Nancy tries it and hits the can; she can shoot better than he can. The three boys and Eleven follow the compasses toward the portal. Hopper visits Joyce with a sign: DON’T SAY ANYTHING. He check her house for bugs, then tells her she was right from the start. The boys reach the place, and there is nothing. Lucas thinks Eleven is the monster, and he and Michael fight, until Eleven hurls Lucas away. Nancy and Jonathan argue, but continue exploring, and find a dying deer—that then gets suddenly hauled away. Then Nancy gets taken. End of chapter.

Chapter 6. “The Monster” Jonathan searches the dark woods for Nancy, and she searches desperately for him. She sees the monster. He finds her caught in a tree, and pulls her out. The tree then reforms to a normal tree. They hide in a house, and share a bed, chastely. Hopper and Joyce continue their search. Eleven remembers time with her father, who says they will make history today. She goes into the tank, where she is to psychically find something. Back in today, Eleven goes to a store, where she takes waffles to eat. Hopper and Joyce talk with a woman who lost her child, Jane, twelve years ago. She speaks of telepathy, telekinesis, and such. Steve and Jonathan fight and Jonathan gets arrested. Lucas zeroes in on the portal, in the laboratory complex. The bullies catch two of the boys and make Michael leap into the quarry. But Eleven telekinetically flies him safely back out, and drives the bullies away. But she says she is the monster. Michael says she isn’t, because she saved him.

Chapter 7. The Bathtub” Lucas on the walkie-talkie contacts them: bad men are coming after Eleven. Get out of there. They try to free, are intercepted, but get away on the bikes, pursued by the vans. Until Eleven telekinetically hurls one truck upside down in front of the others. Steve was jealous and vindictive, but as he ponders things he regrets it and in effect changes sides. Hopper manages to contact the boys and Eleven, but they are suspicious. The bad guys are closing in, but Hopper manages to rescue them. At least the good guys are coming together. Dustin calls Mr. Clarke for information on deprivation tanks, because maybe Eleven can locate Will by using one again. They try it, and she finds Barbara, but she is like a zombie. Then she finds Will, in an alternate kind of place, and tells him his mother is coming for him. Hopper and Joyce break into the lab compound, but get caught.

Chapter 8. “The Upside Down” They are interrogating Joyce and Hopper separately, trying to use them to track Will. Jonathan and Nancy set a trap in a house. Joyce and Hopper don protective suits and enter the toxic realm. Jonathan and Nancy cut their hands to make blood to attract the monster. Steve comes to apologize for his prior behavior. They tell him to get out of there, but the monster comes first. Steve helps fight the monster. They spring the trap, catching the monster with a bear trap and flames. The boys and Eleven are hiding out at the school, but the bad guys find them. Eleven stops them with her mind; they bleed from the eyes and fall. But Eleven falls too, unconscious. Her father comes as the boys are captured during her unconsciousness, but then the monster comes. The boys and Eleven escape in the ensuing mayhem. Hopper and Joyce find Will. Hopper pulls the snake-like predator out of his mouth. Eleven blasts the monster apart, and disappears. They revive Will, but Eleven is gone. Too bad, because Michael really liked her. One month later the four boys are playing a fantasy game. Nancy gives Jonathan a new camera that Steve got for him. Hopper goes to the forest and leaves some waffles. Michael coughs up a section of snake. That suggests it is not yet over. I think this is the first Netflix production I’ve seen, and it’s impressive. Netflix had an interest in Xanth at one time, but nothing came of it. Too bad; they could have done the job.

I watched The Artist, a story of the end of the silent movie era. Set in 1927, George Valentin is a silent movie star, but the advent of sound will likely end his career. In a crowd he collides with a young actress, and that makes the headlines WHO’S THAT GIRL? She is Peppy Miller. George’s wife sees the headline and is not pleased. There is an extended silent sequence as they film a movie, complete with background music, and printed dialogue signs. His smart little dog is also a character. Time passes and we see Peppy rise from the bottom of the marquee up toward the top, until by 1929 she has her own starring roles. As sound comes we start to hear glasses clicking and the dog barking and girls laughing in real life. George has trouble adjusting. His studio plans to stop waking silent movies, in favor of ones with sound. Peppy Miller is in the talkies. George believes that talkies are not to be taken seriously. Then comes the stock market crash of 1929. The studio needs a really successful movie, to survive. George is given notice to clear out. Peppy is now a big star. George has to pawn things for money, then fire his driver and auction off his things. Peppy hires the driver. 1932 he watches a Peppy Miller movie, and his own old movies. Then he tears up his old reels, and burns them. Then changes his mind too late. The dog runs for help, and brings back a policeman. Peppy sees the headline and hurries to the hospital. She brings him and the dog to her house. She intercedes to get him into a movie with her. He discovers that she bought his auctioned things. He returns to his messed up house. She goes there. He considers suicide. The dog tries to talk him out of it but he is determined. She gets there. She talks him into something they can do together: fancy dancing. It works; he is back in the movies.

I watched The Quick and the Dead. This features Sharon Stone as Lady. A prospector for gold shoots a rider coming toward him, but when he goes to investigate the body it’s a woman who chains him to his wagon and steals his horse. Well, he did try to kill her. She rides into town, taking no backtalk from men. A gun fight is announced, the winner wins $123,000. One man, Cort, in chains, is sad to be very fast, but he has renounced violence. They try to string him up and hang him, to make him agree to joining the gun fight, but the woman shoots the rope, saving him. There are gunfighters galore here, all after the money. There is a serious of individual gunfights, day by day, timed by the town clock at noon. A man challenges Lady, and she shoots him. There are dialogues between gunfighters, each of which believes he’s the fastest. Herod, the town boss man is fast and deadly, and knows it and tells it. Cort is forced to participate. Lady wants to kill Herod, who killed her father, but his match is with his son the Kid. She is assigned to fight Cort. They don’t want to fight each other, being maybe the only good guys here, but seem to be locked in. Herod kills the Kid. Lady and Cort face off. Neither wants to fire, but Herod’s men will kill both if they don’t. Cort kills Lady, whom he calls Ellen. Then Cort faces Herod. If Cort wins, Herod’s men will gun him down. But three explosions take out the buildings where the men are stationed. And Lady appears. Maybe her death was faked in a deal witch Cort. She remembers how Herod got her to kill her father by giving her as a child a gun and telling her he will let her father go if she can sever the rope with a bullet. But she misses low, killing her father. Now she kills Herod, as Cort takes out Herod’s men. And leaves Cort to run the town, as she rides away. The law has returned, This is no ordinary western. Credible? No way. Sexy as claimed? No. But still one hell of a story.

In Apull I reread the first Xanth novel, A Spell for Chameleon, and found it worthy. Now I am wondering: from time to time it and Xanth has been accused of sexism. Paramount even rejected it for a movie, after seemingly committing to that movie, because the new boss called it sexist. So the charge has consequences. I did not see sexism when I wrote it or when I reread it over forty years later. Xanth does parody sexism, as it does other things including the attitudes of men toward women, freaking out at the sight of panties. For example princess, later queen Irene had no truck with sexism and good legs. Maybe some readers just don’t recognize parody when they encounter it. So now I would like to pin down this charge. Is there anybody out there who read that novel and found it sexist? Please email me and tell me why. At one point I believe someone said that Chameleon herself was sexist because she varied with the cycles of the moon. But if that is true, all natural women are sexist, no? So please let me know, and I will discuss it in a future column. Daughter Cheryl did spot research and printed out a column titled “Ten Quick Ways to Analyze Childrens (sic; no apostrophe) Books For Sexism and Racism.” It says to check the illustrations for stereotypes, look for stereotypes such as all minority faces being tinted, and traditional roles for males and females. Check the story line for racist and sexist attitudes. Are the roles of women based on their own initiatives and intelligence, or on their good looks. And so on. Do you find stereotypical women in Xanth? They are not warrior maidens, but neither are they garden variety housewives. Also a discussion of a 2013 SFWA article on sexism, where things like “lady author” are considered sexist. I dunno; I like to know the gender of the author of a book I read or a fan letter I receive; males and females do generally have differing perspectives, and that is as it should be. It does make a difference to my mental picture if I receive a letter that says “I absolutely adore your books! I want to visit and make love to you!” whether it is a 25 year old woman or a 75 year old man.

A few years back I tried hearing aids for a couple of weeks, but couldn’t stand them and didn’t buy. More recently when I was making supper I set the timer, and discovered that I could hear it with my right ear but not my left ear. In past times my hearing has been better in my left ear, in part because my time in the US army had me firing a rifle right handed, and the bangs damaged my right side hearing. But now the left was worse? This was alarming. So I got tested, and sure enough, my hearing has been declining in both ears, worse in the left. Further, it is fading in the upper sonic ranges, where the consonants sound, so a sentence like “Have a nice day” might sound like “aa a eye aay.” No wonder I couldn’t understand the TV! I could hear sounds, but they weren’t very intelligible. So this time I did commit to hearing aids, one for each ear, and it helps somewhat, but I am far happier with subtitles on the movies. Hearing aids, like false teeth, are not as good as a person’s original equipment.

I continue to explore veganism, trying out different kinds of high protein non-dairy milk. So far the one I like best is put out by Grocers. But there remain others to try, such as Bolthouse. Some brands advertise “cruelty-free” foods or leather, and I relate to that. As I have said, I am a vegetarian not for my health but because I don’t want to kill or mistreat animals. One day at my doctor’s office I saw a magazine, and I asked if I could take it home with me. It’s a catalogue put out by the Humane Farming Association, at http://www.hfa.org. They are dedicated to stopping the inhumane treatment of animals, and I applaud their effort. Meanwhile the vegans seem to be talking my language. And of course folk can improve their health by growing some of their food themselves. One useful tool is composting. We all have wastes, but if some of those wastes are composted, that’s a nice way to recycle what would otherwise just contribute to clogging sewers. One reference is https://www.austinrealestate.com/homeowners-guide-to-composting.php. Meanwhile, just as factory farms are cruelty-intensive in their treatment of animals, the higher powers are also abusing the farmers. According to the May 2019 issue of the Hightower LOWDOWN, corporation monopolization, financial manipulation, and rigged agricultural policies are driving farmers into the dirt. The 2018 median farm income for the US farm households was minus $1,553. That is, after subtracting the costs of producing their crops from the amount they get paid for them, the average farmer is in the hole by that amount. Seventy percent of farm family income comes from their “secondary” jobs. Otherwise they’d be buried. One spot example: in 2018 dairy farmers got $1.35 for a gallon of milk it cost them $1.90 to produce. Overall, less than 15 cents of your food dollar now goes to farmers. While the billionaires just keep getting richer. What will change this? My readings suggest that only another French Revolution, where the entire royal class was killed, will do it in America. That is what I fear. You think the common man will prosper if the billionaires get slaughtered? More likely we’ll see another Napoleon, or another Communist takeover. Everyone will suffer grievously.

Twice a week I have Chore Hour, when I spend an hour tackling chores I’ll never get around to otherwise. Recently it has been clearing off a counter in my study so that I can use it for my atlases. Dictionaries and atlases are big in my life; I like to know what’s what and where’s where. It may have been some time since I used that counter; I found papers dating to 2002. Also objects, like a key chain saying WORKAHOLIC. I am a workaholic. I saw a recent note about romance writer Danielle Steele being a workaholic, writing 20 hours a day, not for money or fame but because she just has to write. I know how it is, but I don’t write that much, because I deliberately structure my time to include Family and Relaxation. And Chores. And Sleep. Otherwise they might get squeezed out. So I figure to outlive other workaholics, being a tad more sensible and maybe be slightly happier. Workaholism can kill you if you let it, so I use my discipline not to force myself to write, but to force myself not to write too much. As with vegetarianism, I try to be smart about it. Also I found a mini set of books titled The Do It Yourself Genius Kit, subtitled Almost the Entire World Knowledge in One Box. Each of the four mini books is two and a half by three inches across. Maybe 75 or 80 pages, illustrated. Checking the first one randomly I learn that the Sargasso Sea has no shore; it is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. That the Jeep got its name from its original initials, GP, standing for General Purpose vehicle. And that there is a village in France named Y. Hmm; maybe I should read those books. I also found a 2002 “Pickles” comic strip, remarking that life is like a roll of toilet paper: the closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes. Ouch.

So what am I writing now? I am doing stories to fill Relationshsips 8, part of a series of collections of stories I write without regard to what editors might choose, so I bypass them. The stories can be conventional, or not. This month I wrote “Picture,” about a woman who asks a neighbor boy to help her son on the school bus, because he is getting bullied. The neighbor boy puts a pain hold on the bully and remonstrates politely with him, and before he is done that bully will never bother that boy again. The mother wishes she could do an equivalent favor for the neighbor boy, but he asks for nothing. She nevertheless finds a way. Then I wrote the provocative novelette “Power of Pizzazz,” a kind of romance relating to the reason for low crime in a particular town. I think it is reasonably safe to say that you haven’t read a story like this, and may not care to do so again, but you will not forget it. And “A Date With Death,” wherein a dying woman sees Death coming—and instead of giving up her soul she seduces him and becomes his girlfriend. And “Kiss of Death,” about Death’s daughter who can stun a person with her kiss. I will continue with stories this summer. I’m always writing; it is indeed my nature.

The issue of abortion is much in the news currently, partly because of that new Alabama law outlawing it even in the case of incest or rape. I don’t like abortion, because technically the three babies we lost stillborn, before surgery enabled us to keep two, was abortion. I don’t like seeing a living baby killed simply because it has not yet had time to be birthed naturally. But I see hypocrisy here, because most of the anti-abortionists seem also to oppose sensible birth control like contraception. The Catholic Church supports the rhythm method, simply abstaining from sex during a woman’s fertile days, but the bitter joke is “What do you call a woman who uses the rhythm method? A mother.” The anti-abortionists also don’t seem to care about the baby once it is born. They defund things like food stamps that help the poor mothers, oppose universal health care that would surely save babies’ lives, and seem indifferent to school funding for the children. It is as if the baby must be born, but thereafter can drop dead for all they care. Their object seems really to be to punish the mother for ever having sex, even if she gets raped. So I don’t like abortion, but I don’t like the antiabortionists either. A pox on both their houses.

Interesting note in the May 2019 issue of ALTERNATIVES: it seems that the purr of a cat has healing powers. It’s vibration at the right frequencies, 25 Hz and 50 Hz, to promote healing of bone fractures, and bone growth, and ease pain, swelling, and the discomfort of wounds. That helps make cats generally healthier than dogs. Cancer of the bone may be suppressed. I regard ALTERNATIVES as the best of the health newsletters I have encountered, but there is one error in this issue: Doctor David Williams says that you need to floss your teeth twice daily to remove plaque, for your health. A recent study shows that flossing is not effective as a health measure, but of course it will take decades for health professionals to admit that, just as they also resist the ugly truth about fluoridation, and the truth about Vitamin C suppressing the common cold. As Dr. Williams points out, 75% of those on expert health panels have direct financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. You think that doesn’t color their conclusions? No, I am not a health expert, just a person who takes his health seriously and calls a spade a spade. There was a time when the medical establishment endorsed bloodletting as a health measure, and some of today’s pronouncements are similarly suspect. A person needs to keep common sense in mind if he truly values his health.

Shorter items. I received a note from Bernard Drax about his documentary on virtual worlds and their power to overcome isolation for mobility-impaired folk, who can be intellectually engaged regardless of their physical location. If I were paralyzed I suspect I would truly value such a connection. The link is http://draxtor.com/ourdigitalselves. Florida’s new governor is Ron DeSantis, who campaigned as an environmentalist. But he’s a Republican, and they are not known for environmentalism. Sure enough, when it came to a choice between a big new toll road and the environment, he supported the road. Herman Wouk, author of major works like The Winds of War and The Caine Mutiny, died at age 103. I always thought of him as the answer to a quiz show question: “What did Herman do after he fell asleep? Herman Wouk.” But I do remember being wowed by War and Remembrance. An article in THE HUMANIST for May/June 2019 says that a survey shows that 85% or more of evangelical Protestants believe that Heaven is real, that Hell exists, that miracles happen, and angels and demons are active. And they believe that in due course Jesus will return, and the end of days will come, so they’re not concerned about climate change or the destruction of the environment; these things must happen to bring about the end they are anticipating, and we may be close to it now. And many believe that knowledge, reason, and learning are detrimental to belief in Christianity. They are right about that; education does destroy ignorant beliefs.

One more note: I paced my short story �Walk the Walk,� about a lonely little girl who befriends a little walking skeleton boy, she not being prejudiced against the supernatural, with the anthology Little Girl Lost, to be published by Mannison Press. Now they have a crowdfunding campaign for the volume. If you wish to participate, the link is http://igg.me/at/LittleGirlLostBook.

PIERS

Jewel-Lye 2019
HI-

My singleton novel Realty Check will be featured in Early Bird Books, Open Road’s daily deals newsletter, on 7/17/2019, downpriced to $1.99 at all US retailers on that one day. This is about a remarkable house that is on a city street in a choice location, but the back door opens onto a solid forest that completely surrounds the house. How’s that again? The house is fully stocked, including food and clothing that fits Penn and Chandelle, the older couple checking it out, and the first month’s rental is free. So how come nobody wants to rent it? They must have been scared off by the weird effects. In fact it is a portal to other worlds, and it is looking for the right family to appreciate it. So they take it, and bring in their granddaughter Llynn and smart grandson Lloyd for the summer. Llynn, a rebellious teen, is furious about being sent here with the dull old folk, preventing her from dating her rogue boyfriend. Then they show her the back door. She climbs a tree to check the area; it’s endless. The house has other intriguing mysteries. Lloyd is similarly converted, discovering the phenomenal internet connections it has. Now they are ready for the adventure that the house represents. I figured the novel would make a nice movie or TV series, but it disappeared into anonymity, which has been my luck so far. See if you agree that it belongs obscure. I don’t.

I read Scarlet Women, by Ian Graham. This is subtitled The Scandalous Lives Of Courtesans, Concubines, And Royal Mistresses, and that is exactly what it is. What strikes me is how desperately unhappy so many of these lives were. A number of them were famous in their day, but most ended their lives in obscure poverty. Just about all that counted for a woman was her sex appeal, which meant that age inevitably destroyed her. What counted for a man was his wealth, and when that was dissipated, as it so often was, he was out. Had the women sought worthwhile men in their heyday, they might have had happy lives. Had the men sought women with more to recommend them than appearance, they too might have done better. But the women mainly wanted rich living and the men wanted sex with as many pretty partners as they could manage. So maybe both got what they deserved: disappointment. Ordinary garden-variety folk with more realistic objectives seem to do better. Tidbits along the way: La Belle Otero, born in 1868, took her first lover at age twelve. At least eight men killed themselves because of love of her, so she became known as the Suicide Siren. Another courtesan had the problem of falling into deep sleep after making love, so that her companions were able to slip out of bed and escape without paying. She solved this by sewing her nightshirt to her lover’s. One offered fifty thousand crowns for one night in her company; she took the money but sent another courtesan to take her place. He didn’t notice? Maybe the lights were off. One, dying in her eighties, bequeathed some of her money to a lawyer’s young son to buy books; she evidently saw promise in him. His name was Voltaire. One was engaged by a royal mother to take her son’s virginity when he was fourteen. She rose to the challenge and did such a fine job of it that she was rewarded with an estate and a pension. In ancient Greece, prostitution was legal and taxed by the state. At the bottom (so to speak) of the hierarchy were the pornai, from which the word pornography derives. In China, one woman was said to be so beautiful that birds would fall from the sky when they saw her. Intrigued by that, I put such a woman in a fantasy story, and she flashed dragons so that they crash-landed. My wife says that’s sexist. Is it? I thought it was cute, and better than getting toasted by dragon fire. By the end of the sixteenth century Venice was in decline, and more and more families were unable to afford the huge dowries required to get their daughters married well. The girls were left with two choices: enter a convent for a life of contemplation and abstinence, or turn to prostitution. The number of prostitutes in Venice soared. When the authorities were concerned about homosexuality, they encouraged prostitutes to bare their breasts in public in an attempt to convert gay men to normalcy. I’m not sure how well that worked; I suspect some straight men claimed to be gay to encourage such display, then said they had been converted. If anyone doubted, they would be happy to demonstrate their heterosexuality, proving it. In England George, the Prince of Wales, loved his wife, but felt it his royal duty to take a mistress. Henrietta was glad to oblige. “The Princess of Wales knew about the affair and accepted it as any well-brought-up princess would. It helped that she liked Henrietta.” Another, Catherine, enjoyed horse-riding, and could outdo most men. “Her rides on Rotten Row wearing skintight riding habit drew huge crowds. Aristocratic ladies copied her clothes, although few of them could match her eighteen-inch waist.” One lover had a violent temper. When he attacked his mistress, he felt such remorse that he bought her expensive gifts, such as a steam yacht called White Ladye. One Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, was approached by Camilla, who was reputed to have said to him “My great-great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather’s mistress, so how about it?” Her logic was evidently persuasive, and she became his mistress before and after he married the more famous Princess Diana. Klondike Kate, of America, was attractive as as a teen, and became engaged to seven men at the same time, but when her school found out she had to give their rings back. Spoilsport! It concludes with the infamous Mata Hari, who misplayed her cards and was executed by firing squad. My conclusion from this book? Don’t become a courtesan; it’s too chancy.

I watched Alice in Wonderland. This doesn’t follow the Louis Carroll tale perfectly, but seems close in spirit. Alice is a little girl impatient to grow up. She follows a white rabbit and falls into the rabbit hole. She finds herself in a chamber, but the Exit door is too small for her. So she tries the bottle labeled DRINK ME, and abruptly shrinks to maybe six inches tall. Then she finds a sort of blue bun that says EAT ME. She takes a bite—and becomes almost too big to stand in the room. The white rabbit appears, but is spooked away, dropping his fan. Alice cries, and her tears flood the chamber. When she fans herself with the rabbit’s fan she gets small again and winds up in the lake of her tears. She meets people costumed as animals, who do a song and dance for her, but aren’t helpful for her escape. It continues, one little adventure after another. Whatever she eat or drinks changes her size. She talks with the blue caterpillar, who ushers her into new adventures. She rescues a baby, which becomes a piglet. She meets the March Hare. And the Cheshire Cat. The Mad Hatter. She finds a pleasant garden tended by playing cards. Which the red Queen of Hearts governs. Off with their heads! The Mock Turtle. And a trial with ditsy witnesses. Until Alice realizes that they are nothing but a pack of cards. And wakes back in her familiar garden. Except that she is behind the looking glass. She can see her folks beyond the mirror, but they can’t see her. And a dragon comes after her. On to Part Two, based on Through the Looking Glass. Alice can see the chess pieces but they can’t see or hear her. When she picks them up, they think it’s a tornado. But the Owl can see and hear her. So can the flowers. She meets Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Sees the Walrus and the Carpenter. The White Queen of chess, who becomes a sheep. Humpty Dumpty. The White King. The Red Queen. The Lion and the Unicorn. The White Knight. There are some nice little songs and dances. Alice becomes a little queen. Her house has all manner of pastries and flowers. She gets a present—and it is the fire-breathing dragon. Pandemonium. She climbs through the mirror, backs off the dragon, and is home again. And sees the fantasy cast in the mirror, and hears them singing to her. So maybe the fantasy is not completely gone.

I watched White Tiger. Late in World War Two the German forces are retreating, a 90% burned tank crewman is found, alive when he should be dead. He has no memory of his identity, but his skills remain. They call him Ivan Naidyonov. He heals remarkably rapidly. This is the Russian front. They send him back to work on repairing tanks. He says one tank speaks to him, saying it was ambushed by the White Tiger, the same one that burned him. He prays to the God of Tanks. Others have heard of this tank, that comes and goes, ghost-like, destroying tanks it encounters, even tank battalions. It is a refurbished tiger type tank, with extra armor and a more powerful motor. So the Russians put together an equivalent tank to go after and destroy the White Tiger, putting Ivan in charge of the three man crew. It is a crack team, the best available. He hides his tank in a pit, setting up to ambush the White Tiger. He is confident that it will appear, because it is looking for him. And it appears. It destroys a decoy tank; then the special tank emerges and goes after it. And it vanishes. And reappears behind them. But doesn’t take them out. The tracks disappear in the swamp. Ivan says it survives and is waiting for them to attack. Officers think he is crazy, but can’t deny the existence of the White Tiger. A platoon of tanks does attack. The White Tiger meets them and takes out a tank with each shot. It is carnage. Naidyonov’s tank explores the vicinity, following the tracks to a deserted, village, where they fire at a barn—and a tank emerges and is destroyed. But it’s not the White Tiger. Then they find it and battle it. They hit its turret, locking it in place. But then their own cannon blows up. Ivan gets out and fires at it with a pistol, a seemingly futile gesture, and it backs away and disappears again. The Russians advance on Berlin, meet the German high command, and it agrees to sign a statement of unconditional surrender. The generals share a nice meal. But one departs to see Ivan, who says the White Tiger is still waiting, and until it is destroyed, the war is not truly over. And a Hitler figure says that war is the human state. Movie ends. Too bad; this was a fine movie until it changed to something else and ended, never resolving the question of the mysterious tank or the mysterious Russian soldier. Unless there is a sequel to resolve these questions, it’s a cop-out.

I watched the Discover DVD “Chariots of the Gods” Our greatest mystery is why are we here? Have aliens visited Earth? Are we alone in the universe? We look at the stars and wonder whether there is anybody out there. Are there stars with planets that have liquid water on them? There are so many that there must be something. So if we are not alone, have we been visited by aliens? Did the Aztecs know about the other planets, up to Pluto? The Egyptian pyramids—who really built them? Was there alien involvement? There are hidden chambers. Did the Mayans encounter visitor from the sky? A stone picture could be interpreted as an ancient astronaut in flight. Lines and pictures in the desert, on a huge scale; how could they have been visualized without flying over them? Underground cities have existed for 2,500 years. Did they fear an enemy from the sky? The megaliths—could they have been built 7,000 years ago without alien advice? Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Eric von Daniken has theories. Antarctica seems to have been mapped long before we discovered it. Did the ancient Egyptians have electricity? The mysteries continue. So is it true? I am a skeptic, especially about von Daniken. As a writer who has earned a good living from fantastic fiction, I believe I recognize it when I see it. This is that.

I read Mr. Barsin’s Toy Emporium, by Lois Wickstrom. I reviewed this last year, but she did a whole-novel revision, so this is the revised edition. It is better organized than the prior version, so that we know the main characters early instead of some of them late and the overall narrative is better unified. The story concerns several children who separately visit the toy store of the title, where magic exists of you can see it. Few adults can, but many children do. One boy wants a mermaid for an imaginary friend. One girl in a wheelchair wants to rejoin two sylphs she knew before her family moved. One girl wants to slay a dragon. There is a magic wall in the store that the children can pass through to visit the fantasy realm beyond. But there is a hurricane coming, so time is limited. Mr. Barsin, who seems nice, actually has a more complicated agenda. For one thing, he has a dragon aspect. The children may have to give up their physical lives with their families in order to be forever with their fantasy friends. It also turns out that the accident that put the girl in the wheelchair did not after all kill her mother; Mr. Barsin has her mother captive. Can she be rescued? Maybe, if only skeptical parents can be persuaded to assist the children who learn the truth. So it gets tricky, and hard choices have to be made, as the hurricane bears down. Children should like this adventure; it may confirm suspicions they have had about their own toy stores, and explain why their own parents don’t understand the imaginary realm. It is of course the fate of most parents to forget their own childhoods and think that the mundane grind is all that exists. That is part of the tragedy of growing up.

I watched Pyramid. They discover a buried pyramid that has three sides rather than the usual four. This is newsworthy. A father/daughter team supervises the project. They force an entry, and vapor bursts out. Meanwhile there is civil unrest in Cairo, 50 miles to the north, and they are told they have to clear out within 24 hours. So they send in Shorty, their three million dollar rover, to quickly explore the pyramid, watching what it sees on a screen. Then something takes Shorty offline. So Fitzie (a worker?) and Nora (daughter) and Sunni (film maker) and Holden (dad) and Zahir go in to get Shorty, as they can’t afford to lose it. But there is something in the pyramid, some kind of animal. It kills Zahir. The floor collapses and they fall to a lower level. Fine sand flows from the mouths of animal statues; it will bury them if they don’t get out fast. Lizard/dog-like predators start chewing on Sunni, eating her alive. They try to rescue her, but she has fallen on spikes and dies. Then some sort of hand bursts through Holden’s chest, crippling him. Just Fitzie and Nora are left. A wolf-headed man—Anubis? Attacks. There are other bodies; others before them have raided this tomb. Nora reads the hieroglyphics to find the right shaft out. Anubis attacks. Fitzie’s section of the ladder falls. Then Anubis comes after Nora, but she manages to use a fire torch to drive him off, for a while. The lizard/dogs converge—and attack Anubis. Nora flees, but at then end it seems Anubis gets her too. In sum: junk.

I watched Water, set in India, 1938. It is in two versions: the original, Indian, spoken in Hindi with English subtitles, and an English version. Neither worked well for me. I could not properly understand the English version, but the subtitled one was overridden by the maker’s ongoing commentary, which, however relevant, blanked out much of the live action. So I surely missed details. Eight year old Chuyia is married as a child and widowed without ever knowing her husband. So, per the custom, her head is shaved and she is sent to a home for Hindu widows. She is rebellious; she doesn’t like it. A woman is supposed to be like water, completely yielding but essential. One of the pretty young widows, Kalyani, befriends her and lends her a black puppy. That’s mischief, as the puppy is as rebellious as she is. It runs away and she chases it and winds up in the city. A handsome young doctor, Narayan, catches it for her. Thus the doctor meets the widow—and they are attracted to each other. More mischief. This is really their story, as seen by the child. At one point Kalyani and Chuyia are wringing clothing out at a balcony, and accidentally splash the doctor who is passing by below. He is gracious, saying they can do it again if they want to, but the woman hides in embarrassment and it is Chuyia who talks with Narayan, both of them amused. We see the life of the widows of every age, and the vastly inferior status of women in India. The movie is really a tour of the Indian culture. Narayan and Kalyani would like to marry, but it’s against tradition for a widow to marry; it might give other widows ideas. When the head woman learns of it, she in enraged, and cuts Kalyani’s hair. Kalyani was widowed at age nine and never knew her husband, but it makes no difference: a woman is supposed to meekly stay a widow. But she departs and goes to Narayan. What a scandal! It asks the question: what do you do when your conscience conflicts with your faith? When religion is used to justify personal benefit? Kalyani, seeing that her dream is foolish, leaves Narayan and returns to the convent, and wades into the water to drown herself. Narayan comes back for her too late. If only she had waited a little longer! I feel this is unnecessary sacrifice, that may appeal to tragedy-loving critics but not to regular folk. In the end they send Chuyia to be with Gandhi, part of the next society. For her, at least, there is hope. This is a moving and painful film; I can’t say that I enjoyed it, but it is worth seeing.

I read The Sword of Aras, by Kenneth Newell, not yet published. This is a big sword-and-sorcery adventure, the better part of 200,000 words. Torrel is a skilled knight, and his younger sister Laina is so lovely that she attracts the attention of Prince Malak, whom she can’t stand. That sets in motion a complicated chain of adventures, including Torrel’s quest for the magical Sword of Aras and Laina’s ascension to virtual goddess status, with dragons occasionally joining in. Malak is guided by a secret voice only he can hear, so that he knows what to do when the situation is complicated. There is also Varen, a hunter and expert warrior, who does not know his own origin. Others come into play, as the story slowly develops and they interact. Characterization is nuanced; this is not black/white portrayal, though Marak is definitely evil. In the end the few heroes fight against greater numbers to save a village from destruction. There are interesting thoughts along the way, about the nature of power and its uses. So while this is S&S, it is a worthwhile novel in its own right.

I watched Superman and the Mole Men, which I think is the first Superman movie, in black and white, dating from 1951. Reporters Clark Kent and Lois Lane go to witness the drilling of the world’s deepest oil well. A dull routine assignment, they think. But the well has tapped into the underground home of the mole men, six miles down, who come up and look around, spooking Lois. Naturally others don’t believe her. Soil samples glow in the dark. But evidence grows as two mole men explore. They look like small bald men in fur suits, but what they touch glows with radiation. They encounter a little girl, who plays with a ball with them, until her mother spies them and screams. Meanwhile a posse is out to shoot them. It is time for Superman! Superman faces down the mob, trying to talk sense into them. But they shoot one mole man, whom Superman rescues and takes to the hospital, and they trap the other in a shed and set fire to it. He escapes down a chute and makes his way back to the drill hole and back to his home. Superman has to face down the lynch mob again. The mole man returns with friends and a weapon, a ray gun of some sort. Superman meets them and concludes that they want their wounded friend back. He brings the injured mole man to them and carries him to their access hole. They go down, then destroy the hole from below. The end. It’s not much by today’s standards, in photography, special effects, or acting, but interesting as an example of stone-age movie making.

I continue to explore the prospect of turning vegan. It seems that vegan advances are being rapidly made on all fronts, meat, milk, eggs, shoes, clothing, all over the world, and I applaud it. But I received a link to a woman who had tried going vegan, but suffered a loss of health. That is a concern; I want equivalent nutrition as well as equivalent cost. But it turned out that she was not doing just vegan, but also raw, which is another thing, and needed some nutrients in raw meat. Nothing about supplements. There are those who disparage supplements, saying they don’t work, but as far as I can tell, they do work, especially when combined with natural sources. For example I take Vitamin D pills, but I also try to get daily sunshine on my arms and legs. So I don’t see a refutation of veganism here. Meanwhile there are other alternatives to consuming dead cows, such as eating bugs, like grasshoppers, crickets, and termites. Growing insects for protein produces less greenhouse gases than processing other animals, and I understand bug burgers can be quite tasty if you don’t know their source.

My wife and I had our 63rd anniversary in JeJune, and celebrated with a piece of Chocolate Molten Lava Cake. At our octogenarian age that’s sufficient. My wife has health complications probably resulting from the 50 years that she smoked, and is on oxygen, so we go out mainly for doctor appointments, and I don’t do conventions, book signings, or interviews any more. We bought a small generator and I have been learning how to operate it, so that when a power failure comes we’ll still be able to operate the oxygen machine she needs. We live a subdued life. Age is a lady dog, but we are not going gently into that good night, just quietly.

I wrote two novelettes in JeJune. One is “Sinister Scene,” 9,500 words, concerning a young couple looking for another woman to make a trio, as that is their sexual taste. It is sinister, as in left handed, different from the norm, not negative. They are walking the street, discussing the problem, which isn’t one they want to post on a public site, when they blunder into a virtual reality game and are in a fantasy realm. There is no going back; as with jumping off a cliff they can’t just retrace their steps. They realize that they will have to play the game to get out of it. They do, and encounter a female player who is looking for a couple to merge with, in the game. That’s when it gets interesting.

The other novelette is “Skeptic,” 12,250 words. Skip is a total skeptic about the supernatural. Then he is visited by a sexy young demoness from Hell, complete with horns, hooves, and a prehensile tail. She means to seduce him into loving her, and that will predispose him to believe in demons and Hell. He is willing to be seduced physically, but not mentally. Then it turns out that the seduction is mainly a test of his constancy as a skeptic. Believers who make out with demonesses can wind up in Hell for eternity, but not a skeptic. She gives him a tour of Hell, where he meets Satin (after her clothing), Mistress of Hell, she is smart, beautiful, and interested, really his perfect woman, and she loves his skepticism. She means to show him amorous tricks no angel could ever do. He can have a marvelously hot time, as long as he does not believe in any of it. That’s part of the Hell of it. Both novelettes are slated for the next volume in my ongoing story collection series, Relationships 8.

I care for the welfare of people, and animals, and plants. Years ago I discovered a little mulberry tree, intrigued by its intricately curving leaves. It was in a place where it was bound to get run over, so I transplanted it, and after a complicated history including a rogue driver who did run over it, it has grown into a fine young tree. Then last NoRemember (I think it was; for some reason it is hard to retain details of events in that month) I found another, growing right by the house, too close to survive well. So I transplanted it to the back yard where there was more sunlight, and it did okay until a deer ate off its leaves in Dismember. (There are reasons for the Ogre Months.) In spring it sprouted new branches, and was doing well with 30 leaves—when the deer found it and ate them all off. Now we like our deer, but this wouldn’t do. So I made a six foot high chicken wire fence around it, and now it is doing well again with about 29 leaves and growing more. It should in due course make a fine tree.

I watched the Democrat candidates debates with interest. I am and have always been a registered independent, because when I registered in 1959, having gotten my citizenship while serving in the US Army, I realized that neither the Republicans nor the Southern Democrats represented my interests as a naturalized immigrant. In the ensuing half century the Southern Democrats largely converted to Republican and the more liberal northern Democrats filled in, but I am satisfied to remain unaffiliated. To reprise, briefly: I was born in England; my parents were doing relief work for the British Quakers, feeding the hungry children in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, when the new General Franco dictatorship arrested my father and “disappeared” him, claiming they knew nothing about it. But he managed to smuggle out a post card, which reached my mother, and she used that to prove they were lying. So they had to let him go, lest formidable international relief work funds be cut off, but kicked him out of the country. So it was that we came to America on I think the last ship out before World War Two got serious in 1940, on the same ship that the exiled former king of England was on, on his way to the Bahamas. I remember seeing his car unloaded, swinging on a line from a crane, ship to dock. So it should be understandable why I don’t like dictatorships or liars or folk who care nothing for hungry children, and I’m not too partial to war, though I do believe that it was necessary to get Hitler out of power and no way short of assassination or war seemed likely to do that. So I am what is termed liberal, though it seems to me that belief in basic human rights should be considered standard rather than liberal. The national Democrats come closer to that than the Republicans do, and as long as the Republicans support a character like Donald Trump I will not support them. A side note is that when I was on the best seller lists and hauling in money, the Republicans solicited me, evidently figuring I was rich and had to be one of them. When I came off the lists, the Democrats solicited me, figuring I was poor and had to be one of them. I ignored both. Through the decades I supported candidates like John Kennedy and Barack Obama, and disliked dishonest figures like Richard Nixon and, yes, Donald Trump. But which Democrat for president this time? The debates hardly helped, because it turns out that I agree with everything every candidate said. So there will have to be some sorting out, and I will be watching to see who means it and who doesn’t. But at present I believe I could vote for any of them, with a faint hope that the nominee turns out to be a woman.

Related issues. An article by A G Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, discusses Trump’s charge that the newspaper committed “a virtual act of treason.” Treason is a serious charge, as it is punishable by death. It means, in essence, the betrayal of one’s nation. To Trump, of course, any criticism, however justified, is anathema. This article traces Trump’s progression from “the failing New York Times,” to “enemy of the people,” to this flirtation with the charge of treason. Apparently because this newspaper is dedicated to telling the truth as it sees it, as should be the right of any person or organization in America, and tells the truth about Trump. It puts me in mind of when president Clinton was trying to use a military strike to take out one Osama bin Laden, a foreign terrorist he felt was a threat to American interests. The Republicans were screaming in protest against Clinton and doing their best to torpedo his efforts. I remember news commentator Paul Harvey saying “Wag the dog! Wag the dog!” referring to the idea that Clinton was trying to stir up trouble overseas to distract attention from his problems at home. The tail wagging the dog. I thought at the time that the Republicans were committing virtual treason, putting America at serious risk. So bin Laden got away, and the result was 9-11, with almost three thousand Americans dead. Which the Republicans, instead of admitting their own culpability, then used as a pretext to invade Iraq, possibly the one country in the area that had nothing to do with the 9-11 attack. They used torture to evoke false evidence of weapons of mass destruction there. The thing about torture is that the victim will say whatever his torturers want him to say, to stop the pain; not only is it sadistically unethical, it is ineffective for this purpose. But they endorsed it, at hideous cost to America. And now Trump talks of treason? He’s got an odd definition.

I don’t like abortion, for reasons discussed in this column before, mainly my aversion to taking human or animal life. But I also don’t much like the religious or political antiabortionists, who seem to have an agenda other than the welfare of babies. Newspaper article by Lily Abadal says that abortion does not empower women. She points out that abortion may be used as a tool to enable women to be more like men, going to work and leaving home life behind. Thus it is promoting the masculine culture. She points out that not all abortions are freely chosen; young women may be manipulated by parents or guardians who might be inconvenienced by their babies. Men in charge of sex trafficking rings drag abused women to abortion clinics so they can continue exploiting their bodies. This hardly benefits the women. Maybe the focus should be to eliminate the exploitation of women, sexual and economic. I can see her point. When I say I don’t like abortion, that doesn’t I would ban it totally; I do think the woman most concerned should make that difficult decision. I don’t like death either, but I recognize it as one of the architects of evolution. This is an interesting take on the subject. So I say to you antiabortion campaigners, what about promoting contraception and the equality of women, and providing care and homes for unwanted babies? As for the sex rings, I believe that prostitution should be legalized and regulated and taxed; sex is a service like dentistry, accounting, governing, and health care, and properly regulated could eliminate the illegal exploitation of women and the generation of unwanted babies. Unless the real agenda is not to benefit women, but to stigmatize one of the strongest natural urges, sex. To impose outside control on women, a power grab. I speak as a man who stayed home and took care of our first surviving child, while my wife worked. Not all men are trying to suppress woman, and child care does not have to be limited to women.

Article in NEW SCIENTIST says that most atheists do believe in aspects of the supernatural. Oh? As a complete skeptic of the supernatural I am interested. It seems that 20 percent believe in life after death; I don’t. 12% believe in reincarnation. I don’t. Many believe that there are underlying forces of good and evil. I don’t. Many believe in karma. Not me. People with mystical powers? Not me. Astrology? I wrote a novel, Macroscope, featuring astrology, but my belief in it is nil. So it seems that many atheists simply don’t believe in God or Satan, but do subscribe to other aspects of the supernatural. Maybe some believe in ghosts, UFOs, alien presence on Earth, and so on. I don’t. So I had fun writing the novelette “Skeptic,” wherein the skeptic gets some fun erotic action, but I don’t anticipate any visits by sexy demonesses in my real life. Meanwhile it seems that the US military is now taking UFOs seriously. Well, we’ll see; I remember about forty years ago when a big weather balloon got loose and floated over a highway and a report came in from a spectator of seeing inside, little green aliens drinking tea.

Robocalling continues. As I have said before, the authorities could stop it, if they wanted to. For example, if they required every individual phone call anyone made to be charged even a penny per call, regular users would hardly notice it, but it would make robo-dialing a million calls cost ten thousand dollars, and a billion calls cost ten million dollars. Robocalling would no longer pay. So why don’t they do that?

Article from REASON magazine, reprinted by THE WEEK, says that online mobs are attacking the authors of young adult fiction for daring to imagine lives different from their own, and publishers are yielding to it and canceling books, and new voices are being silenced. What preposterous nonsense! How would these trolls see science fiction and fantasy, which are way different, by design, from ordinary lives? Writers who have never been to Mars should not write about interplanetary travel? Writers who have never slain a dragon should stick to swatting flies? Writers who have never changed form to a flying bat should not write about vampires? I, as an immigrant, should be limited to writing only about immigrants, and only my kind, from England? Do those publishers have poop for brains? No wonder self publishing is prospering! To me it smells of the racism and sexism that flourishes in the anonymity of the online community. How about rounding up those online mobs and sending them to reform school until they learn about the diversity and tolerance America is supposed to stand for? About freedom of expression? We really don’t need to be governed by bigotry, contemporary politics to the contrary notwithstanding.

Other notes: Newspaper article by Walter G Bradley recommends not Medicare for all, but that there be a US National Health Service that simply provides health care for all. There would be no insurance, no reimbursement, just direct health care, as it exists in other nations. It would address the issues of cost and quality, and allow those who prefer private insurance to have it, just as today children can attend public or private schools. This makes sense to me. Item in THE WEEK says that arctic warming will in due course cost us seventy trillion dollars. And we can’t afford preventive measures? Item in SCIENCE NEWS says that the bigger a black hole is, the less dense it is. Square cube law, I think. So the actual density of the W87 black hole is less than that of air at sea level. A book titled Slime, by Ruth Kassinger, is about algae, which were the first to harness the sun’s energy in photosynthesis and generated the oxygen that allowed other life to proliferate. Yes, as I recall, oxygen was a toxic waste, until creatures formed who used it for energy. Now algae could produce biofuels to replace fossil fuels. We are wiping out Earth’s plants; nearly 600 species have gone extinct in the past 250 years. This is about five hundred times as fast as the normal background extinction rate. Over-fishing, destruction of habitat, pollution, global warming, and the ever-increasing human numbers are all factors. One idea for cleaner power: use sunlight to separate hydrogen from water, and use that hydrogen for fuel. What it leaves when expended is just plain water. A recent census of all living things found that plants are the most common by biomass, being about 83 percent of the total of all life on Earth. Insects and such make up about 60% of the animal kingdom’s biomass, while mammals are relatively small. Bacteria exceed the combined biomass of birds and mammals. So in terms of weight, we’re lightweights. Artificial Intelligence—AI—suffers from the GIGO complex, that is Garbage In, Garbage Out, and when it emulates our social relations, it quickly becomes racist and can start dismissing real folk as fake. That’s a sad commentary on our social values. Article in NEW SCIENTIST reveals that polygraph lie detectors are nonsense, yet they continue to be used. In Ask Marilyn, she says that no blue eye pigment exists; it’s just that blue-eyed people lack melanin in the iris, so their eyes seem blue. Interesting. My eyes in youth were blue, but in my age have faded to gray, like my hair. Tech billionaires are racing to build an orbiting internet, crafted by SpaceX, that is accessible anywhere on Earth, by 2025. I am interested, as my system no longer goes online as it used to; each keystroke takes something like five minutes. My wife and daughter go online for me for email and posting this column, with WiFi. Yes, my WiFi Wife But what will it cost? I’m damned if I want to pay one or two hundred dollars a month for something I’d use only occasionally. NEW SCIENTIST also says that language may have started to develop 700,000 years ago when our ancestors descended from the trees. The ground was a dangerous place, so they chanted or sang all night to ward off predators, and that gradually evolved into language, maybe by 300,000 years ago. Could be; I believe that language led to storytelling, and that this is the heart of our nature; as a storyteller I am part of the very essence of our species. Plastic is spreading everywhere. As an editorial in THE WEEK puts it, you are probably pooping plastic. Microscopic bits of it get in our food, our blood, or organs. A federal study found a form of it in the urine of 93 percent of people over the age of 6. It is associated with the autism spectrum, obesity, behavior problems, and thyroid dysfunction. Oops, that last one tagged me; I take medication to shore up my thyroid. Is plastic to blame? It is past time to start making plastics that will degrade back to nature in a set time. They are getting closer to decoding brain signals that might help those who can’t speak. This would be a wonderful breakthrough for folk like Jenny, my paralyzed correspondent. Yes, I still write to her once a week, thirty years later, though she can’t answer me.

I subscribe to a number of magazines, and I don’t mean celebrity tabloids. FREE INQUIRY is a Secular Humanist magazine, saying “Beyond Atheism, Beyond Agnosticism, Secular Humanism.” That is, not religious, and concerned with the interests and ideals of people. That’s me. One article in the June/July 2019 issue is titled “Why Do Fundamentalists Lie about the Bible?” by Brian Bolton. That’s a challenging notion. They believe the Bible is literally true in every verse; that it has no errors, and no disguised metaphors. The problem is that the Bible does not support all their positions. For example, abortion: they condemn it, but the Bible speaks of ripping open pregnant women with swords. That’s murder and abortion, no? Since they can’t admit that the Bible is not with them, they have to lie about it. The article goes on to detail other differences on animal welfare, capital punishment, Decalogue displays, family values, Jesus’ teachings, public prayer, same sex marriage, slavery, and sworn oaths. So if you’re a fundamentalist, stay the hell away from this; you’d find it treasonous. Another item is a review of a book about the once leading science fiction magazine, ASTOUNDING, which tackles the foundation of science fiction and leading figures in it, among them L Ron Hubbard who founded Dianetics and later Scientology. The first Dianetics article appeared in ASTOUNDING magazine, you see. To say that the book is not kind to Hubbard is to understate the case. Another magazine is THE PROGRESSIVE, whose June/July 2019 issue is devoted to the threats to life on Earth, beginning with nuclear war, going on to climate change, the opioid crisis, and others. It is scary reading. And PACIFIC STANDARD, this time presenting a collection of its best reports on social and environmental justice. I had to read it a few pages at a time, because the material was so disturbing. While in general I favor policies that will secure a future for mankind, now I have to wonder whether mankind is actually worth saving. It starts with an article titled “What Well-Meaning White People Need To Know About Race.” I am a well-meaning white person, and this is painful reading.

In sum, these columns of mine catch only part of the intellectual landscape I am experiencing, here in the closing stages of my life. I hope that my thoughts have some meaning for some others.

PIERS

AwGhost 2019
HI-

I watched Stranger Things, season two. I watched mainly during a fever, so probably have details wrong. It started with a struggle to get my system changed from TV to DVD; but it just wouldn’t, Until Daughter Cheryl tried it, hitting the same button I did, and for her it worked. Ever thus. The boy Will disappeared last season, but was finally rescued. But there remained something odd about him. There are several continuing narrative threads as the mystery grows. Someone is poisoning the pumpkin crop. Will sees something in the night, like a monstrous tentacular cloud. Mike has problems too, in fact all the boys do. The parents of course don’t understand, except maybe the sheriff. They find Will standing outside in a trance state; he can’t say what happened. Meanwhile Sheriff Hopper and Mike have a row, each thinking the other is lying. Dustin’s odd lizard-like pet, Dart, molts and grows. Sheriff Hopper gets trapped in an underground tunnel and caught by growing vines. Will’s drawings lead him and his mother Joyce to him, and they rescue him. But Will relapses. Steve and Nancy find their relationship intensifying. Will says someone angered the monster; that means trouble. Dustin’s mother is in a trance, repeating a few words over and over; he concludes that she wants him to find a missing girl, Eleven, posing as Jane, an she visits a bad suction of town. A man threatens her with a knife, and she makes the man get overrun by biting ants. She demonstrates telekinesis. She meets Kal. They knew each other as younger children, before they got separated. Kal can make others see or not see what she chooses. The lizard monsters-–the demigorgons, or demi dogs–attack, and eat any human they catch. Then Eleven arrives. It seems she has been staying with Hopper, like a daughter. Meanwhile they tie Will down and heat him cruelly, because the monster that’s in him can’t tolerate heat. They finally drive it out, like a cloud of smoke. Another group tackles the subterranean monster complex, torching it. But Dustin’s pet Dart does remember him, and they pass by him as they escape through tunnels. At the conclusion there is a school dance where a number of couples form, such as Will and Eleven. The main dance is totally unfamiliar to me, because I’m from a prior generation and never was part of the school dating scene. But the huge sky monster remains a threat.

I watched Aquaman. A lighthouse keeper discovers a woman washed up in the sea. She is Atlana, fleeing an arranged marriage in Atlantis. She finds love with the keeper, and they have a son, Aquaman. But Atlantis won’t let them go, and sends a raiding party to bring her home. She wipes them out, but realizes that to save her husband and son she needs to return to Atlantis. She dies there, reportedly sacrificed by the king. Years later there is mischief and Aquaman’s younger half brother Orm of Atlantis makes ready to unite the seven sea kingdoms, and to invade the land. Aquaman is the royal first son, whom they call Arthur, so Princess Mera, a flaming redhead, who is technically Orm’s fiancee, comes to recruit him to lead the opposition to Orm. Why? She is trying to do the right thing, and Orm is not temperamentally suited to rule, being a power-hungry brute. Aquaman and Orm fight, but it is interrupted. Aqaman and Mera wind up in a kind of tour of several sea kingdoms, attacked by each. Until his mother Atlana appears; not dead after all. Aquaman goes to take the Trident, which can be taken only by the one true king—and does take it. He is the one it recognizes. Mera tells him to go defeat Orm. What if he loses? She says to make Orm fight in Aquaman’s own venue this time. She kisses him and sends him off. He fights Orm, uses the Trident to defeat him, and spares him. Atlana appears, explaining that they are both her sons and she doesn’t one son killing the other. Then she returns to Aquaman’s father, while Aquaman rules land and sea with Mera as is bride. Taken as a whole, junky fantasy, but it does have a story line and is visually impressive, with a satisfying conclusion.

I read Radiant Cool, by Dan Lloyd, which I sought because I read a review that indicated it was a novelization of an essay on Consciousness. That’s one of the mysteries I seek to see solved before I die, the other two being Existence and Life. This is dense reading, replete with diagrams and charts and obscure pictures. Consciousness is not a simple on-off switch; it is complicated and messy. The novel doesn’t come up with the answer, but it does have interesting story twists along the way. Young, pretty, feisty Miranda Sharpe discovers Professor Grue slumped over his keyboard, unconscious or dead, so she takes her dissertation and gets quietly out of there. If he is dead, why, and by whom? And what about his specialty, consciousness? Both mysteries are opaque. But later in the novel Grue turns up again, alive, for a while; he had inadvertently overdosed on a drug. In the course of the story Miranda interacts with one Dan Lloyd. Yes, the author of this book. She is cautious, as strange men can get grabby. One she encounters is Gordon-the-nerd. “His amorous advance on me began perhaps ten minutes into the semester; it was dead in the water at eleven.” “At the end of the rainbow of experience, this pot of mush.” “I planned to spend the afternoon finishing my first book, also known as a dissertation, also known as the Swamp Thing.” “That was the paradox of the day, I thought. The instant of conscious life has no duration. Like a point. But packed into the instant is history and expectation, the time line. Consciousness is the line and the point, the warp of space and time. Multidimensionality lives!” Miranda has a copy of a key file Dan has lost via a computer glitch after months of working on it. He is highly gratified. “I won’t be able to sleep until I’ve copied it about ten more times, and buried at least one in concrete.” “All consciousness is consciousness of something.” The novel is followed by a substantial essay, “The Real Firefly–Reflections on a Science of Consciousness.” This is even denser reading. It amplifies aspects referenced in passing in the fictional portion, but despite my fascination with the subject, I can’t say I understood it. Where does the brain process images? Everywhere. It asks what is the natural function of consciousness? But has no answer. So I will answer: it enables a creature to survive a dangerous environment without having to maintain an impossibly large mental file of IF THIS…DO THAT alternatives such as what insects use. I think of it as similar to the shortcut multiplication represents over addition: instead of laboriously adding up a collection of groups of ten beans to get the total number, you simply count the number of groups, then multiply it by that number, taking a fraction of the brain’s time and storage space. So consciousness enables more efficient functioning, and is a powerful survival tool. That’s why nature keeps it. The essay explores the science fiction concept of a brain in a vat. If all the usual stimuli are made, does the brain even know it has lost its real body? It indulges in thought experiments to try to zero in on the minimal requirements for consciousness. “You can’t step in the same stream of consciousness twice.” It establishes that time is an integral component. But it misses what I consider two fundamentals: that feedback is essential to consciousness, such as when you consider yourself considering an incoming image, and that consciousness is an emergent property, occurring only when circumstances are right. I am also not sure he explores the critical role of feeling, which is integral to consciousness. What is the point, if you don’t care? So the author has labored hugely to bring forth something less than a mountain. Still it is a considerable discussion.

My supplementary reading on the subject includes A NEW SCIENTIST article that says one in ten people believed to be permanently unconscious may actually be aware. Can we rescue them? My own experience with this is Jenny, my paralyzed correspondent, who was roused to consciousness by a letter I wrote to her thirty years ago at the behest of her mother. I remain uncertain that I did her a favor, waking her to full body paralysis for life; it’s why I still write to her weekly. No, she doesn’t answer; she’s paralyzed, remember? Fortunately she can move a few fingers, and that enables her to relate to a computer and the internet, so she has a life, just not a physical one. Also a book review on The Origin Of Consciousness, by Graham Little. It suggests that one key step was the development of the neural capacity to record and group events according to their properties, thereby generating ideas. That is, as I see it, if you observe a tiger catching and eating your brother, and later another tiger eating your neighbor, it helps if you can get the idea that tigers are dangerous, which is a survival advantage. It says the attention mechanism of the brain enables redirection of neuron flows, contrary to entropy, in choice or free will, and is the only system in the universe not directed by entropy. Entropy is, as I vaguely understand the concept, the tendency of matter and energy to merge into a state of equilibrium where nothing happens, sort of like nine day old porridge minus the maggots. So consciousness must be the enemy of entropy, and we who have consciousness have creative free will. We also have a sense of self, and emotions. And an article from a 2016 The Atlantic, “A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved,” by Michael Graziano. What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve, and what animals have it? The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. It needs to be sorted out before you get eaten by the tiger. So consciousness may have evolved gradually over the past half billion years, and is present in most vertebrate species. One advance was the tectum, a centralized controller for attention that could coordinate among all senses. All vertebrates—fish, amphibioans, reptiles, birds, and mammals—have a tectum. But invertebrates don’t. That’s things without backbones, like jellyfish, insects, worms, sponges and such. Then a new brain structure developed, the wulst. (Not in my dictionaries, which include the big Oxford English Dictionary) Its most advanced example is called our cerebral cortex, which is like an upgraded tectum. It enables, among other things, the theory of mind. That is, we understand that we are thinking, and can also understand that other people and maybe creatures are thinking too. I think maybe even those insectoid aliens from planet X who have been watching us for the past century. We can understand other people by projecting ourselves onto them, and appreciate how other folk might see us. Hey, Planet X Alien; stop mentally undressing that girl; she’s not your type. Language was another big leap in the evolution of consciousness, and we humans certainly employ it, from TV to smartphones. But an article in NEW SCIENTIST says that consciousness may be an illusion. How’s that again? Just about anything can be doubted, but I know I’m not imagining my consciousness. I may not know its mechanisms, but I know it’s there. Ah, but the article says it may be a partial illusion, a picture knitted together by the brain as a result of all the inputs it is receiving. I think of a movie, which is actually a series of still pictures or fragments of pictures, replacing each other so fast that they blur into seeming reality. Now that could be. We are receiving constant multiple pictures, in the manner of a TV screen, and the blur does seem real.

I watched Skyscraper. They are opening the world’s tallest building, twice the height of the Empire State Building. This is The Pearl in Hong Kong, a spiraling tower. Will Sawyer was a hostage rescue team leader, until he got shot. He now has an artificial left foot. He assesses security for skyscrapers. His “brother” Ben sells out to another side. He attacks Will, and dies in the ensuing fight. He says Will has been set up. Indeed, Will is photographed by the bad folk before they speed away. The gang seems to be run by a young woman, Xia. The mastermind is Botha. They gun down the building managers. The fire is set on the 96th floor; Will’s wife Sarah and their two children Georgia and Henry, are not far above that. The fire is climbing; they must flee upward. To reach them, Will must climb up outside the building, despite his metal left foot. Much of his desperate climb is visible from the ground, and spectators applaud his successes. Falling debris separates Sarah from the children, then the children from each other. Will reaches Sarah, and so does Henry. Will goes after Georgia, but they are captured by the bad guys. They know he knows the building, and want his information. They mean to use the girl to make him talk. But he breaks free and makes contact with the authorities. Then comes back after Georgia, but the interactions are complicated by what amounts to a hall of mirrors. He does rescue Georgia, and they in turn are rescued. This is one scary struggle.

I watched Fantastic Beasts the Crimes of Crindhelwald. This is a Harry Potter sequel to Fantastic Beasts. Newt Scamander is summoned to find a way to deal with Dark Wizard Grindelwald, who escaped confinement and wants to rule the world. It took me some time to get into it, as it has scenes with assorted other folk I didn’t remember. A young woman is required to turn into a serpent. A dragon is conjured into a suitcase. Leta believes she is bad. Queenie distrusts others. Jacob was enchanted. Tina is wary of what’s going on. Back history of a wronged couple. Grindlewald makes his case to his followers. Leta attacks him, and is destroyed. Pyrotechnics erupt. I proffer this as a way not to make a movie. I saw the prior one two years ago, but there was no keying in to refresh my memory, no summary, so it largely passed me by. I’m sure there was more of a story than I was able to pick up on. A sequel movie, like a sequel novel, should make sure the viewer or reader has the information he/she needs to follow it without difficulty. Otherwise viewers/readers are lost at an unnecessarily extensive rate.

I read The God Wheel by Brian Clopper. It seems that every person has a God Wheel, a kind of divine device whose rotation brings him fortune of one kind or another. Felix Martin has a sudden turn of good fortune, with his would-be girlfriend Lorna turning friendly, and finding a $10,000 lottery ticket winner. Then he gets a visit from a ghostly young woman named Yolla, who says she’s his goddess of good fortune. She takes his hand, and suddenly he’s not at home. She shows him a vertical wheel marked in twelve segments, each with a mysterious name. One segment is Yolla; it seems it fell on her, and that’s why his recent rush of good luck. Normally a person does not see his/her God Wheel, which is tucked away in a pocket dimension in his/her brain. Each person has a personal pantheon of unique deities, selected by their wheel. But Felix’s squire, the one who spins the wheel, is missing, so now Felix must spin it for himself. A prophecy says that when this sort of mess-up happens, the dread Entropy Queen may escape confinement. That would be disaster, as she would take over the entire framework of fantasy and reality, ushering in her foul new order. So Felix must now pretty much guide his own destiny, and stop the Queen, to save the world. After that it becomes complicated. Lorna shows up, with her wheel, and they work their random way through her pantheon as well as his. And the dread Entropy Queen does show up, a formidable figure. Fortunately they manage to muddle through and save the existing order, so the rest of us can relax; with luck we’ll never see our own wheels.

I watched Fear. Blond sixteen year old Nicole has a typical dull family life with father Steve and mother Laura. She meets David at a party, unaware that he has bad connections. They go off by themselves. They kiss. She stays out too late and gets halfway grounded. They date, becoming increasingly intimate. He visits at night when her folks are away. Another day he sees her with another boy, Gary, a family friend, and beats him up. That puts their relationship in question. Dad, Steve, tells David to get the hell out of her life, or else. Then Nicole sees David making out with her friend Margo. That really ties it. David threatens Margo, and goes after Gary, killing him. Steve goes after David and his friends. Who in turn go after Nicole’s family, smashing into their house. Mayhem as the family fights back. David dies, ending it.

I watched The Watcher. Helicopters, police cars, and armed police converge by night on a city address. They are after a serial killer who studies his victim for weeks ahead. He grabs her, ties her, gags her, dances with her, before killing her. But doesn’t rape her. Then comes to the crime scene as if by chance. He mails pictures of his victims, before they are killed, to the FBI police detective, Joel Campbell, challenging him. Now the focus is on the next victim, Ellie; if the police can identify her before the killer strikes, maybe they can save her and catch him. They don’t, and she’s dead. On to the next, Jessica. Meanwhile the killer, Abraham, even signs up with the same psychologist Joel uses, Polly. They don’t catch up to Jessica in time either, but now are close on Abraham’s trail. He steals a car; they are after him. He sets a gas station on fire, and escapes in the distraction. He raids the psychologist’s office and gets a recording of her last interview with Joel. They meet at a cemetery. Abraham takes Joel to where Polly is tied and gagged, amid explosives. But Joel has his cell phone on, so the police are tracking him. He says that he and Joel need each other to give meaning to their lives. There’s a tense showdown as the fire and explosions start. Joel manages to carry Polly out of it as Abraham gets burned to death. Polly is likely to be Joel’s girlfriend.

I watched Raising Cain. Carter is picking up his little daughter Amy, but his wife doesn’t arrive, so a neighbor woman takes them in her car. He chloroforms her and stops the car. Then his twin brother Cain shows up. They are evidently into something devious, like stealing children and experimenting on them. Carter adores Amy, but when starting to make love with her mother Jenny, he hears Amy cry, breaks off, and leaves the house. This is curious. Then he spies Jenny making love with a friend, Jack. He kills her, puts her in the car, and sinks the car in the river. She recovers consciousness just before the car goes under, too late. Or does she? Meanwhile a police psychologist, Waldheim, discusses cases of multiple personalty, which originate when a child is abused and creates an alternate personality to remember it, the original one remaining innocent. This must be Carter and Cain, explaining how Cain can mysteriously appear and vanish. Waldheim interviews Cain and his other personalities. She needs to get the one who knows where the stolen children have been hidden. That’s Margo, who knocks her out and escapes. Cain assumes the identity of his father, Dr. Nix, who started all this. No, it turns out that Dr. Nix is real, having faked his suicide 18 years ago. Then Amy wanders in the park, looking for Daddy—and sees him. Amy has the syndrome too. This is not my preferred genre, but it is well enough done.

I watched A Kiss Before Dying, the fourth in the package of four I got for six dollars. Set in 1987. Dorothy dresses well for an important date. She meets her boyfriend Jonathan Corliss, and they will meet her father and tell him of their relationship. Then Jonathan pushes her off a ledge, killing her. Her father is the head of Carlsson Copper, one of America’s richest men. They think she committed suicide. Her twin sister Ellen survives. It turns out Dorothy was pregnant; that must be why he killed her,to avoid that complication. A year later they still think it’s suicide, but Ellen is sure it wasn’t. She investigates, and a friend finds a picture of Corliss–and in turn gets murdered. Now at last the police believe that something is going on. Ellen knows Jonathan as Jay Faraday, and has sex with him. They date for a year. Her friend Rose gets beaten up. Jay meets Ellen’s father. Another friend says she knows whom Dorothy was dating when she died. So Jonathan/Jay kills her, and throws her body into the river. Jay and Ellen marry. Jay gets along fine with her father. But Ellen continues to put hints together about her sister. Jay is aware of that. Then one of his old college friends spies him as Corliss. Corliss’ mother says that he committed suicide three years ago by swimming out to sea, but his body was never found. That’s when he assumed the identity of another person. Bit by bit things are closing in on him. He catches Ellen investigating his past. They fight, she flees, and he gets run over by a Carlsson Copper train, ironically. So it is finally over.

I read The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maas, a leading literary agent. Actually I know how to write fiction, critics to the contrary notwithstanding, but it was on sale and I was curious about his take on it. He focuses mainly on, yes, the importance of emotion, and he’s right; fiction has to stir your emotion, or you’ll soon set it aside. He gives examples both from published novels and his own experience, and offers little exercises to encourage the writer to amplify the emotional aspects of his narrative. I would say this is well considered and presented, and the average writer can profit from it. I was pondering writing a novelette at the time, so I tried to apply the advice to that, and came up with a strong emotional sequence that should benefit my story. So yes, I recommend this book, especially if you are a novice writer struggling to enhance the effect of what you write.

I watched Hardbodies, the first of a sixpack of Beach Bodies movies I got for five dollars, which is a bit over fifty cents an hour. Three middle age men rent a swinging beach house. They hire a young stud Scotty to teach them how to score with the local girls. He gets them into better clothes and tells them how to dialogue. It’s a challenge, but it begins to work. They get into it with lively girls. Bare breasts galore. Not much of a plot line, and it devolves into farce, but that’s not the point. The point is to show as many young sexy girl bodies as possible, and it does do that.

I watched Private Resort, the second Beach Bodies movie. Jack and Ben crash a posh private resort, meaning to chase the hot babes. Until they spy the fabulous wife of a jewel thief. Now there’s a challenge! It’s a farce, flesh alternating or overlapping with slapstick. One boy meets a mystic who turns out to have a phenomenal body. The boys get the wife in their room, too drunk to stand. One gets a friendly waitress on the beach. The jewel thief tries to get the diamond by force, but the woman knows karate. A wacky chase through the halls of the hotel, into the ladies’ locker room, everywhere. Fun.

I watched Side Out. Monroe is coming to work for his uncle in real estate in Pasadena. Prospective customers are hostile, as he is serving eviction notices. One is Zack Barnes, who plays volleyball on the beach. He meets the pretty marine biologist student Samantha. Monroe gets into volleyball and turns out to be good at it. Zack sees potential in Monroe and starts coaching him to play better. Monroe uses his legal knowledge to help Zack escape eviction. That costs him his job but wins Zack’s friendship. They team up in volleyball. They enter a major tournament and make it to the finals. Zack can get a big payoff to throw the match. Will he? He starts to, but in the end doesn’t, and they manage to win after starting ten points behind. They are the new champions. This is a good, compelling story, really not about beach bodies.

Jewel-Lye was an interesting month for me. I wrote the 9,350 word novelette “Choice,” about an alien nanny, Sliper, for a five year old human child, Jane, who is taking her to visit her own home planet, when she notices suspicious human characters and knows they mean to abduct the child for ransom. She is not equipped to fend them off. What to do? She spies an alien man of a warlike planet—in fact their two planets are at war now—with a five year old boy, on similar business. Wealthy human families currently hire alien protectors for their children; it’s the current fashion. She makes her choice. This is neutral ground, and his boy has torn a pant leg that the warrior is ill equipped to mend. She signals him, making mending motions, which her six finger hands are well equipped to do. Then she glances significantly at the three lurking rogues across the hall. The man quickly assesses the situation and nods. He brings the boy, and she expertly repairs the pant leg. Then man and boy fade out, to reappear when the rogues strike, and the man wipes them out in an instant. She nods; their deal has been completed, and they go their ways. But it is actually the beginning of an adventure neither sought or expected, and they wind up together as a couple, adopting laboratory made human twins. The sequel, “Lab” follows those twins, whose destiny is beyond what anyone imagined.

But when I finished “Choice” I was struck by a fever of up to 102F that wiped out my exercise routine. It started with trouble sleeping; I simply could not get comfortable enough to nod off. It was a great relief when I did get back to a normal schedule there. One complication was a sudden urgency for urination that simply would not wait; in fact as I rushed to the toilet I pissed my pants. Then when the time came to defecate, right, I pooped my pants on the way to the toilet. Did I mention sudden urgency? In due course the fever passed—then reappeared, or maybe it was a new illness. My new hearing aids started popping out of my ears at odd moments; fortunately a visit to the audiologist fixed that. Another complication was my typing. I touch-type on a modified Dvorak layout, but my keyboard is marked for the inefficient QWERTY layout, so when it goes wrong I can’t just hunt and peck to correct it. I would type a sentence, pure gibberish, so I would retype it—more gibberish. It took me longer to laboriously make corrections than it did to do the initial typing. So it seemed my fingers had the poop-in-pants syndrome. In the midst of that my adult trike got a flat tire, and the new fashioned patches don’t work; if the makers actually tried using their own products they’d know that. Maybe they don’t care. So I found an old old-style patch, and it held for one day. Sigh. So my daughter bought some new old-style patches, and that worked. All told, it was a couple of weeks of nuisance, and I lost five pounds. I caught up on reading, and on videos, and sleep, then slowly resumed my exercises and got to work on writing the 9,650 word novelette “Lab.” I am a writaholic; the rest is incidental.

Remember the Xanth sexist question I had two months ago? So far five readers have addressed it, and the count is 5-0, no sexism. But they were male responders; a female is working on it now, and we’ll see.

I cleaned up some back piles of papers. Things that are not writing tend to accumulate, and every so often I devote a Chore Hour to sort them out. In this manner I discovered the buried March 1, 2019, issue of The Washington Spectator, with a devastating article titled “Deconstructing Trump,” by Patricia Roberts-Miller. It says that to many people the Trump phenomenon seems impossibly new and outrageous, with his followers inexplicably oblivious to his dishonesty, irrationality, and incompetence. Yes, I’m similarly mystified. Trump is Trump, but are the Republicans not paying attention? As I recall, there was a time when a Republican was a conservative, and a conservative valued things like integrity, tradition, family, and financial responsibility. Today it seems he values greed, bigotry, dishonesty, and spite. Did I misunderstand, before? This article may clarify that. It says that Aristotle called rhetoric the art of finding the available means of persuasion. So why does Trump’s base support him so absolutely? Are they stupid, or is this their actual nature? This article goes back to 1939 when Adolf Hitler was in power in Germany, the main architect of World War Two, mentioning his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf. As I happens I read that book in high school; it wasn’t assigned, I was simply curious. I remember his reasoning that when he investigated the various ills of society there was always a Jew at the root of them, therefore he felt the world would be better off without Jews. I recognized that as specious logic; he came with a bias against Jews and sought justification of it, as bigots do. Anyway, the rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke concluded that Hitler’s rhetorical effectiveness came from his relentless repetition of “the bastardization of religious forms of thought.” That is, ways of thinking common to Western European Christianity, projecting and scapegoating. Identifying a common enemy, claiming a symbolic rebirth and toggling between material and spiritual ways of explaining events. Demagoguery displaces policy argumentation with mindless praise of “us” and condemnation of “them.” Conservative Christian Germans overwhelmingly supported Hitler, as conservative Christian Americans supported slavery, segregation, and lynching. I find this an ugly but revealing parallel. Hitler projected all the flaws of his, and the Germans, onto the Jews, accusing them of doing what he was doing. He identified any person who disagreed with him as Jewish, just as Trump now speaks of fake news and awful “libruls.” And, Hitler said, Germany would be great again. Recognize the playbook? Then about Trump: “What matters is that his rise to power was fueled by a demagoguery that reflected the racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and authoritarian values of the GOP.” It concludes “Trump isn’t Hitler, but he has put the rhetorical strategies of modern history’s most galvanizing and villainous demagogue to effective use.” Now you know.

Shorter notes: the Authors Guild says that we have stories and creativity that are valuable. But we need to stop computers from trying to recreate us, and work jointly to safeguard the importance that human creativity has in all our future. I am not sure I agree; if a machine can write fiction as well as I can, maybe it should have the same chance on the market as I do. Fair is fair. Newspaper editorial says that the big companies are making billions in profits, yet paying no taxes. For example, Amazon made $11 billion in 2018, and claimed a tax rebate of $129 million. I agree that they should pay at the same rate we grunts in the trenches do. Article in NEW SCIENTIST says that most advice about diet is fatally flawed. Maybe, but I believe I will continue to eat fruits and vegetables, avoid highly processed food, and take supplements, because this advice, too, may be flawed. Another article says that organic foods are not necessarily more nutritious than conventional ones. But I agree that we need better studies. Another article says that cancer cells produce an odd electrical current that maybe we can turn against them. My daughter died of cancer; I’d love to see a treatment that could stop it. Newspaper item says that studies indicate that healthy people don’t need low-dose aspirin for heart health; in fact it does no good and may be risky. I knew that decades ago; my doctor had me on low dose aspirin, but I learned it was bad for the brain and I dropped it and him. I do value my brain, and not just because that alien from Planet X may relish the taste of it. So unless you have specific reason, like a prior heart attack, you probably should stay clear of contstant aspirin. And Ross Perot died. He was a billionaire who ran for president in 1992, used his money and an array of charts and graphs, condemned the federal budget deficit and was leading in the polls, when he suddenly dropped out, to return months later. What happened? He blamed Republican dirty tricks, but I think the answer was more prosaic. He was talking to supporters, and at one point referred to “You people.” A black man challenged that, and Perot realized that he had blundered into one of the code phrases that dismissed blacks as a less than worthy group. In effect his underwear was showing. He was so embarrassed by his mistake that he dropped out. That cost him his lead, and maybe the presidency. But I am not at all sure he would have made a good president; he had other hangups. Item says that women’s brains react to sexual images just as much as men’s brains do. I have trouble believing that; as far as I know, the great majority of patrons of porn sites are male, not female. Article in NEW SCIENTIST for July 20, 2019, says they have found the black soldier fly, whose larva can be dried and fed to pets, can replace fish-meal in the diet of farmed fish and animals, can be swapped for soya in animal feed, baked into bread, and mixed into ice cream. They can digest all manner of human wastes, and can even be processed into a kind of plastic. They do it without producing methane. Converting excrement into food may sound yucky, but most of us, including vegetarians and vegans, unknowingly eat fats and proteins from insects all the time, because they are in the crops we harvest and get ground up with the grains. So this may be the next coming thing, which you can accept or tune out, but you’ll be eating it. I just thought I’d give you the glad news. Have a great day!

PIERS

SapTimber 2019
HI-

I watched Calendar Girl, the fourth Beach Bodies movie. Friends Roy, Ned, and Scott decide to go to Hollywood to find Marilyn Monroe, whose nude picture they saw on a poster. But the address they have is wrong. They keep searching. Meanwhile a loan shark is looking for Roy, who stole some money from him. They visit a nude beach, but have to flee when the loan shark’s men follow. Really not much beach viewing here. Roy gets PROPERTY OF USA tattooed on his butt. Then somehow Roy gets a date with Marilyn. He sends Ned (I think it was) instead. And it’s her, in all her splendor. She treats him like a friend. They walk in the surf. At the end she hugs and kisses him. He will never forget.

I watched The Wife. Joe Castleman makes out with his wife Jeanie, though they are of grandparently age. Then he gets a call that he has won the Nobel prize in literature. They go to Stockholm, Sweden, for the award. Their son David is a writer, and emotionally conflicted. We see flashbacks to when Joe and Joan met; she was not his first wife. She was an aspiring writer herself, but gave it up when she married Joe. Gradually it becomes apparent that the talent which won him the Nobel prize is actually hers, uncredited. He had the big ideas, but she had the talent. So he wrote the stories and she fixed the faults, like the wooden dialogue. That collaboration worked, and the stories and novels were published and recognized. But the stresses of the ceremony make them quarrel, and she decides to leave him. She’s tired of being the real writer, with him getting all the credit. Then he has a heart attack, and dies. But Joan will protect his reputation. Okay, I’m a writer, and I owe a lot to my wife, but not my writing skill. My talent, whatever it may be, is my own. But I can relate, because I suspect there are marriages of this nature. Men are recognized more freely than are women, so it can be a convenient course. Sometimes it is the woman with the notoriety, and her husband who quietly makes it work. When a writer say he/she owes it all to the spouse, that may be literal. A quality movie.

I watched Spring Break, the fifth in the Beach Bodies sixpack. Adam and Nelson come to Fort Lauderdale for the rites of spring. A glitch puts them in the same room with two more experienced guys, who turn out to be real assets when things get rough. There’ a belly-flop contest, drinking through a straw contest, best buns contest, wet T-shirt contest, and others. Plenty of booze and bare breasts. The older guys pick up intoxicated girls and bring them to the room. Nelson’s stepfather is a politician running for office, and he doesn’t want Nelson getting in trouble and ruining the campaign with a scandal. So Nelson is trying to avoid him. He joins a girl in her room, exits to get some Coca Cola, but then can’t remember the room number and doesn’t know her name and never makes it back. They manage to reconnect later in the night, avoiding his stepfather’s hoods. For a while. Nelson gets locked in, and his friends try to spring him. There’s a battle between the friends and the hoods. Nelson finally faces down his stepfather and backs him off, saving the hotel. So all ends well.

I watched Stan & Ollie. These are Stanley Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Ollie is fat, Stan ordinary. They do a song and dance act. They’re getting older, but are rejoining now. But they are playing to sparsely filled theaters. They do make audiences laugh, and attendance improves. Then it turns out that the financing for the movie they were going to make fell through, so there will be no movie. There goes their hope of returning to the big time. They have a falling out, saying they’re really not friends, just two actors put together for an act. Then Ollie collapses, a heart attack. He survives, but will retire. But just can’t give it up yet, so their show will go on. They do it, but Ollie’s health does not recover, and they don’t perform again. It’s sad, as endings are.

I watched Lovelines. Malibu High and Coldwater Canyon High are essentially at war. They play tricks on each other, such as invading a swimming class with nude girls and having girls in a pickup truck moon the other school. Piper is at Malibu, and her musclebound brother is determined to stop her from seeing Rick from Coldwater Canyon. They are both singers, and each admires the other’s ability. There’s a car chase, and weird bombing that soaks them in alcohol as the police are alerted. They meet and kiss in a sort of fouled up Romeo and Juliet balcony scene. They date. Meanwhile they are finalists in the Battle of the Bands. It concludes in mayhem. The bands decision is a tie. And of course Piper and Rick will be together.

I watched Sorry to Bother You. Cassius Green, “Cash,” gets a job as a telephone salesman. His only requirement is to stick to the script. Another caller is Detroit. It’s tough, because the cold calls reach folk making love, dying of cancer, and being otherwise distracted or busy. If they make enough sales they get to be a Power Caller, the top tier of telemarketing, and make more money. Meanwhile his girlfriend works for a sign company, twirling the sign at traffic. They form a union and chant “Fuck you RegalView!” over and over. What do the bosses do? They promote Cash to Power Caller. This is weird. This gets him in trouble with the other callers, who feel he deserted them, and with his girlfriend, who leaves him. Part of the ceremony has a lovely, almost naked young woman reciting classics while the group throws eggs and blood bombs at her. Cash protests, but she tells him to stick to the script. This is still weird. They demand that he rap, so he chants “Niggershit! Niggershit!” And they chant it with him. Surreal. Men with horse-heads are in the lavatory. A vision? He is shown an explanatory movie that indicates that they make horse-headed humans for money. They”ll be better workers. Cash is offered a hundred million dollars to become a horsehead for five years, being their man among the creatures. He balks. His girlfriend returns to help him through this crisis. He tries to expose the nefarious plans of the WorryFree company. There’s a riot as police try to break through the picket line, and horseheads fight back. They are Equisapiens. Cash gets locked up, but the horseheads break him out. He and girlfriend return to their garage apartment. And he starts changing into a horsehead. This is one of the wildest movies I’ve seen. It becomes pure fantasy, and yet there may be a message there, if only about the secret lives of those anonymous callers.

I watched Black K Klansman. Ron Stallworth is the first black cop in Colorado Springs, and he has to endure the racism of other cops. He is sent on a mission to infiltrate the black resistance, wired. Stokely Carmichael, as Kwame Ture, addresses a black group. He is a potent speaker and charges them up. Ron joins the KKK by telephone, but then they want to meet him personally, so a white man has to learn to talk like him. The white man meets their representative, and learns that they never say Klan, they’re the Organization. They say they don’t do violence any more. That’s hard to believe. The white “Ron” is Jewish, and the Klan hates Jews too, so it’s chancy. Ron meets a black woman, Patrice and likes her, but she’s suspicious of his undercover work. Then racist David Duke visits, and Ron is assigned to guard him. This is tricky. The white “Ron” is also there. The Klan, discovered, goes to Plan B, with a wife planting a bomb. It gets hairy, but they survive. And have to destroy all evidence of their investigation. But David Duke realizes he’s been had. And the Klan burns a cross outside Ron’s house. There is rioting. And an identified connection to the present Trump administration. Hmm.

I watched On the Basis of Sex. It starts at Harvard Law School, 1956. Ruth “Kiki” Bader Ginsburg is studying to be a lawyer, as is her husband Martin. They have a baby, Jane. Martin collapses in class, and it’s serious. Testicular cancer, survival rate 5%. She attends Martin’s classes for him, in addition to her own, making notes, so he can keep up. He survives, but could relapse. He takes care of the children at home. She graduates at the top of her class. In 1959 she is trying to get a job, but there is evident prejudice against women. She finally gets a job with a firm that couldn’t find a man, so took a woman. Then to 1970, when it seems the law allows discrimination on the basis of sex, that is, discrimination against women. Until a man sues for sex discrimination: he can’t get a tax deduction for the nurse he had to hire to take care of his ailing mother, because he’s an unmarried man. They take the case, as it could change everything. The ACLU enters the picture. They develop their case. They argue it before the Tenth Court of Appeals, and Ruth persuades the judges to change the law. This set a precedent that started a chain reaction of reform. And, in due course, Ruth Bader Ginsburg became a member of the Supreme Court herself. This is one fine movie, based on reality. Also a disconcerting reminder how prejudice pervades just about every aspect of our society, and how difficult it can be to root it out.

I watched Night School. Teddy Walker is a fast talking maverick who simply can’t study. 17 years later he is dating Lisa. He proposes to her and she accepts. Then a fluke accident burns down the shop. So he needs to get his GED, and that means night school. Carrie teaches the class. The students are an odd collection. The whole class sneaks out, trying to steal the test answers, and gets fouled up. It turns out Teddy has several learning disabilities, like dyslexia. That enables Carrie to teach him. The process is dramatized like an anything-goes physical combat. The whole class is emboldened by their achievement of their GEDs. But Lisa thinks he’s been lying to her about his evening classes, and dumps him. So he plans to skip the GED test, seeing no point any more. Carrie comes after him and makes him go to take it. But he fails. So he studies further and retakes the test. And finally passes. And gives a speech at graduation, saying anything is possible. And Lisa returns to him. As one who dates from before dyslexia was a diagnosis, so I was considered willful or stupid, and took three years to make it through first grade, I relate. I fought, successfully, to see that my dyslexic daughter did not get screwed the same way by the system. But there were some battles. There are stupid people, and some of them are running the system.

I watched Widows. Jamal Manning is running for office in Chicago. It’s a rough race, and people are being killed. Jamal kills his share. So there are widows. A widow, Veronica Rollings, learns she owes a debt of two million dollars that they claim her husband stole. She finds a notebook with suggestive private material; maybe they’ll accept that in lieu of the money. Several other widows are in similar circumstances. These are brutal gangsters. Women have to sell themselves and their services, not necessarily sexual, to survive. Three widows get together to try to obtain a five million dollar cache they can use to pay off the two million dollar debt and keep some for themselves, but their project is beset with problems. They need a driver, and recruit another woman for that. They make their raid, cloaked with distorted voices. They get into the vault and pile packs of money into their bags. They have to kill to get away. One gets shot. The bad guy loses the election. The women survive, but what kind of a life is it? Not the kind of story I enjoy. As with stupid people, there are criminals, and some are powerful politicians.

I watched Instant Family. Ellie would like to have children; Pete wouldn’t. She is pondering adoption. He’s alarmed. They visit an adoption agency and learn about other prospective adoptive families of all types: couples, two gay men, a single woman. They qualify for foster parents. They meet Elizabeth—Lizzie—and her two siblings, Lita and Juan, and take them in as fosters. Their first big Christmas dinner, little Lita wants potato chips instead, and gets violent when denied. It winds up in chaos with food all over the floor. When they ground Lizzie she defies them. Juan drops a nail gun on his foot and gets nailed through the foot. But slowly they learn to relate. Then Lizzie, who is a pretty girl at age 15, makes nude self pictures of herself to send to her boyfriend. Things complicate and Pete and Ellie get arrested. The hearing awards the children back to their birth mother, who has reformed, but it is apparent that they are uncertain they want to go. Then their mother relapses. The younger ones are relieved, but Lizzie has a problem; she finally accepts reality. Four months later the adoption become official. Yet again I relate, because after three miscarriages we feared we could never have children of our own, and what adoption agency would consider a self employed vegetarian SF/fantasy writer as a father? Then with medical help we did get two of our own, avoiding that hassle. But I remember.

I watched Spiderman Into the Spiderverse. Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider and became Spiderman. Miles is an ordinary teen; then we see the spider bite him on the hand. His body starts changing. He meets Wanda. His hand sticks to her hair, and pulls some out. Now his feet stick to walls; he runs along them. He can turn invisible, sometimes. He has become another spiderman. He is chased by a giant green monster, then rescued by the original spiderman. Five new dimensions open. Spiderman is injured, so he gives Miles a device to destroy the Collider and save the universe. But the big bad guy, Kingpin, is trying to kill him. He escapes, but there is a news report that the original spiderman has died. He interacts with other spidermen from other universes. And a spiderwoman. And Peter Porker, a little pig spiderman. They all try to help Miles. But he has to find himself, make a leap of faith. They get control of the collider, and one by one the spiderfolk depart, returning to their own dimensions. Then Miles finally fights and defeats Kingpin. All is reasonably well. A fast paced movie, many special effects, easy to do in animation, but fun overall.

I watched Vice, about former vice president Dick Cheney. This is a cynical expose. He gets booted from Yale for drinking. His girlfriend Lynne gets fed up. He promises never to disappoint her again. He gets a job as a political adviser for a large financial firm, finally making good money. Lynne’s mother drowns, though she never went near the water. No serious investigation. Dick evidently knows who did it, and warns the man away from his wife and daughters, then sets out on private revenge. President Nixon resigns and Cheney sees that as an opportunity to increase the power of the executive: the president will have absolute power. But then the Republicans lose the presidency. All is off until the election of Reagan four years later. Meanwhile Cheney has a couple of heart attacks, and his wife Lynne campaigns in his stead. She is effective. Then his daughter Mary comes out as lesbian. That’s politically awkward for an arch conservative. His heart improves. He runs for vice president with George W Bush, redefining the office. The Supreme Court on a party line vote stopped the legal recount of the votes in Florida, which would have given it to Gore, and gave it to Bush. They were in. Cheney got to work on the big issues like climate change and the estate tax, and quietly made progress. Then came 9/11. They invade Afghanistan. They expand warrantless investigation. They redefine torture to allow water-boarding. They arrange to promote Iraq as an enemy, to focus public outrage about 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, so this had to be carefully crafted. They craft it, and invade Iraq. Favored company Halliburton makes huge profits on no-bid war contracts. And no weapons of mass destruction turn up in Iraq. It was all a scripted fantasy. And from that war emerged ISIS. In due course Barack Obama is elected president. Cheney’s heart acts up again. Chaney gets a heart transplant. Gay daughter Mary runs for the senate. He survives. Mary later runs for the house of Representatives, and wins. Suicides of American troops in Iraq and other mischief continues today, but Halliburton stock rose 500%. Conservatives object to the movie because it has a liberal slant. But what about the facts?

I watched Eighth Grade. Kayla Day is an 8th grade girl, recognized as being the most quiet in the class. They receive their boxes of mementos from 6th grade. She’s plain, with not much going for her. Her father tries to be supportive, but she wants none of it. There does not seem to be a mother in the picture. She’s not happy. She sees the other children having fun, and the girls with their nice bodies. She makes herself join them in the swimming pool. It’s a friend’s birthday party. She meets the boy Aiden. She makes a series of encouraging videos. Aiden asks her whether she can do a blow job. So she researches oral sex. She practices on a banana. They spend a day with a high school student, to get a notion how it will be. Kayla pairs with Olivia, who seems really nice. But her life continues awkward. This is bleak, and painful because of its realism. What do you do when your face has blemishes, your body is lumpy, you’re not genius smart, your friends are few, and not rich? That is the fate of too many, male and female. But Kayla’s father says he is proud of her. She has a sort of date meal with Aiden, potato sticks. That works well. So maybe her life is turning positive. I relate to this, because I was nothing in school, but wound up perhaps the most successful member of my high school class, with a long marriage and a career I love. Things can change.

I watched Won’t You Be My Neighbor, about Mr. Rogers. He was an ordained minister who liked children. Sounds dull? Not to me. When my little girl Penny came into this world, in 1967, changing our lives, she liked the children’s program Sesame Street, yes, but it was the following program Mr. Rogers who really won her heart. The man had heart. One of the films they used broke and they were suddenly stuck with on ongoing show and no content. So he grabbed a puppet and made a squeaky voice and addressed the children—and that was the beginning of the puppetry. A neighborhood was the place where, if you felt scared or worried, it would reassure you. His neighborhood was where any child was accepted and reassured. TV executives didn’t think anything much of him, but when they had a Mr. Rogers Day where he would appear personally, the line was blocks long. He believed that every child was unique, and needed to be told that. The children loved him, as mine did. Love your neighbor and love yourself. Then Nixon became president and wanted to cut the funding. Rogers had to go before Congress to argue to protect the funding. He was persuasive, and the funding was not cut. The sock puppet Daniel, a sort of little striped tiger, seemed to speak for the anxieties Fred Rogers himself had as a child, and that many children have. He integrated his program in a time when racism was more open than it is today. Each day he would swim one mile in leisurely fashion, then weighed himself: 143 pounds. After more than 500 shows he let it rest. He tried doing a show for adults, but didn’t connect the way he did with children. He tackled more adult themes, like death. He felt the greatest evil was those who tried to make others feel like less than they really were. He respected childhood. He said it’s not all clowns and balloons. He believed that love can abound and can be shared. But critics said he was an evil man, because he told every person they were special. So much for the critics! He had stomach problems. He talked about dying well, with intact hopes. He said that everybody longed to be lovable, to be loved. Critics were intolerant of his tolerance, that he accepted gays for example. Are there other people out there who are like him? There must be. He is gone now, but his message remains.

I am getting old. I had my 85th birthday in AwGhost. Every so often I get an uncomfortable indication of my senescence. For example, I forget things. Such as the fact that I watched a particular video a year ago, and reviewed it here. Only when I was well into it did I realize that I had seen it before. So here it is, reviewed again, and those whose memories are sharper than mine can skip to the next paragraph. I watched Lady Bird. The year is 2002, Sacramento. Christine prefers to call herself Lady Bird. She wants to go on to college. She wants to be in a play. She’d like to have a boyfriend. She likes Danny, who is in the play with her. They kiss. She visits his family for Thanksgiving. She learns that Danny is gay. That’s a shock. Then by Christmas she meets Kyle, but he’s paranoid about some things. She considers sex, but isn’t ready for it yet. She talks back in school and gets suspended. She blows up at her family. She has sex with Kyle, then learns he wasn’t a virgin. That’s another shock; she had thought it was mutual sacrifice of virginity. She gets an acceptance from an eastern university, at least it’s a waiting list. She leaves Kyle and goes to the prom with her friend Julie. Her mother learns about her application to the eastern university and is alienated. She turns 18. She does finally get accepted to the college. She goes, and meets David, a promising prospect for a relationship. Her father sends her the letters her mother wrote to her but didn’t send: love unvoiced. She calls home, reconnecting. Lady Bird’s new life is upon her.

I watched Ejecta, which intrigued me because for $3.95 I got both the DVD and Blu-Ray discs. It begins with an interview with a man who says he tried everything against the invading aliens but nothing worked. That we try to imagine what to do when the end of the world comes, but by then there is no tomorrow. He is William Cassidy, captured or rescued by human troops. Tarzan/Jane technique; the man threatens to beat him up, then comes a nice woman who is more friendly. He says he was taken by aliens 39 years ago. They came to his door. What did they look like? He doesn’t say. So they bash him, and the woman starts over. He says he has woken up in many places over the years. They put a kind of helmet device on his head that is supposed to extract his thoughts. Instead the girl applying it gets scorched. Then one Joe Sullivan, film maker, astronomer, drives to Cassidy’s house, having received an email from him. Cassidy is famous, so this is quite a chance. The woman is still questioning Bill, and when he doesn’t answer directly, she socks him. Bill is walking through darkness, seeing mists and smoke and maybe lava. Much casting about in darkness. The woman puts pain gloves on his hands, torturing him, but he doesn’t crack. Bill and Joe experience more effects in the night. Noises. Flashes. The woman shoots Bill in the forehead, but he doesn’t die, and half dead men grab at her. One puts a glowing ball to her head. Now she is possessed. She shoots herself through the head, but it doesn’t end. She screams. A mass coronal ejection is when the sun sends radiation into space. Is this what it is all about? This is a low budget horror flick without much substance. Too bad.

I watched Thumbelina, an animated musical fairy tale. She is so called because she is the size of a normal person’s thumb, springing full grown, clothed, and talking, from a freshly-grown flower in a pot that a good witch gave the lonely farm woman. Her golden hair falls almost to her knees. The farm animals loves her, as does her adoptive mother. Then she meets the fairy prince Cornelius, who is her size. They ride on his Bumble Bee. But that night she gets abducted by a toad and locked in a walnut shell. The dog tells the prince what happened. Meanwhile the toad family wants Thumbelina to join their song and dance act, popular with the forest animals, and marry Mrs. Toad’s son. She is stranded on a floating lily pad, which then goes into the rapids. But she is rescued by the fish. She winds up with the jitterbugs, which are friendly insects. But the toad prince is determined to find Thumbelina and marry her himself. A beetle man puts her in the beetle dance. But they regard her as ugly. Jacquimo Swallow decides to help her. He searched for the Vale of the Fairies so he can tell he prince. But then the first frost of winter comes. That’s bad for Thumbelina. A fox tells her that the prince was found dead in the snow. It’s a lie meant to trap her. I’m not sure why creatures like the fox and mole are her size; foxes are way larger in real life. No, I’m confusing field-mice for foxes. Thumbelina decides reluctantly to marry the mole. Toad finds her, but she refuses him too. Everybody want to marry her! Then Prince Cornelius turns up and fights for her. She agrees to marry him—and she sprouts wings, becoming a fairy. And they live happily ever after. A fun fantasy.

I watched The Disappointments Room. Dana, David, and 5 year old son Lucas move from the city to a rural southern mansion in need of restoration. So far so good. Lucas finds a cat, Rascal, in his room. The surrounding land is overgrown, and there’s something nasty out there. Dana is an architect. She has scary dreams. She is outside at night when a light comes on briefly upstairs, where no one is. She investigates. There are bats there. Behind a big dresser there’s a hidden door, locked. She finds a box of keys, but none of them fit this door. Then she finds a separately hidden key that works. She goes in; the door slams behind her. Tormented by visions, she sleeps on the floor. The door opens and she escapes. David and Lucas hadn’t missed her. Her bad dreams continue. A girl died here July 5 of some prior year, but there’s a girl in this house, or a ghost. A woman in town tells Dana of the Disappointments Room some houses had, where unwanted children were confined until they died, their very existence hidden. That must be the case here. Dana has seen that child. She has a vision of Lucas being torn apart by a black dog. What she finds is the cat Rascal torn to bits. Is she losing her mind? David is worried. A young local man does work for them. She rips out the paintings of the house’s former owner and burns them. The young man locates and digs up an old coffin. He get bashed and hung from a tree. Dana sees a vision of the father killing the girl by taking a hammer to her skull. They leave that spooky house. That father is still there. End of movie. The one nice thing about it is the concept of the Disappointments Room.

I read I, Libertine, by Theodore Sturgeon, originally published under a pseudonym, Frederick R. Ewing. Sturgeon was arguably the finest stylist the science fiction genre has had, beloved of critics and of readers, an unusual combination. He died in 1985 at age 67 and remains revered. Yet he was not the most read author; critically disdained writers like me were far more successful commercially, let alone ones like Stephen King or Dean Koontz. Why? I have been interested in Sturgeon for some time. In 1982 I went with my then twelve-year-old daughter Cheryl to the Science Fiction Research Association, SFRA, meeting in Kansas, where I met Sturgeon. In fact I sat beside him on stage, part of a panel. His eyes were locked throughout on Cheryl in the audience, making her uncomfortable. Sturgeon has been called the apostle of love, his stories tackling deeply human themes, and Cheryl was then at the very dawn of womanhood, a fantasy maiden, exactly the type he noticed. But that is peripheral. What did I have that Sturgeon didn’t? Two things, primarily. The first was discipline; I could sit down and write at any time, feeling like it or not. He couldn’t; it was an awful effort for him to write. What an irony: one of the finest writers extant, with editors eager for his work, who didn’t much like to write. So his output was relatively small. The other thing was that I truly like to write, as he did not; I am most nearly alive when I am writing. I think that is true for many, perhaps most writers in any genre. Certainly it’s not really for money; authorship is a low paying profession, at the edge of poverty, except for a few flukes. So we write a lot, while Sturgeon wrote little. You can’t sell if you can’t write.

So what of this novel? I regard it as an object lesson in the conflict between what critics like and what readers like. The style is phenomenal, as Sturgeon explores British society of two centuries ago; the author obviously has the nuances of dialect and manner down pat. The problem is that I, as a garden variety reader, am not much interested in those nuances; I want the story to get on with the action, change, revelation and wonder. This book takes forever to do so. Lance Courtenay is a young man of superior breeding who has yet to achieve his proper place in society. The notorious Lady Chudleigh visits the neighborhood with her lovely assistant Miss Axelrood. Axelrood charms Lance, then appears in his apartment and asks him to assist Chudleigh. He does, though it complicates his life. Progress through the novel is slow to the point of tedium, but eventually surprises come. It is really more style than substance. There’s not much there there. So it has wide praise and few readers. Too bad.

I watched The Device. Abby and Rebecca, sisters, visit their family’s cabin in the woods. They dump the ashes of their late mother in the lake there. They remember what happened twelve years ago, as they reunite after a decade apart. It seems that Rebecca was kidnapped, turned up pregnant, and has traumatic memories of the occasion. Now Abby finds a seemingly harmless black ball, near the wreckage of maybe an airplane, and her hand gets cut. She doesn’t want that ball to be near her. They leave the cabin and go to their house in town. Abby’s fiance Kelvin is intrigued by the ball. When he rolls it on a table, it curves around and rolls back to him, even when the table is tilted. Abby starts having nightmares. The ball starts to glow in the night. Kelvin gets blood on his fingers from touching the ball. Is it a “black box” from the wreckage? Abby is discovered to be pregnant. A three fingered alien man appears and touches Abby. The ball is under her bed. Rebecca remembers seeing UFO aliens, who took her boyfriend Chuck away and she never saw him again. Abby is visited by the alien, who pokes a finger painfully, bloodily into her belly. She takes the ball and throws it in the lake. Kelvin learns he is sterile, so her baby is not his. Abby talks with the doctor who aborted Rebecca’s baby. He says it was alien. Now Abby is similarly pregnant. Kelvin attacks Rebecca. And the ball is back with Abby. She takes it to Kelvin, then throws it into a pit. He chases it, and it kills him. Abby cuts the alien device out of her hand so it can’t track her any more. The alien comes for her anyway, knowing where she is. It takes the baby out of her. She sees it and screams. End of movie. So this is part psychological thriller, part alien contact. It could have been more, in more competent hands.

I watched The Deadlands. The villain Wirepa foments mischief and treacherously slaughters the men of the Maori tribe, in Indenusia. Only the chieftain’s teenage son Hongi escapes. He must avenge this murder, but he is only one against many. His only hope is to pass through the forbidden deadlands and forge an alliance with the mysterious warrior there. He goes and meets the warrior’s wives, then talks with the warrior, who is uncertain whether to kill and eat him, or to help him. A wife says he should help the boy. So he does, training him in combat. They tackle Wirepa’s band, killing them in fair combat one by one, but Wirepa escapes. The Warrior is struck down, but survives. Hongi takes care of him. The Warrior eats a drug and talks to his ancestors. Hongi talks with the woman Mehe of another tribe. Behe and the Warrior talk, then fight, and he kills her, because she would have told the others that he was just a man, and her tribe would have come to take his tribe’s lands. He says that he killed his ancestors while they slept. He says he is not the hero, but the monster. Then they go after Wirepa and his four remaining warriors, who hole up in an old fort. Hongi and the Warrior set fire to it, so the men have to come out. Wirepa defeats the Warrior, but then Hongi defeats Wirepa, but spares him rather than give him an honorable death. Shamed, Wirepa walks away. It is the Warrior who has the honorable death. This movie is mainly combat, but there is Maori culture there.

I watched the comedy Deep in the Valley. Lester and Carl are hungry for girl-type action. They enter a video booth, and it takes them to Deep Valley, where scantily clad police girls arrest them. This world is like an adult film, with shapely girls in exposive clothing or outright bare breasted. So they encounter parody comedy characters as they try to escape back to their own world, some friendly, some unfriendly. A mean woman tortures Lester by apparently giving him an enema of air, maybe promoting gas pains. Plot is not the point; sexy exposure is. They have one rule: you can’t fall in love. But Carl does, and gets banished back to home. And his new girlfriend follows him.

I had planned to start writing Xanth #46, Six Crystal Princesses, after the turn of the year, but had a bit of time left over so tried starting it in AwGhost, just to see if there was something there. I’m a writaholic, and I just have to be writing something, and other projects had wrapped up. And it moved, coming together nicely. So now I have written 26,000 words, three and a half chapters, a quarter of the novel. Prince Ion and Princess Hilda, eleven years old, the twin children of Queen Ida, King Ivy’s sister, both have Magician or Sorceress magic talents, being descendants of Bink. He is immune to all elixirs. That might not seem like much, but his immunity enables him to collect all manner of them, from healing elixir to youthening elixir to accommodation elixir, that last being what divergent creatures like big ogres and tiny imps use to relate intimately. The elixirs don’t affect Ion, but have potent effects on others, as we see in the course of the novel. Hilda sews magic into cloth. For example she sews a flying carpet that will take them anywhere. Anyway, they decide to rescue the six princesses trapped in crystals by a dragon, and therein is the novel. It turns out that they aren’t ordinary princesses; they’re feminists of six different species: human, elf, goblin, centaur, bee, and demon. They need to find suitable princes for them, as they can’t just be set loose unattended. In medieval Xanth princes don’t much favor feminists. So there’s a challenge, complicated by the fact that the rescuers are children, forbidden by the dread Adult Conspiracy from knowing exactly how princes relate to princesses at night. It gets wild in places. You of course will be there, when.

I have a certain interest in cancer, in significant part because my elder daughter Penny died of melanoma a decade ago, one of the private tragedies of my life. I’d like to see cancer banished from the face of the world, but there are many types and they are still taking folk out in droves. Well, the August 2019 issue of ALTERNATIVES, the best health newsletter I know of, features a possible cure for cancer. Proprietor Dr. David Williams is justifiably cynical about prospects. “We no longer talk about cures. The focus has shifted to developing drugs and programs that manage and control disease. There’s no money in curing and eliminating diseases. But there’s a neverending profit stream associated with managing them.” See what I mean? He’s right on target, of course, but I suspect is about to become very unpopular with the disease-managing industry. “It’s hard to believe that the primary goal of these cancer facilities is to find a cure and put themselves out of business. If a universal cure to cancer is discovered, rest assured the industry will make it difficult to obtain, and it will cost a fortune.” “Cancer has become a $500 billion-a-year business.” He documents cases where treatments jump from pennies per pill to hundreds of dollars per pill. The vendors are not interested in your health, so much as the money they can squeeze from you. I have remarked before how I went generic on my thyroid medication, reducing my cost from about thirty dollars to five dollars per prescription, only then to have generic jump to fifty dollars. It’s worse with other generic drugs; people are suffering. I feel that gouging the public on necessary medication should be a criminal offense. I think it would be, if the politicians were not in the pay of the big industries. But I don’t run the world. Anyway, cancer is a live wire. Is there actually a cure? There may be. There is a dog de-wormer called Panacur C, whose active ingredient is fenbendazole, or FenBen for short. They have used this family of drugs to treat gastrointestinal parasites like roundworms, hookworms and pinworms safely for six decades. It’s for animals, but seems to be safe for humans too. But it has a side effect: it may cure cancer. Maybe all forms. It seems veterinarians have known about it for decades, including this aspect. But there’s no money in promoting it as a cure for cancer; who would pay for a big controlled study to prove a treatment that is already in the common domain? Not the companies who would have their business wiped out by such proof. So it has lain fallow. Which is part of what gets my dander up: did they let my daughter die because there was no profit in curing her of cancer? Um, not necessarily, as there was no sign of metastasis in her case until suddenly it was everywhere in her body, but it’s a suspicion. What is the evidence that FenBen works? Well, in 2016 Joe Tippens was diagnosed with incurable, advanced small cell lung cancer and given less than a one percent chance of survival even with aggressive treatment. His weight dropped to half. So he tried the dewornmer, without telling his doctors. In three months he was clear of cancer, and remains cancer free today. He is not the only example. About 400 people are taking FenBen, with 70% success. The failures may be because they started it too late; there are limits. So the main doubt seebn to be not in whether it works, but in whether it would approach 100% success in a controlled study. Okay, I shared this information with my son-in-law, John Nanci, yes, Penny’s widowered husband, who is a chemist, and who has a similar interest to mine in this respect. I lost a daughter; he lost his wife. That still hurts a decade later. He pointed out that the sample is awfully small. More study is needed before we can say this is not a fluke. Also that Dr. Williams seems prone to positive interpretation, not stressing negative indications the way he does positive ones. But the limited evidence so far is persuasive, even with those cautions, and this might or might not have saved Penny. So if you have cancer and face likely death soon because your money for sky-high treatments that only slow, not stop, the malady is exhausted, what do you have to lose? You can buy Panacur C directly from Amazon or other online pet supply companies, or through your local pharmacy if it is cooperative. Say it is for your pet, if you have to. But first check my source, because I am no doctor, ALTERNATIVES Volume 22, No. 8, August 2019. The email address is feedback@drdavidwilliams.com. My hope is that it is true, and that there will be a growing base of patients who try it, with or without their doctors’ approval. Because too many doctors accept what the commercial pharmaceutical industry tells them, and that may be suspect. In fact, it would be nice to blow lid off the suppression of the news of a possible general cancer cure and get the truth at last, whatever it may be. It’s too late for my daughter, but if other lives can be saved, that will make it worthwhile.

Briefer notes on assorted lesser matters: It seems that Trump’s polls are dismal. But polls are not necessarily reality. Now counterfeit books are appearing in Amazon’s virtual bookstore, and to hell with their copyrights. Also top publishers are suing Audible for taking proprietary audiobooks, converting them to unauthorized text, and distributing that as “new” books to their customers. Audible is owned by Amazon. The worst predator on mankind is the mosquito, transmitting diseases that may have killed almost half of the 108 billion humans who have ever lived. There’s a movie, sympathetic to Trump voters, The Hunt, that has been shelved. It is a satire where folk deemed racists are kidnapped and become the prey in a savage hunt, so the sympathy is with them. Maybe some day that censorship will ease and we’ll get to see it. I oppose censorship regardless of its orientation. 73% of all extremist related deaths in the US over the past decade have been linked to right wing terrorists. Immigrants are being told to go back where they came from. I’m an immigrant from England, but my life is American. I plan to stay here. We’re all immigrants if you go back far enough. Can video games contribute to mental health? They hope to improve the storytelling aspect to make it work. Yes, I believe in storytelling. They may be thinking of adding more biofuel to gasoline, or rather petrol, in England. My impression is when they diluted gasoline by 10% biofuel in America, our mileage per gallen declined by ten percent. That makes that benefit illusory. They are getting closer to mind control for gadgets. That could really help folk like Jenny, my paralyzed correspondent. Meanwhile Artificial intelligence, AI, is learning how to imagine itself in another party’s place. That’s theory of mind, and is progress. In my novels robots are fully conscious and feeling, but real life robots (as it were) still have a long way to go. The August/September 2019 issue of FREE INQUIRY, the secular humanist magazine, has an eight page ad insert introduced by the editor that is a takeoff on Christianity. “For a humane and genuine morality, Christian theology and Christian free will must be killed dead,” it says, and makes its case. It’s a strong case; it impresses me. One of the books on my reading list addresses this subject, so I will have more to say on it in another month or so. Climate change is degrading our cropland, which in turn leads to further change. A high school teacher says that the advent of the smarphone is messing up his classes. Students bring the phones to class and watch them instead of paying attention to the class material. I was an English teacher before I made good as a writer, and holding students’ attention was a challenge then, because most seemed not to want to learn anything; it must be worse today. I wonder how these kids expect to make a living, when they get out of school? Research is finding some genetic links to same-sex behavior, but they can’t seem to narrow it down to specific genes. Conservatives say that the gays choose that behavior, as if that is a condemnation. Why shouldn’t they choose it, just as conservatives tend to choose to be tight-assed about sex in general? Letter in NEW SCIENTIST says that this ransomware epidemic could readily be stopped, if companies simply backed up their records on a secure computer. Um, yes, but what about the delayed action traps, that manifest hours or days later? They would take out the backups too. Still, company security does seem lax. Article in NEW SCIENTIST suggests that we don’t really see reality, we see our mock-ups of it that it may be a collective delusion. Yes, this is like the problem of consciousness: it may be an illusion, just as the seeming reality of a movie or TV show is illusory; what we actually see are pictures or parts of pictures replacing each other so rapidly that it seems like reality. So while I don’t doubt my own consciousness, I concede that it may be to an extent illusory. An article on drawing water from even the driest air; new devices are being developed to do it, and it could solve the fresh water problem. They are discovering more dinosaurs. The problem is that not all happen to get fossilized; it’s a matter largely of chance, so we miss some. We think of dinosaurs as a failed life experiment, because they are gone now, but they lasted maybe a hundred times as long as we have. It was only ill chance that took them out, making space for us. Bananas may be doomed; a fungus is taking them out and so far there seems to be no way to stop it. Ouch; we like bananas and eat them daily. Where is biological science when we need it? And from an article human exceptionalism by Adam Neiblum in the August/September 2019 issue of FREE INQUIRY: “Yet we are still prone to the dualistic thought-hangover of seeing poop, pee, and boogers as animal while failing to recognize that equally so are Bach and Beethoven; the Sistine Chapel; our landing on the moon; our ability to negotiate an intersection with four-way stop signs, or the collected works of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris.”

Daughter Cheryl went online and downloaded some spot research (TED talks) on subjects that interest me, such as Consciousness, that I discussed last column and mentioned above. (I don’t go online any more; my system takes something like five minutes per keystroke online, and I lack the patience.) Untitled talk by Michael S A Graziano in February this year inquires What is Consciousness? He says that there is an important distinction between the brain’s processing of information, and our experience of that processing. That experience is our consciousness, as with my analogy of the motion picture. The reality of what we experience may be largely illusionary. Okay, but that does not address two of my criteria for effective consciousness: feedback and feeling. We need to be feeling ourselves feeling ourselves, or we’re not in the picture. We need to care about the ongoing experience, or it is pointless.

Anil Seth in April 2017 had a wonderful discussion of consciousness. He said we are all hallucinating all the time, and that when we agree about our hallucinations we call it reality. Again I think of the motion pictures, where you aren’t really seeing what you’re seeing, and must reluctantly agree. It is important; as he says, “Without it there’s no world, no self, there’s nothing at all.” He also suggests that if we can experience joy and suffering, what about other animals? Do they also have a sense of self? On that I completely agree. They do, and I deplore their mistreatment by mankind. Will there come a point where computers also develop a sense of self? I think so; the robots in my fiction, do, as I remark earlier in this column. He says “Consciousness and intelligence are very different things. You don’t have to be smart to suffer, but you probably do have to be alive.” This guy is sharp! He says that in the past we thought the mystery of life was inscrutable, but now we are learning its chemistry. “So as with life, so with consciousness. Once we start explaining ts properties in terms of things happening inside brains and bodies, the apparently insoluble mystery of what consciousness is should start to fade away.” He says there are the sights, sounds, smells and so on, like a 3D, fully immersive inner movie. Then there’s the conscious self, the experience of being you or me. “Imagine being a brain. You’re locked inside a bony skill, trying to figure what’s out there in the world. There’s no lights inside the skull. There’s no sound either. All you’re got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world. Whatever they may be. So perception – figuring out what’s there – has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals. The brain doesn’t hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.” This is a beautiful analogy. I think of a prisoner in solitary confinement, in darkness and silence, desperate for news from outside. So he picks up the trace vibrations in the wall with his fingertips and interprets them, gradually getting a picture that may be as much his imagination as reality. “We don’t just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much, if not more, from the inside out as from the outside in.” It is controlled hallucination, all that we have to go on. And our experience of self is another hallucination, shaped over million of years of evolution to keep us alive in a dangerous realm “We predict ourselves into existence.” Can this be done with machines? “Just making computers smarter is not going to make them sentient.” He concludes “With a greater sense of understanding comes a greater sense of wonder, and a greater realization that we are part of and not apart from the rest of nature. And … when the end of consciousness comes, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all.” I think this guy is a genius.

As AwGhost ended, Hurricane Dorian was orienting on Florida. Every hurricane tries to reach me, but their eyes are poor and they have trouble finding me. But Dorian took perfect aim; our little tree farm was dead center of the cone of probability. But as the storm approached it realized that it would have to traverse the whole of Florida to get here, which would drop it from super hurricane status to mere tropical storm status, a heavy penalty. But if it stayed over warm water, veering north, it might manage to reach the top, category 5. So it is pausing to think about it, and probably it will stick to the warm water. Wouldn’t you? In our 31 years here on the tree farm, we have never seen hurricane force winds, though several named storms passed right over us. They don’t think very well, but they are learning. We’ll see how smart Dorian is.

PIERS

OctOgre 2019

HI-

Xanth #17 Harpy Thyme is on sale for $17.99 the entire month of OctOgre. This one features Gloha Goblin-Harpy, the prettiest and the only crossbreed between these two warring species. But whom will she marry, since there are no other winged goblins? The Good Magician assists her by having the rejuvenated former Evil Magician Trent, and Cynthia Winged Centaur help her search for a suitable husband. Unfortunately both ladies start to get interested in the handsome young-looking Trent. This is of course mischief.

I watched Aleta Vampire Mistress. The bodies are better than the acting, but there’s intriguing material here. An armed robber holds up a group of folk at a party, until a hooded figure comes, immune to bullets, and kills him, sucking out his blood. Other vampire victims turn up. Ivar Helsing is one man interested in the case. FBI agent Dan Higgins is sent to investigate. He learns that an ancient Chinese princess, Aleta, became a vampire, and traveled the world feeding at will. She has sex with them, then feeds on them. She meets Joerg, and likes him, seduces him but spares him. Until he learns her nature. Then she curses him; all his descendants will die. Back to the present: now she is active in America. A lady psychic, Ariana, is able to fathom Aleta’s long history for them. Nice bare breasted dancing sequence. Aleta especially likes virgins. She holds Ariana prisoner to be tortured. The Secretary of Defense, Arthur, visits her. He wants to recruit her for covert killing. She doesn’t want money, but two or three virgins a day. Nice seductive song and dance sequence. But then they argue, and the vampires kill the men. But Ariana summons the power of her ancestors and defeats Aleta. This is a sort of weird movie, not your ordinary vampire flick I think, and of course I liked the dancing.

I watched Cyborg X. The X Corp makes extreme weapons. Then it gets taken over by a cyber virus. This is, of course, mischief. It is the apocalypse. 99 percent of people are wiped out. The survivors must avoid an army of deadly machines. A hooded figure watches as two resisters get killed. There are only a few remaining pockets of resistance, and they are under siege. The hooded figure is a young woman, part of one cell, Lopez, buxom but tough. They send a party to rescue Kilmore, the one who used to run the company. They have to fight off cyborgs. Kilmore explains how the virus took over. He suffers nightmares. But he becomes an active member of the unit. They go after the cyborgs, and take losses in bloody gunfights; those creatures are tough. They raid the old HQ, following an obscure signal. They find the home computer, but don’t know the access codes. They are pursued by a cyborg with circular saw hands. Jack finds his sister, now a cyborg. She stabs him; Lopez hacks her apart, then hits the STOP switch, turning it all off. She is the only survivor of that fracas. But the girl she hid in an underground bunker also survives. The fight will continue.

I watched Leaving Last Vegas. Ben seems to be an alcoholic. He tries to pick up Sherry at the bar but she begs off. He gets fired. He goes to Las Vegas. He picks up Sera on the street, offering her $500 for an hour. He just wants her to stay with him. He says he wants to drink himself to death. When she returns to her pimp he beats her up for not bringing in enough money. She realizes that she really likes Ben. Her pimp dumps her. She goes to Ben and they have dinner together. She asks why he is trying to kill himself. He’s not sure. She invites him to stay the night with her, then to stay permanently; she’s tired of being alone. He agrees, but says she must never ask him to stop drinking. Also that he’s in love with her. They go gambling and have fun, until he goes crazy, overturning the gaming table, no apparent reason. He buys her earrings. She knows he’s a drunk and he knows she’s a hooker. They understand each other. They have never had sex. She pours liquor over her bare breasts. Then he cheats on her, having sex with another woman. She kicks him out. A trick goes bad and she gets beaten up. Her life seems pointless without him. Then she finds him again. They finally have sex, though he is in a bad way from the alcohol. And he dies. The thing is, they accepted each other as they were, significantly imperfect as they were.

I watched Escape from New York. Anyone in post apocalyptic New York stays there. One-Eyed Snake, a former decorated hero, is a manacled prisoner. He will be given a full pardon for every crime he has committed if he can rescue the downed USA president within 24 hours. If he doesn’t, he’ll be dead. He flies quietly into New York. He finds the plane: no other survivors. He has a tracker to follow the president. But the monitor turns out to be on someone else; the president may be dead. Weird things going on; people are crazy. Somebody called the Duke may have him. He gets a car and runs a gantlet of rock-throwing and club-wielding men. He finds the president, but gets caught himself. They send a message out saying amnesty for all prisoners or the president is dead. They put Snake in a ring to fight their champion in public. While he fights, his uncertain allies Brain and Maggie, she of truly remarkable breasts, rescue the president. But their car is a trap and they barely escape it. Snake and Maggie survive. She tries to gun down the pursuit, but dies. So he gets the president out. Was it worth it? But the invaluable tape has been swapped out for junk music. That’s Snake’s revenge.

I watched The Usual Suspects. This is on odd one. A shipment of gun parts was hijacked in New York. The police are arresting a number of men who may be connected. Why are they all in the same lineup, instead of one of them with four innocents per normal protocol? This has to be a setup, fishing for information. But they’re too smart for that. 21 people died on a boat for an illicit shipment that wasn’t there. What’s going on? There’s a special job that requires five specialized people. Are these the five? One of them, Verbel Kint, seems to be the protagonist. It seems the New York police ran an illicit taxi service for criminals. The heat’s on, so they go to Los Angeles. They need a metal case and kill to get it. A flashback shows one Mr. Keyser Soze hiring the five of them to destroy a shipment of cocaine, for which they will be paid $91 million. So who is Soze? He was a man who got raided, his family held hostage. He killed his own family, then the raiders, then went after the raider’s families, friends, and business associates. You don’t mess with Soze. But now they are messing with him, and learn from his emissary that they and their families are hostage to their performance. Both sides are playing for keeps. So they raid the boat, and destroy it and its crew. But there was no cocaine on it. Just about everyone except Verbel dies, and Soze is gone.

A reader, Dave Baxley, recommended a TV series that very loosely reminded him of my Space Tyrant series, in that the setting is the future, where colonies and space stations have been established throughout the Solar System. So Daughter Cheryl, who is more competent online than I am, downloaded it for me. Remember, I come from another century, the stone age before the internet existed, and I’m still trying to catch up on these newfangled phenomena. In my day not even TV existed, just radio. When I tried to use her notebook reader to watch it, it told me to touch HOME to get into it, but the only thing that gave any response was a sort of circle at the side that told me I would have to get online to enable Siri. Cheryl had shown me, but as usual when I touched the same button she did, it didn’t work for me. It turned out that you need to touch it lightly; I was pressing it firmly. So I had no date with Siri, and hope she’s not mad at me. Then when I did try watching it I had to focus so hard on the dialogue that I lost any sense of the story line. I now have hearing aids, but I still need the subtitles; if you don’t understand that, you’re not an octogenarian with fadintg senrses. Just wait until you’re my age, when the Interstellar Outernet your grandchildren love won’t give you the time of day. (Because, it explains, you need to specify which zone of which planet. Just punch in the code for yours. You don’t know the code? You’re terminal. Kindly watch the following commercial for economic space burial.) So next day she set it up with subtitles and I tried again. This time I followed it, sort of.

Episode 1 “Dulcinea” In the 23cd century Mars is independent and militaristic, air and water are incredibly precious, and trouble is brewing. Heiress Julie Naro is trapped in a weightless cell, maybe being held for ransom. Elsewhere a man is being tortured by being hung up on a wall while Earth gravity, which he is not used to, slowly wipes him out. He can stop it only by giving the information his captors want. That seems to be it, for the introductory episode.

Episode 2, titled The Big Empty. Ade, the new navigator, talks with a crewman. Then a flashback to a prior trip that encounters a debris field. The captain wants to go after the ship that did this, but the crew balks. This is mutiny, but they don’t care. Meanwhile the water ration is being held back. The man being gravity tortured in episode One is now in a sustaining tank, but still won’t talk. Men working in vacuum run out of air, and are saved in a close call. I am not clear where this leads. Obviously things are going on, and something is threatening, but I couldn’t tell what.

Episode 3, The Big Cant. That’s short for the Canterbury ship. Man and pretty girl seem about to make love, but he must depart. There’s distress call. The water delay continues. Julie remains captive. Unrest grows. An interrogator takes a pill so he can tell if a person is lying. Who destroyed the Canterbury? It must have been someone who wants to to promote a war between Earth and Mars. I am still not following it very well. My daughter says it has a broad compass, so that a number of different settings are playing; thus one does not pick up exactly where the prior one left off.

Episode 4. “CQB” A ship is coming. Is it for Naomi? They warn it, but it fires torpedoes. So it’s a battle. Meanwhile a man is looking for Julie Naro. The unknown ship has remarkable weapons. It does not seem to be in the registry of ships. One man has seen a ship like it before: one blew up the Canterbury. The ship is getting holed; people are dying. Holden is supposed to be taken off the ship, but he goes off on his own. A dead man has a memory chip that they did out of his leg. They have to scuttle the ship. But it is not easy to do so. They reach an escape vessel and move out.

Episode 5. “Back to the Butcher” Four people, three men and a woman, one of them Holden, escaped the destruction of the Canterbury, but no one knows they are alive. Then they receive a message. Someone doesn’t know who they are, but offers them sanctuary. Meanwhile the search for Julie Naro continues. She must be involved in something incredibly valuable. We learn that Julie was a Belter; the Belters want to know what happened to her. They get information bit by bit. I am not following the larger picture. I never had trouble following Star Trek episodes; they were simpler. They were also individual episodes, instead of parts of a larger narrative, so my problem maybe inherent in the format.

Episode 6 “Rock Bottom.” They negotiate with the Butcher; it’s a bit like poker bluffing. They might help each other if they could trust each other. Meanwhile slackers are tossed out into space, along with enemies. Holden and Naomi get together, coming to know each other. Miller finds a data cube with revealing information, and gets in trouble. It seems the corruption is wider than he knew.

Episode 7 “Windmills.” Holden, Amos, Alex, and Naomi on the Rocinante come up against a Martian blockade. They discover Kenzo on the ship, another man hiding from the Martians. They don’t trust him, though he says he can help them. He’s a spy with key information. Meanwhile Avasarala, who lost her own son to this war, calls on Holden’s family, seeking information, though they are not on the same side. Tavi wants to accompany Miller, but he says no. Kenzo’s information: the words “Donkey Balls” the Martians receive as a code to desist. It works. The Rocinante is free, for now.

Episode 8 “Salvage.” The Rocinante finds a derelict in space, a stealth ship on an asteroid that looks like the ones that destroyed the Canterbury and Donnager. They board it, and confirm that it is the one that killed the Canterbury. But why was it scuttled? They turn on the ship reactor so they can have lights. It is the Anubis, after the god of the dead. Some strange equipment on it is “alive,” that is operative, and absorbing energy from the reactor. They shut down the reactor immediately, and decide to destroy the Anubis, which is too strong a weapon. On Earth, Avasarala learns that one of the top men has committed suicide. Holden and crew dock at a Eros station, and gunfire erupts. Holden and Miller meet. They find Julie dead.

Episode 9 “Critical Mass.” Flashback to Julie Naro to show how she got into this. She gets captured and imprisoned. She sends out a distress call, but receives no answer. Her skin is blistering. So it seems she died, and now the question is who did this to her, and why. They get a sample of her flesh. She had wanted to steal the new bio-weapon, but they used it on her. They find a whole roomful of dead. Now Holder and Miller may be contaminated.

Episode 10 “Leviathan Wakes” Holden and Miller are caught on Eros. They learn that the plague is being deliberately spread. Avasarala in concerned about Earth. Sigh; overall I could not follow enough of this series to pick up on more than a fraction of what was going on. From what my daughter tells me, it is an adventure I should enjoy, if I could only follow it.

I read Talk on the Wild Side, by Lone Greene. This is a book about language and linguistics, and its thesis is that purists who protest the degradation of language, such as using Who for Whom, are wrong. That language is constantly changing, and today’s supposed errors are tomorrow’s correct text in a new dialect. “But the schoolchild learns, through this kind of teaching, that grammar is a set of rules for torturing your natural sentences into an unnatural form that will satisfy a teacher.” It reminds me of Churchill’s remark, when chided for ending a sentence with a preposition: “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.” And it is indeed nonsense; there is no rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition; it’s something the purists made up. Such ignorance can cause serious mischief. I left my best publisher because the editor insisted on applying rules to my text that were wrong, making me look ignorant in print. One example: I had “He, like she.” He changed it to “He, like her” and refused to yield, so it appeared that way in print. His logic was that the preposition “like” takes the objective case. Now I was an English teacher before I made good as a writer, and I did know what I was writing. “Like” has a number of uses, one of which is as a preposition, yes, but I was using it as a conjunction, much as I would “He and she” or “He or she.” Saying “He, like her” makes no more sense than saying “Her was the belle of the ball.” I got fed up with being overruled by an editor who did not know the language as well as I did and who refused to learn the nuances. Yes, in that case I was the purist. The fact is, as this book makes clear, schools are teaching Formal, when real folk are speaking Natural. One is not right and the other wrong; both are dialects for different purposes. Street vernacular is effective on the street. It is the schools that refuse to learn the nuances. “Language is not so much logical as it is useful. It is not composed; it is improvised. It is not well behaved; it is resourceful.” Another issue is terminology, learning the technical names for natural linguistic expressions. As I put it, to the extreme annoyance of some teachers, a runner does not need to know the names of the muscles and ligaments of his body in order to run a race. Neither does a man need to know that he is using pronoun, verb and pronoun, subjective and objective case, when he says “I love you,” to his girlfriend. They understand each other perfectly already, as their children can attest. “Children learn a blizzard of grammatical terminology in primary schools… But there is no clear evidence that this actually makes better writers.” Amen.

I read Senior Moments—Ageing Disgracefully, by Tim Whyatt. This is a small collection of cartoons about older folk, some of them risque. One example I like: an old woman with her walker is approaching a tree where a bird perches on a branch above the sidewalk. The bird is thinking “Come on, come on, I can’t hold it in much longer.” Another: a naked man is facing two women in the living room. They have a box of quoits, you know, doughnut shaped rings. One tells the other: “As soon as the Viagra kicks in, it’s game on.” And one more: A monk is facing a store display of quiche, and messages a nun, I think getting the spelling slightly wrong “Fancy a quickie?” So it’s naughty fun.

I read Little Girl Lost, Thirteen Tales of Youth Disrupted, an anthology edited by Ronald Linson and Deidre J Owen, who also illustrated the stories. They tend toward horror, but not all of them, and not all the girls are really little, some being teens, but overall they are in social or supernatural trouble. In due course there will be a sequel volume, Little Boy Lost. The volume, and the publisher, came into existence when the editors each had a story, and decided to publish them their own way. “Wailing Jill” by Hailey Piper tells of a girl who thought she was safe because she had nothing of value, but her eyes were taken, and now she haunts the neighborhood looking for replacement eyes. Only a foolish child would go out at night, so of course one does. “The Child Thief” by J B Rockwell has a Pooka, a ghost horse, who is looking for a child to ride him. But it has to be the right one. In “Walk the Walk” by Piers Anthony—yes, that’s me—a lonely little girl befriends a little walking skeleton, a risky thing to do. “The Smuggler’s Door” by Drew Piston has a young woman assigned to guard a castle door, letting no one in or out. Not easy to do, as those outside seem to assume deceptive forms of friends or siblings. Would you deny your wounded brother? You had better. “Forgive and that Other Word That Means Forget” by Caitlin Marceau has a novel notion: a notebook that wipes out the memory of any word written in it. Usually synonyms take its place so the language remains viable. Tay has the book, and writes the name of the boyfriend she has broken up with. That is serious mischief, because even he no longer knows his name. She shouldn’t have done that. “They Belong to Her” by Deidre J Owen, editor and illustrator. Two families decided to revive an old dance hall and resume its operations. But there is something strange here, reminding me of The Phantom of the Opera. They find old ballot shoes stained with blood, and something not quite visible touches the dancers. Real mischief is brewing. “Barrens and Brine” by Rhiannon Lotze has a girl captive aboard a sort of pirate ship that sails across desert sands instead of water. She longs for the ocean, but they won’t let her go. When she tries to escape, to go to the water, it gets ugly. “The Girl Who Couldn’t Shed Tears” by Bradley R Mitzelfelt. This land is desperate for water, and folk are dying of thirst. Cecily has dying children to care for, so she sneaks out after curfew to search for water, even if she must steal it. “The True Nature of Swimming Holes,” by Ronald Linson, the other editor. This story got to me for an irrelevant reason: the girl is named Penny. My daughter who died a decade ago was Penny. We had lost three stillborn in the first decade of our marriage, and feared we could never have children of our own; Penny changed our lives almost as much as our marriage did. Penny is gone, but the memories remain. But back to the story: a swimming hole appears in the forest where there had been nothing before, and two boys and the girl share it that summer. But the pool has a secret. In “A Setting for Julia” by Roxanne Dent a girl ditches her twelve year old sister in the city so she can visit with a friend, and the sister disappears. Uh-oh. “Based on a True Story” by Nicola Kapron shows the other side of a newsworthy incident. The ways the movie version differs from the reality. I suspect this is uncomfortably true to the reality of that. “Remembering, Almost” by Ashleigh Hatter has a girl who suffers inexplicable changes in reality that other folk don’t notice. What is happening here? Is she crazy? Not exactly. “Sarah Small” by Rachel Nussbaum has a girl’s beloved brother taken by the monster under the bed. Naturally the parents don’t believe any such thing, so it is up to her to rescue him, if she can. So when the monster’s pit opens up again, she enters it, putting herself at similar risk. It’s a scary adventure. This is a varied and interesting collection of stories that I can recommend to readers with a taste for the supernatural; there are no bad ones. The one that I remember best is the one about the pool, but that’s for a coincidental reason. They deal with children, but they are evocative for any age.

I watched When the Sky Falls. Meteorologist Jamie takes time off for a vacation with his family, though he is concerned that there could be a catastrophic weather event. His ex-wife Charlotte is upset because his girlfriend Megan is coming along. They take two cars. He travels with daughter Kilee and son; Charlotte travels with her mother Millie. Lightning strikes alarmingly near them. Some kind of storm is moving in, a bad one. Jamie and Kilee hike on a forest path. Charlotte and Millie are still on the way. They catch up to Megan and acquaint her with the storm danger; the lightning is going to be dangerous in this area because of increased ozone concentration. Jamie is tinged by lightning and falls; he now can barely walk. Charlotte and Megan drive together to warn them, an awkward combination. Son and his girlfriend Bailey also drive out. More lightning strikes near them. Now there is strange ball lightning that rolls around, destroying what it collides with. It is getting worse; they have to get out of there. Charlotte and Megan work together to help. Jamie rigs a device to attract the lightning, to make it safe elsewhere. It works; there is a phenomenal display as the ball lightning detonates there as they escape. Charlotte and Megan hug; they are now friends. I had trouble understanding the dialogue even with the hearing aid, but this is one dramatic show.

I watched Age of Dinosaurs. They wheel a patient into tho laboratory: a small unconscious dinosaur. Things go wrong and the creature wakes and attacks. A former firefighter Jake and his shapely teen daughter attend the opening show the bio-tech company puts on. They can now regenerate living flesh from single molecules of past creatures. But then the creatures get loose and terrorize the audience. Hell breaks loose. Jake and daughter Kate are trapped inside the building as the dinosaurs come after them. One thing that bothers me is that they are showing carnivores with horns. That’s a mismatch. They break out of the building, seemingly immune to bullets, and get into the streets of Los Angeles. Flying pteranodon carry away people, another highly unlikely phenomenon. So this is fantasy, but exciting. They fight helicopters on an even basis. Jake and Kate finally manage a hairsbreadth escape and it is over. The science is nonsensical, but it’s a compelling movie.

I read 30-Second Brain, edited by Anil Seth. This is subtitled “The 50 most mind-blowing ideas in neuroscience, each explained in half a minute.” It also has seven profiles of the most noted figures in the field, and seven glossaries of terms. I learned that the brain contains at least 90 billion neurons, and from a glossary that a neuron is a cellular building block of the brain. No single neuron has any idea who you are. “But somehow, by chattering among themselves across networks of billions of interconnections, neurons conjure up your self awareness.” But glial cells outnumber the neurons 50 to 1. They are the maintenance crew, yet they are not in a glossary, so they remain largely anonymous. I find that mind-blowing in a manner I suspect the book’s authors did not intend. I learned that the brain uses 70 percent of our 22,000 genes. But genes are not in a glossary either. Fortunately there is a description here: “A gene is a set of instructions in DNA for making a protein.” But DNA is not in a glossary. Maybe an updated edition will have it. I believe it is the code that governs the rest of the machine, resembling a spiral double ladder. If you think of genes as the letters, DNA is the words and sentences. I learned that the cerebellum looks like a fist-sized cauliflower, accounts for ten percent of the brain’s volume, but has half of the neurons found in the entire central nervous system. It must be important. It is involved in motor control, memory, mood, language, and attention. As I see it, if the main brain is the man of the house, the cerebellum is the staff that sees that his directives are carried out, whatever it takes. Myelination is discussed, a subject I am interested in because my wife suffers demyelination and requires regular treatment for it, to preserve her mobility and life. My analogy there is that myelin is like the insulation around electrical wires; without it the wires short out and the machine sputters out. But myelin is more than that; it actually speeds up the current along those wires, I think multiplying it several fold. A section discusses the evolution of the brain. Why did it expand so greatly in humans, recently? One theory is bipedalism. That is, getting up to stand on two feet instead of four. That’s another pet concept of mine. I agree: going two footed transformed our species in multiply significant ways, from forcing brain expansion to putting permanent pronounced breasts on women. Other mammals have developed breasts only for nursing, not for display. Don’t get me started. So this book is a marvelous stimulus for ideas, but fals somewhat short as an initial primer for knowledge about the brain.

I continued writing Xanth #46, Six Crystal Princesses, doing another 30,000 words, through Chapter 8. Ion and Hilda, the twin children of Ivy’s sister Princess, now Queen Ida, are off on a mission to rescue six crystallized princesses. A complication is that Ion can’t walk alone; he suffered an injury of his legs earlier that cripples him. He could not use healing elixir because he is immune to all elixirs, ironically. But then he met Vinia, in #44 Skeleton Key, (not yet published) whose talent is telekinesis but who suffered awful allergies and could not go outside. But in his presence she was fine, because his ambiance abolished all allergenic substances, they being varieties of elixirs. She used her talent to make his legs walk, and the two walked together in lock step. It was a match of convenience, but they were soon emotionally as well as physically inseparable; when they grow up they will surely marry. So why am I going off on this diversion? Because when I started writing the novel I realized that Vinia would make a better protagonist, being essentially an observer of the Magician and Sorceress in action. Spot lesson for aspiring writers: sometimes an observer makes a better protagonist than a main character. So it is Vinia who runs the gantlet of challenges to see the Good Magician—and he’s not even there at the time. Instead the Designated Wife of the Month Dara Demoness handles it, giving Vinia a magic ring with which she can orient on any person she needs to. She orients on Dara’s friend Demesne (pronounced di-MEEN) Demoness, who is one of the crystallized princesses. This is possible in part because one of the other princesses is telepathic, and can communicate with the others despite being physically frozen. And would you believe, the prince they find for Demesne is the notorious Demon Grossclout, the terror of the School of Magic. Demesne had a crush on him when she was in his class, and she was one of his best students, so he is intrigued, being about ready to retire. There are worse fates than joining a lovely and smart former student with a crush on you who is about to become Queen of a new feminist Queendom. He winds up helping Vinia, and he is one fearsome helper. For example, he is the Magician of Intimidation, and when they need rain, he glares at a cloud, and the cloud is so terrified it wets its pants and looses a deluge Thereafter things begin to become interesting. So you can see that this novel is jam-packed with fun features that will hopelessly roil the guts of my critics who claim that I never did have any imagination or narrative talent and have less now. Keep it in mind when you run out of reading matter, yea many years from now when it gets published.

Of possible general interest: you know how online scams try to trick you into giving them your money? Well, I received a series of emails from one Ms Joy Oti, Director of Operations, Lloyd Bank PLC. as one of their valued customers. No, I have had no prior contact that I know of. She informed me that they were depositing seven and a half million dollars to my account. No information where it might have come from; you would think that such a sum would have a solid origin. But first they needed my full name and address, my phone number, and a scan copy of my ID. When I did not respond they asked me to please let them know if I was not interested, and if I did not deposit $295 transport fare for them to deliver it to my address, they would hand it over to someone else. When I still did not respond they urged me to get in touch, because they were informed that I was dead and many people have been to their bank claiming to be my next of kin. Every few days they emailed me again, frustrated by my lack of response. Two weeks after the initial contact they informed me that a group bearing my name was applying intense pressure for them to transfer the funds on my behalf. The thing about a scam is that if you respond at all, they know that you exist and can zero in on you more accurately. If you give them your ID they can really go to town on you. These folk evidently don’t realize that Piers Anthony is a fictional identity with no legitimate relatives. But if you receive a similar communication, beware; there is unlikely to be any big money in it for you.

I have a number of concerns. One of them is how to save the world from the depredations of mankind. We are generating the fifth or sixth great extinction, by our diet, pollution, and just plain numbers, and if we don’t stop, the world as we know it will end, probably within the next century, maybe sooner. I fear we are not going to stop. I am hardly the only one to be concerned, but so far the others have not succeeded in halting the process. I keep hoping that I can find some avenue that no one else has thought of that will make all the difference. Or find that something that someone else is trying to do that has phenomenal promise, that maybe I can help promote. Failing that, we are probably doomed. Daughter Cheryl downloaded some material for me, and I am considering it. One thing is food; our consumption of meat is causing horrendous damage to the natural scene. But the vegans are working on that, and figure that in the next twenty years the meat industry may crash, replaced by plant based alternatives. I hope they’re right. Another thing is energy; our use of coal and oil is a source of both heat and chemical pollution. So let’s consider that. Solar and wind energy are essentially clean and endlessly renewable, but the sun doesn’t shine everywhere at all times, and the wind does not always blow. We need reliability, and while solar/wind should certainly contribute, there also needs to be a source that is guaranteed steady. The arrival of revolutionary forms of solar power may change the picture; one prediction is that solar will overtake fossil fuels as the world’s preferred source of electricity. More power to it! Hydro is promising, but damming rivers can mess up the natural environment. There is hydro-wave, tapping the power of the waves of the sea. But inland is away from the sea, meaning there will have to be more power-lines. Terrorists can go after power lines, too. This should be followed up, but I think it remains unproved as far as reliable power goes. So there are prospects, yet at the moment none seem perfect. We need another. What could that be? Well, one option is nuclear. Once a nuclear power plant gets established, run a long time. But there are caveats. One is disposal of the radioactive wastes. You can’t just send them to the city dump; they have to be secluded safely away from anywhere we live or go. Another is mishandling; human error can have a horrendous cost. I live within fifty miles of a former nuclear plant that was rendered defunct by a stupid decision. Accidents have happened globally, as Chernobyl showed in 1986. Another is terrorism; some terrorists have the know-how to fashion crude bombs from nuclear plant materials. So the nuclear option is feasible but dangerous. What remains? There is an answer that advocates for solar/wind and nuclear seem not to consider: geothermal. This draws on the heat of the world itself, below us. It is essentially inexhaustible and could sustain all our power needs indefinitely, or at least as long as the world lasts. It is reliable; as with nuclear, once set up, it can continue virtually forever. It is relatively inexpensive; savings can be as much as 80% over fossil fuels. Some variations do pollute some, with a smell like rotten eggs. But what is called binary is a closed system, letting out no stench. It is clean, releasing essentially no emissions of any kind. It is local, available anywhere in the world including your back yard. Some sources are easy to reach, like Yellowstone, but if you drill deep enough from your back yard, you will get it. I believe that this is the way to go. But how to stop another problem, our overpopulation—I’m still pondering that.

I was doing some cleaning up of counters. As noted before, every decade or three I do that. This time I encountered a manuscript dating from circa 2005 with no name on it. I surely received it and commented on it to the author, back then, but now in my senescence I can’t remember the event. It is titled “Faster Than Now,” and seems to be a description of, or summary of, a movie, scene by scene. It features a rather special car involved in a special race and a save-the-world plot. It would likely make one wild, compelling movie. Does anybody recognize it from this title or description? If it became a movie, I’d like to see the movie.

Shorter notes: Another 2005 paper that turned up is titled “Dolphin Stress Test.” You look at the picture of two dolphins leaping through the air. If you see anything other than a dolphin, you may be under stress. Okay, I looked at it. The left figure is a dolphin. The right one is a cow. Obviously I’m under serious stress. In the Sep/Oct 2019 issue of THE HUMANIST is an article titled “Life and Why it must Continue.” It concludes “We can see that the point of life is simply, life. More life, better life. No higher purpose is needed because we already have, deep in our genes and under our noses, a purpose that is incalculably high.” So when someone asks what is the purpose of life, that may be the answer. A book review in the same magazine of The Founding Myth by Andrew Seidel remarks on bits of religion grafted onto an originally more pristine secular foundation, such as “In God We Trust,” “One Nation Under God,” and God Bless America.” Yes, I remember in the 1950s when they added “under God” to the pledge of Allegiance, a religious reference that does not belong there. I leave it out when I recite the Pledge. America was supposed to be a secular nation, not a Christian nation, regardless what the religionists pretend. And THE PROGRESSIVE for August/September 2019 has an article titled “The Triumph of Their Will,” I think a play on the Nazi propaganda movie Triumph of the Will, which points out that white nationalists are building political power from within the Republican Party. Yes, I have read elsewhere that they are in the process of taking over that party; there seems to be an affinity of interests there. Maybe it was headed there anyway, but it’s scary. Newspaper item says that the percentage of foreign-born U.S. residents is now the highest it has been in more than a century, 44.7 million people. I don’t find that figure scary. I am one of them. I was born in England, and am a naturalized American citizen. I believe in American values in a way that too many native-born citizens seem not to, such as keeping the government of this country free of religion while respecting the right of any religion to practice here without harrasment. Uncomfortable news item: people whose blood pressure rises significantly between their 30s and 50s are much more likely to suffer brain shrinkage in older age. My blood pressure has remained low, fortunately. NEW SCIENTIST question: suppose there was no Big Bang creating the universe? There is some evidence that it is cyclical, expanding and contracting. It also may be two billion years younger that we figured. A study links all soda, sugar or alternate, to a greater risk of early death. It contributes to obesity, and 40% of adults are obese, but this is more than that. Small, obvious robots brighten the lives of the very lonely folk, being treated like pets or people. Of course in my fiction robots are people, but it will be a while before technology catches up with that. In an advice column, a woman visited relatives, then privately texted them with information about things like a slow bathtub drain she thought they might want to know about. They reacted with fury and banned her from any further visits. The columnist sided with the relatives. What? If you can’t privately tell someone something like that, I see the problem as with the relatives, and the columnist, not the visitor, who was trying to be helpful. Is it no longer permissible to send helpful notes? I remember when at a trade show I encountered a man with his fly open, I drew him aside and quietly advised him so he could cover up. If he had been like those relatives, would he have slugged me?

I read Little Darling’s Pinups for Pitbulls, by Deidre Frantklin. This is an unusual book, featuring, yes, pictures of pretty girls with their dogs, which are pit bulls and crossbreeds, the point being that these dogs are in need of love and homes. The author as a teen volunteered at a local animal shelter, and walked a pit bull dog a woman left, a nice dog. But the shelter had a “kill pitbulls” policy and made no exceptions. So I think that dog was lost, unfairly, but the experience got the girl interested in the plight of these animals. She adopted Carla Lou from Texas, sight unseen, but when the dog arrived it was love at first sight. The author became a model, specializing in burlesque, Little Darling being her stage name. She has an abundance of tattoos on her arms and legs, of things like a dog’s face. She started the organization Pinups for Pitbulls, dedicated to saving maligned dogs. It turns out that no breed of dog is inherently vicious; in fact the Pit Bull Terrier is naturally loving. It is bad owners who make them vicious, treating them savagely, training them for dog fighting, or simply neglecting them to the point of starvation. Pit bulls have been used as hearing dogs, as service dogs, and as therapy dogs, yet they are also the most abused and neglected of breeds. The organization campaigns to eliminate BSL, that is Breed-Specific Legislation, which is based on ignorant condemnation. When some towns eliminated pit bulls, the rate of dog bites did not decline. Yes, some pit bulls do bite, but statistically they are no worse than other breeds. Overall this is a nice picture book with a worthwhile message. I had shared the belief that this breed is dangerous; now I know better.

My wife of 63 years, Carol Ann Marble Jacob, CAM for short, has been fading at age 82. As I write this, she is in the hospital, and not certain to come out alive. She has been treated the past fifteen years for CIDP, that is, Chronic Inflammatory Demyelating Polyneuropathy. This is a rare condition, distantly related to multiple sclerosis, where the body’s own immune system goes wrong and attacks the myelin sheathing around nerves, leading to loss of the use of the limbs, and worse. See my comment in my review of 30-Second Brain, above. Her wiring was shorting out, starting at the arms and legs. We got a wheelchair, but she could not propel it herself because her arms were unresponsive as well as her legs. We knew that when it progressed to organs like the heart in would be the end. I had to heave her off the wheelchair and onto the toilet, and back again; she had no personal privacy. It was a great day when we got the diagnosis and treatment, IVIg, IntraVenous Infusion Gammaglobulin, which saved her life. I remember the day when she was able to lift her feet an inch off the bed. That was circa 2004, and treatments every five or six weeks have sustained her so that she could walk and do things for herself. She handled our finances, downloaded emails, and transcribed my penned answers to arriving email letters, as well as posting these HiPiers columns. So she was an active part of my life and career, though I took over the making of meals, housework, washing dishes, and physical chores. So it has been until recently, when our daughter Cheryl started taking over some of the chores such as grocery shopping and laundry, as these became too difficult for Cam. Yes, I could do them also, and have before, but I need time for my writing, as that is what pays our way. She became increasingly tired, unable to sleep comfortably at night, falling asleep sitting up when reading or eating, her appetite for food diminishingly small, and when she did eat it turned to painful gas, a pain in the posterior, no joke. I hated to see her miserable with that, but I could not fix it. Finally Sunday, September 30, Cam realized that she needed to go to the hospital, and Cheryl and I took her in. They found that her complex of symptoms such as COPD, that’s Chronic Obstructive Pulminary Disease, heart fibrillation, edema, a bad aortic aneurysm, and of course the original CIDP had reached the point where only heroic measures could save her, and these she did not want, understandably. She faded in and out, disliking the special mask over her face that was part of the treatment; she knew she could die without it, but wanted to rest in relative comfort. I of course defended her right to live and die as she preferred, though I dread being a widower. So she is off the mask, and I fear declining, and I suffer for her, and the house is lonely as hell, with reminders of her absence everywhere. How I wish she could be home and well again! But what will be, will be.

My wife’s situation cut short this column, because of the time consumed at the hospital and my grief for her situation. Fortunately I had written most of it before the crisis struck, and Cheryl is doing yeoman service keeping Cam company, ferrying me to the hospital, and negotiating with doctors, nurses, and hospice representatives to ensure that Cam’s preferences are honored. None of this is fun, but we are managing.

And then a miracle: Cam got to come home after all. It was suddenly put together after I wrote the discussion above. Cheryl worked with Hospice, and they arranged to have an oxygen concentrator twice the power of the one we had, because Cam needs that now, and a nurse to break us in to the new regimen. This does not mean that Cam is recovering, just that now she can expire at home, with we who love her, instead of in the hospital, a situation she much prefers. We have to make adjustments, but it seems so much better for all of us this way. There will surely be more anon.

PIERS

NoRemember 2019

HI-

For those interested, Xanth #42, Fire Sail, will come on sale at $16.99 this month, NoRemember, but maybe you can remember it if you try hard enough. The title was suggested by my wife, and now represents a memory of her. The novel introduces the magic boat with a sail made of fire, that is the size of a rundown rowboat outside but a fancy yacht inside, that sails through the air. Fibot, that is the Fire Sail Boat, will be a regular feature in future Xanth novels, together with its human and animal crew—remember the Pet Peeve bird? Tata the Robot Dogfish? The children introduced in Five Portraits?–in the background. Then in Jewel-Lye 2020 there will be Xanth #43, Jest Right. That features a lady jester who can’t get anyone to take her seriously, so she makes a profession of it, getting laughs. Such as how she flashed her panties at a prospective suitor at pointblank range, and he projectile vomited, burning her bottom with the acid (ass-ed?) so now she can’t sit down, “That’s why I’m a stand-up comedienne.” But somehow it seems less funny when she wants a serious boyfriend. Also available this month is The Iron Maiden, from my Space Tyrant series, featuring the Tyrant’s sister Spirit, who has a story of her own to cover. She was the real power behind that throne.

In my prior HiPiers column I told how my wife Carol—CAM, for her maiden initials Carol Ann Marble—was getting to come home from the hospital. She did, but it was a brief respite; after one night and one day home she died at 12:05 AM October 3, 2019, age 82. Our 63-year-long marriage was over. Her death, as far as we could tell, was peaceful. It was listed as congestive heart failure, but it was really a combination of conditions that finally wore her out. We knew she was fading; indeed, she had been declining for the past fifteen years; but still it was an ugly shock. Is an expected death in the family easier to bear than a surprise death? Perhaps, as Daughter Cheryl and I were prepared, but had we had any choice we would have kept her alive and healthy. So I went into grief mode, following the program I had prepared well in advance. I read the books on handling grief that Cheryl bought me a year and a half ago, and I wrote a novelette-length, painfully candid study of that long marriage titled “My Rose With Thorns.” Was the marriage perfect? No. But is any marriage ever perfect? It was good enough. I teased her that she was nineteen when I married her, but she didn’t STAY nineteen. So she did have thorns, but overall she was my Rose, and her loss dropped me into desolation. I have not yet decided whether to share “My Rose” with the public; I will edit it, have Cheryl go over it, and perhaps share it with interested family members before I make that decision. It is a significant segment of my private life and my handling of my loss.

Meanwhile, life continues. I am carrying on because there’s not much else I can do. I am maintaining my existing routine. Maybe that is a crutch, but I need the crutch to fend off the immense emptiness that engulfs me any time I pause. I am continuing my exercise schedule uninterrupted, answering my email as usual, eating and sleeping as usual. Well, not perfectly with that last; the first time after she died that I lay down and closed my eyes, I saw a mental picture of her lying dead, and that ended any chance of sleep. But as the days and weeks pass, I am sleeping better. Reminders of her are constant; everything reminds me of her. Her sandals on the floor, which she won’t be wearing any more. Her dark chocolates, which she won’t be eating now, so I am eating them, feeling vaguely guilty about it. We use only half as many bananas now, half the egg salad sandwiches I make for lunch, half the dishes I wash, half the bed sheets. The TV is not on nearly as much. But I am getting used to that; it isn’t as if I mind thinking of her. She is part of me, of what I am, of whatever I will be. I am learning to do the things she did, such as writing checks to pay the routine bills, and how to use the WiFi (I called her my WiFi Wife) to go online and download the email. A private amusement was that on occasion women would solicit me by email, not knowing that my wife handled it and uploaded my responses. I expect to finish writing my current Xanth novel in due course, and to continue reading books and watching DVD movies. I may start getting out more, becoming more social; it was not a lack of social interest that kept me at home before, but my commitment to my ill wife, who was essentially housebound. So I am free, albeit in a manner I did not desire. Now on with those books, which reviews you may skip if you’re not in grief yourself. At such time as you are in grief, you may want to return.

I read Healing A Spouse’s Grieving Heart, by Alan D Wolfelt. This is subtitled “100 Practical Ideas After Your Husband Or Wife Dies.” I found it relevant, with a number of good thoughts. This is for the time of marriage “Until death do us part.” That time did come for me, after 63 years, and while I expected it, I could never be really ready for it. I will review it by quoting brief excerpts from it. “Healing does not mean forgetting or ‘getting over.’” “You don’t ‘get over’ grief. You learn to live with it.” “Mourning is the outward expression of our grief.” “Since your spouse died, you may have found yourself contemplating your own eventual death. This is very common.” “Be suspicions if you find yourself thinking that you’re ‘doing well’ since the death. Sometimes ‘doing well’ means you’re avoiding your pain.” “Imperfect love, which is the best we humans can manage, is infinitely better than no love at all.” It quotes the Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,/ the courage to change the things I can,/ and the wisdom to know the difference. “Grieving spouses tell me that the way they combat loneliness is by making it a point to interact with others.” “Acknowledge the reality of the death…your spouse is dead and will never physically be present to you again.” “Usually the grief hurts more before it hurts less.” Should you continue to wear your wedding ring? There is no “correct” answer. I am continuing to wear mine, and now I also wear my wife’s matching ring on the ring finger of my right hand. It constantly reminds me of her, and that is painful, but it does keep her with me at least symbolically. The book warns of “griefbursts,” which are periods of heightened and sometimes overwhelming sadness. Dating again: “…the enjoyment of a new love isn’t a betrayal of the old one.” That’s good to know; my life with my wife satisfied me that I do not want to live alone. “Ignore hurtful advice” such as “It’s all part of God’s plan.” The book gives a savage mental response: “Then God has pretty crappy planning skills.” If you remarry: “It’s important to let your new spouse-to-be know that your first marriage will always be an important part of your life.” Yes indeed. Divorcees may write their former spouses out of their lives, but not widowers, and certainly not me. “Choose to live.” “Just as you surrendered to the mystery of love, you must surrender to the mystery of grief.” Overall, I found this book helpful and reassuring in a practical way, and I recommend it to others at such time as they suffer a similar loss.

I read A Grief Observed by C S Lewis. I remember the author from childhood when I read Out of the Silent Planet, set on Mars, Perelandra, set on Venus, and That Hideous Strength, set on Earth. He also wrote the children’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia, which we read to our own children. The man could write. But this is not science fiction or fantasy or religion, exactly; it is the story of his grief following the death of the woman he loved, Helen Joy Davidson. She came into his life late, born 17 years after him, and she was dying of cancer when he met her, regardless what the movie version claims. She had a young son by her prior marriage. She died in 1960, age 45, and he died three years later, age 65. He had become religious as his life progressed, but this loss shook him out of it for a while. When she died, he wrote this book about his grief. I am writing a kind of bio of my late wife, similarly, as one way, perhaps, to expiate my grief, along with reading these books on grief. Some of his reactions are savage. I buy books so I can put check marks in the margin when I read them, for future reference. So here are some of my marks for this one. On God, whom you turn to with gratitude and praise when times are good. “But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.” God did not save Helen; that is his anguish. I, who never believed in God, have no such problem, and don’t curse Him, though maybe I do curse Fate. On the problem of friends who turn away from the recently widowed: “Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.” “What a pitiable cant to say ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do.” “Kind people have said to me ‘She is with God.’ In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable.” “Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable. And how or why did such reality blossom (or fester) here and there into the terrible phenomenon called consciousness?” “Now God has in fact—our worst fears are true—all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty,” “What do people mean when they say ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist?” There is more, but I trust this suggests the essence.

My daughter feels that I need to get out of the house, rather than fester home alone, and she is surely correct. So we made an excursion to the Universal Resort in Orlando, going with my son-in-law John and my granddaughter Logan, who is now nineteen, who were visiting and helping clean up decades of accumulated mess in the house. John’s wife, my daughter Penny, died a decade ago, of cancer; we did what we could to help him and Logan cope then, and now he was returning the favor. Family helps family. It can make a huge difference. So this was for all of us. This is Halloween Horror season, so Fear was the essence. The pamphlet advice was “Just keep telling yourself ‘It’s only a nightmare.’” We toured three haunted houses and four scary rides. There was a lot of waiting between events, and seemingly endless back-and-forth loops in the lines to each attraction, but this is the nature of this beast. I have to say that the horror houses have hardly improved since my day, circa 75 years ago; they consist mostly of walking through cramped corridors where loud sounds blast you and spooky figures leap out at you. I wished I had left my hearing aids at home. We did Ghostbusters, Yeti Terror of the Yukon, and Depths of Fear, simulated underwater zombies and such. Tour one and you have more or less toured them all. They also had costumed figures out on the street, leaping out at you, and some shows presented to the walking-by audience, such as pretty girls dancing. But the rides were something else. We started with the Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit (sic) which lasted a scant two and a half minutes, but it was some ride. First it tilted up ninety degrees so that we were going straight up; then it dropped straight down again. Then it zoomed around curves, twisting so that we felt as if we were being thrown out into the sky, and continued with a seeming crash into a wall. The instructions were to sit up straight with your head against the headrest, but that thing hauled my body around so violently that it was all I could do to hang on any which way and hope my head stayed in place. The other rides were less strenuous, but did have their twisting and crashing moments. We did Revenge of the Mummy, Harry Potter and the Escape From Gringotts, and MEN IN BLACK Alien Attack. The Mummy one had 3D glasses, which added to the effect, and Men in Black had several whirl-arounds that were fun too. On the whole I preferred the rides to the walks, but all of them were fun in their fashion. So were the long walks to get here and there. For example, there were tourist girls with blinking red horns. There were bare legs galore. At one point we walked behind a shapely young woman in stretch pants, her buttocks as they flexed as interesting as some of the paid sights. So I’m 85 years old; I’m not dead even if my age makes me reminiscent of a zombie, and I notice. So yes, I can recommend this amusement park complex to you. It is phrased as horror, this season, but it’s fun.

I watched The Time Traveler’s Wife. Henry talks with a child, saying he is that child, grown up. Because of time travel. Later a pretty girl, Clare, approaches this man, saying that she knows him even if he doesn’t know her. She says he traveled back in time to see her as a little girl; she has known him since she was six. Then we see that scene, as he meets her, tells her, then fades out. She has to fetch clothes for him, as they don’t travel time with him. He has been traveling randomly in time since he was six. He can’t choose it; it just happens. At any rate, he marries her, she knowing his situation. But it’s tough, because he can be gone for two weeks at a time. But he uses his future information to enable her to win five million dollars. They also see a future self dying of a bullet wound. They cast about for a way to stop his time traveling, but it’s tricky. Clare gets pregnant, but then loses the baby. But suppose the baby is another time traveler? It traveled away from her womb. But that surely kills it, as it can’t live outside at that stage. It happens again. He decides to get a vasectomy, because such a pregnancy endangers her health as well as the life of the baby. He visits her as a teenager; but won’t tell her what they fight about in the future. She slaps him; he kisses her. That wows her. As a married woman, she seduces one of his younger forms, and gets pregnant that way. This baby survives. The time traveler fades out and reappears in the future where a ten year old girl hails him as Daddy. She’s his daughter, Alba. She can travel in time, with some control. He returns to tell pregnant Clare. Then they see Alba with a younger friend, who is also Alba, time traveling. They learn that he will die when Alba is five years old, shot. But he survives and is lame, confined to a wheelchair. But he knows that something is going to happen. There’s one last meeting in the meadow when Alba is nine. Then he is gone. This is a fine, touching time travel romance. I watched it in my grief for the loss of my own spouse. It does seem to relate, in its fashion.

I watched The Dressmaker. Tilly is a glamorous dressmaker who returns to her small hometown in Australia, seeking the truth about her notorious reputation. She is considered to be a murderess. She cares for her eccentric mother Mad Molly. The house is an absolute mess; she has to clean off the floor with a shovel. She enables the local ball team to win, by distracting the opposing players with her sexy body. She sees the men and women, remembering when they were boys and girls cruelly teasing her. Now handsome Teddy approaches her, and she is soon falling for him. Meanwhile, one by one, she is transforming the local young women to beauties via her expert dressmaking. Bit by bit she zeroes in on the source of her bad reputation. The testimony against her was false. But there was one witness they hadn’t known about. The boy she supposedly killed had killed himself in an accident. Then boyfriend Teddy as a sort of joke drops into a silo which isn’t loaded the way he thought it was, and dies. Teddy had wanted Tilly to say “I am no longer cursed,” and it seems she was still cursed. She is largely incapacitated by grief and rage, but her mother Molly marshals herself and sees about rescuing her. Then has a stroke and dies. But the letter she sent gets results. Things devolve into a kind of chaos. Tilly burns the house and grounds, and the fire extends to the village, destroying it. Now it seems that her vengeance is complete. This is billed as a comedy, but it’s hard-hitting stuff.

I watched King Kong. The vaudeville is closing because of poor attendance. Young pretty Ann Darrow wants to get a part. Does she take a job in the burlesque? She’s not eager. Then she encounters Carl Denham, who is looking for a cute size four girl for the lead in a silent movie. It is to be filmed on a remote island with ancient ruins. The ship, a tramp steamer, SS VENTURE, is heading out, barely ahead of the police, as this studio is deeply in debt. So Ann does not realize how chancy this venture is. Skull Island, as yet undiscovered, is west of Sumatra. There was a report of a hundred foot high wall on it, thought to contain something monstrous. Ann and Jack the playwright kiss. And they find the island! It is hidden in deep fog, and has formidable cliffs at the shore which they must somehow navigate to stop from wrecking the ship. But it runs aground. They send a boat ashore. Carl, Jack and Ann are on it. The scenery is fabulous. There are rows of skulls, and dinosaur bones, and ancient stone ruins. They find natives who kill some of them and capture some. Then a party from the ship shoots some natives, and the captives escape. They throw stuff overboard to lighten the ship, and it heads back out to sea. But Ann is captured again. They send an armed party back to rescue her. It looks as if the natives mean to sacrifice her to a fire god. She is strung up and put across a pit. And the giant ape comes and carries her away, screaming. Only Carl sees that. Naturally he focuses on what is most important: he makes them ready the cameras and film. A rescue party follows. Jack spies footprints in the muck. He starts a camera, catching grazing dinosaurs. Then they stampede, with much smaller predators among them. Meanwhile the ape drops Ann and is concerned because she is unconscious. She recovers and crawls away. He catches her. Then she realizes that he is intrigued by her. She dances. He knocks her down for sport, repeatedly, until she tells him No, it’s not funny, you big ape. She gets chased by dinosaur predators, until King Kong comes to her rescue, battling them. She realizes that he is on her side. Meanwhile the men fight off giant bugs and weird toothy slugs. Ann sleeps nestled on Kong’s arm; they are bonding. Jack comes to her rescue while ape and woman sleep. Giant bats attack Kong as Jack and Ann flee. They finally make it to a boat and make it back to the ship, while Kong, knocked out by bottles of I think chloroform, falls unconscious. Ann hates to leave Kong. But they chain Kong and bring him back to New York, where Carl puts on a hammy show. Kong breaks the chains and is free. Jack leads him through the city streets to Ann. Kong tosses cars aside and picks up women, looking for Ann. And she comes to him. He picks her up and walks the park. They slide on the ice of a pond, until troops attack. He climbs the Empire State Building with her. Then six biplanes attack. He knocks one out of the sky. She climbs a ladder up to join him, but bullets dislodge it and she falls. Kong manage to catch her. Kong takes out two more planes. She stands beneath him and waves off the remaining planes. But one attacks from behind, finishing Kong, who falls off the building, leaving Ann there alone. Until Jack joins her. It is over. I rather expected a junk movie, and certainly it has impossible elements, like the unexplained giant ape and dinosaurs, but this is one dramatic and compelling story.

I watched the TV series Westworld. Evidently the private channels suffer less from censorship, because the gore is gorier and the nudes nudier than normally seen on TV. It starts with a young woman in a chair, being questioned. Does she know she is in a dream? Yes. Does she want to wake up? Yes. Then on to a train ride, and a man, Teddy, getting off at a station in a western town, Sweetwater. Then he sees Dolores. They know each other. They ride their horses together. Then a mean man accosts her. When Teddy tries to defend her, it turns out that the mean man is a “newcomer” who can’t be touched or shot, but can do it to others. He shoots Teddy and drags Dolores off. This turns out to be a kind of amusement park, catering to the guests with programmed androids male and female. At the end of the day the androids’ memories are wiped. But some are showing new gestures, not originally programmed. Then a replay of the day, with Teddy arriving. The sheriff malfunctions. Something is going wrong. They have 1,400 guests in the park; they don’t want to have to shut it down for repairs. Other hosts malfunction. The main bad guy says that there is a deeper level to this game, and he wants to get there. Teddy gets killed again. Another day Dolores is sure that things will work out. She slaps a fly. That’s new, since hosts normally don’t react that way. End of Episode 1.

Episode 2: Dolores is told to wake up. Does she remember? Guide Angela meets William, a first time visitor to Westworld, which is now futuristic. He asks Angela whether she is real, and she says that if he can’t tell, it doesn’t matter. The bad Man In Black shows up at a hanging, shoots all the others, hauls the victim, Lawrence, away. Programmer Bernard Lowe interviews Dolores, saying there is something different about her, tells her not to speak elsewhere of this matter. Then he talks with Theresa, another programmer. Other hosts seem to be slowly going wrong too. Ford is one of the controllers, played by Anthony Hopkins, so he has to be important. The Man in Black questions Lawrence: where is the entrance to the maze? He shoots Lawrence’s wife to encourage him to talk. Theresa comes to Bernard, and makes love with him. It seems they have a personal relationship as well as a business one. Ford comments further. Episode fades out.

Episode 3: Bernard interviews Dolores again. A new day starts. Teddy meets Dolores again. He promises someday soon to take her to the ideal place where the mountains meet the water. Ford talks with Teddy. Teddy tries to teach Dolores how to shoot, but her conditioning prevents it; hosts can’t try to hurt players. Ford says they want to create consciousness in the androids. Bernard remembers his late son; that may be messing up his judgment. Dolores is waylaid by bad guys, and this time does manage to shoot one dead and escape. She joins another good guy, William, and faints.

Episode 4: Bernard interviews Dolores again. We learn that her parents were hurt, then killed. She suspects there is something wrong with this world. He tells her that if she can find the center of the Maze, she can be free. She wants to be free. The Man in Black is hunting snakes when he finds sexy Armistice with her tattoo of a serpent coiled around her body. That interests him. He travels to Wyatt with a taciturn Lawrence. Armistice tells the Man in Black of the desperado Wyatt, whose men she killed in retaliation for his murder of her family. Theresa and Ford discuss his new narrative. Maeve finds a bullet in her unscarred belly, proving that her visions are real.

Episode 5: the Man in Black kills Lawrence and strings him up by his feet. He rescues Teddy. Ford talks with Dolores. They discover that a transmitter in a host has been sending information out of the park to an unknown party. Dolores saves Teddy by shooting down the men attacking him. She is no longer the docile host. The Man in Black talks with Ford. Is there a deeper meaning in the game? A naked Maeve catches a bird on her finger and talks with lab worker Lutz

Episode 6: Bernard investigates the use of hosts to transmit information. They are not going wrong, they are being used. The Man in Black and Teddy zero in on the maze. Theresa dismisses Bernard; their affair is over. Lutz and Maeve view the Westworld presentation. Maeve, too, is becoming independent. Bernard discovers that Ford has a whole family of hosts. Teddy and the Man in Black wipe out an army post. Maeve bargains to upgrade her host potentials. It turns out the Theresa is the one sending the information out.

Episode 7: Bernard interviews a host, investigating the problem. Theresa and Hale are secretly stealing Ford’s information, so that if he gets fired, he won’t be able to destroy his work and render the work valueless. Meanwhile an escape train loaded with explosives is traveling though the area. William and Dolores are on it, becoming intimate. Oh? What happened to Teddy? Then the train is ambushed. But the ambushers are in turn ambushed, and William, Dolores, and Lawrence flee. Then the Ghost Nation attacks, changing the picture again. Bernard shows Theresa the unregistered hosts he had discovered, and prototypes. Ford appears, and tells them that Bernard is a host. Bernard attacks and kills her.

Episode 8: Bernard is appalled that he has killed Theresa. Ford has him turn it off so that he can function normally. Maeve is thoughtful. She plans to escape, though that is complicated, because there is a bomb in every host that will detonate if they depart. Meanwhile Dolores and William discover the dead party, with one survivor: Logan. But he soon dies. Dead Theresa is found; Ford acts as if it is a mystery to him too. The Man in Black tells Teddy that he is here to be the loser in a rigged game. They find one surviving woman, then are attacked by a creature with the head of a bull, largely invulnerable. Maeve shows how cruelly independent she can be, killing the one who tries to decommission her. There is mayhem in the town of Pariah. Ford tries to reprogram Maeve, but she fights back. She strikes Teddy; he is needed back in the fold. This story is getting so wild I’m not sure it is making sense. This is the hallmark of second string script writers who think surprise and violence substitute for story.

Episode 9. Bernard interviews Maeve. She asserts her dominance over him. Bernard insists on getting access to all his memories. They cut Dolores open to reveal her mechanical innards. She fights back and flees. Maeve and Billy go to Hell. The Man in Black narrowly escapes death. Bernard suffers more memories. Ford tells Bernard about Arnold, the original programmer. He wanted to create consciousness in the hosts, not the mere appearance of it, be the real thing. And Bernard learns that he is in fact Arnold. Dolores begs him to help her, but he can’t, because he is dead. Ford directs him to shoot himself and departs.

Episode 10, Bernard wakes Dolores. They find dead lying all around the town. This time when a stranger collides with Teddy, Teddy shoots him dead. Bernard tells Dolores that consciousness is a journey inward. In fact it’s a maze. He wants her to help him destroy this place. Charlotte Hale visits Ford. She tells him he is being taken out of control, once he introduces his new narrative. A doctor is poking into the mouth of Armistice, the one with the serpent tattoo, and she bites off his finger. It seems the hosts are revolting. William searches for Dolores. We learn that the Man in Black is actually the aged William. She stabs him, but he stabs her back. Teddy rescues her, but she dies in his arms. Ford introduces his new narrative, “Journey into Night.” Police raid the host storage facility, but they start coming to life and fighting back. Ford revives Dolores. He explains that the maze is a test for imagination and empathy. Ford bids farewell to Bernard and gives him the maze. Then Bernard talks with Armistice; it is his voice that has been inwardly guiding her. Ford addresses the guests of Westworld with a pep talk. Then Dolores shoots him dead (she must have been revived), and begins shooting the guests. And reactivated hosts join her in that. This is so wild I’m not sure I’ll watch the second season.

I read It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay, by Megan Devine. This is a book that tells it as it is. Essentially, that your loss has changed your life, you can never go back to your former life, and must learn to make your place in the devastated landscape that is your present existence. That only love will sustain you, love of others, and of yourself. This may seem negative, but it is the truth. The author was a grief therapist for a decade, and thought she knew what it was all about. Then her partner died suddenly, and she learned the other side of it. “Our culture sees grief as a kind of malady: a terrifying, messy emotion that needs to be cleaned up and put behind us as soon as possible…We see it as something to overcome, something to fix, rather than something to tend or support. Even our clinicians are trained to see grief as a disorder rather than a natural response to deep loss. When the professionals don’t know how to handle grief, the rest of us can hardly be expected to respond with skill and grace.” She knew; she had been a professional. Now she is orienting on reality. “Here’s what I most want you to know: this really is as bad as you think. No matter what anyone else says, this sucks. What has happened cannot be made right.” “Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.” “All the books that pointed toward getting out of pain by simply rising above it somehow—I knew it was crap. Saying so only got me labeled as ‘resistant.’” “Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form.” There is more, much more, but I think this suffices to show the nature of this book. I do recommend it to those in need, and think that friends of the bereaved should read it too, to have a better notion how to help. One more quote. “These future-based, omniscient, generalized platitudes aren’t helpful. Stick with the truth: This hurts. I love you. I’m here.” I suspect that this is the grief book I will most remember.

I read The Grief Recovery Handbook, by John W James and Russell Friedman. This book, in contrast to the prior one, aims to facilitate a fast and effective recovery from grief. But it turns out they are not opposites; when one says you don’t recover, you learn to live with your loss, the other considers learning to live with it to be recovery. They are using different language toward a similar end. This one presents a series of exercises you can do to facilitate your recovery. “What do we mean by recovery? Recovery means feeling better. Recovery means claiming your circumstances instead of your circumstances claiming you and your happiness. Recovery is finding new meaning for living, without the fear of being hurt again. Recovery is being able to enjoy fond memories without having them precipitate painful feelings of regret or remorse.” It mentions the five emotional stages a dying person may go through after being diagnosed with a terminal illness: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. But it says that grief for death or other significant loss should not be a matter of stages, and that the listed stages may not apply anyway. Who is in denial about a dead spouse or child? Who is angry, unless the loved one was brutally murdered and the murderer claimed diplomatic immunity and escaped punishment? Who is bargaining? No, it is the natural depression we have to deal with. It makes a point that scores with me: “No matter how well you may have thought you were prepared,…you were still massively affected when the death actually happened.” I knew for fifteen years that my wife was declining toward death, and did everything I could to help her, and toward the end as it loomed I knew it was a matter of days, but it was still a supremely ugly and lasting shock. The book makes the point that there can be grief for any type of loss, not just death in the family. For example, moving: you lose most of your friends and have to start over; the familiarity of your home and local environment is gone. That’s a heavy mental burden, especially for a young child who has no control. Another example is marriage: you lose your prior life and start a qualitatively different life. Another is changing your job, especially if you were fired. When I went to full-time writing I expected to be nervous about the loss of a regular income. Instead I discovered that I was relieved that now, working for myself, I could not be blamed for someone else’s mistake, or forced out by office politics. Also financial changes, positive or negative. Yes, when I went to full time writing, at first my wife and I had to scrape by on a minimal and uncertain income. Then when I became a bestseller we went rapidly to wealth. I remain pleased that it did not affect our marriage, except in the sense that we now could live more comfortably. This book also has an interesting definition of Forgiveness. “Forgiveness is giving up the hope of a different or better yesterday.” You are supposed to forgive a transgressor not for his benefit, but for yours, so that the corrosive feelings no longer dissolve your guts. For example, suppose a brute rapes you. You forgive him, but the private subtext might look like this: “You Jerk, I hate you and what you did to me! You terrified me and robbed me of trust and safety. You violated my body, sexually and physically. I have a hard time trusting anyone—even myself—now. I cannot live the rest of my life holding on to the resentment I feel for you. I forgive you so I can be free. But my forgiveness is for me, so I can rebuild my life. More than anything, I hope the police find you and put you on trial and find you guilty and put you away forever. Goodbye!” How’s that for bluntness? I would amend it only by deleting the “goodbye,” as that is actually a contraction of “God be with ye,” and the rapist doesn’t deserve that. Maybe substitute “Go to Hell, where the demons can rape you eternally!”

I read Progressing Through Grief, by Stephanie Jose, LMHC , LCAT. Subtitled Guided Exercises To Understand Your Emotions And Recover From Loss. This is really a workbook,with sixty blank pages for you to fill in with your own experience. “Grieving is a process that does not completely end; it evolves and becomes integrated into your life.” It says that this book is not meant to be read, then set aside; it is meant to be your companion. Since I have my own process for handling my grief, such as writing the biography of my life with my wife, I am indeed setting this book aside, but I can see that it could be quite useful for someone else. Much of its text has been covered in the other books I read on the subject; it is not that this book lacks points, it is that I see no point in repeating them in the column. It encourages the expression of grief. “Most people do not realize the importance of having their words heard by someone else.” “Do whatever it takes to get some laughter in your day. A good laugh is truly medicine and can make even the worst days feel more bearable.” It touches on the guilt some feel for not somehow preventing the death, though they may have had little or no control. “The key to overcoming guilt is realizing that it is self-imposed.” “Guilt is not logical, it is a feeling.”

I read Understanding Your Grief, by Alan D Wolfelt, Ph.D., the last of the six grief books I read this month. He is also the author of the first of these books. Like the others, it has its points. It has ten “Touchstones” for finding hope and healing your heart. T#1 is “Open to the Presence of Your Loss.” “I have learned that we cannot go around the pain that is the wilderness of our grief. Instead we must journey all through it, sometimes shuffling along the less strenuous paths, sometimes plowing directly into the dark center.” It seems that some people try to avoid it, or bury it out of sight, but they are only delaying their recovery. Each Touchstone focuses on a different aspect. Such as T#5 Recognize You are Not Crazy.” Because your mind may be largely zonked out, you may have suicidal thoughts, or get into alcohol or drugs, suffer weird dreams, or have mystical experiences like communicating with the one you lost. “You’re not crazy, you’re grieving.” T#6 is “Understand the Six Needs of Mourning.” These, abbreviated, are 1 Accept the reality of the death. 2 Feel the pain. 3 Remember the person who died. 4 Develop a new self identity. 5 Search for meaning. 6. Let others help you. Thus, step by step, this book helps chart your course through that wilderness. But I wonder about one bit of advice: it says to avoid making any major changes in your life for at least two years, because your judgment is suspect then. Good point. But I am 85 years old; I could be dead in two years. So it seems to me that if I mean to live my life, I need to get on with it now. It says that more than half of remarriages in that period end in divorce. But I have read that half of all marriages end in divorce, so that’s not much of a change. So I expect to be cautious, but ready to make changes if they seem appropriate.

Having seen the TV version, I watched the original movie version of Westworld. The entertainment complex has three venues: West World, Medieval World, and Roman World. The customers take trams to the world of their choice. In this case, it is West. For a thousand dollars a day they get to indulge their dream. They become gunslingers. Our protagonist encounters an insulting man in a bar and shoots him, and he dies bloodily. He was a robot. Then on to the girls of a brothel, who certainly seem human. There’s a bank robbery; at night a crew quietly cleans up the strewn bodies. They are taken to a lab where they are repaired and reanimated. There have been more robot breakdowns recently; what is the cause? Then a customer is arrested for shooting a bad guy. A woman brings him a tray of food along with an explosive so he can break out. He shoots the sheriff, another robot. Then a rattlesnake bites his friend. That’s not supposed to happen. It’s a robot snake; what went wrong? A free-for-all fistfight erupts in a saloon. Naturally the guests survive it in good style. Then a bar girl refuses to be seduced. Why didn’t she follow the program? A robot kills a guest. Now they have lost control of the robots. This is bad mischief. The bad buy who got killed before, played most effectively by Yul Brynner, is now pursuing the guest who killed him. The guest flees to Medieval World, where bodies are strewn all around. And to the repair facility, where there are more bodies. He douses the robot in whiskey, shorting him out so he can’t function properly. That evens the odds somewhat. Then he sets fire to the robot. He rescues a maiden, gives her water—and she shorts out; she was a robot. It is over at last.

I read A Box of Dreams, by Denis Bell. This is a collection of twenty six short stories, most of which had been published elsewhere before. I am an experienced professional writer, and I like stories, but this literary type is foreign to me and I can’t say I understand them except in the sense the title suggests: open a box of dreams, take them out one at a time, try to catch their evanescent messages before they flicker out of sight. Some imagery is startling. A writer is not pleased with the attitude of a small publisher, so he does a parody of their words and sends it in as a story. Only to learn that the publisher folded twenty years before. So it seems they had the last laugh. An executive is assigned a new assistant, but when he is intrigued by her, she disappears, and it is as if she never existed. They invent a machine that tells a person exactly when he is going do die, with 100% accuracy. Is this to be believed? Our protagonist risks the publicity and death threats because he knows he has another thirty years to live. A boy fights back against molestation by his employer. One story, “Placebo,” is only 25 words long: the doctor promises the medicine will start working soon. It may indeed. A girl is stalked by what may be a phantom lover. A professor is fired without cause, and finds a way to destroy the college in return. In “Purple Dress” a man helps a young woman get out of trouble. She says she’s the type who likes to pay her debts, so if he will put on a raincoat she will bend over. Hoo! So while this is not my kind of story collection, parts of it may indeed wend their way into my dreams. I wonder if I have a raincoat handy? Addendum: the author advises me that a raincoat is contemporary slang for a condom. Sigh; that hints at how far out of touch I am; I didn’t know.

Herta Payson died two years ago, age 84; I just learned of it. When I was 11 and she was 12 I had a crush on her that helped define my taste in women thereafter. Folk demean puppy love as of being of little account; I don’t, because I loved her with a passion that was exceeded only by that for the woman I later married. It was not returned; indeed Herta did not even know of it until decades later. She had a full life and three children, had a master’s degree in Jungian psychotherapy and had a psychotherapy practice. She also danced and choreographed. Obviously she was well beyond my compass, and in any event she would not have been the woman in later life that I had known as a girl. But she did teach me how to play chess, and her mark remains in me. Rest in peace, Herta.

My daughter Cheryl, who pretty much enabled me to survive the loss of my wife, looked up and downloaded the current Wikipedia entry on me. It is ball-park accurate, with aspects garbled. It doesn’t seem worth correcting it, as someone else could come along and overwrite my corrections with more inaccurate information. The only source for accurate information about me is HiPiers.com. Others who claim to speak for me, don’t.

Cheryl also downloaded an article on Writer’s Block. I don’t suffer from it, having realized early on that I could not afford it, any more that I could afford stage fright when addressing an audience. Teaching math in the US Army and English in civilian life cured me of stage fright, and my so-called [bracket] system enables me to write at any time, anywhere. That dates from when I wrote in pencil on a clipboard; when my text stalled I would discuss the matter with myself in brackets, so that I could readily edit out that material when typing the second draft. Later with the computer I simply used a separate comment file, and that system still works for me today. It should work for anybody. So I suspect that a writer who suffers chronic block does not, at heart, really want to write. Cheryl also downloaded a collection of comments by Ray Bradbury. What I remember from years ago is someone’s comment about Bradbury, that initially he wrote an enormous amount of enormously bad fiction. But gradually he improved until he became successful. That was the case for me too; I wrote for eight years before I sold anything, but I kept moving and learning and finally did get there. Bradbury loved writing; so do I. I think of Theodore Sturgeon, arguably the finest stylist the science fiction genre has produced, beloved by the critics, with editors clamoring for his work, yet he never achieved a fraction of the commercial success I did. What do I have that he lacked? Discipline; when I have a job to do, I do it. But I also love writing, as he did not. And I tune in on what folk actually like to read, which is something like anathema to the critics, who evidently think that they should be the arbiters of public taste. As a very general rule, if the critics love it, chances are you won’t. This may account for why students often don’t like studying literature; it is critic approved. A new study indicates that vegetarians have healthier hearts, but more cases of stroke. I’m a vegetarian; my heart seems healthy. But my mind? And sexual orientation is on a continuum, rather than being one or the other.

I have gotten behind on my science magazine reading, because of the emotional and detail complications of the loss of my wife, but do have brief passing comments. NEW SCIENTIST had an article on empathy, titled “Why do we care?” zeroing in on what I call empathy, the ability to relate to the feelings of others. I believe that to a considerable extent it defines the human species. Bones fire up the body’s response to danger, releasing a hormone that helps; it seems the bones are not inert supports. About 6.5 percent of American women say that their first sexual experience was rape; the average victim was 15 years old. This is a sad comment on our culture, but I suspect the true figure is double that. Item from The New York Times: “Frightened Republicans have decided that they have to ‘play dirty’ to win.” That’s nothing new. As I see it, their attitude was “Sure we cheated in 2000; we had to, to win. And we’ll do it again. Get over it.” I speak as one who resents the way that Florida in 2000 actually voted Democrat, but was put in the Republican column by the Supreme Court on a party-line vote, giving the presidential election to the Republicans, who promptly got us into an unjustified war with Iraq, and the complications thereof, such as Isis. But you know there are huge private profits to be made from war. I am a naturalized citizen and a registered independent; I hate to see corruption take over my adopted country. THE WEEK reprinted an item from THE WASHINGTON POST, concluding that the press had treated Hillary Clinton’s email handling as a virtual crime. “In fact, the coverage treated Clinton’s ‘transgressions as far worse than his, when the opposite was clearly true.’ As a result of that historic error, a deeply corrupt, amoral reality TV star is now ‘the most powerful person on Earth.’” Yes, par for that course. Warning from the health newsletter ALTERNATIVES about treatment resistant sepsis that is spreading in US hospitals, with a forty percent mortality rate. But injected Vitamin C can stop it—if the hospitals want to. But it may be that as with curing cancer, there’s no money in it for the special interests. Tech companies retort that last year there were 45 million online photos and videos of children being sexually abused, double the number of a year before. I wonder again: what is this apparent appetite for sex with children? I hate to think it could be part of the normal range. Article republished in THE WEEK: the Lie Detector doesn’t work, but they still use it. October 10, 2019 CITRUS COUNTY CHRONICLE has 30 pages of a “Sassy Cups” contest featuring ornately decorated bras. For example the Crystal River Country Store shows a bra made to resemble a cow’s udder. That does make sense, doesn’t it? They are milking it for what it is worth. New word to me: pyrocumulonimbus, a type of cloud rising from an intense wildfire. Chemists create a new form of carbon: cyclocarbon, a nine sided molecule. Other forms of carbon are diamond, graphite, graphene, buckyballs, and carbon nonotubes. It’s a versatile element. And they are zeroing in on the origin of the female orgasm; how does it benefit the species? In rabbits ovulation can be triggered by copulation, so maybe orgasm also relates, to make the ladies more amenable. But some antidepressants, such as Prozac, reduce the ability to orgasm. So maybe rabbits breed no well because they don’t take Prozac?

And I watched Green Card, which was suggested to me because I am considering converting our returned-to-nature pool to a garden or greenhouse, and there’s supposed to be a nice greenhouse sequence there. It starts with a marriage of convenience, a French composer, Georges, and a lady horticulturist, BrontE. By marrying her he can get a Green Card so he can live in the USA, and she can live in a fancy apartment of her dreams, associated with an elaborate garden that needs special care. So first they marry, then they meet. The immigration people inquire how they met, and they have to make up an impromptu story. They realize that they need to get their stories straight, because they may be questioned separately about each other’s habits. They have to fake up their supposed relationship, taking pictures. Then BrontE runs into Phil, the man she loved. And Georges is disturbed. He is supposed to move on out of her life soon, but he is obviously jealous. Then it is time for their separate interviews. They pass them, and separate, but both are uncomfortable. He composes music for her and sends her the script of it. They meet again, and hug and kiss. They put the wedding rings back on their fingers. They separate, but hope to be together soon. But I never got a good look at that supposedly fabulous penthouse greenhouse. So I watched an interview feature on the disc, and caught some more glimpses.

It has now been a month since my wife died, and I am tiding through and making tentative plans for what remains of my future. There will surely be more anon.

PIERS

Dismember 2019

HI-

Open Road is running sales on my ebooks books there. With luck this will be posted Dismember 1, and with further luck you may see it in time to catch these ones. Statesman andRoc and a Hard Place are $1.99 on the first. The Cluster series in $2.99 on the second, and Xone of Contention $1.99 on the second.

It is now two months since my wife died. I am tiding through well enough, sleeping better, catching up on things. Family visits have been an emotional help. I returned to writing Xanth #46 Six Crystal Princesses, after a month doing “My Rose With Thorns,” and it moved well. Fans tell me that my novels represent a diversion from the problems in their lives, a kind of safe harbor, helping them cope. Well, it turns out to work similarly with me, because I feel distinctly better when I’m in Xanth instead of my mundane grief. I am now at the final chapter, and will probably complete the novel by the turn of the year. So what will I do in the time originally slotted for #46, Jamboree, FeBlueberry, and Marsh 2020? I will probably start writing #47, Apoca Lips. Apoca is introduced in #46. She is queen of the Lips tribe, with outsize lips; when she kisses a man and applies her magic, it makes him her love slave. For some reason the neighbor men don’t like that, preferring that all the submissiveness be on the female side, so there is war. They try to put hoods on the women so they can’t kiss but are there for the rest of whatever. But there is one man from a distant land who likes Apoca as she is, and their relationship is the substance of this novel. It may become world-shattering before it finishes; I can’t think why.

I watched Rupture. Renee is an ordinary housewife, a divorcee. There’s a spider in the sink and she freaks out; her young son picks it up in his hands and takes it out. She is being watched. Someone puts a device on her tire that gives her a flat on the highway. A man volunteers to change the tire for her, but he is part of a group that suddenly tasers and kidnaps her. She is bound and gagged in a moving truck, and taken to a laboratory. She struggles, but she is securely chained. She hears others in the lab screaming. She learns that G10 12X is what they need people for, whatever it is. There are 20 people here. They seem to be being tortured. Renee is questioned about things like allergies and fears. gets injected with something, an orange fluid . They sniff her skin, literally. Then a tarantula comes, freaking her out. When alone, she manages to break free and crawls into a vent passage. She peers through other vents and sees other people being tortured, different ways. She gets loose in the lab and explores it. She climbs an air shaft to the roof, but can’t break out there. She continues sneaking around the lab, avoiding the personnel. She is getting good at spying. Then she gets back on her bed, in her chains, before they catch her. Then she uses an injection intended for her, on one of her captors, and wheels the unconscious captor to a different section. She flees through a labyrinth of tunnels and chambers, but they recapture her. G10 12X turns out to be a genome they are trying to evoke is the captives. They put a helmet on her, filled with spiders that run over her face. Until her face distorts, cracking the helmet off. She has ruptured. They return her to her home, where she no longer fears spiders at all. She helps her son Evan escape them. So she is now one of them, but not on their side. Can she hide her true orientation from them?

I watched Kiss of the Damned. Djuna is a beautiful vampire. Handsome human screenwriter Paolo courts her, not knowing her nature. She begs him to go, and he does, mystified. He visits her at her home, and she rejects him after kissing him and biting him so that he bleeds. Finally she tells him that she’s a vampire, feeding on blood, with no heartbeat. The problem is that her passion for him is rising. She has him chain her to the bed by wrists and ankles so that she can’t hurt him, but he unlocks the chains. They make love without kissing. She has bitten him so he will become a vampire too. She tells him all about their small vampire community. Now he can move in with her. Then her vampire sister Mimi comes to stay for a week. This is mischief. Their mother Xenia knows and isn’t concerned. Mimi goes out and seduces a man, bites him, and kills him. That by the vampire standard is moral; “turning” and living with a man is not. He meets the vampire community. They have a supply of synthetic blood. Mimi gems into sex with a man and woman together, until Djuna breaks it up. Then she goes and takes on another couple. It seems that taking their blood gives her extra strength. This is more mischief. She takes Paolo’s agent, or causes Djuna to take him. More mischief. She comes after Paolo, seducing him. Yet more mischief. Then she brings a virgin, Anne, to Xenia’s home. This is wickedly tempting for Xenia. Even more mischief. Why is she doing this? Of course Xenia feeds on the virgin and kills her; she can’t help herself, as Mimi knew would be the case. Djuna and Paolo confess to each other, but the damage is already done. Then Mimi wrecks in a car, but survives. She drags herself home, needs the human maid’s help, but the maid, knowing the score, refuses. Maybe now the mischief is over.

I read god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens. That’s the way the title is, the first word not capitalized. I am agnostic, borderline atheistic, and I am interested in truth wherever it may be. This is a tirade against religion, often using prejudicial language. One quote will show what I mean: “In 1844, one of the greatest American religious ‘revivals’ occurred, led by a semiliterate lunatic named William Miller. Mr. Miller managed to crowd the mountaintops of America with credulous fools…” This is unfortunate, because the author makes a powerful case that pretty well damns religion in many aspects. It is clear that religion does not ennoble its believers; to the contrary, it causes them to do outrageous things, like burning unbelievers alive or otherwise torturing them to death. Children can be brutalized or rendered into sex objects. Religion supported slavery. “The most devout Christians made the most savage slaveholders.” He does not spare religion’s leaders. “Gandhi…was quite prepared to make hypocritical use of violence when he thought it might suit him.” Chapter after chapter he builds an overwhelming case against religion. I fault him again because he does not discuss the good that religion does, only the evil. There is certainly much evil, but that is hardly the whole story. Too bad.

I watched Alone With Her, a story of stalking. It shorts with a man’s images of girls on the beach, shots of partly exposed breasts and up between the legs as they lie on the sand. Then Doug orients on Amy. She’s the one! He manages to plant a spy camera in her apartment. He talks with her at the coffee shop, she not knowing about the cameras. Doug is watching as she makes a date with a co-worker, Matt, and is jealous. He tries to make a date with her himself, but she declines because of the date she already has. He says okay, but is privately furious. He helps her prepare some pictures, but she finds something intangibly odd about him. Meanwhile she’s really interested in Matt. She goes to bed, but develops an itchy rash. Then she accidentally knocks down the camera. Then she steps on broken glass and badly cuts her foot and hand. Her friend Jen gets suspicious of Doug. He kills Jen. Amy is broken up about it, not knowing Doug did it. She thinks he’s her good friend. They make out, her initiative, but break it off. Then she realizes that he planted the cameras. They fight. He throttles her. That effectively ends the movie.

Interesting column by Cory Doctorow in LOCUS, a magazine of science fiction and fantasy news. The essence is that John W Campbell, the longtime editor of ASTOUNDING later ANALOG Science Fiction magazine, was a fascist. ASTOUNDING was one of the magazines I came up with, back in the 1950s, considered the best in the field, whose editor actually read his slush pile (that is, the accumulation of submissions by writers and amateurs) and gleaned the best of it, treating newcomers fairly. As I recall, five my own stories emerged from that pile to be published there. Campbell actually did his job, in contrast to some. I remember H L Gold, editor of GALAXY, telling me not to even try to compete with the big boys, though in the longer term I was more successful than maybe 95% of them. Obviously I respected Campbell more than Gold. Yet there was a problem. I remember discussing it with another writer, then more established than I was: should I be selling my stories to an editor who seemed to be a covert racist? He replied that what should concern me was not the man’s personal philosophy, but his manner of doing his job as editor, which was exemplary. That struck me as good advice, and I followed it. After all, as a vegetarian I don’t demand that editors be vegetarians; that’s not relevant to storytelling. Neither is racism, usually. Still, it bothered me, and other writers, as this present article clarifies. Some feel that Campbell was responsible for setting a tone of science fiction “that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists.” Indeed, major portions of my own work do not fit the Campbell mode, because as a naturalized alien myself I support aliens in science fiction and fantasy. (I came to America as a six-year-old English child in 1940.) So the question remains: what do you do when the best editor in the field has a personal philosophy you can’t abide? Doctorow remarks that the person who recently called attention to this, Jeaette Ng, “has been subjected to a triple-ration of abuse and vitriol, much of it with sexist and racist overtones.” They blame her for telling the truth about Campbell? I am ashamed for my genre.

The October/November 2019 leftist magazine THE PROGRESSIVE (yes, I am more leftist than rightist) has an article by Karen Dawn titled “Beyond the Slaughterhouse” about producing real meat without killing animals. It poses the question asked at a Good Food Conference last year “If the new meat being grown is called ‘cell based’ or ‘cultured,’ shouldn’t traditional meat be labeled ‘slaughtered?’” That is surely more polite than my term “dead cow.” Not only does traditional meat kill herds of animals, the industry is a major global polluter driving climate change. We have to stop it if we are to save the world from ugly destruction. This real meat is grown in the laboratory from animal cells, which can be taken from dead animals or still living ones without hurting them. I’m not sure how I feel about that personally, as the very notion of real meat turns me off, but philosophically it makes sense. Not only does it spare the animals, it is actually cleaner, because the pollutants ingested by animals are not in it. So it can be called Clean Meat, literally as well as ethically. It seems two me to be worth pursuing commercially. During the Thanksgiving holidays I tried a Burger King Impossible Burger; I can’t verify the liketess, as I have not eaten real meat in 65 years, but this tasked okay to me.

I live in Citrus County, Florida. The physical climate is nice, but I never liked the political climate. Recently it made the national news, because when a local library wanted a digital subscription to the NEW YORK TIMES, for its 70,000 local library cardholders, the commissioners balked. “Why the heck would we spend money on something like that?” “Do we really need to subscribe to The New York Times?” “Fake news. I agree with President Trump. I don’t want The New York Times in this county. I don’t agree with it. I don’t like ’em, it’s fake news and I’m voting no.” Understand, this “fake news” newspaper over the years has won more than a hundred Pulitzer Prizes, and is globally renowned for its accuracy. But these Trump Republicans don’t want the local folk to have it. Protesters are asking snidely how these commissioners feel about censorship and partisanship. How, indeed! Tourists are announcing that they will cross Citrus County off their travel plans. Actually the libraries do have print copies of the newspaper, but home-bound cardholders can’t read those. Of course a commissioner has someone to blame for the bad publicity: the local newspaper, THE CITRUS COUNTY CHRONICLE, for blabbing. An anonymous “Sound Off” comment said “The Chronicle should run a correction. Last weekend they said we should set our clocks back one hour. In fact, we should set our clocks back 100 years; back to a time of bigotry, ignorance and political prejudice.” Another comment: “If ignorance is bliss, the Citrus County Commission meeting room must be a place of sheer ecstasy.” And “What ever happened to evolution? Darwin had it all wrong. Man is still an ape.” This fracas is still playing out, but maybe some good will come of it, like maybe a new, more liberal, open minded, slate of commissioners who won’t seek to deny folk their preferences in objective news. I hope so. Who knows, Citrus County might even venture into the 21st century. Newspaper article asks whether we remember when the Republican Party was for fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets, and conservative democratic principles? It concludes that that party no longer exists, and the GOP may be going the way of the Whigs, I wonder.

We have been massively cleaning up the house, and odd things turn up. One was a 20-year-old collection of notes and clippings for my weekly Jenny letter of the time. Remember, Jenny is the paralyzed girl I have been writing to since 1989. This was a story in the newspaper. Five surgeons discuss who made the best patients to operate on. The first one said Accountants, because everything inside is numbered. The second said Electricians, because everything inside is color-coded. The third said Librarians, everything inside is in alphabetical order. The fourth said Construction Workers, because they understand when you have a few parts left over at the end, and when the job takes longer than you said it would. The fifth one said Politicians, because there’s no guts, no heart, no spine, and the head and butt are interchangeable. This seems as true today as it was twenty years ago, especially here in Citrus County.

NEW SCIENTIST article by Graham Lawton says we have a way to predict and change the world. Should we use it? This is Multi-agent artificial intelligence, MAAI, a technology that allows predictions to be made with extraordinary accuracy by testing them in highly detailed simulations that amount to entire artificial societies. In this political season such a thing is of interest. It seems it was used in 2014 when an Ebola epidemic broke out in West Africa. The model predicted that if left unchecked it would infect 1.4 million people. So they adopted quarantine measures and safe burial practices, and infections were only 28,000. Maybe that was coincidence, but it is persuasive. Now the game has changed, driven by a dramatic improvement in computing power, data, scientific understanding of human nature, and of course artificial intelligence. Now we really can model humans, and major cities, and ultimately the world. So can the effects of significant population shifts be figured out? Such as 20,000 Syrian refugees settling in Norway? What about climate change? That’s at a tipping point that can destroy society as we know it, and we are in desperate need of a feasible solution. But at article published in Forbes.com says that climate change isn’t all that bad. Well, we’ll see, in due course, won’t we. What about the proliferation of dangerous hate on the internet? But there are serious cautions. They modeled a society with a majority religious group in conflict with a minority one—and there was a spiral into deadly violence. How could they restore peace? The simulation suggested genocide. So now in politics, using MAAI, about the only ethical requirement that could be placed on models is transparency. The article asks “Does that make you feel secure?” Considering the definition of a politician in the prior paragraph, and by observation of the current political scene, I have to say it scares me. But as the article also says, the genie will soon be out of the bottle. This is coming, regardless.

On Thanksgiving Day my daughter, and a guest, and I went to see A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, about Mister Rogers. It is a completely different take on the subject than the other movie I reviewed recently. My conclusion—remember I am not a believer, so you may dismiss this if you wish—is that if Jesus should come again, he would resemble Mister Rogers.

Briefer notes, gleaned from my recent reading; Half of your career success may be due to luck, especially with films, songs, books, and scientific research papers. Yes; this confirms what I had figured for my own career and that of others I have seen. So some supposed geniuses are mainly lucky. Climate change: there is a backlash against protesters, but the new wave of protests is creating a political climate for much-needed action. Domestic violence: it continues, with most being men against women, but some the other way around, or in same-sex couples. How can it be stopped? Criminalizing it isn’t slowing the rate. Early intervention to change sexist attitudes may help, and public educational campaigns. It exists world wide, and locally; my wife volunteered at a local abused women’s shelter for nine years, and my daughter still does. Evolution: early mammals may have had cold blood. So what caused them to turn warm? Mammals appeared in the middle Jurassic, about 170 million years ago, but their temperature is uncertain. War: today America has 35,000 tanks, but not crews for them, yet they keep building tanks. Why? Because constructing them is good for the economy. But I understand from prior reading that money invested directly in, for example, helping the poor, is more effective economically than the same amount invested in war. Meanwhile here in Florida, about 700 poor people die each year for lack of medical care. Quarks: they are the most fundamental form of matter, but do they really exist? There are six types, but some are disappearing. Are they changing into some other kind? Another item on loneliness says the effect of chronic loneliness on morbidity is the same as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and may be worse than obesity or diabetes. I, as one who recently lost his wife, am conscious of that, and working to restore companionship. Quote in the Citrus County Chronicle by Harry Leon Wilson: “Hell is given up so reluctantly by those who don’t expect to go there.” Yes; and if Hell does exist, some of those sanctimonious folk may be in for an ugly surprise. Letter in the Tampa Bay Times by David Nathanson points out that times have changed from the founding of America, and now votes don’t take months to be counted, but are tabulated immediately. So the original reason for the Electoral College no longer exists. But with gerrymandering the counting process has been corrupted, so that the popular winner does not necessarily win the election. We are seeing the result of that. A baby on the vegan diet died from malnourishment, and the parents are charged with manslaughter. Now I have been seriously considering the vegan diet, and I don’t believe it has to be nutritionally inadequate. As a vegetarian I knew I had be smart about what I ate, and a vegan has to be smarter, but no child need die on that diet. Newspaper article by Emily Sheng tells of her startling health crisis from an autoimmune disease, lupus. She says that thirty years ago the chances of developing an autoimmune disease wore one in four hundred, but it is one it twelve today. That’s interesting. My wife suffered from an autoimmune disease, and it severely limited her options. The article says that air pollution is a culprit. That’s one more reason to curb the pollution we are causing; we are dying from it. Letter by Michael Pravica says we need to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources, stop the decimation of our forests, and plant more trees. Amen! Item in New Scientist says that a few days in the hospital changes your gut bacteria. That can be mischief. More and more children are experiencing eco-anxiety. Some think that’s an illness, but it is actually an outbreak of sanity. Expose republished in THE WEEK originally from Haaretz Magazine is an expose of China’s “re-education” camps. My conclusion: stay away from those camps, especially if you are a young woman. They may not be as bad as what the Nazis were doing in World War Two, but there are similarities. They are punishment for nonconformity to the communist line; original thinkers need not apply. Item on whistle-blowers, those who report fraud, waste, crimes, or threats to public safety. The wrongdoers hate being tattled on, and punish the whistleblowers accordingly. That’s why they need anonymity. I regard my six year tenure as a blacklisted writer as similar; I demanded that the cheating publisher honor its contract, and they tried to wash me out of business. It is why I honor anonymity in my survey of electronic publishers, who will do the same to any whistleblowers they catch. Now there is a book, The Triumph Of Injustice: How The Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. Lotsa luck there, folks. I am far from the billionaire class, but I have investments in things like tax-free bonds. I am tempted by the so called flat tax, where everyone pays the same rate, with no exceptions. But the very rich simply move their assets out of the country. Actually the effective tax rate paid now is close to flat, because of the way the rich avoid it while the poor can’t. And information about the Kurds, whose territory was split between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran and have no country of their own. President Trump was the latest of a number to betray them. They have not been fairly treated. Newspaper article reports of the powers that be say that it is too expensive to consider climate change, but that the truth is that it is too expensive not to deal with it. I fear we are doomed, though I don’t think I will live to see it. The young who are protesting our inaction are correct. And the pro life/ pro choice debate continues. My take is that an individual life does begin at conception, and that baby deserves its chance. But most pro-lifers seem not really to care about that; once the baby is birthed they proffer no support. I feel that there should be universal sex education and contraception so that no unwanted babies are conceived, and I regard many of those who are pro-life but anti contraception as hypocrites. If a born baby is not wanted, then there should be facilities to take care of it and raise it as a ward of the government. So no one has to die, but population may to some degree be controlled. And an item on killer asteroids. NASA is watching, but can’t identify all of them, and one could slip through and smash us. If one more than half a mile wide hits, that would be real mischief, if there are survivors. An interesting illness is Mal de debarquerment syndrome, in which folk suffer not from sea sickness but from land sickness, unable to adapt to land that is not swaying under them. And there is a growing problem with homemade “ghost guns” that escape regulations and wind up in the hands of killers. Well, I have a solution: register the ammunition.

On that cheery note, I wind up the month of NoRemember. As I wrote at the outset of this column, I am tiding through, and it should be evident that my opinionations are as varied and ornery as ever.

PIERS

Jamboree 2020

HI-

This month, Jamboree 2020, Open Road has Xanth #20 Yon Ill Wind on sale all month in the USA for $1.99. That’s the one where the Demon Xanth loses a Demon wager and has to assume the form of a donkey-headed dragon and associate with a mortal woman, who must shed one tear of grief or love for him before he is freed. And he gets the wrong woman, Chlorine, whose talent is to poison water. She has long since cried herself out, is bitter, and has only one tear left, which she is not about to waste on such a monster. A Mundane family also gets lost in a storm and winds up in Xanth, joining them. So if you like really fouled up fantasy cheap, here’s your chance. Face it: if you had good taste, you wouldn’t be here.

I watched Firefox. Firefox is the code name for a radar-invisible thought controlled airplane that flies at six times the speed of sound, the most formidable war machine ever built. But it’s Russian. Gant (Clint Eastwood) is sent on a secret mission to steal it. He has three months of training. He visits Moscow as a legitimate businessman. They are watching him, following him. He is supposed to meet three men and do exactly what they say. He meets them; they kill one of them and put Gant’s papers on the body. Now he is officially dead and has assumed a new identity, escaping the surveillance. But the KGB picks up on him again, he kills one and escapes again. The two he met are helping him. They set him up with another new identity, but the Soviets are on their tail. He leaves the moving car at night; his companion will try to lead the pursuit astray. He succeeds in bashing the pursuing car into a flaming rollover. Gant connects with a man and woman team who brief him on the layout of the complex and the details of the route to the plane. There will be a fiery diversion. Finally he sees the plane itself, a futuristic machine. But now they know who he is, and that he is in the complex. The diversion starts, and fire rages. The ones who helped him die. He boards the plane and starts it up. He makes it outside and takes off. The Soviet authorities contact him and ask him to return. He declines, then reverses course. They think he is going south; he. He heads north. He puts the plane through its impressive paces. They figure out where he is going, as they ready the duplicate plane. They search for his refueling craft. He is running out of fuel and must refuel. The refueling submarine rises through the ice of the sea. Gant lands beside it, barely avoiding the bare water. They start refueling, but the Soviets are converging. Refueled, Gant takes off again. He thinks he’s home free. Then the duplicate craft catches up with him. They duel in air with bullets and missiles. Gant manages to destroy the other craft. Now he can make it safely home. I think this movie could be shortened by half an hour in the first half, but then it gets into good, compelling action.

Daughter Cheryl rearranged the living room and got a new Blu-Ray/DVD player, so we tried out the setup watching Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. The first Jumanji as I recall was a wild board game that led into things like stampeding elephants. This one is a video game. Four teens in detention discover an old video game console, turn it on, and soon get literally sucked into a jungle world, and into the bodies of their avatars. One pretty girl finds herself in the body of a nondescript man; the more ordinary girl becomes a martial arts woman. A nerd turns into a muscular man. All this requires some adjusting, especially since they are not conversant with the jungle, and there are marauding cyclists coming after them. One fun sequence is when the former pretty girl, now a portly bearded man with glasses, drills the other is how to be sexy. Then that girl goes to distract several men most effectively until she is close enough to lay them out with roundhouse kicks, while the others in the group accomplish what they need to to progress in the game. They have to win the game in order to get out of it. They finally succeed, and return to their original bodies, but their relationships to each other have changed. It’s a worthwhile movie.

I lead A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken, which was recommended by reader Chad Jones. The title relates to the supposed mercy of not losing love, death being preferable but severe. Death in love, not death of love. The author knew C S Lewis, and a number of Lewis letters are included in the text. Sheldon fell in love with Davy, nickname of his girlfriend and later wife, and neither could face the prospect of losing the other, so they made a pact to die together, “The Shining Barrier.” But then she did get ill and die and he had to suffer. C S Lewis was helpful throughout, and then Lewis fell in love and lost his wife, and wrote A Grief Observed, which I reviewed last month. So it is an interesting connection. I appreciate it all the more by being in my own grief when reading them. He suffers, then Davy returns to him for a brief visit. He knows she is dead, that this is a dream, but it is her, and he is glad of it. She says she can’t stay long, and she departs. Then he suffers what he calls the second death: the end of his grief. He now accepts that she is gone; all that is left is emptiness. He would rather have kept the grief, because then he was closer to her. I relate to that too.

Daughter Cheryl got loose on Black Friday and bought things on sale-we are suckers for sales–including a giant 55 inch diagonal TV, twice the size of anything we have had before. It has all sorts of features that I, a relic from a prior century, am not familiar with. But some I like, such as the subtitles on regular TV broadcasts. I have hearing aids now, but dialogue can still come across mushy, so subtitles really help. We watched one of her DVDs, Alita, Battle Angel, which turned out to be a near future fantasy about a man who discovers the remnant of an cyborg, that is, a human brain and android body, only the head, chest, and one arm remaining, thrown away in the junk pile. He happens to be an android repairman, so he builds her into a new body, and she’s one cute seventeen year old girl with a mostly mechanical body. Contemporary animation makes it look real. She turns out to be a sophisticated warrior, the most advanced of her kind. She takes on monstrous android men who treat her with contempt, and reduces them to, well, rubbish. This is one case when a delicate-looking girl can indeed battle big men effectively, because her heart has enough power to run a city for months, and her speed and training are formidable, and she has motive and guts, so to speak. So it is mostly a slam bang action show, but fun. And no, they didn’t have her flashing luscious flesh. I enjoyed it anyway.

The second movie we watched on the big new TV screen was Pokemon: Detective Pikachu. As I have mentioned, I come from the 20th century and am not really at home in the new 21st century. Pokemon is one of the things I don’t properly comprehend. As I understand it, the Pokemon characters are animate cartoons that mix with real people, and there are supposed to be teams of one of each, so that they can accomplish greater things, whatever they may be. The Pokemon Pikachu gets together with our human protagonist, a regular man, and they try to solve the mystery of the man’s father’s death. It looked like an accident as his car drove off the road into a canyon, but they are suspicious. One character who seems like an enemy is MewTwo, who reminds me of Catwoman in another series: feline, female, and intriguing. She is bare and breasted, but not provocatively so. But she is not a cat; she’s more like a dinosaur in cat form, with a substantial serpent’s tail. It turns out that she is actually on their side. When bad guys blasted father’s car off the road, she saved him by merging him with his Pokemon companion, who was better able to survive the crash. At the end she undoes the merger and father is back alive. There’s a whole lot else I hardly grasped, but it is nevertheless a fun movie. If they have another with MewTwo in it, I’ll probably watch it.

The third one we watched was Captain Marvel, this one female. It’s a bit jumpy for my taste; modern film makers seem to have forgotten the craft of intelligible storytelling. It is mostly about her loss of memory so she doesn’t understand the extent of her powers, and about the several malign enemies she encounters, who are trying to learn more about her. Finally she manages to fight her way out of the traps she falls into and recover parts of her memory. Then she discovers that the good aliens she was helping are actually bad ones, and the enemy aliens are good ones who have been maligned. This is mischief. At the end she swears that she will be going after the real bad guys soon. So we shall surely see a sequel, in due course. She has a phenomenal female shape when in costume, but up close she’s more like an ordinary girl; no sexy exposure. No romance to speak of, either; this is action and mystery.

I read Simone and the Serpent’s Sword by Davina Purnell. This is a standard fantasy, with the protagonist starting confused but finishing by winning all the marbles, at it were. With one difference: Simone is a teen who recently birthed a son, Joel, whom she nicknames Sweet Pea. This complicates her role as a sword wielder. She was in foster care, until a set of foster parents adopted her. Who in their right mind, adopts a pregnant teen? she wonders. But as it turns out, later, they had reason; they knew something she did not. She settles down to sleep with her baby—and wakes in a racing carriage drawn by four horses who are headed right for a cliff. She tries to stop them but they pay her no attention. Then a big man with golden hair rides up and grabs the traces of the lead team, and pulls them in a wide turn away from the cliff and guides them to a stop. He is Twain, and he becomes her companion as the story proceeds. So it starts with action, and continues with revelations. Simone is actually a Lady with unusual powers, which she needs to master in order to accomplish her mission here, saving the good kingdom. But she also has to take care of Sweet Pea and complete her mundane classes, so it’s a fair load. The writing is not completely professional and there are perhaps electronic reader generated typos, but overall it is interesting and consistent, a worthwhile story.

I watched Love, Death, and Robots,an adult animated science fiction anthology consisting of 18 assorted episodes.

“Sonnie’s Edge” A fighting woman is offered a substantial bribe to throw a match. She refuses. She was tortured before, her face marked. and now is getting back at the men who did this to her. Two monsters fight in the ring; the smaller, femalish one, finally wins the gory struggle. Then a beautiful young woman visits her seductively, and abruptly attacks her, smashing her: the briber’s revenge for her denial. But then she reanimates as the monster and kills tho woman and the briber; she wasn’t in that body. It was a counter-trap.

“Three Robots.” Three robots visit a post-apocalyptic city. One resembles a powerful man, another is an orange dwarf, the third is a female shaped like a pyramid. They discuss how humans eliminated themselves by poisoning air, water, and land. They encounter cats, who now dominate this world.

“The Witness” a young woman sees a murder committed. She tries to summon help, but it’s complicated. She strips nude, escaping, then dresses, to a degree. She does escape, I think.

“Suits” Henry “Hank” Graves goes out to check a breach in security while Beth remains inside to keep track of things. He operates a giant walking robot, but things are attacking. They are thousands of DeBees. Then dinosaur-like machines attack. They save the farm, but lose a neighbor.

“Sucker of Souls” Archaeologists explore a tomb, and are attacked by the demons within. They get trapped inside, the exit guarded by Dracula the Impaler. They encounter dozens” of cats.

“When the Yogurt Took Over.” A special new yogurt culture becomes sentient. The yogurt takes over. Then the yogurt takes off for the stars, leaving mankind behind.

“Beyond the Aquila Rift” Greta says there’s been a navigation error, and now they are light years off course. The man and Greta make love. They are 150,000 light years from home, and it is several hundred years later. In it really Greta? Suzy doubts it. Greta is a multi-legged insect. But she does like him and the others.

“Good Hunting” Magical creatures are losing their magic and getting weaker. Yan is stuck in her human form, and then in I think a cyborg form. Now she just wants to hunt the evil men who did this to her. Assisted by a deadly cat.

“The Dump” the old man Dvorchack is supposed to clear out of the dump, as it has been sold. So he tells a story. A monster eats his friend. Then back in the present the monster eats the inspector. The dump will survive.

“Shape Shifters” Decker’s desert squad is attacked. Some soldiers are shape shifters, werewolves, who are unpopular with the regulars. There is a night fight between two werewolves, theirs and ours. Ours kills theirs, and carries the body into the desert.

“Helping Hand” Anthem is a spacewoman, working on a station in orbit. A malfunction dooms her to die in space. She disconnects pieces of her suit and herself to throw of impel her to safety, sacrificing her left arm. Ouch!

“Fish Night” Two men get stranded in the desert when their car stalls. This region was once a sea. They sleep in the car, and wake under the sea. Fish and swimming reptiles surround them. The younger man strips and swims to the surface. And gets eaten.

“Lucky 13” Name of the ship that lost two crews, so a woman gets to pilot it next. They go on a mission, get attacked, and fly in caves underground to escape. She flies 19 more mission, and suffers no casualties. Thus it becomes Lucky 13. They get caught on the ground, but do save the men. She gets a new ship, but she wishes it could still be Lucky 13.

“Zima Blue” Zima is a muralist, painting ever greater things. Claire finally gets to interview him. Zima had become a cyborg. He had started as a woman. Claire must tell that story.

“Blindspot” Their mwission is to steal a microchip. Kali, the rookie, gets the toughest jobs. But they succeed, though the others are saved only by their back-up brains.

“Ice Age” They discover a frozen lost civilization in their refrigerator. As they watch it progresses rapidly to more recent cultures, right up to nuclear war. Then it makes it to the future. Then it is gone. And back to the dinosaurs, with cave men, yet.

“Alternate Histories” Multiversity explores six alternate scenarios for Adolf Hitler’s death, changing history. They get pretty wild, concluding with the squids taking over.

“The Secret War.” A Russian winter setting, World War Two. They encounter some kind of monster. Then more monsters come. They send one on a pony to break out and tell the authorities to bomb this place to rubble. They will die to save the world. It’s an ugly struggle. The monsters win, but the bombing comes.

I did manage to finish writing the 102,000 words novel Xanth #46 Six Crystal Princesses, wherein four children go to rescue six princesses locked in crystals, and that turns out to be quite an adventure. Toward the end it introduces Apoca of the Lips tribe, who has a potent kiss and will be featured in her own novel, Xanth #47 Apoca Lips. That may be world shattering; can’t think why. And on to my review of Crystal:

I read Six Crystal Princesses, by Piers Anthony. This is Xanth #46, written early because I needed a distraction from my wife’s decline and death. It did help. The story concerns the twin children of Princess Ida, Ion and Hilda, age eleven, who decide to rescue six crystallized princesses from a dragon. Ida had been crystallized but accidentally released, and gone on to marry Prince Hilarion of the Kingdom of Adamant, next door to Xanth. But what about the other princesses? How could mere children tackle such a project with any chance of success? Well, Ion is a Magician and Hilda is a Sorceress, and their magic is potent. Still, they were supposed to fail to make it to the Good Magician, a gentle way of preventing them from getting into real trouble. But the protagonist is Vinia, a girl with short range telekinetic power, who helps Ion to walk, and she manages to pass the challenges and win their way through to the Good Magician’s castle. After that they have a fabulous adventure, not only rescuing the princesses, but helping to establish the feminist Queendom of Thanx, which is Xanth spelled sort of backwards. If you are now or have ever been a child, you should like this one.

I read the twelve page discussion “Common Herb Cures Many Cancers” by CD Moulton. Back in SapTimber I discussed a breakthrough described in the August 2019 issue of the ALTERNATIVES newsletter that suggested a possible cure for many types of cancer, FenBen, used as a de-wormer for dogs. If you get cancer you should check that out for yourself, rather than have your life savings depleted by conventional treatments that in the end may not save your life. Now we have another possible cure for a number of types of cancer, derived from a weed plant, a herb, Ambrosia peruviania. It also may stop malaria and other maladies. When the author talked with one doctor, refuting the doctor’s objections, the doctor called him a quack and stormed off rather than really consider it. Par for that course. There are a number of other herbs that may have curative effect. So if traditional medicine can’t do anything for you, at a price you can afford, check this out for yourself, just in case. I speak as one who has suffered from the ignorance of conventional medicine, finding my own way to effective treatments for things like the common cold—Vitamin C—and hypothyroidism—levothyroxin. My doctor seems amazed by how healthy I am for my age, a vegetarian yet, but that’s not entirely coincidence. Still, check anything out for yourself, because most of what seems like quack medicine is exactly that.

We watched Sherlock, another take on the famous series. This time both Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are young men, unable to afford individual lodgings in London, and Sherlock needs an assistant, so they share an apartment. They both actually like the tension of going after dangerous criminals. Watson is tough and resourceful, and Sherlock is a genius. When called a psychopath he corrects it, saying he is a high-functioning sociopath. Yes, I researched sociopathy for my novel The Sopaths, and Sherlock is correct. They investigate a series of suicides that of course are masked murders committed by a serial killer posing as a cab driver, put up to it by the nefarious Moriarty. A worthwhile story, though I think my favorite remains the one where the Doctor is a woman.

I read Dreaming the Marsh, by Elizabeth McCulloch, a Florida author. The Interstate Highway passes by a large lake and a lovely marsh, but a planned development threatens to destroy this natural beauty. Then mysterious words appear on the side of a shiny new building: “Deep down and under/ Up to the sky/ Shining and plunder/ The well runs dry” They can’t be erased, and they don’t show in photographs, but are plain to people who go to see them. What do they mean? Then comes the monstrous sink hole, slowly swallowing all the land of the planned development. That is the background. The story concerns a number of local folk with their interesting histories. Such as Jade and Jasmine, two pretty sisters, one of whom is hetero, the other lesbian, both highly sexual. But the conclusion, in my mind, lacks resolution; the sink hole is there, the people are moving out, and that’s it. The mysterious words, which change slightly, begin to have some meaning, describing the sink hole, but their origin is never explained. The marsh seems to be present only to be drained, the well running dry, so those who want to read about marsh life are apt to be disappointed.

As those interested know, I am in grief for my wife of 63 years, who died three months ago. I have been coping, thanks largely to my daughter and visitors. We have a house guest for the holidays and have been out and around, doing things like visiting Busch Gardens in Tampa, which has become a full-fledged amusement park, and the Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park in Citrus County, where Lucifer the Hippopotamus governs. I admit to being a bit nervous when taking the Skyride at the Gardens, as we dangled precariously over the walks and buildings, but it was fun. But the fickle finger of fate will not leave me alone. My computer is glitching, putting wrong dates on things, so that each day I have to correct it “by hand” but it still manages to put wrong dates on stray files, some of which then get lost in the listings because the machine doesn’t know that they are recent, not two decades old. So now I am behind on my reading and jammed on this column and will have to cut it short. Next month I’ll get the computer fixed, I hope.

Several columns back I queried readers whether Xanth is sexist, as that was the given reason it was rejected as a planned movie. I think there were ten or twelve votes in all, male and female, none of which said it was sexist. One had a sour comment about the mental state of whoever thought it was sexist. Ugliness, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I suspect that some critics are too dull to catch on to the parody that abounds in Xanth, taking it literally.

I read the “Ask Marilyn” column when I see it; it runs in the Sunday supplement PARADE and that isn’t always included in our local package. We subscribe to two newspapers, so can usually find it in one or the other, but sometimes it skips both. Regardless, one I did see was for Dismember 15 addressing the question “Why is high-fructose corn syrup linked to obesity?” Marilyn answered that it’s no worse than sugar, having no more calories. Sigh; she’s done it again. As I understand it, the thing about it is that it does not turn off the hunger signal when you have eaten enough. Other foods do. So you keep on eating it without the normal limit, packing in the calories. That’s what incites obesity. You have to look a bit beyond what the commercial food industry tells you; its interest is in making you eat more, and buy more. It sure doesn’t care much about your health.

Kameron Hurley has another good column in LOCUS magazine, titled “The Power of Giving a Damn.” She says she developed a chronic illness when she was 26 that forced her to re-evaluate how she treated herself and the people in her life, and what she allowed herself to care about. She discovered that she was not self sufficient. “What we need in order to be alive in this moment are the people around us.” So she became more interested in the world around her and in humanity generally. Superstitions and creepy fairy tails “were preparing us for strife, for death, for suffering.” She focused more passionately on her writing, “Allowing myself to feel, to care, to be hurt, was the only way I was ever going to produce any kind of work that mattered.” She came to believe that it was not a weakness to care about others. That “historically, it is small groups of passionate people who change the world.” Amen. I care about people, animals, plants, and the world, and am slowly zeroing in on a means to do my part to save it from the depredations of our out-of-control species. But I fear we are already beyond the point of no return. Fortunately for me, I am unlikely to be around when the chaos comes.

Interesting article in the newspaper for December 30 by Elizabeth Rosenthal titled “Analysis: In medical billing, fraudulent charges weirdly pass as legal.” She has been covering health care as a journalist and author. Now she got a face-full of it first hand. Her husband was on his bicycle and had a bad accident because of a pothole. He was charged over $9,000 for two days in intensive care, $20 for a pill that costs pennies at a pharmacy, myriad other charges, and over $7,000 for a “trauma activation fee.” Every component of his care was billed separately, so what was that for, aside from masked theft? He was also charged for doctor visits that did not occur, and services that were not performed. The list seemed endless. It was mostly covered by insurance, but why was the insurance paying for fantasy billings? She concludes “If we want to name the costs of our $3 trillion health system, we’ve got to rein in this behavior, which is fraud by any other name.” Yes indeed. And why aren’t our politicians enraged by this, if they aren’t on the take themselves? Is that where the trauma activation fee goes?

Article in THE WEEK reprinted from AEON titled “Working Hard at Being Happy” remarks on how hard we work to maximize our happiness, but concludes we’d be better off accepting that happiness is something that ebbs and flows, accepting that negativity is fundamental to life and thus to happiness. It seems that people in sad moods tend to be more persistent and hardworking in complex tasks. Folk in a Western culture pursuing happiness are four to ten times as likely to develop clinical depression or anxiety than those in an Eastern culture. Meanwhile the American Psychological Association revised its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders so that any bereaved person grieving longer than two months might be considered to have a mental illness requiring medicaltreatment. Okay, my wife died three months ago and I remain in grief for her, so sign me up for mental illness. It won’t be the first time that I deem the official standards to be crazier than I am. Recently I pondered when I might be ready to remarry, were there a suitable prospect available, as I do want to get on with my life, and I concluded that would be when I am ready to remove my wedding ring from my left hand and my wife’s matching ring from my right hand. I am not ready today, and won’t be ready tomorrow, or next week, or next month. In fact I may never be ready to do that. My wife is part of who I am; she lives on, in that manner, in me. Maybe when the good doctors of the American Psychological Association suffer similar loss and grief they will understand.

I’m a health nut; it is surely a significant part of the reason I have outlived the average American man, and for that matter, woman. I don’t smoke or use deleterious drugs, I exercise seriously, keep my weight to what it was at college, do get enough sleep, stay busy, and I watch what I eat. I am a vegetarian, nudging toward vegan, so when I saw an article in NEW SCIENTIST about a nutrient vegetarians may be low on, my attention focused. This is Choline, pronounced KO-leen; it reminds me of the song about Jolene. “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, please don’t take my man.” Lovely woman, lovely song. Choline, please don’t take my health. It is an almost anonymous part of the Vitamin B complex. The richest sources are meat based. It makes up cell membranes and is important in the liver’s fat metabolism, and helps in nerve signaling in the muscles and brain, especially for babies before and after birth. Women who take extra choline while pregnant tend to have smarter children. Just something to be aware of.

I live in Citrus County, Florida. Yes, the one that excluded the NEW YORK TIMES newspaper as fake news. I love the physical climate but not the political climate. As far as I can tell, local conservatives take whatever President Trump and his advocates are guilty of and accuse the Democrats of doing it instead. For example one published letter is headed “Democrats, take back your party.” It says the Democratic party has been compromised and no longer represents the values it had in the past. See what I mean?

Briefer notes: the scourge of robocalls continues, and they say they don’t know how to stop it. One suggestion I have made is simply to have the phone companies charge a minimal amount, like one cent, for every call. Regular callers wouldn’t notice, but the callers who make thirty million calls a month would. One passing annoyance was when I received a robocall purportedly from my wife, two days after she died. I didn’t answer; I don’t believe in ghosts. Is there a fifth force of nature? Scientists in Hungary claim they have found it. The four are gravity, electromagnetism, the weak and the strong nuclear forces. They call the new one a “protophobic force.” I will be interested to see what develops there. Of course in my fantasy the fifth force is Magic. The mundanes haven’t caught up to that one yet.

The rush of holiday distractions messed up some of my movie reports; for example I saw but did not review the female sequel to Ghost Busters. It occurs to me that my reviews are of only peripheral interest to my readers, so maybe I will cut them down to passing mentions, a resolution for the new year. I don’t like to bore my readers more than is good for them.

Thank you, to all who sent messages of support and condolence; I do appreciate your interest. I am getting along reasonably well, and expect to continue in that vein. Life does continue.

PIERS

FeBlueberry 2020

HI-

I continue muddling along. I have a house guest now, who helps where she can, but mainly my daughter Cheryl keeps my course reasonably steady. I continue with the household routine, keep learning things I need to know now that my wife can’t handle them, like handling email and paying the bills, and I keep writing, of course. But in case anyone wonders whether being a widower is fun, no, it isn’t.

We watched Moana on the big TV. This is a Disney animation. This is a story of the south sea islands, wherein Moana, pronounced mo-Ana, the teen daughter of the chief, sets out almost alone to save her people from starvation because the local fish have run out. She has only a more or less cockeyed rooster for company. The seas are rough, and it’s all she can do to survive, but she is determined. She encounters the demigod Mao, who once had the power to change forms thanks to his huge magic fishhook. But he lost the fishhook. She prevails on him to join her quest and they travel together, facing perilous threats. Mao manages to recover his fishhook, and that helps. But then they must brace the fiery goddess of the volcano. Moana nerves herself and goes to the goddess and gives her back her silver heart. That transforms her into a beneficial spirit, and she helps them accomplish their missions. There’s no romance, no sex, no gruesome deaths. This may not seem like much, but I think it is the finest animation movie I’ve seen; it has adventure and heart and amazing realism, so that the animation does seem alive.

We watched Poms, wherein Martha, a woman of retirement age, comes to a retirement community and is immediately welcomed with more enthusiasm than she is really prepared for. She had thought to quietly acclimatize herself. One thing leads to another, and she decides to form a club for cheer-leading. Folk look askance, as this is considered to be an endeavor for teens, not grandmothers. She gathers seven more old women, and they practice, with problems of health and fitness and their own children who don’t want them to embarrass themselves. Then they go to a contest, where the teen girls perform phenomenal acrobatic flips and tosses, wa-a-ay out of the seniors’ league. They do embarrass themselves, banging into each other and falling. But they persist, and do finally compete, in their own set style, and in the end wow the crowd with their age-defined performance. But Martha turns out to have cancer, and she is dead within a year, leaving mainly a fond memory of what she accomplished. It is based on a true story, and I applaud it. I mean, cheerleading is supposed to be encouraging the audience to cheer the team, right? Who says the cheerleaders have to be sexy teens?

We watched Long Shot. This is humorous political with quite serious undertones. A woman runs for president, with a reasonable chance. She favors good causes, such as saving the environment, so naturally has difficult going. She hires a speechwriter three years her junior whom as a teen she babysat, and he has had a crush on her ever since. He has the touch, and her speeches are effective. She’s driven and passionate, as politicians are, and when she gets a hankering for him, she promptly seduces him. When complications require her to back off her environmental stance, he resigns, being even more devoted to that than she is. But he still loves her, and she discovers she loves him. A political enemy manages to get a video of him masturbating to one of her speeches, and uses that to smear them. She finally publicly announces that she loves him, and wants him with her. So he masturbates; so does everyone, she says. She brings him back, they align on the environment, and succeed in forging on to victory. A nervy movie I doubt they could have made a generation ago. I like the environmental theme; we do need an about face on the politics of that.

I read Valkyrie: Darkness Awaits, by Mark McQuillen & Mara Reitsma. This is an 120,000 word fantasy, and only the first part of a continuing narrative. There’s a huge cast of characters, and relationships are complicated. It is set in an alternate universe with a five thousand year history. Magic abounds. There are the Valkyrie women, who resemble Amazons, and Elves who resemble humans; Dwarves, and assorted other species, generally assuming human form, whose original forms can be dragons or even a ball of energy. Many are in the form of lovely women, and a number are eager for sex with human men or women, some of which is shown in fair detail. War is imminent, that will likely wipe out one side or the other; it has been building for some time, and some Valkyries have been corrupted and are sowing mischief, undermining the human cause. So there is real trouble brewing. One of the Good Guys is Gil Swanson, a human soldier. A Good Girl is Gil’s niece Tisiphone, who has long been cooped up for her own education and safety, and savagely resents it. She uses a kind of magic mirror to see far-away events, and can travel in the blink of an eye, literally. Gradually we learn parts of what is going on, and uncover obscure relationships. A huge battle is about to occur. So there is a major story developing here. However, it is not ready to be published; it needs a competent copy-editor to harrow it into shape.

We went to Sea World, in Orlando, Florida. This is an amusement park as extensive as the others, with sights and rides, but focusing on the sea and its importance to the global environment, which focus I approve of. We went to the show at Shamu Stadium, where the orcas, otherwise known as killer whales, performed, leaping from the water, turning somersaults, and deliberately splashing the audience. I am concerned about whether captive animals of some intelligence really like being required to perform, but suspect they do like the splashing. Then we moved on to Antarctica, Empire of the Penguin, and saw the penguins virtually flying through the water, and saw videos of their life in the frozen wastes. We took a mock helicopter flight across the arctic, wherein the room became the helicopter and shook about as the front video showed a scary ride. It was remarkably effective; it did feel like perilous flying. We rode in one of their whirl-around boats on icy seas. We went on to admire the sharks, jellyfish, seals, and dolphins, and many-colored fish, and we ate at their restaurants. I of course also noticed the women visitors, who came in all shapes from intriguing to appalling. Overall it was a fun excursion, worth a day to assimilate.

We watched The Meg, a movie about a fearsome ancient shark freed from a deep section of the sea, somewhere between 75 and 90 feet long, whale sized. It has a seemingly insatiable hunger. They barely escape it, only to discover that a second one followed it to the surface. So there is likely to be continuing mischief.

We watched Isn’t It Romantic, the madcap story of an overweight woman of about 40 who dreams of romance but knows it doesn’t happen to the likes of her. Then a purse snatcher grabs her handbag, she fight him off, and walks into a post. She wakes in the hospital, then goes on to an odd adventure, with her dull messy room becoming splendid and a handsome man courting her. But she actually prefers a more ordinary friend, who gets taken by a more glamorous friend, and they are about to be married. She tries to stop that, then realizes that actually she loves herself, and lets him go. She collides again, and wakes back in the real world. So she acts, going after the man she likes, and discovers that his eyes have always been on her. So there is a happy conclusion after all. It culminates in a grand dance, with her as the central dancer midst the beauties, and actually it works. It’s a fine dream. Why can’t plain folk have dreams too? The pretty folk will not be nearly as pretty in twenty years, while the ones with character will still have it then. So this is a fun farce with a kernel of truth.

I read Werewolf Max and the Midnight Zombies by N A Davenport. This is part of a series for preteen children, simply told, with illustrations. It is theoretically horror, but not bad enough to really scare ten year olds; rather it educates them about the nature of the breed. Max is late getting home, and gets chased down and bitten by what he thinks is a big dog, but is actually a werewolf. Soon Max becomes a werewolf himself, with enhanced powers of sight and smell and hearing, and increased strength. He also heals rapidly. He can change to wolf form at any time, but then the kill lust is upon him and he might even attack his own family. Other werewolves clarify this for him, and guide him as he tackles zombies and fights banshees. Then he learns how to change form and remain in control, a great improvement, and shows the others how. By the end he is satisfied with his new condition. I enjoyed this short novel, and believe that children will also; it’s a fun read, the action is continuous, and I will move promptly on to the sequels.

And the first sequel is Werewolf Max and the Banshee Girl. A new girl, Keira, comes to Max’s school, and shares his class. She smells and looks like a banshee, one of the chalk-white, midnight-black haired females whose scream can knock out werewolves. Yet she seems almost like a regular girl. He joins a Halloween project with her, and when working on it she meets his little sister Maddie, who likes her. That makes Max nervous; banshees are as dangerous as werewolves. He tries to spy on Keira, but doesn’t learn much. Then the banshees strike, abducting Maddie—and Keira helps him rescue her. Then the werewolves corner Keira, and Max diverts them so she can escape. Now Keira is in trouble with the banshees and Max is in trouble with the werewolves. Can the two of them actually become friends? Future novels in the series should clarify the answer. I liked this novel, and found it compelling: preteens should like it too. In it we learn how banshees are made, which is different from the way werewolves do it by biting.

Then the prequel, Lost in the Graveyard. This concerns Max’s friend Tim, who got out of control and bit him, making Max a werewolf too. That’s a hazard for werewolves: they get wild and can’t control themselves. Tim, as a human boy, gets left alone in a graveyard by bad boys. Zombies emerge and attack him; werewolves attack the zombies, and Tim accidentally gets bitten. Then he has to learn how to behave as a werewolf, lest he go wild and kill his family. He discovers that he heals extremely rapidly, and has phenomenal strength; when he strikes a stout tree branch, he breaks it right off the tree. At the end he meets Max and they become friends; later they will both be part of the same werewolf pack. Overall I like this series very well, and recommend it to adults who prefer their horror mild instead of Jalapeno style, as well as to children. Threats of death abound, but are mostly escaped. We gain some sympathy for werewolves, and maybe even for some banshees: they are people too. But zombies, not so much.

Daniel Daly, for whom I wrote my essay relating to If There Is a God, asked me to write him a snail mail letter of substance for his collection. I pondered a month, then wrote and sent him this:

Dear Daniel,

I have views on a number of things, but perhaps most important to me is the question of the state of our world today. I feel that mankind is overrunning it, driving other species to extinction, and destroying the environment in several ways. This needs to be halted or reversed, but I fear that the powers that be are locked into greed and denial, sacrificing tomorrow for seeming wealth today. They like to say that Malthus was wrong, in his prediction of disaster if our course does not change, but I believe he was right, and that the world as we know it today is doomed unless we make what amounts to a U-turn soon. The seas, lakes, and rivers are polluted, killing fish; the sky is polluted, killing birds; the land is polluted, surely killing us in due course. Our failure to stop the juggernaut of overpopulation will lead to mass starvation as resources are exhausted, and the likely inheritors will be the rats, the roaches, and the germs.

What can be done? Many things, but the more pertinent question is what will be done. One aspect is food: the mass consumption of meat is causing a significant portion of the damage, as forests are cleared to make pastures for cows, pigs, hens, and other creatures raised only to be slaughtered for food. Antibiotics to keep them healthy are leaking into the environment, causing resistant strains to develop, spoiling the effect, so that the original treatments no longer work, and the risk of plagues increases. However, progress is being made as plant-based meat imitations are developed, equivalent to the original in appearance, texture, and nutrition, and there is hope that within a decade or so the animal slaughter industry will be driven out of business.

Another aspect is the use of fossil fuels. These pollute and heat the sky so that it becomes unhealthy to breathe in cities and elsewhere, and warm the planet so that the climate is affected, causing deleterious changes to animal and plant life. The seas are rising as the ice of the poles and mountain glaciers melts, and those dependent on the waters of formerly stable rivers will suffer as they slowly dry up. Storms are becoming increasingly savage in some areas, while some formerly damp areas are drying up, becoming deserts.

I may focus on energy, in my quest to do my part to ameliorate the damage we are doing to the world. Some say that nuclear power is the only way to go, but aspects of that are downright dangerous, considering its toxic waste and the efforts of terrorists. Some say solar or wind, and these are good, but not reliable for steady power unless superior battery storage is developed. Some say plant power, such as burning wood or processing fuel from compost, but these deprive the world of organic material that we need for food. So I think the one ultimately best bet is geothermal, in which wells drill down to where the interior is hot, and use that heat to generate the power we need. It is non-polluting and inexhaustible. The challenge is to get to it and pipe it out. A place like Yellowstone Park has that heat near the surface, but elsewhere the heat is deeper, perhaps miles down. We need to develop better drilling technology, so that the drilling itself doesn’t waste energy and pollute the environment. We also need to be careful not to destabilize the ground in the manner of fracking. So there are challenges, but I suspect this is the best long-term solution.

Even if food and energy are solved, the problem of overpopulation remains. We need to cut our numbers to a tenth or so, and as yet I see no kind way to accomplish that. So that’s an essay for another time.

I received a letter from Grace Norvell of the Policy Lab team, on a similar subject. She told me in part “As you know, spending time in nature can have massive positive effects on an individual’s both mental and physical health. Our society is now so dependent on smart phones and other digital avenues for interaction and communication, but with this there have been some troubling repercussions. There is no doubt that growth in technology has produced many great things for us, but with this we have also experienced spikes in both mental and physical disease.” So they are performing nature and gardening clinical trials, looking to dive deeper into the research behind the positive effects of individuals interacting with nature. Their web site is Clinical trials on the positive effects of gardening and experincing nature.

I have been returning to nature in my own limited fashion. Since my wife died we have been engaged in massive housecleaning, and this month got to the garage and the pool. Now the garage holds two cars instead of one car and junk. The pool returned to nature long ago — we discovered that 80 degrees may be hot for air but it is cold for water to swim in — and was colonized by algae and frogs. We caught a bucketful of tadpoles and I took them to the nearby lake. Now we are filling it in with dirt, and I expect to make it into a protected sunken garden. Will it require a full greenhouse to shield it from the hungry flower-consuming forest animals, caterpillars, the chill of winter and the heat of summer? We’ll see.

Interesting and somewhat alarming column in the January 2020 issue of LOCUS, “Inaction is a Form of Action” by Cory Doctorow. It describes the insidious ways that American free speech can be curtailed by private corporations with plenty of money. For example, a curtailed-speech restaurant can buy out its competition, so if you have no choice except to eat there you can’t talk politics. Also, professional internet trolls can learn the nuances of the rules and exploit them. “That means that the rules intended to catch bad conduct will only stop amateur trolls – and innocent people.” “The US government has made very few laws regarding speech online, and yet we live in an environment that has been very toxic to speech itself.” “We are now in a speech environment where power is so concentrated that the whims of a half-dozen tech execs determine—for all intents and purposes—who may speak and what they may say.” He recommends that Net Neutrality should be reinstated. “Because inaction in the face of danger is a form of action.” Yes, I was sorry to see Net Neutrality go, knowing that was mischief. We are indeed losing our freedoms, and if we are not sheep we do not want to be herded into the corral for fleecing or butchering. I have always been a goat among sheep, getting in trouble for not going along with the herd. Don’t be a sheep.

We watched Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, which I think may be the finest animation movie I’ve seen. I really liked Moana, but I think this is even better. I understand it was a massive box office flop, maybe because it wasn’t standard fare. A man much like Jesus has been in prison for years, though the people adore him. Then he is released, but when he refuses to sign a paper renouncing all his beliefs, they execute him. This happened to Jesus and I think to other prophets: the powers that be don’t like getting the masses riled up with other values than submission to authority. Along the way is a cute little girl who refuses to talk, and her lovely mother. The girl meets the Prophet, who teaches her how to imagine things like flying with the birds, and she finally begins to talk, first only to him, then generally. There is absolutely beautiful dancing. There are special animation effects, not to make it look like real life, but to show the kind of wonderful art pure animation can generate. The whole thing is a marvelous work of art, and I recommend it to anyone with a mind and feelings. Too bad there aren’t more such folk extant.

I have been getting behind on my reading, thanks to complications in my life as I try to orient on what remains of my future, which means this column is shorter that recent ones, but I do have some notes. Article by a dentist in the local newspaper titled “Fluoride key to protecting health.” The hell it is; the opposite is the case, but it would be useless to try to argue with one who thinks he knows. Political cartoon on Jamboree 23 has two parts. The first shows Arlingthon cemetery gravestones, labeled “Gave their lives for their country.” The second part shows the Senate GOP, labeled “Gave their country for Trump’s lies.” Macanudo cartoon for Jamboree 1 shows Theseus facing the monstrous Minataur, asking “Does it help if I tell you I’m vegan?” Solicitation from cfi Center For Inquiry says in part “Sociologists have found that the more a population clings to religion the more likely it is to suffer a wide range of social dysfunctions. Within countries and within states in the United States, a high degree of religious belief predicts poor outcomes relative to average income, income inequality, homicide, incarceration rates, healthfulness such as longevity, and other similar measures. As to out-of-wedlock births, the two states with the highest rate are Mississippi and Louisiana, which are among the top states for church attendance.” Newspaper column by high school senior Renata Happle for 1-30-2020 titled “We need real-world sex ed” says that a friend of hers is suffering from chlamydia and HPV that she might have avoided had schools taught sex education. “Forty-one percent of teens are sexually active” but schools not only don’t teach safe sex, they actively prevent it from being taught there. Shame on them. Newspaper item 1-18-2020 says that a study shows that high speed jet air dryers disperse 20 times more germs than paper towels. And here I thought the air blowers were sanitary! Item in THE WEEK for January 17 2020 says not to count on electric cars. Until they can go hundreds of miles without refueling, and doing so easily, at comparable cost, they are essentially toys. Damn: I was counting on them. WASHINGTON SPECTATOR for October 1, 2019 (I told you I was behind on my reading) says that a handful of conservative billionaires, Christian leaders, and Media Barons are holding democracy in the US hostage. It does make the case. Newspaper letter says that General Soleimani went to Iraq on a peace mission, and was assassinated because the powers that be in America don’t want peace in the middle east. Could that be true?

THE WEEK reprinted an article from THE ATLANTIC titled “Learning to accept your decline,” by Arthur Brooks. Its thesis is that the happiness of most adults falls through their 30s and 40s and bottoms out in their early 50s. Then for most folk contentment increases until about age 70; thereafter it is mixed. Some stay steady, some get happier until death, but others, especially men, see their happiness plummet. Depression and suicide rates for men increase after age 75. Giftedness and early achievements are not insurance against later suffering. The waning of ability is especially brutal psychologically. “Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy,” race car driver Alex Dias Ribeiro wrote. The end of success is the end of the line, and many die of bitterness, or search for more success somewhere else and are unhappy when that is elusive. Charles Darwin of evolution fame is cited as an example: he stagnated later in life and was depressed. J S Bach the composer is another example, managing to avoid depression by becoming an instructor. Others just have to accept their inevitable decline. In creative careers success and productivity increase for the first 20 years after the inception of a career, on average. “Decline is inevitable, and it occurs earlier than almost any of us wants to believe.” But if we accept it, we will be less unhappy. Okay, I have been a full time pro writer for 54 years, a bestseller in the 1980s, and am still writing today. Have I lost my edge and don’t know it? I don’t think so, but I could be in denial. As far as I can tell, my imagination and writing skill remain at the level they were in the past. But this study makes me nervous. Readers of this monthly column and my recent Xanth novels will surely let me know whether I am an exception or deluded.

Let me conclude with an example of what it is like to be alone. I received a call I wanted to answer, but in a Senior Moment I couldn’t remember which button on the phone to push. So it went to the answering machine. So I typed the other party an email to explain, and tried to send it — and it glitched, saying I had entered a wrong password. What? I didn’t enter any password: I didn’t need to, as I had already sent other emails that day. We finally emailed on another phone Daughter Cheryl, away in Orlando, who then handled it. Then it turned out that my letter had gotten through, despite the error message. And my afternoon was chewed up, when I was trying to complete this column and do key letters. I started the day with plenty of time to spare, but finished jammed. All because I couldn’t find the usual button on the phone. As I like to put it, I have no belief in the supernatural, and glitches from left field are that, so the supernatural constantly gets back at me like this, even by faking error messages.

PIERS

Marsh 2020

HI-

We watched episodes of the first and second seasons of FUTURAMA, an animated science fantasy series. A young man, Fry, is unsatisfied with his contemporary life, and through complication and mishap winds up a thousand years in the future, where he meets a junky robot, Bender—because he can bend things—and Leela, a young woman with a sexy body who turns around to reveal a face with only one big eye. They become a threesome, as none of them like their assigned jobs and soon quit them, which of course means mischief in this locked-in society. They proceed from one rollicking adventure disaster to another, adding characters along the way. This is a fun series, very much my kind of junk.

I read Exposed!, by Henri Broch. This is a searing exposure of pseudo science, such as dowsing, clairvoyance, astrology, the Shroud of Turin, smart animals, and haunts. I found the chapter on recognizing deceptive techniques of argument especially relevant. One is the circulatory technique. I remember one example from decades ago, not in this book, of how in a trial the defense presented irrefutable evidence that the accused was not in town the day of the murder, and the prosecutor dismissed it because they already knew the man was guilty. Huh? But they got a conviction. In the present case, they knew the subject used ESP (extrasensory perception) because he got results exceeding chance. How did he get those results? By ESP. What proves the divinity of Jesus? His miracles. How could he perform miracles? Because of his divine nature. Another is the snowball technique, like a snowball rolling down a hill and becoming a snow boulder at the bottom. They keep adding things, overwhelming the doubters. Another is the escalation technique. Folk tend to stick defensively to an argument, unable to admit that they could be wrong. Thus they hide from the truth, inventing ever greater support. I encountered that when I was blacklisted and lied about, when I demanded that a publisher honor its own contract and it turned out that refuting the liars got nowhere. My daughter challenged an SFWA officer who was doing it at a convention, and he refused to talk with her. The conclusion is that we don’t see things as they are, but rather as we would like them to be. It seems that paranormal research has not progressed in decades, thanks to this effect. Another is the “Little Streams” effect, where a key detail may be omitted. The book gives an example of how they tested the idea that a dead chicken could not shatter the glass of an airplane cockpit. But when someone tried it independently, using a cannon to fire a chicken, it smashed the glass and pretty much destroyed the cockpit. That was reported to the authorities, who responded laconically “Defrost the chicken.” The moral is not to forget the little detail that can make a big difference. Another technique is to omit negative results. I might flip a coin heads ten times in a row, proving or strongly implying the application of mental force, but it is meaningless if I don’t also publicize the 99 other tests where that didn’t happen. Companies are notorious for doing that, publishing only the tests that show how safe their products are. Some things I have gone into in the past for my own reasons, such as the way I studied astrology for Macroscope. There is a case for astrology, but I think not a valid one. I was fascinated by the Shroud of Turin, noting that the Catholic Church, which does believe in Jesus and magic, was objective about it, while the critics seemed to know it was false before they ever considered the evidence. The Bible didn’t mention any shroud, which would have covered only the head anyway, not the whole body. When I look into something, I want to ascertain the truth, whatever it may be, and I will abandon my preconceptions when the evidence refutes them. As this book thoroughly refutes it. Overall, Exposed! buttresses my own belief that there is no supernatural, at least not the conventional kind. One of my fans, a believer, said that to her, God was natural. Excellent answer. But remember, I don’t believe in Dark Matter either, and the jury is still out on that. I think they just don’t understand how gravity operates at galactic range, and don’t want to admit it. An example of the escalation technique.

Then I read at item in SCIENCE NEWS that just might provide the answer, the issue for November 9, 2019 (did I mention how I got 30 magazines behind, in the chaos of trying to organize what remains of my life after my wife departed?), titled “The structure of the cosmic web is revealed.” Studying neighboring galaxies 2 billion light years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius, astronomers spied filaments of ultraviolet light. The gas filaments absorb light from black holes—strictly speaking, nothing comes from a back hole, but surrounding gas can be yanked around so that it glows—and re-emit it, making the faint filaments visible. They form networks of energy. I see it as like spreading largely invisible strings extending through the galaxies, as if holding them together. And there it is. The galaxy is whirling around too fast to hold together without flying apart, so astronomers conjecture that there must be a lot more matter in them that we can’t see, its gravity holding them tight. But suppose they are bound instead by surrounding strings? Suddenly no need for Dark Matter, just faint strings around bags of stars. Have I solved the major mystery of the universe, and now can patiently wait for science to catch up with me, and of course credit the breakthrough to someone else?

I have a house guest, MaryLee, whom I invited to come be my companion, perhaps more, as I knew early on that I am not equipped to live out the rest of my life alone. My wife is not coming back, so my choices are to live alone, or in company. I considered who might be compatible. We had corresponded for 24 years; I had no idea what she looked like. I was not looking for a pretty face, but compatible character. It is said that love is friendship that has caught fire. Well, she visited, and it caught fire. She is 60, compared to my 85½; we’re hardly teens, but sometimes it feels like that, with the novelty of new love. We each have our complicated histories, with a number of potential liabilities, making us wary, but I believe she is the One. More anon, when.

I was fighting off a cold with vitamin C, when my adult trike pulled a stunt I never expected. I was tooling along, returning one Sunday morning with the newspapers, on the 1.6-mile loop along our long drive. Then abruptly the trike keeled over to the right, dumping me on the pavement. It seems a tire was going soft, and it felt like a giant hand grabbing the trike and dumping it down. Ouch! I extricated myself with difficulty, then walked the trike home; as the day progressed, my internal bruising manifested, and walking became a challenge. The following week was awful; the discomfort interfered with my sleep, and when I went to the bathroom, as I have to do several times a night because of my high-water diet that prevents me from getting another kidney stone, those excursions were uncomfortable also. I had to mount the stairs one at a time, left foot up, drawing the right foot up after it. Taking a shower was out for a week. Yes I know: that stinks. Clipping my toenails was a challenge I barely managed, bracing a foot on a stand and doing it left handed. My exercise schedule was also out for a week; now I am slowly working my way back into it. I simply have to suffer through the siege, until the pain of moving that limb decreases.

I live on the little tree farm we bought circa 1986, about a hundred acres. One problem is that illicit hunters regard it as free-range. We have allowed only pig hunting here, because the feral pigs tend to drive out other creatures. The pig problem dates from a bit before my time, when Spanish Conquistador Hernando de Soto, circa 1540, brought pigs to serve as a ready source of meat, and some of them escaped, and have ranged Florida ever since. It requires a 70% annual attrition just to keep their numbers even. But the polite, law-abiding hunters we allowed here seem to have been replaced by the lawless variety who raid from air boats. Once years ago we discovered marijuana being grown on our property. The sheriff’s office set up a camera to catch the culprits, but the camera got stolen. This time we discovered hunting stands and metal automatic feeders, that spray out grain to attract the animals so they can be shot. I suspect that’s illegal. My concern is that those hunters are going after more than pigs: what about deer, turkey, gopher tortoises, bobcats, rabbits, otters and such, all of which we have seen here? We are trying to protect those animals. So we’re taking down the equipment, and if anyone complains we’ll put them in touch with the sheriff’s office, which I am sure will give them close attention.

In the chaos following my wife’s death, I got behind on my reading by about 30 magazines. Book reading slowed to a crawl, and so did my writing. I am trying to catch up, but distractions continue. In sketchy order, notes from my clippings. Florida has sentenced more innocent people to death than any other state; reform is obviously needed. It is predicted that the current stock market bubble is leading up to the greatest economic collapse in all history. That is what I fear, but of course the money folk won’t listen. It may be occurring even as I write this. Now there is a service that intercepts robo calls, for $3.50 a month. Really? Health care costs in the U.S. are double those in Europe, but our service is poorer. As long as we keep voting in the vultures, this will continue. Body temperature is falling about half a degree F per decade. This is good, maybe. Your chances of being affected by a data breach are about 1 in 15 per year, and long-term it is practically guaranteed you’ll get caught. Special interests are trying to preempt the internet; they need to be opposed. Too many folk are being persecuted, jailed, and exiled, some disappeared, where the internet is not free. We don’t want that here. Rats will chew up the wiring in your car, soon rendering it inoperative. Yes, it has happened to us more than once, entailing inconvenience and three-figure repairs. I like to live and let live, but I put out rat poison to protect my car. The CIA secretly owned a global encryption service, thus getting access to the secrets of many nations. Going vegan saves countless animals; we should all do it. Phil and Gay Courter—she’s a nationally selling writer in Citrus County, as I am—got caught aboard a cruise ship when the corona virus broke out, and were trapped in quarantine. They were finally rescued, for another two weeks in quarantine, but at least they are on their way home. Comedian Jamie Loftus joined the smart-folks society Mensa on a lark, and wrote about it humorously as “My Year in Mensa.” “Good news—they let dumb sluts into Mensa now.” It seems the bright folk were not amused; she received a wave of online vitriol including a death threat. I think that says something about Mensa’s smarts that should give truly intelligent folk warning to stay clear. I stayed clear for similar reason decades ago: they weren’t smart enough in ways that count. Doorbell cameras are exploding in popularity, and not just for safety. Folk using them are becoming voyeurs. It seems there’s a lot to see out there, when others don’t know you are looking. But hackers can preempt them not just to spy, but to shout racist slurs at toddlers or send pornography to children. And there is a planet orbiting two stars, 1,300 light years from earth. That’s practically next door. Too bad we can’t visit.

Letter in the newspaper by retired director of the Pasco County (Florida) Health Department, Mare J Yacht, but it pertains to my home county and indeed the nation. The essence is that she supports Medicare for All, but that costs must be controlled. I agree emphatically; aren’t the same folk who say we can’t afford to care for all our citizens the ones who gave a trillion dollar tax cut to the wealthy? Let’s stop with the giveaways to the rich and start helping the poor. Isn’t that what Jesus would have done? By all means, bring the costs down, as they do in other countries. Don’t let the poor be mercilessly gouged. A court decision prevents Florida from barring felons who have served their terms from voting until they have paid off their court costs. Good for the court, as this was a thinly disguised mechanism for barring likely Democrats from voting. The Hong Kong mischief continues, as the Chinese government tries to crack down on that population’s independence. I’m rooting for Hong Kong. It seems that lonely young men can find video games more compelling than real life; it’s a type of addiction. This of course is mischief. Here’s a nasty one: here in Florida, 118 handymen got arrested for operating without a license. But they were trapped. Undercover operatives asked them to do routine tasks, that don’t require a license, then badgered them into doing something that does, like tiling. When they agreed, they got nabbed. This sort of entrapment is unethical and should be illegal; on their own they would not have gotten into the wrong work. While real criminals are being ignored? Similar mischief in Russia, where a military court sentenced anti-fascist activists to prison terms of 6 to 18 years for terrorism despite compelling evidence that the charges were entirely made up. No problem: they were simply tortured into making bogus confessions. When will it occur to local police to do the same to handymen? All over the world scientists are getting arrested and imprisoned for telling the truth. It seems that didn’t go out with the medieval Inquisition. Meanwhile in America, supposedly in an economic boom, housing costs are outstripping wages, and health care is casting millions into dept. But Trump supporters call this fake news. New research indicates that state-level increases in the minimum wage of $1 are tied to a 3.4 to 5.9 percent decrease in suicide rates among working-age folk. Name I encountered in the news: Attracta. I like it. The past decade saw the middle class shrink, longevity fell, and a whole generation fell behind. This is our economic boom? There were tree-dwelling apes in Europe who strode upright five million years before humans did. What happened to them? And an early explorer of Antarctica was shocked by the sex lives of penguins, who indulged in homosexuality, divorce, infidelity, rape and prostitution. So he covered it up, and we learn of his report a century later. I find it interesting that these supposed vices are not limited to the human kind. There must be survival advantages. Or maybe sex is more of a free-for-all than we like to think.

Newspaper article titled “5 Myths About Consciousness.” Consciousness is one of my hobbies, and I am gambling that I am not the only one who has it. The myths listed are 1. Humans have a unique brain. It says that ours is not the largest, compared to pilot whales, elephants, and others; and mice have the same number of categories of brain cells, so there is no simple explanation why humans “sit atop the cognitive hill.” 2. Science will never understand consciousness. But we have learned more about consciousness in the past century than in all preceding history, and seem to have a fair chance of getting there. 3. Dreams contain hidden clues about our secret desires. Sigmund Freud to the contrary—I never had much respect for him, and think he was obsessed with sex—most of our dreams seem to reflect daily events and concerns. My theory is that the brain must constantly process the incoming flow of information, ascertaining how we feel about things, so they can be appropriately filed in memory. I was once a file clerk; nothing is so lost as something that is misfiled. The brain has to get it right, and feeling requires consciousness, so the events are paraded by our sleeping awareness and duly tagged in all their shades of feeling. Science hasn’t caught up with me on this yet or with the science fiction genre, but it surely will in time. 4. We are susceptible to subliminal messages. In a word, No; they have tried it and it doesn’t work. 5. Near-death visions are evidence of life after death. Again, no. The dying brain imagines things, but it is only imagination. Folk are too damn eager to believe in an Afterlife, so they can think that death is not really the end. That’s a great boon for religion, not reality.

Article in the 16 November issue of NEW SCIENTIST—I am trying to catch up, honest I am!—says that biologists agree that all life forms must have certain key basics. They should be capable of generating energy from the environment and putting it to use. Of growing, and shedding waste. Capable of passing their genetic material to new generations of organisms via reproduction. That is, sex. There’s an immense variety; Earth hosts up to a trillion different microbial species, less than a million of which have been cataloged. The rest, known colloquially as microbial dark matter, remain enigmatic. Sulfur is promising, being one of the most abundant elements in the universe, and versatile. And carbon, which has marvelous properties ranging from diamond to old fashioned pencil lead. Who knows what we might find in the wider universe, could we just get out there to touch it?

The draft of this HiPiers column was completed on Leap Day, FeBlueberry 29^th. Tradition says that on that day a woman may propose marriage to a man. And here I thought than in a free society she could do it any day.

I try not to remark too much on politics, in these columns, but the current political season is riotous. So far my interest is in Tom Steyer, though I fear he is about to be eliminated. I hope I am not disappointed. For the record, I liked John Kennedy, and later Barack Obama. Politics seems to be devolving.

I keep forgetting to mention it, but back in December, Doug Harter updated the Xanth Character Database, adding the characters from Fire Sail.

PIERS

Apull 2020

HI-

I read The Mystery of the Old Farmer’s Gate, by Steven G. Taibbi. This is not in shape to be formally published at present, but it has a solid story. It starts with the Avaloneans of 20,000 years ago. They managed their civilization well, taking good care of their planets and people. They were expert in computer science and robotics and androids, which were hard to tell from living folk. Exploring a primeval forest, they encountered an odd structure, which turned out to be a gate to another world, a duplicate of their own but deserted. Who made it and left it unattended? That is the mystery. They made a tunnel to it and guarded it, but as time passed and their empire faded the gate was forgotten. Later folk on Earth found the tunnel and gate but kept it secret, instead exploiting the natural resources of the world beyond it. So the mystery of the gate remained. Then Kevin Burke discovered it, and the contemporary story commences. He gets to know the local librarian Ann Belknap and her cat Paws, and shows them the new world. Things complicate, as they discover a kind of subway, that remains operative, and are attacked by vicious 8-foot-tall creatures. They meet an alien watcher, who provides them with superior weapons and recruits them as representatives of the Avalonean Empire. They wind up traveling in space and waging war against the monsters. There is also another tunnel that leads to a world where magic operates. There is a huge amount in this novel, with the mysterious gate turning out to be the access to far more than an alternate world.

I read Immortality, Inc., by Chip Walter. This is about the prospects for extending human life, perhaps indefinitely. Most of it details the involvement of Silicon Valley executives involved in the effort to cure diseases and abate aging, but it does in due course get to the essence. That is that we are not there yet, but progress is being made, and in another decade or so we may have ways to greatly extend the lives of folk now living. The techniques relate to genetic engineering and close study of the human genome to spot hidden liabilities so that they can be dealt with before becoming lethal. So probably the answers will come just too late for me, as I am 85 and not getting younger. Ever thus.

I read Love in Cardwell, by Mark F. Geatches. This is a romance, but I think not a genre formula novel. Handsome Jason is a former U.S. Navy SEAL, deadly in combat, now a restaurateur, running his own little establishment, but he keeps himself fit with daily exercise. Three regular patrons size him up as a prospect: Susan, an attractive 50-year-old who is incidentally married, Karen, who has an aggressive boyfriend, and Lucy, a nice girl. Karen makes a play for him and soon has him in bed, much impressing him. That freezes Lucy out, but she is nice about it, as is her nature. It is clear to everyone else that Lucy is the one for Jason, but Karen is experienced, skillful, and determined, and soon has him roped. Except for an unplanned encounter that changes everything. Karen’s boyfriend attacks Jason, who was not looking for trouble but is more than competent to handle it, and the boyfriend winds up injured and unconscious. That does open Jason’s eyes about the nature of his girlfriend; he hadn’t known of the other man. Now at last he orients on Lucy. Romance is not my genre, but I found this novel competent, interesting, and compelling. I recommend it to those who like non-formula reading, whatever the genre.

AUTHORS GUILD sent news that it is appalled that Internet Archive is now making millions of in-copyright books freely available online without restriction on its Open Library. I am appalled too, as I earn my living by writing and that will dissipate if my books are stolen and posted openly online. This is piracy. They justify it because of the pandemic. Oh? What else will the pandemic justify? Carjacking? Robbery? Murder? Where is the limit, once the law is ignored? This needs to be shut down, if we are not to become a lawless world. The Guild membership is up in arms. So should we all be.

As folk generally know, I have been a vegetarian all my adult life, essentially because I don’t like hurting animals, and am now considering taking the next step to going vegan. I admire the vegans, and this does seem to be an obvious progression for mankind as a whole. The February 2020 issue of the newsletter wise vystopia, but Marc Ten Low, mlexa68@gmail.com addresses this subject. He says Australia is having its hottest, most deadly summer in recorded history, with billions of wild animals perishing in the brushfires. “But that is almost nothing compared to the number of animals slaughtered in the livestock industry on a daily basis.” He says the easiest way to reduce suffering in the world is veganism, based on nonviolence toward any sentient form of life. Nonhuman animals should NOT be used for food, clothing, entertainment, or any other purpose; they are here with us, not for us. He points out that many so-called environmentalists are not vegans. “The vegan movement is currently the greatest and fastest growing social justice movement in the world. Society is starting to open up, but it may be too late for life as we know it.” Check his newsletter for more information. I am glad to know that there are people like him in the world.

Last HiPiers column, I mentioned my house guest MaryLee, who transitioned from Companion to Girlfriend. Now she has moved on to Fiancee. She wears my engagement ring with a three quarter carat pale amethyst stone and we have matching platinum wedding bands for when. We don’t know when we’ll marry, but it will probably be a small, quiet, very private occasion, maybe a virtual elopement. The auspices are mixed. We became engaged, and the stock market plummeted, pandemic spread across the globe, and we are under virtual house arrest along with millions of others as the global economy sinks toward a devastating recession. Was it something we said? I wanted to take her to the big amusement parks like Disney and Universal, and they shut those down. She wanted a beach wedding, and they shut the beaches down. She wanted to go shopping, but we’re not supposed to go near other folk even if the stores remain open. Yet if we have to be housebound 24 hours a day, at least we are alone together. There’s a whole lot of hugging and kissing going on. Don’t tell.

This will be my briefest HiPiers column in some time, because distractions like the coronavirus and MaryLee (no known connection) have taken my time. My reading and writing have also suffered. Incidental items: a front tooth on my dentures popped off, and I had quite an adventure getting it fixed and picking the dentures up from the lab, as deliveries were stalled. Then next day it popped off again. This time I’m using the dentures anyway, as I need them for chewing. I do newspaper puzzles to keep my brain halfway alert. On Sunday, March 15, I solved their Word Wheel, the word being Pedestal, only to find a different answer, Stampede, in their answer key. Lo, both words fit. I read that a flat-earth believer rode a rocket into the sky, to prove the earth is flat, but it crashed and he died. Now we’ll never know whether it is flat, round, triangular, or sexy hourglass shaped. Assisted suicide is spreading. I feel a person should have the right to die in his/her own fashion, as well as the right to live, rather than being captive to the special interests who want to preserve life until the financial estate is completely wasted. Hypnosis as a medical treatment is coming back, especially for treating anxiety. The Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago is thought to be when modern creatures, including the ancestors of mankind, first appeared. But new research suggests that there was no explosion then, just a continuation of developments in the prior period, the Ediacaran, 600 million years ago. But fear not; modern creatures did evolve, even if it seems that the most primitive become politicians. Remember Otzi the Ice Man? Evidence grows that he wasn’t just a traveler ambushed unaware. He may have been fleeing pursuit, and they finally caught up with him. He led them a fair chase, but they got him and left him to freeze on the mountain. They have found evidence of an ancient ape that walked on two legs 5 million years before mankind did. Not bent-legged like other apes, but solidly straight. Maybe that’s where mankind got the idea. And an item on the origin of the self: why did awareness of it develop? Maybe it is the interface between a complex outer world and a complex inner world. How does a living body know what to do with the myriad impressions constantly coming in? Randomness could be disastrous. Which of the myriad aspects of the internal realm can best handle them, when each one is different? Something needs to decide, and that is the conscious self. I remember a friend of mine in college whose logical graduation thesis concluded that man is the universe, and self dies not exist. He could not accept either one. I, though a skeptic, can handle both. But I do believe that self exists, while being uncertain about the universe.

The isolation of the virtual lockdown means that now I have to do things that others did for me before. I am trying to learn the laundry, though MaryLee stepped in to take the brunt of that, and downloading and uploading my own email. I learned how to work the WiFi dingus, pushing the switch from FFO to NO to turn it on, though the WifFi can be as balky as the regular internet used to be. When there’s something complicated like a copy of a letter to another person or an attachment, MaryLee steps in again, being more experienced in online navigation than I am. But our computer thinks it’s me, so pulls its usual stunts, like vanishing a sentence, paragraph, or whole file without warning or chance to save it, or closing the program without notice, or simply refusing to do what we ask, like download or send. Once I got an error message that I had used the wrong password and my letter could not be sent, when that action required no password. Today when we listed a copy of a letter to send, it translated that address to Japanese, repeatedly. I have never sent any letter in Japanese, as I almost flunked high school because I was unable to learn a foreign language. Anyone who thinks that computers are dumb machines that do only what they are told to do has not had experience with my willful equipment. MaryLee is now a believer. Even geeks have admitted bafflement on occasion. So hours can dissipate frustratingly, helping me to get very little done these days. Which perhaps is the point. If the critics couldn’t shut me up, the jinxed equipment is trying.

Until next time, virus and computer permitting.

PIERS

Mayhem 2020

HI-

I read Arcana Creek by Brian Clopper. This is a juvenile fantasy (remember, juvenile is a category, not an indictment) featuring eleven-year-old Max Edgars, who is visiting his grandmother for the summer. About all there is to do there is play by the small river flowing by her house, Arcana Creek. But as it turns out, there is more to that little stream than shows. For one thing it’s magic, off and on. For another, there’s a naiad, or water spirit, named Sunia, who introduces herself in mysterious fashion. There’s a troll named Walter living under a bridge nearby. And Tolvo, a fox who has learned magic spells. The creek is innocent enough, but when there is heavy rain it gets stirred up and muddy, and evil magic takes over. Nice creatures become mean ones when that water touches them. In due course Max decides to go rescue his lost grandfather and his grandmother’s sister, who are captives of the evil spirit Fraught. This becomes a fair adventure, as you might imagine, because Max is just a boy and Fraught not only is far more powerful magically, the whole mission is a trap to catch Max and compel him to poison more of the magic waters.

I read With a Side of Universal Destruction by Brian Clopper. This is quite different from the prior novel by the same author. Will Strooter is a man in his mid twenties who keeps a goldfish named Lloyd in a bowl, as he has done for fifteen years. When it dies, it turns into a collection of orange globules. He puts it out, bowl and all, on his doorstep, expecting it to be mysteriously replaced with a living fish by the end of the day. This has been happening for fourteen years. His erstwhile babysitter Ruth, when he was eleven, had given it to him as a parting gift when she went off to college. Lloyd seemed to bring him good luck, and when it was dead he had bad luck. He has a lingering crush on Ruth despite her absence from his life. Meanwhile his work at the office is pretty much only for the paycheck. Now it is complicated by the rush of bad luck during the fish’s absence. An accident sets fire to the place. Will is in danger of getting fired. Then he encounters Ruth, whom he hasn’t seen in fourteen years. She is now in her thirties, but looks the same as his memory of her. At that point things change. She says she looks no older because she’s a shapeshifter. That there will be no new Lloyd fish. That they are in danger and must flee. Sure enough, an alien flying craft strafes them, blasting things and people in its effort to wipe them out. They wind up on her spaceship. Then it gets complicated. The oversimplified essence is that she planted a god in him, way back when, and now others are out to kill him and take the god’s power for themselves. The action is continuous and the conclusion shakes the universe. It is dangerous to mess with even young gods.

Personal: to rehash the background, leading into the foreground, and maybe the future, Carol, my wife of 63 years, died about seven months ago. I was proactive in handling my grief. I read half a dozen books on grief that my daughter got me. I wrote a novelette-length essay about our long marriage. I joined a hospice bereavement group. And, knowing that my choices were to live alone or with company, as Carol was not going to come back, I decided to try for company. I wrote to MaryLee, who had been a correspondent for 24 years, as I felt she was the most likely woman I knew who would be compatible. I asked her to come be my companion. I had no idea what she looked like; it was character I sought. In digested effect, I told her that while I might not be much, we had these warm Florida winters, in contrast to those in Tennessee. She drove down to give it a try. It is said that love is friendship that has caught fire. Well, it caught fire. On Wednesday, April 22, Earth Day, we got married. The auspices were mixed. The coronavirus siege blotted out our prior plans, and some counties were canceling the issuance of marriage licenses, so we got on with it before that could happen here. She had wanted a beach wedding, but they closed the beaches, so we made it simple and close to home. When we got in my car to drive out to the wedding site, the car refused to start, so we switched to her car. She had a nice bouquet of red and white roses for the occasion—which she forgot, leaving them in the car; but we did get some nice pictures of her with them later. I wear dentures; a front upper tooth came off, making me gap-toothed. I turned it in to the dentist, and in due course we had to search out the lab for it, as the virus siege stopped deliveries. The fix cost me $260. One day later it popped off again, and we were in lockdown, so I figured it wasn’t economic to try to get it fixed again, and tried not to smile during the wedding. When we exchanged rings, I had put hers in my watch pocket with my spare change. Then when I went to retrieve it, it was gone. Finally I found it, forming a circle around a dime, looking like the rim of the coin. What a way to hide! We were married at 9 AM by a Notary Public, Kat, on our tree farm, beside a sable palmetto, the state tree of Florida, with my daughter Cheryl and friend Charles as witnesses. They had set it up beautifully, and the pictures were very nice; I may run a couple with this column. We even stood one alligator apart, thanks to a mini alligator statue Cheryl bought at the foot of the tree. It was a lovely little ceremony. I remember especially MaryLee’s look of love as we exchanged vows and rings. Carol will never be forgotten: I still wear her gold wedding ring and mine on my right hand, and expect to wear them until I die. But now I wear the platinum wedding ring on my left hand that signifies my marriage to MaryLee. We had ordered a queen size bed to share; it didn’t arrive until the day after the wedding, so we had to jam together in a twin bed. There are worse fates. We had thought of a wedding dinner, but the Virus vetoed that and we ate alone together, with two small cakes, chocolate and vanilla, in lieu of a big wedding cake. But we really are married. It is the second marriage for each of us, and I think the final one, though I suspect it will not last as long as my first marriage did. It even changed my appearance: now I have no suspenders, and no socks on my feet while wearing sandals. There’s a new sheriff in town, as it were. MaryLee says it takes ten years off my appearance, but I’m still a thoroughly senior citizen. So are we perfectly matched? Well, I’m a morning lark and she’s a night owl, so we do spend time apart. But we’re about as compatible as can be, whichever way, and we do love each other. I am looking forward to a happy decade. Stay tuned.

The Authors Guild ran an open letter promoting the shut down the so-called National Emergency Library that used the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext to distribute copyrighted books online. They say it is piracy, pure and simple, and I agreed, as I said in my Apull HiPiers column. I received a response to that from Dean Howell, who said he wanted to correct some misinformation, as he is an Open Library user. He says the Archive operates within the confines of United States law, and is a legitimate library. All of its copyrighted works are protected by Adobe DRM, and readers are required to use Adobe digital editions to decrypt the DRM and read the book. There is also an option to read the book on your browser. “Both offerings are poor and difficult to use.” Open Library legally procures copyrighted works by soliciting its users for book sponsorship, and pays the publisher a certain amount of money. A given book can be read by only one person at a time. Typically there is a waitlist for books. What they have done during the pandemic is lift the waitlist restriction so that readers no longer have to wait in line. The books are still protected. So who is correct? At this point I am uncertain.

One of my incidental interests is composting, as this reduces waste and is a kind of home-grown recycling effort. I have mentioned it before, about a year ago. We routinely compost our organic kitchen wastes, and occasionally get new plants growing from them, helping nature do its job. Now I have heard from John Quinn, who says that his team recently created a guide for individual households that want to get started composting. If you are interested, here is the link. https://www.johnquinnrealestate.com/home-composting-guide/.

Lesser notes: they have found strange particles over Antarctica. No, they don’t seem to represent Dark Matter. There are also odd FRBs, that is Fast Radio Bursts coming from distant galaxies that tease us by repeating, then vanishing. The national death rates from Covid-19 vary significantly by country, but this could stem from differences in testing; the actual rate could be similar. The coronavirus is one type, but it turns out that there are more viruses on Earth than the are stars in the universe. Wow! We have two mulberry trees I rescued and transplanted to our front and back yards. It seems their leaves have toxins inimical to all insects except the silk moth, but I have to protect them from creatures like deer. They are trying to turn hydrogen into a metal. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and its metallic form might be a room temperature superconductor, which would be a phenomenal asset. But the process requires a very hard squeeze. They are working on it.

The advent of my love and marriage messed up my writing, reading, and video viewing, and I am behind on them all, as the relative brevity of this HiPiers column shows. MaryLee is a sexagenarian (that means sixties, not sexy) and I am an octogenarian (eighties, not eight sided crystal shaped), but we feel like teens in our new passion. I presume that in time things will settle down and we will return to normal productivity; remember, she’s a writer too, and an artist with her photography. But for now—well, when I get close to her I just have to hold and kiss her, and she kisses me back, and when I wake at night with her beside me I have to catch her hand or whatever. Newlyweds will know how it is, and others may remember. When the Virus Siege alleviates, if ever, we hope to spend some time on the beach, and maybe travel a bit. We’ll see.

PIERS

JeJune 2020

HI-

I read Cultures and Beyond, The Art of World Building 3, by Randy Ellefson. I reviewed the prior two volumes, Creating Life and Creating Places, when they were published. Each volume is a comprehensive discussion of its subject, useful for new writers and surely for established ones too. I have been writing and selling novels for more that half a century, and I have been learning things here. I recommend all three for background reading for those who are serious about the worlds they create. The present volume is amazingly informative about the several aspects of culture, covering armed forces, religions, supernatural aspects, languages, and everything in between. It even lists all the American military ranks. Take a supposedly minor aspect, creating names. I have a small collection of books of names, which I use for my characters, trying not to duplicate myself too often, but I see I am an amateur in this respect. Naming names can be a science! Every section of this volume is similarly detailed. I am not sure whether reading it would cure the dread Writer’s Block for those who suffer it, but if a writer runs out of inspiration, reading this book well might restore it. Certainly it should be on the shelf, as it were, ready to check when uncertainty threatens.

I read The Sleeper’s Serenade, by Jacob Oakley. Fisherman Jedren is seduced by a lovely largely anonymous woman, who later brings him his infant son, whom he names Harpis, as he feels the mother is more harpy than woman. Twenty one years later Harpis captains his boat The Sea Goat, which takes some passengers. One of these is the gnome Wren, and he is perhaps a more important character than Harpis. He belongs to the Syndicate, a secret organization dedicated to the service of the ruling elite. His importance becomes evident when pirates raid the boat. Wren’s magic animates the corpses of the recently slain crewmen, who then turn and fight the enemy. Enemy dead are also reanimated to fight beside them. Soon the pirates are in retreat as their numbers drop. Harpis also turns out to have magic, unifying the living crew members to fight savagely as a unit while Harpis sings. The main portion of the novel shows the machinations of devious figures, who come close to destroying the home kingdom before Wren and Harpis manage to defeat them. It is a hard-hitting story, with gritty bloodshed and ugly magic, evidently one of a series featuring Harpis.

I read The Evil Rotten French Fry, by Gary S. Opas. Knowing the time it can take to write a novel, I suspect this was written before the coronavirus hit the scene. Coincidence or not, this is about a pandemic that isn’t taken seriously at first, so spreads phenomenally. It is not quite like other pandemics, however. This one is designed in a laboratory, to infect a specific family. But it gets away. The victim develops an insatiable taste for tomato juice, and grows potato sticks on his/her head. He projectile vomits on his target, who is then infected. Apart from some initial confusion and tiredness, it seems to have no other ill effects. In fact there comes to be a kind of camaraderie of victims, whose potato sticks can embrace each other when two infected heads get close enough. Eventually a victim gets annoyed and hires a sharp investigator to run down the source. That becomes its own story. This is a lighthearted adventure, no great strain to assimilate unless you happen to hate french fries.

I read Little Boy Lost, More Tales of Youth Disrupted, edited and illustrated by Ronald Linson & Deidre J. Owen. I reviewed their prior volume, Little Girl Lost, last OctOgre; that was 13 tales of girls, while the present one is 15 tales of boys. As before, not all the subjects are children: they range up to about age 18 or older, depending on special circumstances. Some stories are cute, some horror, some strange. Some themes are reasonably conventional; some are impressively original. It is not feasible to comment on all of them individually, so I’ll mention those that struck me in passing. This does not mean that the others are unworthy, just that my tastes are individual. “Someone Else’s Shoes” by Fiona M. Jones features young Elvis, who is a clone of the famous singer Elvis Presley, raised by adoptive parents so he can grow up to resume an interrupted singing career. But he stops speaking, then disappears. What went wrong? Well, in effect he was wearing someone else’s shoes and didn’t want to be channeled. I can’t speak for the original Elvis, though he was my contemporary, about half a year younger than I, but I suspect this is about the way he would react. Creative folk don’t like to be channeled. “Ride the Ride” by Piers Anthony—yes, that’s me—is about the fear of the boy inside the man as they approach a horrendous roller coaster ride, but are rescued by the supremely calming intercession of a mysterious woman who joins them. They both love her, but she turns out to be a ghost. Regardless, they don’t want to let her go. Not all ghosts are spooky. “The Inspection” by Jeremy Thackray has refugee children from all of history hiding in a church. The problem comes when inspectors want to send them home, where they may soon die. This is one powerful story. “From the Trash” by Marie Vibbert is a tricky murder mystery relating to a boy lost on a moon station. Is the woman who finds him tough enough to save him? “Killing Miss Pope” by Ken Goldman is a story of vengeance. Stephen stutters and is called retarded by cruel teacher Miss Pope, ruining his education when he is actually fairly bright. I relate to this, because I evidently suffered from dyslexia before that was fashionable, so I was I think considered retarded, and it took me three years and five schools to make it through first grade. Only when I got out on my own did I manage to score, and today I think few but literary critics consider me retarded. I think such a critic is a work of art finely fashioned from fecal matter. Schools can be like death camps for creative children. Yes, I made sure my dyslexic daughter did not get screwed like that, though it took some heroic measures like yanking her out of her first grade school so the teacher could not destroy her, and later interceding in college. I was once an English teacher myself; when I make a point to the folk in charge, they ruefully know I am correct, and action follows. “The Great Gumball Machine” by John B. Rosenman tells how a boy wins a special gumball that can give him an ideal future career. But he is justifiably cautious; not every gift is ideal. “Shy Boy” by Don Noel. Harold secretly loves the girl next door but lacks the courage ever to approach her. Until fate intercedes. “The Prince’s Choice” by Mark F. Geatches. Prince Monroe, 16, must choose his future bride from a dozen girls selected by his parents. All are remarkably lovely and qualified, but he fixes on the youngest, Maya, who is barely 13. And his parents send her away. He can’t oppose them directly, but he remains steadfast in his choice. An interesting conflict of wills. I relate because fate eventually steered me to a marvelous woman who did not exist when I was young. “Monster in the House” by Tim Mendees is an ugly horror story, as Kenny, 12, finally manages to fight his way past the monsters that invade his house. Of course it’s not quite that simple. This one made me wince, and not just because monsters constantly tormented me when I was a child. “Everything Under the Sun” by Noah Grace has a most interesting background situation. The authorities have special watches that can stop time, so that they can investigate crime with no apparent time passing. But there is a penalty: the investigator ages while the world does not. Thus the protagonist is a woman who has mothered her 7-year-old daughter for 14 years. Investigators seem to age rapidly, and become eager to retire so they can age normally. This is a take on time that I never thought of, and if it is original with the author, I congratulate him for skunking me imaginatively. Overall, this is another remarkable collection of stories of many genres, with lovely illustrations for the editions that have them. It stirs memories and emotions, as my reactions indicate. Publication date is June 18, 2020.

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A reader asked me for writing advice, and I got into a spot essay that should apply to just about any aspiring writer, so I’m running it here without reference to his name:

Many folk dream of making it as writers, as you do, and as I did. But few actually make it, about one in a hundred, and this is not necessarily because of lack of talent, but the cruelty of the market. For example, when I demanded that my first publisher honor its own contract and pay me due royalties, I got blacklisted for six years, lied about, and even a writers’ organization tacitly sided with the publisher. I am still not in good repute in some quarters.

It was a supreme irony that when that publisher cheated one too many writers, and got sued, and the proprietors had to flee their own company, the new editor discovered that he, too, had been cheated, and invited me to contribute to the reformed publisher. That was when I wrote A Spell For Chameleon, starting the Xanth fantasy series that in due course made me a best seller. But few cheated authors get such breaks. I’m not saying that all publishers cheat, but there are sharks in those waters and the average writer is largely on his own.

I labored to help make it possible for any writer to get published, and today that is the case, thanks largely to the Internet. But sales are generally small. Don’t expect to make any significant money writing. Do it only for your own satisfaction. Then hope you get lucky, as I did.

To answer your specific questions: 1. For your routine, try to do some creative writing every day, even if only a hundred words. Keep it going, day by day, until you get there. If one project doesn’t move, try another that may move better; don’t let a balky text stop you. 2. Don’t pay an editor to edit it; this is apt to cost you more than you will ever make in sales, and not all professed editors are truly competent. Edit it yourself, or have a literate family member go over it, then shop for a publisher. I maintain an ongoing list of electronic publishers and related services at HiPiers.com you should find useful. If you get a publisher, they will edit your manuscript to the extent they deem appropriate. Avoid any publishers that want you to pay for anything, unless you get into self publishing. Check changes closely, but don’t make a scene unless they do something like turning your innocent girl protagonist into a call girl. 3. The best way to get your story out there is to get a good publisher who can properly promote it. It will help if you turn out to be a good and exciting writer, but that’s not enough. Competition is fierce. You need to get lucky.

Regardless, my best to you. Some new writers do score.

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Now another letter, but first a bit of background. Thirty-two years ago, a twelve-year-old school girl, Jenny, was crossing the street at the designated time and place, supervised, when a drunk driver crashed through and took her out. Fast action and intensive care saved her life, but she remained in a coma several months, barely responsive to others. The drunk driver had no remorse; they had to arrest him and haul him in from his fishing excursion to make him attend the hearing; as far as I know he paid no penalty for what he had done. I call him a burro sphincter; translate that as you please. Jenny’s mother, desperate, hoped that a personal letter from her favorite author would rouse her so that she did not sink into permanent oblivion or death. It was a long shot, but what else was there? So she wrote to the author, me, and I responded by writing Jenny a nice letter. They read it to her—and it did bring her out, and she re-entered the human world. But that was when it became apparent that she was almost totally paralyzed. She could wiggle one toe, and move some fingers of one hand; she couldn’t talk. That put me in a crisis of conscience. I had done what I thought was right, but had I actually sentenced Jenny to a life of imprisonment in her paralyzed body? So I did what I could: I wrote to her weekly, trying to entertain her with minor personal details of my own life, maybe providing her a vicarious experience of a better condition. Time has passed; her mother died, my wife died, but my weekly letters to Jenny continue. A reader reads them to her, as she can’t hold them herself. The published book Letters To Jenny consists of my first year’s letters to her. At once point a studio considered making a movie of the story, but that fell through. So now, as it were, it is just Jenny and me, the world indifferent. It is a one-way communication; she does not respond, being unable to type, but her family says she still likes the letters. Thus this week’s letter, one page long as they all are.

Dear Jenny.

You’ve got to stop worrying about the coronavirus! Even if you don’t speak of it, your mother hears you, and that sets her off, and she has to try to reassure you that she’s not gong to let it happen to you. So here is one more Mr. Butts comic, which she barely slipped by the guardian angel, who is getting downright suspicious. He thinks she’s trying to sneak cigarettes into Heaven; good thing he doesn’t know the truth, that she’s trying to reassure you. Be reassured, think nice thoughts, so she can relax at last. Not that she was ever good at relaxing, but this makes it worse. No, she’s not threatening to tear off your head and—never mind. And stop trying to work the Jumble word puzzle on the back of the Curtis comic. If your reader catches on that you’re not paying attention, she’ll be annoyed. She’s not here for her health, you know. [NOTE: Jenny’s mother smoked, and I teased her about it, pretending that the animated cigarette Mr. Butts in the Doonesbury comic strip was her favorite character. Now I say that her main annoyance in Heaven is that it bans smoking there. You know, smoke is for Hell. The facetious threat she made to Jenny was something like “If you don’t stop that, I’m going to tear off your head and shit down your windpipe.” She was remarkably expressive when annoyed.]

This week’s Monstrously Huge News is that the star jasmine flowers, which had finished out their season by the end of last month, abruptly resurged. First there was one flower, then more, and more, until the top day there were 432!! That’s a new record. This morning there were only 260 as it subsides. I knew you’d be amazed and thrilled. Other flower news: remember the one I need to use a mnemonic to remember? Aga lion? Aga tiger? Aga leopard? Ah! Aga pantha. Just one plant is blooming this season, and its first flower of the developing cluster has opened, with six lovely blue petals. We also have one honeysuckle cluster. Yes, Xanth has the Heaven-Can-Wait Honeysuckle that mesmerizes bees; ours lacks that magic. Ah, well. Maybe next season. [NOTE: That’s in Xanth #46, Six Crystal Princesses, not yet published.]

Other news: Cheryl got me a new hose sprinkler, as the old one could no longer be turned off, making things messy. The new one works beautifully. Isn’t that exciting? You’re so good at concealing your excitement that sometimes you fool me, at least for a moment. No, I’m not going to splash you.

Carroll and Lina Wren are gone, and so are their hatchlings; the nest is empty. I hope that means they matured and flew off together, not that a snake called. And on this morning’s exercise walk I spooked two deer. They bounded off around a turn, and I heard a crash. When I caught up one was lying on the ground beyond the fence; it must have caught the top and crashed down. I hoped it wasn’t badly hurt. Then on the return trip it was gone. What a relief! Bye, deer. [Our local wren species is the Carolina Wren, hence the names. As for the deer: I may have spoken too soon, because next day, about a quarter mile on up the drive, a grown deer turned up dead, the vultures congregating. Cheryl and I dug a pit and buried it. So it may have been injured, walked a way, then died. I hate that kind of scene, but it is nature. We could have left the carcass to the birds, but elected to intervene to abate the developing smell.]

There is a kind of minor sequel to the Jenny story. One book of mine one woman read was Letters to Jenny. She wrote me a fan letter because of it, and that started a 24-year correspondence. One thing led to another, and now MaryLee and I have been married a month, thanks, perhaps, to Jenny. Fate can be devious.

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I receive solicitations to include links of many kinds here in my HiPiers column or on my Links page. I try to restrict them to the purpose of this site, which is to promote my books. But sometimes my other interests get in the way. Courtney McNally asked me to check his beginner’s guide to house plants. I like plants, and now have a number in pots that will soon be planted in the sunken garden we made from the old swimming pool. So plants are part of my life, and not just because I am a vegetarian. So here is the link to his guide, which covers all manner of plants, such as money plant, air plant, African violet, Zebra, snake plant, spider plant, rubber, and many more. If you are considering getting house plants, this may be where to start. https://www.myjobquote.co.uk/blog/beginners-guide-to-house-plants/.

NEW SCIENTIST had an article on the evolution of sexuality, which says that same-sex attraction isn’t an evolutionary paradox. Sexuality varies continuously from hetero to homo, and has a range of social functions that include play, social bonding, affiliation, barter, conflict resolution, dominance, and appeasement. It says this applies to both straight and gay sex. My attitude is that some religions choose to claim that sex is only for procreation, nothing else. They are wrong. Animals have sex only for breeding, sometimes coming together only when the females are in heat: screw her and begone. The human species is a bit more enlightened, recognizing that sex can be a social lubricant that facilitates group dynamics, and contributes to the survival of the species by enabling larger groups to work together.

NEW SCIENTIST says that arachnid (that’s spiders) intelligence is changing our ideas about brains and consciousness. The mind of a spider may even extend into its web. Yes, the web could be regarded as a giant sensory organ. They wonder whether spiders can be conscious. I say of course they are, as are the six-legged insects. Consciousness must be a relatively simple feedback mechanism, and when they discover its secret, conscious robots will follow. They already exist in science fiction.

I have a recent problem. I used to write my fiction, read books, watch videos on DVD or Blu-Ray, and handle necessary chores. My time has been monopolized by things, and I have read no books I bought, watched no videos, and written no fiction in the past month. I have four novel-length projects, including being one chapter into Xanth #47 Apoca Lips, all of which are stalled. When my wife Carol died we got into a massive housecleaning, as she had not been an apt housekeeper. In fact our insurance dropped us because of the condition our house had fallen into. We also converted our long-defunct swimming pool to a sunken garden. These projects are nearing completion, and the time they are taking should be easing off. The house is back up to spec, and we can live without the insurance. The coronovirus is partly to blame, as I now have to handle my own email instead of letting my daughter do it, and transcribe my written notes to correspondents. The email system seems to be cursed; it intercepts my letters, deleting words, sentences, paragraphs, or the whole thing, so that I have to start over. When MaryLee tries to bail me out, it does the same thing to her. So correspondence that used to take minutes now takes frustrating hours, and I am seriously behind on some of it. Yes, I typo a lot, partly because I am now working with three different computer systems, two of which lack my version of the Linux keyboard so I type touch where the functions used to be and no longer are. I now have a programmable ergonomic keyboard that should solve that problem, once I get time to get familiar with it. Regardless, my Linux systems never pull such stunts, only the Windows system I inherited from my wife. Maybe it’s mad at me for remarrying. In due course that balky system will be gone, but at present it’s a time consumer. New marriage is another culprit; MaryLee and I can’t just hug and kiss in passing; it can be hours before we separate from incidental contacts. Maybe that will ease off in time, but no, we’re not going to hurry it. Another thing is my reading. I try to help other writers as I can, and part of that is reading and reviewing their novels in the hope that this will facilitate their publication and success. I am a slow reader, and a novel can take me a week to get through. The novels have been piling in, and I still have two to go. So just as I finally had to pull the plug on sending signed pictures, when they got to a regular 50 a month and were appearing for sale on eBay after being obtained free from me, I have to act to reclaim my working time. On deck are two more novels to review, Into the Lair and Elf Righteous. After that I will not be taking any more for some time. I expect to resume writing this month, and to watch some videos with MaryLee. [After I wrote that, we watched Terminator: Dark Fate, commencing the new order. That’s a hard-hitting story with some interesting twists.] In short, doing what I want to do, rather than having all my time taken by what others want me to do. I am old; as I like to put it, the average American man my age is several years dead. I don’t know how much time I still have to live, and I want to enjoy it. I also want to do my bit to help save the world as we know it, so that humanity will have a future other than the slow apocalypse of global warming, despite the destructive efforts of some contemporary politicians. If this seems selfish, so be it; enough is enough. You have been advised.

PIERS

JewelLye 2020

HI-

I read Into the Lair, Book One of the Taming the Chaos Trilogy, by Jerry Bridges. This is a massive fantasy novel, over 140,000 words, and a powerful one. It begins with a Forward summarizing the Ages of Future Earth. The First Age is the world we know, up to about the present; the Second is the twenty five thousand years following the destruction of the First, where magic exists and alternate species develop, such as elves dwarves, ogres and many strange beasts, some of whom are intelligent. The Third Age sees interbreeding between humans, elves, demons and others, leading to magical children, crossbreeds, and the rise of many species of ferocious dragons. The Fourth Age sees wars of extermination that eliminate most of the dragons. The Fifth Age sees wars and uneasy alliances, and is the setting for the main body of the novel. There is an interesting and useful device wherein each chapter is prefaced by the name of a character, who is the protagonist for that chapter. So there are many viewpoints, but there is no trouble following them. One is Kailynn, who is a male elf, with light green skin and sky blue hair. He looks ordinary, but is 5,000 years old. To abridge things considerably, he avoids his lovely wife because she is urgent to mate and have a child but this is highly inconvenient for him at the moment. Then he goes to help the humans in a phenomenal battle, single-handedly destroying the enemy but then getting abducted himself so that others think he is dead. When they discover that he is alive but captive of the dragons they set up a mission to rescue him. This leads to many adventures, culminating in fighting a number of dragons who have powers like burning, freezing, or worse. The action throughout is hard hitting, as is the characterization. In fact every part of this novel is outstanding; I suspect it will become a minor classic of its type in due course. Even a fight with an animated chest that wants to collect magic things is compelling, and some of the actions of godlike creatures is mind blowing. One example from memory: a woman wants special power from a magical creature, and to sell it he twists off her hand and makes her eat it herself. Then similar with her leg, which I think he eats. She must endure the pain: he likes feeling that. Favors do not come cheap.

I read Elf Righteous by Briant Reil. This is the third in a series, following Elf Mastery and Elf Doubt in 2016 and 2018 respectively. Despite the light hearted titles, these are increasingly complicated, serious, and hard hitting books, with sometimes dismayingly thoughtful characterizations. The protagonist is Kyla, a girl elf, for all that elves live several hundred years. She is trying to do what’s right, but in the complex social and political setting it can be challenging to know what is right, let alone managing to accomplish it. She has some magic of her own, plus some magic items that others want, notably Empress Aethelwyne, who is unscrupulous about obtaining them. At one point Kyla swallows them, and the Empress, unwilling to wait for them to emerge naturally, starts to have the elf girl cut open for them. No anesthetic, no threatening, just hold her down and slice her gut open. The Empress is straightforward about her designs. Kyla manages to get away, injured, but is pursued, and she barely escapes several times. She learns more about her own powers, such as being able to use her mind to read the minds of others, and edit out key memories or sights, such as herself, so that she in effect disappears. To simply considerably, the essence is that the power Chaos has been awakened, and is destroying whole planets. He can perhaps be stopped by the artifacts Kyla has, if they can figure out how to use them. But just stopping Chaos isn’t enough; they need also to prevent the Empress from achieving her ruthless conquest of the several dominions that make up the larger society. There seems to be no perfect answer, and indeed, this fantasy is realistic in its refusal to provide an unrealistic solution. Read this for adventure, not laughs.

I read The Child of Chaos, by Glen Dahlgren, Book 1 of the Chronicles of Chaos. I have a special interest in Chaos, as the Demon of Chaos appears in a future Xanth novel, written but not yet published. Needless to say—so naturally I am saying it—my take on Chaos is different and much lighter than what is presented in the novel I am reviewing here. But I think we agree that Chaos is at least the equal of all the more conventional figures combined, and is to be treated with respect if not outright fear. Chaos is the original state of the universe, before the domains of Order got established. We see this in Elf Righteous, reviewed above, and in my coming novel Skeleton Key. Fans of the concept of Chaos are welcome to take note. The author of this volume has a comprehensive background in electronic gaming, and is now moving on to writing his own fiction. He is clearly competent in the fantasy genre, and this book shows him to be a formidable novelist in his own right. This is what fantasy fiction should be, though it is so hard-hitting that I’m not sure it is really suitable for younger adults.

In Child of Chaos, the main protagonist—there are several viewpoint characters in the course of the novel—is Galen, who starts as a boy of twelve and ages as time passes. He and his twin sister Myra are on their way to test for service to the religion Charity, along with two friends. They have some trouble with mean spirited bullies, but do get there, and Myra passes the test to become a priestess. Galen doesn’t pass, but there is something odd about him, as if some other force is calling him. Meanwhile the bully Horace uses his ruthless cunning to sneak into the Temple of Evil and take over as its head priest. He then uses similar ugly skills to do the same with the Temple of War. Then he comes after the Temple of Charity, which is when it gets complicated. Galen and Myra fight back, but the outcome is by no means certain. There is a quality of imagination and detail here that impresses me, along with good characterization. This is no ordinary sword and sorcery story. This is another novelist who I think will become more widely known as his skill is appreciated. Look for it August 16.

I try not to discuss politics too much in the column, because I think most readers come here because they like my published books, mostly the funny fantasy, and whatever political inclinations I have are not relevant to that. For the record I am far liberal; I registered in 1959 as an independent because neither the Republicans nor the Southern Democrats reflected my views. Since then the Southern Democrats have mostly morphed into Republicans and the national Democrats have come closer to me. In recent years the Republicans seem to have gone off the deep end of ignorance and bigotry. A recent political column paraphrases my view nicely. It refers to the unraveling presidency of “the Crybaby-in-Chief,” who threw a tantrum because a photograph of the crowd at his inauguration showed that it was smaller than that of his predecessor four years before. It refers to his “Niagara of lies,” and suggests that not only must he be removed in the next election, those Senate Republicans who support him in lock step must be routed. It even quotes from T S Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” and says there is no such thing as rock bottom here; the worst is yet to come. Who is this extremist columnist? George Will, the noted conservative commentator.

Our hundred-acre tree farm started with trails around and through it, but three decades have filled them in with resurging wilderness. The crop is thirty acres of slash pines; I would have preferred longleaf pines, but it was planted before we bought it. The rest is assorted oaks with occasional magnolias, hickory, dogwood, persimmon, red cedar, cypress, holly, multiple saw palmetto and Sabal Palmetto like the one MaryLee and I got married beside, two mulberry, and a single volunteer sand pine. So we got the paths cleared out again, and find we have some very nice forest alcoves. But MaryLee is not a hiker the way I am. So we bought a Mule ATV so we could drive those trails. It’s a nice little vehicle and should be perfect. But the day after we got it, a neighbor sighted a big black bear on our property, even taking a picture of it. This is not bear country, but I like to think of our farm as a kind of wildlife refuge. We have deer and feral pigs galore—the latter are descendants of ones brought by the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto nigh 500 years ago, for slaughter, that got loose and have ranged Florida ever since. I’m glad some escaped their fate, but they are a nuisance now; the forest floor looks like a disc-harrowed field where they have foraged, and they tend to drive out other creatures, like deer, and big ones can be dangerous when encountered, though ordinarily they scramble away. So that is the only hunting we allow on our property, to keep them down. We have alligators, gopher tortoises, opossums, raccoons, squirrels, the occasional fox or otter or bobcat, many kinds of snakes including, yes, rattlesnakes and the lovely coral snakes, also the big indigo snake that eats rattlesnakes and I think is the State Snake, all of which we value, plus birds, including the stately sand hill cranes and more common cattle egrets, hawks, owls, huge piliated woodpeckers and others. Even a nest of chimney swifts in our disused brick chimney, who fly all the way from South America just to be with us. Also insects galore, especially the green and blue dragonflies by day and fireflies by night and even once a lovely flower fly. I dislike only the mosquitoes, though ours are cute little ones. We have the huge golden orb spiders and others with smaller but prettier webs. Yes the deadly brown recluse spider is native to these parts, but we’ve never had trouble with them. Most creatures simply mind their own business, ignoring us, and that’s fine. I’d love to have a bear, but am cautious, as they can be dangerous when surprised or cornered. Suppose I am on my exercise walk and suddenly encounter an irritable bear? That prospect freaks MaryLee out. So now she follows in the car when I walk, just in case. And the ATV has sat unused, until we are sure the bear has meandered on to other pastures. No, I can’t ignore MaryLee’s concern; she’s being wifely. She is determined that I don’t do something stupid and widow her prematurely. Other married folk will know how that is. It’s why married men live longer than single men. Who says backwoods life is dull?

The conversion of our pool to a sunken garden is now almost complete. We got the torn enclosure mesh redone so that the flower-eating creatures can’t get in, and are about to set out assorted flowers and maybe vegetables. There were some sacrifices along the way. The pool had been taken over by frogs, and there were tadpoles we didn’t want to ground. So we got a bucketful of tadpoles and I hauled it down to the edge of the lake and let them swim away, and any frogs we caught we took down also, though most departed on their own. Cruelty-free conversion has its nuances. Carroll and Lina Wren had a nest there, with live chicks, so we had to wait until they vacated before closing it off completely. Then one day the nest was empty. My hope is that the chicks spread their wings and flew, but my fear is that a snake cleaned them out. Now the wrens have nested on our front portico, and the eggs have just hatched; I hope the snake doesn’t think to check there. But there was also a nest of cute little wasps. These are not your fierce stingers, but half sized ones nesting on a wind chime. Every so often when I was working there my head would inadvertently bang it, setting off the chime, but the wasps were tolerant and never protested. They were nice neighbors. But if we shut them in with tight new screening, how would they survive? They needed to forage farther afield. So early one morning when they were torpid I took the wind chime out to hang near a tree. That seemed to work, but gradually their number diminished, and finally the nest was gone. I fear I had put them in an area the birds could spy, and they got eaten. I like birds, but I wish I could have better protected the wasps. Yes, nature is red in tooth and claw, but I don’t have to like that aspect. One day we saw a mole in the garden, and I’m not certain whether that would be good or bad for the flowers, but it is hiding. We also got a low picket fence set up around the edges, so no one could accidentally step off the edge and drop four feet down and hurt a flower plant. So we finally have the garden started, but with some regrets along the way.

One thing I started doing in that connection: for the last 50 years or so I have composted organic kitchen wastes in our back yard, recycling them into useful soil instead of stinking up our household trash. Now that we have the sunken garden, I am composting the scraps in a corner of it, where our local armadillo can’t dig them up overnight. So this may be the place to mention a link, Creating The Best At-Home Composting System, https://porch.com/advice/creating-composting-system/. So if composting interests you as it does me, here’s how.

I check in the Junk Mail section of my email every so often, as legitimate letters can wind up there, and some junk gets in the legitimate section. I found The Equedia Letter, a sort of provocative newsletter. One article said it had predicted that six events would determine our future. 1. Inflate. 2. Deflate. 3. Control. 4. Divide, where they incite riots and hate crimes. 5. War, where they mask the international financial and economic crisis through the rhetoric or the reality of war. 6. Reset, where they blame the war for changing things to suit the powerful elite. It says we are already in Stage 4, so Stage 5, War, is near. This makes uncomfortable sense to me. I do fear that Trump, seeing his defeat in the election looming, will start a war so that he can declare marshal law and stay in power indefinitely. The newsletter says to make as much money as you can, because the shit is about to hit the fan. I hope that does not happen, but worry that it will, and it’s not just money that concerns me, but the servival of democracy itself. These are interesting times.

Shorter notes: I check the Ask Marilyn column in the Sunday supplement, as there can be interesting things there, regardless whether she is right or wrong. One week she was asked to make three words from the letters A E G I L N R T. Okay, I made A TEN GIRL. But the keyed answer was to make three different eight-letter words. I figure my take on things differs from the norm. One item in NEW SCIENTIST says that a concussion is not just a passing headache, but can have long-term complications, because the brain has been injured. I believe it. The sixth mass extinction of wildlife on Earth is well underway, and accelerating. I believe it, and know that we humans are the cause. If there is a god, he may eliminate our species, to save the world. That prospect bothers me. Question: will Russia interfere in our presidential election again? Answer: it never stopped; they are working tirelessly to destroy democracy; and are having more success than I like. And an ugly recent new trend, as police deliberately assault journalists. That suggests that there is more police malfeasance than has been known, and rather than clean up their act, those police are trying to shut up those who report on it. That trend needs to be squelched immediately. But how?

Meanwhile, having caught up on my reading of other writers’ novels, I am resuming my own projects. MaryLee and I put together a book titled The Dying and the Light (apologies to Dylan Thomas for the paraphrase of a line of his, one word changed) which DREAMING BIG will publish in due course. That consists of two pieces written in grief, her “Invisibly Captive,” fiction about a way to cure Alzheimer’s, after her mother died of it, and my own “My Rose With Thorns,” the story of my 63 year marriage that some feel is too personal to be published. After writing those pieces the authors met and married, coincidentally. We are also working on another collaboration that I will un-stall as I catch up. And we are watching Season Twelve of Doctor Who on Blu-Ray, which Robert Katayama sent me. Doctor Who has become wondrously more sophisticated over the decades, and we had trouble following the complicated plot lines at first, but are catching on better with subsequent episodes. Doctor Who is now a woman, not played for sexiness, and I like that.

Hilltop Farm, the massive—290,000 words—history co-authored by me and my sister Teresa Engeman, is now being globally marketed. This is the story of an ambitions Utopian community in backwoods Vermont in the early 1940s, during World War Two. The forest property was inaccessible by car in winter, so we trekked by snowshoes, and there was no electric power, so we used a wood burning stove and kerosene oil lamps. The book consists mainly of the letters of our intellectual pacifist parents Alfred and Norma Jacob, both of whom graduated from Oxford University in England, and journals of the time, that we inherited and saved for about seventy years before concluding that the story needed to be told, and we were the only ones who could do it. I selected and transcribed the letters and Teresa edited the whole, adding pictures and explanatory notes. The community finally foundered, and our parents divorced, but it is a significant story for those interested in obscure things like saving the world. We regard it as an irony that only the two useless children survive that effort today. More on this anon, when.

And so life continues in its petty pace, as I reflect on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools to—well, never mind, because you already know it.

PIERS

AwGhost 2020

HI-

I read This Book Will Blow Your Mind, by the contributors to my favorite magazine, NEW SCIENTIST, edited by Frank Swain. It was given to me last Christmas by MaryLee, whom I later married, but I was so busy reading novels for others that I didn’t get to it until now. Portions of it are indeed mind blowing, if you have the mind for it. I like to own the books I read, so I can mark them, so as to be able to find things I may want to reread, and my check marks are all along it. The first section tells of seventeen impossible things before breakfast, such as that lightning should not be possible, considering the laws of physics, teleportation is possible for small enough things, the infusion of young blood might cure aging—hm, that interests me as I approach age 86, for some obscure reason—someone hopes to transplant human heads, and five mythical animals turned out to be real, like the duck-billed platypus and colossal squid. The second section is titled “You Are Not Who You Think You Are.” For one thing your body consists of about ten times as many bacteria as functioning cells, so you are really a bag of bacteria. Do you think you are saner, smarter, and better looking than the average? So does everyone else. Since this is impossible, we are delusional. But you are a member of a species that is the greatest runner on Earth. Chances are that if you train for it, you can outrun any other earth creature. Think you’re an atheist? We have evolved to believe in the supernatural. Fortunately I escape that, being an agnostic, but it still makes me nervous; my fingers are crossed. It concludes with current experiments in treating mental illness with hallucinatory drugs like LSD and Magic Mushroom: not only do they seem to work, a single dose can last for months. And so on; this book is packed with obscure significance, all the way up to the nature of the universe, which shouldn’t exist. So are we all imaginary? Not exactly. I recommend it for anyone with a mind, knowing that eliminates maybe ninety percent of folk, but most readers of this column should be in the upper ten percent of sanity, smarts, and appearance, yes?

I also read a novelette-length collection, “Lavender Fables” by Clayton. I omit the last name because I understand internet trolls go after anyone who has any original thoughts or unconventional viewpoints. These are little stories mostly concerned with lesbianism, supportive rather than condemnatory, urging tolerance. They are mostly phrased as talking animal stories, but the concerns are human. One of the shortest is how one female asks another female if she would like to go to her den for a tryst, and the other says certainly not; her own den is much closer. Perhaps the longest concerns a princess who will marry the one who obtains a fabulous pearl for her. But it is in a giant oyster in a difficult place under the sea, and the men who try it fail. Until finally a woman tries it, and her gentle touch enables her to get the pearl, and she is the one who gets to marry the princess, who in turn is quite satisfied. My own attitude toward the gays and lesbians is that I am firmly heterosexual, loving the look and feel of women, and no way am I going to change. I assume that the gays are as locked into their orientation as I am to mine, so I follow the golden rule and let them be, as I prefer they do with me. We can work together, be friends, just not romantic partners.

I mentioned last month how we bought a Kawasaki Mule ATV, then didn’t use it because of a bear scare. We are still wary of a possible bear, but are now driving the Mule out to pick up the morning newspaper, a 1.6 mile round trip. In due course we’ll drive it around the tree farm, the bear permitting; it is after all an off-road vehicle. On my exercise walking days MaryLee now follows me in the car, just to make sure I don’t get into an argument with the bear. She is being wifely, keeping me out of trouble.

The sunken garden has now been planted with all the potted flower plants we got. MaryLee’s favorite color is purple, so Cheryl bought her a slew of purple flowers, few of which I had heard of. So I made a chart showing where I planted them, and marked the ones from the tags. Four plumeria rubra, subtypes Inca Gold, Jubilee, Bliss, and Rhapsody; the first three may become small trees, the fourth is a miniature, though at present the largest. Two blue Skyflowers, one subtitled Sapphire Showers. One Sallyfun Deep Ocean Salvia. Two Graffiti Mix Pentos, one light purple in color, the other straight purple. One Salvia Splendens, color blue purple. Six little purple Mexican Heathers. One hydrangia MaryLee gave, me, one calla lily our friend Charles gave MaryLee. One pink hibiscus that grew last year from a broken off branch, ironically the only new hibiscus to survive, because it was isolated from the unseen caterpillars that denuded the others at night. One potted passionflower, and one volunteer passonflower. Three cherry tomato plants, two from the hydroponic Aerogarden they outgrew, one from friend Julie Brady. Maybe one mango tree I planted from the seed in a store-bought fruit. Two avocados, similarly from fruit. At the edge a volunteer beautyberry. I have now replanted the AeroGarden with six Romaine lettuce pods, which I will move to the sunken garden when they outgrow the indoor one. My guess is that the next year will transform the sunken garden as the plants all grow and vie for space. This project is just beginning. No, no intelligent alien planet plants from other galaxies. Yet. But stay tuned.

MaryLee and I like to watch TV and movies together, and yes we hug and hold hands as if on a date. We have yet to have our first real date; the coronavirus squelched that part of our courtship. We have time for them mainly in the evening, so I don’t have blow by blow reviews as I did int the past. We watched season of Westworld before, but it became increasingly violent and nonsensical. Now we have seen several episodes of the second Doctor Who series, sent by Robert Katayama, wherein the Doctor is a woman, and they’re fun. No, they aren’t played for sex appeal; no intimate flesh shows and there’s nothing suggestive; the lead is personable female, is all. The Fifth Element, which I would have to watch again to make much sense of it; mainly I remember a marvelously sinuous blue plastic singer. We watched the first three The Fast and The Furious movies, which feature car racing and fairly intense human interactions; the best of those is #3 Tokyo Drift, featuring the way they throw their cars into controlled skids on the turns; that’s hell on the tires, but fascinating to watch. Beauty and the Beast, a remake I haven’t seen before, well done. Now MaryLee and I find we relate to the roles, she being Beauty, I the Beast, but no, I don’t seek an enchantment to make me young and handsome. Dante’s Peak, wherein a resort town is near a dormant volcano that revives to terrorize the natives. Yes, there are scary sequences, the kind that make couples draw closer for mutual support, which we like. As I may have mentioned, we seem more like teenagers than senior citizens, at least in this respect. And the first The Expendables movie, which we found to be what we consider violence porn, where Man A hits Man B, who hits him back, and back and forth in ten minute sequences. The monotony is broken by some appearances of a nice figured woman; I’d settle for less grit and more girl. We don’t expect to watch the sequels.

Somehow there was a mix-up and I got put on the mailing list for Trump Supporters, which I really am not. They think my name is Roland Westlie, and are desperate for me to contribute $35 to the Trump re-election campaign. “We are up against an unhinged left-wing mob, a Democratic party that has embraced radical socialism, and the FAKE NEWS media that will NEVER tell the truth about all of our accomplishments.” Alas, I am disappointing them. I wonder whether the real Roland wonders why the Trump campaign is suddenly neglecting him? I hope he gets over the hurt.

I am back to writing, having halted the deluge of outside novels to read and comment on. One I declined to read at this time is 700,000 words, another only 400,000. They are surely worthy pieces, but for me not writing is like not breathing, and I had to claw back my time. I had four projects on hold for two months. One collaboration was summarily ended by the other party; then there were three. First I wrote a chapter in the collaboration MaryLee and I are doing, The Alien Cleaners. (We have another, The Dying and the Light, to be published in due course.) Then I wrote a chapter in Xanth #47 Apoca Lips. Apoca is a woman with a devastating kiss, as you might imagine. Yes, there will be a pundemic in it, though in real life I am not at all amused by the virus. In AwGhost I should proceed further on both projects. I do coincidentally have a ghost character in the Xanth novel, Ghorgeous Ghost, introduced in the prior novel. The fourth project is Deep Well, likely to be my next significant novel, in contrast to my entertainments. Critics like to pretend that I don’t do any serious writing, while carefully ignoring my serious work like Macroscope, Tarot, Tatham Mound, or the GEODYSSEY historical series. Critics, as I like to define them, can be works of art finely fashioned from fecal matter. Ask any other writer to get confirmation.

Every so often I check my Junk Mail category, because sometimes legitimate mail gets dumped there by the machine, while true junk mail gets put with the good stuff. Thus I found The Equedia Letter for July 19, 2020. This issue explores the COVID pandemic. It says that this letter isn’t about Left or Right, it’s about seeking the truth. It reprints an article by Beda M Stadler titled “Why Everyone Was Wrong,” originally published June 10, 2020. It says the media have been calling this virus novel, that is, unlike prior ones, and it isn’t. Also wrong to claim that the population would not already have some immunity. “Thirdly, it was the crowning stupidity to claim that someone could have Covid-19 without any symptoms at all or even pass the disease along without showing any symptoms whatsoever.” It says that it is merely a seasonal cold virus that mutated and disappears in summer. “The virus is gone for now. It will probably come back in winter, but it won’t be a second wave, but just a cold.” Okay, remember that this article was first published June 10. It follows the Republican position, that Covid-19 is Fake News. I call this faith-based medicine. So what happened in the following six weeks? Record cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Why? Because too many people believed false reassurances like this, ended their seclusion, mixed with the crowd, and caught the virus, often from those without visible symptoms. The heat of summer did nothing to slow the virus: it’s not that kind. America was supposed to be the best prepared nation for handling a pandemic, but it turned out to be one of the worst. Because of this ignorant attitude. I wonder whether this outfit will ever run an article “Why Equedia Was So Wrong.” I’m not holding my breath; such folk don’t like to admit their errors, however deadly they may be. They prefer to think that everyone else is So Wrong, regardless of the facts. The pandemic wasn’t exactly a surprise; THE WEEK reports how THE WASHINGTON POST said that the United States spent years preparing for a pandemic, and had detailed plans to deal with it. But the Trump administration ignored the advice of health officials and failed catastrophically in its response. It even cut the budget of the health department responsible for dealing with such a crisis. Now we have 150,000 American deaths that could have been prevented, and the costly count continues. Ignorance is not necessarily bliss; it can be lethal. Florida, where I live, echoes the nation; when a man asked a local Publix Super Market store where he shopped why they were not enforcing mask use, they banned him from the store. We shop at Publix, and always regarded it as a fine outfit; I hope our local store is not like that. (I haven’t been there recently; the lockdown, you know.)

We have a colony of air potato vines. These are invasive plants that have rather pretty heart shaped leaves and produce what look like small potatoes hanging from their vines, in the air. They like to climb trees, and can so cover trees with their foliage that the trees don’t get enough light and suffer or even die. I tried to get rid of ours years ago by collecting and disposing of 600 potatoes, but next season the plants came up again undeterred. Our patch is about 120 feet square, and expanding. What to do? Big government to the rescue: they imported a predator from the home region of the plants and now are passing it out free. We released a jar of 50 bugs that look like narrow red ladybugs at the edge of our infestation. The bugs eat only air potato leaves, and should in due course seriously inhibit the plants. We can see the holes in the leaves where the bugs chew. The bugs will go dormant in the fall, but return when the plants resume in the spring. We shall see.

Shorter shrift: The July 2020 Hightower Lowdown says “Something Is Rotten at Big Meat, Inc.” I’m a vegetarian, so meat processing is not my forte, but this is appalling. The workers are required to sign wavers that void injuries, of which there are many, and can’t quit without losing their unemployment coverage, so they are locked in. Conditions are crowded, and when the pandemic came it was discovered in one unit that 58% had the virus. I hope the Vegan surge soon drives such companies out of business, and not just for the sake of the slaughtered animals. A recently published book is titled Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L. Trump, the president’s niece. I suspect the title pretty well covers it. An open letter to Harper’s magazine was signed by153 prominent writers, academics, and artists, speaking out against the rise of a culture marked by intolerance of opposing views, and a ferocious campaign of coerced conformity in America. Naturally the letter is being condemned by those coercers. I learned that Karen is more than a girl’s name: it’s a code word among restaurant servers for an overly demanding customer. I presume there are male Karens too. A warning from a teacher: don’t rush to re-open schools. Yes, my niece is a teacher, and I was one myself, back in the day. Teachers are making out their wills and pondering whether to risk their lives or their livelihoods by refusing to go into that quagmire. Schools will close again soon enough as the virus explodes again, infecting the children’s families, so it does seem better to wait. Teachers and children are not meat plant workers. Or are they? And a note that one estimate indicates that America adopting a Medicare-for-all program would save nearly 70,000 lives each year. Ah, but the special interests would lose a lot of money from the present Your Money Or Your Life system, so it won’t happen.

PIERS

SapTimber 2020

HI-

We watched Welcome to Marwen. I loved it; MaryLee did not. It starts with a downed airman getting caught by Nazi soldiers who mean him no good. Then several lovely young women appear, and mow the Nazis down with their rifles. It turns out that these are dolls, brought to life by the protagonist’s imagination. He is a mentally handicapped man subject to bullying and maltreatment by others, but in his mind his animated dolls even the score. I liked it because of all the pretty girls; I’m not sure why MaryLee didn’t like it.

I discovered a 22-ounce bag of wildflower seeds I hadn’t noticed before. When I checked the date, it was 2009. Those seeds had sat there for 11 years? Maybe it was a project my wife Carol had in mind and didn’t get around to. So I planted them, some in a row in the sunken garden, which incidentally is doing fine so far, some in a raised bed, some outside. I am hoping that at least a few of them will come up. After all, seeds found in Egyptian tombs have sprouted after 2,000 years, and this isn’t quite that long.

I have been writing. First a 4,000-word story “The Wrong Stars,” then two more chapters of Xanth #47 Apoca Lips, about 13,000 words in all. They are mired in the pundemic zone, an awful place. But Prince Nolan Naga is beginning to make an impression on Apoca, which is just as well, as he is courting her. They have a formidable Quest to complete, as it involves a Dwarf Demon. When a man asked a Demon whether it was true that the ratio of a Capital D Demon to a mortal person was that of a galaxy to a grain of sand, the Demon replied that this understated the case. But a Dwarf Demon is less formidable, so the case may be accurate here. It is nevertheless a challenge, as the Dwarf Demon does not want to cooperate. Which reminds me: #44 Skeleton Key is scheduled to be published Jamboree 2021.That’s the one where the alien cuttlefish girl Squid doesn’t believe that she is the most important person in the universe, but as it turns out, she is.

MaryLee and I have now been married over four months, and there are no problems yet in our relationship, our taste in prettygirl movies notwithstanding. My first marriage lasted 63 years; I’m not sure the second will endure quite that long. Which reminds me: I had my 86^th birthday in AwGhost. Cheryl and MaryLee gave me a lovely 2-foot-high sculpture of a svelte nude woman with one leg lifted high, whose hair reaches the floor. I love that hair! I should notice the other details in due course. MaryLee also gave me a box of Turron, the Spanish candy I haven’t had since I left Spain as a child in 1940. It is made from almonds. Ah, memories; it’s never too late for them.

We are now driving the Mule ATV for things like picking up the newspaper in the morning and exploring the trails on the tree farm. It’s a nice little vehicle, except that this morning, SapTimber 1^th, it was balky, lurching forward when I had it in neutral. Hmm. In other respects life here is, well, mundane, as we remain on the virus lockdown. MaryLee would like to go out shopping—she’s a woman, and that’s what they do; I think it is in their genes—but doesn’t dare as long as the virus lurks. I received an invitation to participate in a dream animation project, but had to decline because what few dreams I remember are dull. It seems that my creativity is monopolized by my fiction writing.

I read about QAnon, a conspiracy theory claiming that world leaders, Democrats, and intelligence officers are all involved in a global child sex trafficking ring that President Trump and his minions are working to expose and destroy. I suspect the name derives from the mysterious Q in the Star Trek series, though he is not that kind of criminal. Naturally the Republicans endorse this kooky paranoia; it fits their current interest.

It seems there is a new building material, Foam. Polystyrene foam sandwiched between white steel plates. Steel and foam, the effective insulation expected to save fifty to seventy percent on electric bills. Recyclable, when that time comes. Durable, tough, environmentally friendly. I am not planning to build a new house, but if I were, this would be a prime interest, assuming the price comes down.

Article in NEW SCIENTIST for May 16, 2020, (I remain behind reading my magazines) discusses the speculative fifth force. We know of Gravity, Electromagnetism, the Weak Nuclear, and the Strong Nuclear forces that hold galaxies, atoms, and other things together, but is that all? There are aspects of the universe that don’t seem to be completely explained by these, such as the seeming insufficiency of gravity to keep spinning galaxies from flying apart. So they conjecture Dark Matter, to provide enough gravity to do the job. My stance is that gravity is stronger at that range than they know, so there is no Dark Matter, but at present it is an unsolved mystery. Could there be another force that we have not yet measured here on backwoods Earth? What about the expansion of the universe, which seems to require a force opposite to gravity? I think of a magnifying glass: it can focus sunlight to a point that can burn what’s at the center, but around it is a cone of reduced light where the sunlight would have gone had the magnifying glass not deflected it. Could Dark Matter be the focus, and Expansion the reduced cone? So individual galaxies hold together, but are repelled from each other? When some theoretical scientist wins the Nobel Prize for solving the great mystery of gravity, remember where you read it first.

In the same issue is an article on how the seaweed kelp might transform our food industry and thus our polluted environment. I use kelp daily for iodine, to support my thyroid. Remember, I’m the one who got excluded on my insurance for “all mental diseases” when the doctors failed to diagnose my thyroid deficiency so pretended I was imagining my fatigue and depression. As I like to put it, I wasn’t crazy, the medical profession was. So I appreciate kelp. Now they are considering creating huge farms growing seaweed that absorbs CO₂, then sinking it in the sea along with all that atmospheric pollution. I have another idea: grow edible seaweed and rework it to become meatless meat, driving the animal cruelty industry out of business and incidentally unpolluting the world.

And another article in that issue. There’s a reason this is my favorite magazine; I have not found an American magazine to match it. This is titled “What is Reality?” That’s another of my buttons. This one is actually an ad, would you believe, for a book The Nature of Reality, by Roger Penrose, reprinted from 2006. The introductory blurb says “We humans have a problem with reality. We experience it all the time, but struggle to define it, let alone understand it. We don’t know when it began, how big it is, where it came from or where it is going, and we certainly don’t know why it exists.” Amen. This article discusses the precision of mathematics in clarifying aspects of the universe, and the mystery of consciousness emerging from inert physical substance. It is mind stretching. It concludes “What does this tell us about the nature of physical reality? It tells us that we cannot properly address the question of that reality without understanding its connection with the other two realities: conscious mentality and the wonderful world of mathematics.” I have encountered Penrose before, and regard him as a genius. Nothing here is causing me to change my mind.

Newspaper article is titled “Current crisis is looking more like the Great Recession.” Yes. America is now passing six million cases, reaching toward 200,000 deaths, has near record unemployment, and shows precious few signs of any near-term letup. The nature of our economy is changing. This is serious mischief, and I think that only the mass removal of the present government is likely to seriously address it. Another article addresses the “equity gap.” That is, the way minorities are paid less than whites, are less likely to own their homes, and more likely to live in poverty, get arrested, get shot, and be generally excluded. They are suffering worse in the pandemic; it coincidentally clarifies how bad they were off already. Covert racism is endemic. We need massive reform. But will we get it? As the song says, the answer is blowing in the wind. I can’t say at the moment that I am especially proud of my state, my country or my species. But what’s the alternative? Reform is easy to preach, but hard to accomplish, whatever the venue.

The summer months are Florida’s monsoon season. Here on the tree farm we got 12.1 inches of rain in AwGhost. Hurricanes are promised for SapTimber.

This HiPiers column is my shortest in years. The distractions of the lockdown and new marriage have torpedoed my working efficiency. But I would not have it otherwise.

PIERS

OctOgre 2020

HI-

OctOgre 3 addition: My thanks to Salguod Retrah, who keeps the Xanth Character Database up to date. He added the characters from Jest Right in SapTimber.

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MANNISON PRESS, of the Little Girl Lost and Little Boy Lost volumes, sent a story to contributors. “Time Served,” by Ronald Linson. I read it in fragments as a few minutes were available here and there while doing other things. Ralph Goodman is convicted of murder and sentenced to five years in the distant past, three million years ago. They give him a shot and when he wakes he is there in the Pliocene. It is actually fairly pleasant, on a grassy hillside with wildflowers, near a herd of small horses. Now all he has to do is survive. He manages, and does okay. When his time is up and they bring him back to the present, he just wants to return to the Pliocene. But there’s a surprise. Yes, you are wondering about paradox, since anything he changes might impact today’s world, but that is covered. It’s a nice story, maybe a signal of the kind this publisher will want when it does another volume.

My meandering mind leads me along some devious bypaths. One day it led me to one of William Butler Yeats’ lesser known poems, “Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop,” published in 1932. Old Crazy Jane has some of the most profound truths I have seen. “‘Fair and foul are near of kin,/ And fair needs foul,’ I cried.” Then she gives an example. “A woman can be proud and stiff/ When on love intent;/ But Love has pitched his mansion in/ The place of excrement; / For nothing can be sole or whole/ That has not been rent.” Think about that. If a man wants to make love with a woman and generate offspring, he must go between where she defecates and where she urinates. Some virginal women have a hymen that must be rent, that is, torn, before the act of love can be completed. So the fairness of love must handle the foulness of excrement and torn flesh. One needs the other; they are indeed near of kin.

I am at age 86 well into retirement age, but I am a workaholic, which means I can’t just relax and take things easy. My life continues constantly hectic, or so it seems. For example, I am trying to keep my books in print, because readers ask for them, and out of print novels can be hawked for several hundred dollars for used copies. I hate having my readers ripped off. But MUNDANIA PRESS folded, and has become unresponsive, which means that some of my best work is in limbo. DREAMING BIG has taken over my Relationships series of story collections, where some of my best and provocative fiction is, and DREAMING BIG is ready to republish the first five volumes. So I needed to find my original files on them, after changing computers and operating systems. Bear in mind that I have had 200 books published; back files can be tricky to locate in the crowd. I succeeded, with help, but it was a frustrating exercise. Yet typical. Not the least of my frustrations is the old Windows email system I inherited from my wife Carol. It is balky and difficult, and likes to abolish my email letters when I am maybe two thirds through them, so that I have to retype them, wasting my most precious commodity, time. Sometimes they can be found elsewhere, such as in trash or delete, but sometimes they are simply gone. When MaryLee tried to help, the letter was vanished beyond recall, and she had to do it over. Then next day the original version appeared, from we know not where. There really is a ghost in that machine.

Last month I planted decade-old wildflower seeds, hoping some would come up. Sigh; so far none have appeared. Oh we do get volunteer wildflowers, like dandelions, but it’s not the same. However the Sunken Garden as a whole is doing well enough. The latest planting is a seven foot tall papaya tree that so far seems to have survived the rigors of transplant with only the loss of a few branches. I transplanted our AeroGarden tomatoes and lettuces there when they outgrew the indoor no-soil unit, and so far they seem to like it. We also have three avocado plants grown from seed saved after eating the fruits. Limited gardening can be fun. I bury the household organic garbage there to let it compost. As I see it, composting is significant recycling, and I encourage it. In that connection here is another link for How to Make Compost; I was not able to display it on my aging computer system (you have surely heard the saying “Old age is not for sissies”), but those of you who reside in the 21^st century more comfortably than I do should be able to invoke the site.Https://gardeningmentor.com/make-your-own-compost/.

I continue to write my current novel, Xanth #47 Apoca Lips, and am in Chapter 6, where a number of the early characters appear briefly, such as Bink, Chameleon, Trent, and Iris. A reader suggested it, and they shouldn’t fade away entirely as the series ages. I am able to write only a few hundred words a day, because of containing time-consuming distractions, but I am now about 43,000 words into it. Apoca, remember, is the gal with a devastating kiss. Then she kisses the Demon Chaos, whom you will meet in Jamboree 2021 in #44 Skeleton Key. It is said that a Demon is to a mortal person what a galaxy is to a grain of sand; she learns that the case is vastly understated. Fortunately Chaos is on her side. In Xanth demons and Demons are not evil: they are more like fundamental forces.

At this stage MaryLee and I have been married five months, and my guess is that we will last at least another month, year, or decade, as fate may decree. I promised her good things, like touring Disney World and the other local attractions, but the coronavirus degrees otherwise. Lockdown can’t last forever, can it? Don’t answer that. We do enjoy riding the Mule ATV out together in the mornings to pick up the newspaper. But I am also aware that it is the verge of the one-year anniversary of my wife Carol’s death. She lived to age 82, so I can’t claim we were parted early, and I am getting the bleep on with my life, but I can’t just tune out 63 years of togetherness. I really don’t much like death, for all that it is inevitable.

This column was interrupted by my bone density test. A side effect of the levothyroxin pills I take is loss of bone density, so I need to keep on top of it. A decade or two back I had osteopenea, which is a precursor to osteoporosis, so now I watch my bones as well as my general health. The test was routine, but still I felt faintly nervous as I had to lie on my back with my knees on a block while the machine went back and forth, humming like a big truck and beeping as it prepared to back over me.

We watched part of the Presidential debate, and didn’t bother to finish it. Debates are meaningless if the rules are not followed. The next debate will see the rules enforced, or lose its audience almost completely. That should get the networks to pay attention. It was as if this one never heard of a debate before. All that is needed is to give each debater his/her time to speak, and if the other party interrupts, turn off their mike until their turn comes. We don’t need any more yelling out of turn.

The newspaper comic Beetle Bailey had its 70^th anniversary. It started September 4, 1950, and has had more than 25,500 strips. I remember; I was in high school, and it was a college comic. Then Beetle, on a dare, signed up for the Army, and has been there ever since. Perhaps it signaled part of my own life; I finished high school, spent four years in college, got married, and wound up in the US Army, because in those days young men got drafted. I had been raised in a pacifist Quaker family, and did not much like war, but my choices were stark: military service, or prison. I felt that less damage would be done to my conscience in the military than in prison, and never changed my opinion. Whether those with consciences should be imprisoned is a question it seems most Americans prefer not to think about. I might have avoided military service, as my wife was pregnant, so I was technically a father, exempt. But then she miscarried, and I was pitched into the Army for two years. I remember going to the Chaplain and explaining that while I was not a pacifist, I doubted that I could kill an enemy soldier (I am a lifelong vegetarian because I don’t like killing animals either). He said he was sorry that my patriotism was not better than that. So according the word of Jesus, to be patriotic means killing strangers? This became one plank in my general contempt for religion. I am not agnostic because I haven’t thought about it; it is that religion does not match my standard of morality. And yes, I believe that if Jesus came to the mortal world again, he would prefer my company to that of that Chaplain. Fortunately I served between the Korean and Vietnam wars, stateside, so was never put to the kill or be killed test.

I pick up stay correspondences, along the way, and some of them are interesting. Yes, of course, every fan of mine is interesting and superior, by definition. But some folk are different. One such is Marcus Ten Low, who puts out a newsletter, Wise Vystopia. The September 2020 issue discusses veganism. That is, the stage after vegetarianism, with no animal projects eaten or used. As a vegetarian I use milk and eggs, because it doesn’t hurt the animals to take them, though now that I know how badly those animals are treated, I am seriously considering turning vegan. I admire the vegans for their militant efforts, and believe the world will be better off when they finally drive the meat, milk, egg and leather industries out of business. Don’t laugh; they are making real progress, all over the world, and I do believe we will see it happen soon enough, like within a decade or so. With luck I will live to see it. Meanwhile a quote from Wise Vystopia: “Mainstream media will not tell you the shocking truth that the coronavirus started in a situation in which nonhuman animals were needlessly exploited. In fact, more than 75% of all pandemics, including mad cow disease, swine flu, and the coronavirus, are zoonotic diseases: that is, they have been cultivated among animals, particularly farmed animals, in the first instance.” He says that governments patch over problems but do not address core issues. “It has only been the power of the vegan movement that has heavily reduced the powers of the dairy industry, for example, and shown that when people learn the truth, they will do the RIGHT thing.” I am perhaps more cynical; I think they will do the right thing only when it gets cheaper and more convenient than the wrong thing. In the old days, when our leaders in America said all men are created equal, it turned out they didn’t mean black men, though they did know of slavery. They did not include women; the gender had to fight savagely to achieve equal rights, and that effort is as yet not quite complete. We are perhaps getting there soon. “Giving up meat, dairy and eggs will not only reduce your risk of dying from the major health complications such as heart diseases and cancer, it will boost your immune system, making you considerably less susceptible to infections. Your refusal to consume animal products such as leather, wool or silk will help make the world a better, more humane place. Most importantly – for the animals – choosing to live vegan will free your conscience and allow you to live the very best life without the hypocrisy that comes with consuming our animal cousins.” There is more. If this interests you, you can inquire to mlexa68@gmail.com, or donate to paypal.me/marcuslow1.

My book reading and video viewing has plummeted, thanks to the changes in my life of the past year; I hope to return to them in due course. Some readers may have noticed how much shorter my current columns are. But I do still go through my news and science magazines, and read the newspaper, and portions of this monthly HiPiers column are devoted to that. Herewith some of those items.

From May 30, 2020, NEW SCIENTIST (I did mention getting behind?) All five mass extinctions are now linked to global warming. I think it is that volcanic activity heats land, sea, and air, kills plants, and the animals starve. Um, yes, but it was a meteor that set off the volcanism that took out the dinosaurs, and today it is mankind’s pollution that is heating things without volcanoes. No Signal is a novel that has implants put in every person’s brain, controlling them. Thus everyone behaves. What could go wrong? I’m betting plenty. NEW SCIENTIST for July 18, 2020, has an article on AI, that is, Artificial Intelligence, and considers among other things whether machines can ever become conscious. That’s one of my buttons. MIT Professor Max Tegmark was interviewed, and the interviewer suggested that you can’t program something to have feelings. Tegmark says that’s a mistake we made with animals, thinking they don’t have feelings, and now we are doing it with machines. Oh, I agree; my novels have thinking, feeling robots. But what is the secret of doing it? They don’t know, but my guess is the right kind of feedback, that is, thinking about thinking, feeling about feeling. The breakthrough could be incipient. Another article ponders the secret of photosynthesis that plants accomplish; if we learn how to do it, would make food that bypasses plants. Then maybe we could leave Nature alone. THE WEEK for 9-25-2020 reprints an article from THE WASHINGTON POST Magazine about football-linked brain injuries from concussions. They do exist, but are hard to identify. That’s hardly the only concern. I was an experienced soccer player, but was excluded from the high school program without even a tryout, apparently because of my size, being the smallest in my class. In retrospect I suspect they did me a favor, because that spared me “heading” the ball, which could have damaged my brain. Newspaper item on how gun suicides are a public health crisis; half of American suicides are by guns. My sentiments are mixed; I don’t much like guns, and certainly don’t like the corrupt NRA, though my Army experience suggested I was a dead shot, but I do think folk should have the right to end their own lives if they so choose, and guns make that easy. And items on so called conservatism today. My take: since when did “Principled Conservative” became an oxymoron? Because it seems it is. And one on LGBTQ Hispanics in Miami who are objects of hate crimes but must suffer in silence. Only about a third of reported cases lead to arrests, and of course the great majority are not reported. I am a white heterosexual who loves the look and feel of women. I wouldn’t want to be persecuted for that, and don’t like seeing others get persecuted for their orientations. Perhaps related is a review of a book Democracy In Chains by Nancy MacLean, about the radical right’s stealth plan for America. They want to make America a plutocracy, and seem to be making good progress. I hope the coming election stops them cold.

More anon, when.

PIERS

NoRemember 2020

HI-

I use the Ogre Months. Ogres are justifiably proud of their stupidity, and their memory isn’t so great either, so they have trouble remembering a month this late in the year. Hence NoRemember. I think my favorite is the one my daughter Penny suggested, FeBlueberry, when the redberries are blue with cold. The ogresses, in contrast, are not so stupid, but are proud of their ugliness; their smile can curdle milk. There was once an actress in Xanth who had to play the role of an ogress. She was a good actress, in fact a superlative actress; her smile could curdle water.

I was invited to contribute to a collection of interesting dreams, but had to decline, because my dreams are dull, if I can remember them at all. It is as if all my vaunted imagination goes into my fiction, and none is left for dreams. Actually, it is my belief that dreams are merely that fragment left over as our sleeping mind goes over recent events, sorting and classifying them according to feeling; something that requires temporary consciousness. An obnoxious driver cut you off at the intersection while giving you the finger? That fresh memory gets considered and classified under Outrage, with connections to Driving, Cars, City Streets, and Obnoxious People. It’s complicated classification. A pretty cashier smiled at you as you paid for your purchase? File that under Wishful Romance, with connections to Pinup Calendars, Shopping Sales, Magenta Lipstick, and Feminine Hair Styles. You certainly wouldn’t want those memories to get jumbled together, so that the pretty girl cuts you off with an insulting gesture, or the arrogant driver flashes you with sexy pink panties. So the brain is busy during sleep, doing the dull scutwork, and dreaming counts. Maybe someday the experts will catch up to the real meaning of dreams, not being readers of this column. But here’s the thing: dreaming is a process, like fire, a river, or life itself, and if you start remembering the process, that has to be processed for filing too, ad infinitum, like two mirrors facing each other. So you don’t want to remember your dreams; just let them do their job and fade cleanly out. So my forgetting my dreams is not a signal of senility, but of proper functioning. Existence is a finely meshed machine.

Nevertheless, as the time crunched nearer to my having to do the chore of writing this monthly column, I remembered a dream. In it I was assigned to write a paragraph on a subject of my own choosing, as long as it was fairly reasoned and presented. What should my subject be? I thought maybe Sexuality. But then I wondered whether that was appropriate for the fine upstanding clean-minded elite folk my fans represent, in contrast to ordinary fans of other writers. Then I woke up with my question unanswered. Bleep! So I think I had better pass that by, to the relief of those elegant fans, yes? So then what should my paragraph be about? Well, the month of OctOgre saw the one-year anniversary of the death of my long-term wife Carol. We were together 63 years, through thick and thin, going from near poverty (I once found a nickel in the gutter and entered it as income) to wealth, from losing three babies stillborn to getting two we could keep, only to lose the elder one, Penelope, to melanoma, skin cancer, at age 41. From my getting blacklisted and lied about for six years with no help from a writer’s organization that tacitly sided with the errant publisher, for the temerity to demand that my publisher honor its contract and stop cheating me. To my later return to that same publisher when it was under new auspices and becoming a best selling author there, uncheated, but with no admiration for the corrupt system that tends to punish the victim rather than the offender. Carol was with me throughout, supporting me and enabling me finally to prosper. I rather doubt that any other writer has had a career quite like mine, pushing the limits of propriety and chance every which way, contemptuous of the endemic knavery in the profession, where Art is subsumed in Finance. I couldn’t have done it without her, and bleep, I’m sorry she is gone.

But time crunches on, and today I am remarried and still looking toward the future. I knew I didn’t want to live alone, and now MaryLee is with me. She loves the Florida backwoods, with its palm trees, hanging Spanish moss, and sea oats; she’s a bundle of enthusiasms. Of course there’s a poem about how there are Day People and Night People, the twain interacting only with difficulty, concluding “By some peculiar quirk of life, / They always wind up man and wife.” Yes, I have done it twice, being a Day Person, she a Night Owl. We do meet at twilight. The Sunken Garden, converted from the pool, is now growing nicely, with the purple flowers MaryLee likes, as well as cherry tomatoes and lettuce. Our latest addition is the papaya tree, which is on its third flower and perhaps its first fruit. I think of it singing “I’m Papaya the Sailor Man.” Gardening is fun, as we see living nature; we do depend on it and should support it. For those who want an updated, comprehensive guide to the benefits of gardening, visit https://happydiyhome.com/benefits-of-gardening/. Outside, our Turk’s Cap hibiscus is now in bloom, with as many as 90 flowers a day.

My octogenarian health seems okay, as I try to eat right, sleep right, exercise right, and live right and left. I mainly stay off the Internet, in part because I fear that gadding about in it would suck up my time, and I’m already well behind on reading my books and magazines and watching my DVD videos. I understand that anonymous trolls lurk there, pouncing on anyone who expresses an original thought or has an opinion contrary to theirs, lying about people, then saying it’s just their opinion. There may come a day when they have to pay a penalty for such abuse of free speech. I defend anonymity, as it helps prevent retaliation for telling the truth—how well I know about that!—but what about lies? There should be some standard of decency, at long last.

And the end of Daylight Saving Time is looming. I remember a comment once that DST is like cutting an end off a stick and gluing it on the other end to make it longer. And we continue to struggle with our old email system, which seemingly randomly eats letters and balks at downloads. It is run by MacroHard Doors, the program that never forgave me for escaping it via Linux. I continue to write Xanth #47, Apoca Lips, being now over 60,000 words into it, and our heroes are about to get to meet a zombie robot. How does a robot get zombied? Read the novel and see, when. So do I have a subject worthy of a paragraph? I doubt it, despite my dream. It wasn’t worth remembering, as my critics knew before I ever did.

I wrote a short short story on request for a charity flash fiction anthology for families struggling at Christmas, “A Home for Skyla.” This may not be your ordinary Christmas story, because Skyla is a scorpion that stings a little girl on Christmas Eve Day. We get to see Skyla’s take on it.

I have a twice-weekly Chore Hour, when I do chores that I know I’ll never get done otherwise. A recent one was cleaning up one of my cluttered desks. I found old papers dating back over 20 years. One from only 10 years ago was sent me by a fan, Julia, a feature on Reasons to Buy a Dog. If you want someone who will eat whatever you give him, and never say it’s not as good as his mother’s, then buy a dog, with a cute doggie picture. If you want someone always willing to go out at any hour wherever you want, buy a dog. Another cute picture. Someone who will never touch the remote, doesn’t care about football, will sit next to you as you watch romantic movies, buy a dog. Someone who is content to get on your bed just to warm your feet; someone who never criticizes what you do, who loves you unconditionally, buy a dog. But if you want someone who will never come when you call, ignores you totally when you come home, runs around all night, only comes home to eat and sleep, and acts as if your entire existence is solely to ensure its happiness – then buy a cat. I like the fakeout.

The early Xanth novels were published individually, then later collected in three novel volumes for 1, 2, 3, and 4, 5, 6. I thought that was all, but fan Michael “Snicker” Lynch corrected me: there is one for 7, 8, 9, titled Spellbound Xanth or The Continuing Xanth Saga. Read it at your own risk.

And my ever-accumulating pile of clippings. I read mainly science magazines, weird as that may seem for a writer who scored mainly in fantasy. Here is the key: I love fantasy, but I don’t believe it. I believe science. My secret ambition is to know everything about everything, before I kick the bedraggled bucket and descend into the oblivion that is the fate of nonbelievers. In the February 1^st (okay, in ogre terms, FeBlueberry 1^th) issue of NEW SCIENTIST—I did mention getting behind a bit?—is an article titled “What is Reality?” That’s one of my buttons. I’ve never been quite satisfied that existence makes sense; there should be nothing. I fear that one bright day I will truly discover reality, and pop out of existence, along with the universe. The article may be coming to a similar concern. “The harder we look, the less real it seems.” So is reality imaginary? We’re not sure. “Everybody knows that we don’t see all of reality. I say we see none of it.” “We perceive the world in relation to what we already believe.” In sum, we just don’t know. That leaves me uneasy. Article in the Feb. 29 issue addresses antimatter: what is it really? It seems to be the same as matter; with on opposite charge. Some wonder whether it would fall upward, but that seems doubtful. Newspaper article by Benjamin Warner titled “Claiming my Racism.” He is a well-intentioned, liberal, vegan with a couple of black friends. He lives in a comfortable neighborhood with its benefits and general protection. Black folk mostly can’t do that. So is having the benefit of a society crafted by racism an indication of racism in himself? Maybe. Are women the stronger sex? Article in the August 1 (AwGhost 1^th) NEW SCIENTIST concludes that they are, because they have two X chromosomes while men have only one. That gives them twice as many options to make up for defects in one or the other, so their systems mess up less and they live longer. Why do clever people make stupid decisions? Because they may jump to “obvious” conclusions. Yes, I’ve seen it happen, and been caught by it myself. You do have to be careful about assumptions. An example: if it take 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how many minutes would it take a hundred machines to make a hundred widgets? Most people answer a hundred. I got the right answer, which is five. But I have encountered tricks like this before, so am wary. NEW SCIENTIST for 1 August has an article about the unlikely rise of dinosaurs. They were pipsqueaks in a world of giants. But they had one thing the others lacked: birdlike lungs, that could take in oxygen both breathing in and breathing out. The Permian extinction of 250 million years ago took out 95% of species in the ocean and 70% on land. That gave the more efficient breathers their chance. Then 66 million years ago the meteor took out the dinosaurs, leaving only the birds and mammals, who I think survived because they were mostly hidden in caves. We were lucky we were small enough. Item in THE WEEK that Trump is catering to the Republican base, but since liberals and independents make up about 65% of all voters, he can’t win that way. NEW SCIENTIST again, saying that you might think we know a lot about the universe’s first fraction of a second, but we don’t. In fact we don’t know enough about its present state. It is constantly expanding, but we don’t know how fast, or, I think, why. Digital computing has pretty much taken over, but is analogue coming back? Maybe so, or possibly hybrid. If you are one of the working poor, you are almost as likely to get audited by the IRS as if you are in the top 1%. Fraud is huge, but nothing is likely to be done about it. Why? Because the rich have the resources to fight back, and we are on the way to becoming a plutocracy, government by and for the rich. Of those who get Covid-19, as many as 9 of 10 may suffer some kind of lingering condition after recovery. Like extreme tiredness, difficulty concentrating, or loss of taste and smell. So it is not a matter of getting over it and being part of herd immunity; that herd will be sick.

MaryLee and I continue on home lock-down, being in the high risk group, despite wishing we could get the heck out and visit the beaches, tour the amusement parks, and shop up a storm. We never even had a honeymoon, because of the Virus. We have now been married six whole months, and haven’t tired of it yet. Those twilight trysts can be delightful. I repeat: if you have to be confined, it helps to be newly married, even when you are of geezer age. Now you know.

PIERS

Dismember 2020

HI-

I stopped reading novels for the rest of this year, because they were squeezing out my writing time, which was already compressed by complications of the virus lockdown and being freshly married. An affectionate new spouse is hell on a schedule, as some of you may remember. That has been effective; in NoRemember I wrote chapters 9, 10 and 11 of Xanth #47 Apoca Lips, and am now about 83,000 words along in a projected 100,000 word novel. Apoca, she of the really hot lips, has a problem. All the girls like her handsome talented boyfriend, Prince Nolan Naga, and some of them are really sexy babes not at all shy about expressing their interest. Now they need the help of a sand witch, one who specializes in sand, and what she wants is Nolan to be her very own. Yes, she’s an ugly crone, but she has witchly illusion to make her the hottest babe yet. Think of the sand shifting in a scantily clad hourglass figure, especially when she turns around. What to do? Well, they decide – oops, this is supposed to be a general information and opinion column. No need to bore you further. I hope to complete the novel by the end of the year, and you’ll be able to read it in due course, sand and all.

At any rate, I made an exception by reading a nonfiction book written by the other bestselling novelist here in Citrus County, Florida. We have known each other for decades, and in 2011 I reviewed the book by her adopted daughter. three little words (intentional lower caps) by Ashley Rhodes-Courter. They are not the words you might think, and it is a caution about adopting a teen or pre-teen, as I think Ashley herself would agree. I speak as one who once feared that we would be unable to have our own children, after Carol had three miscarriages. But we suspected that the hidebound adoption agencies would rule out a politically independent vegetarian agnostic fantasy writer with uncertain income as a suitable parent. Fortunately our luck changed, in that and other respects. The current book is Quarantine! by Gay Courter, subtitled How I Survived the Diamond Princess Coronavirus Crisis. Phil and Gay Courter were on a cruise ship in the Orient in February 2020 when the coronavirus-19 pandemic broke out, and someone aboard the ship came down with it. The ship was quarantined, and they were stuck on it as the malady spread to other passengers. They were at high risk, being in their 70s. They took the precautions of masking and social distancing, but how much can you do when locked in confined quarters with 3711 people aboard and you have to breathe the risky air conditioning? They wanted to get the bleep off that boat. The US government hardly seemed to care. So they mounted a publicity campaign, hoping to bestir the governments of all the international passengers so that they would fetch them off the ship before they caught the plague. They were finally successful, but it was at times an ugly struggle, and leaving the ship was not the release expected. The quarantine stalked them relentlessly.

This book is, incidentally, a nice premier on exotic cruises. A family of retirement age could have a wonderful time, with elegant cuisine, marvelous international travel, dances, household services provided, and compatible fellow travelers. At least until the Virus bid fair to convert Heaven to Hell. They finally got off the ship but… “Several people got off the bus because they needed a bathroom, not that there were any in sight. Much later were heard that the only option had been to pee in the rain.” Men in hazmat suits guarded them, as if they were toxic. “Great understatements in history: Pompeii—’a bit of a dust storm,’ Hiroshima—’a bad summer heat wave,’ and Wuhan–‘just a bad flu season.’” When they landed in Texas “The fog was as thick as the proverbial pea soup. Haloed lights dotted the presumed airfield. Humans in white-hooded jumpsuits looked like larvae laid by the white-winged leviathan.” “But you don’t expect that your luxury cruise will harbor a killer virus, resulting in your being returned to the US in a cargo plane that lands at a remote Air Force base where you are ordered into federal quarantine for a minimum of two weeks, leaving you without rights, without agency, and on the wrong side of a heavily guarded fence in a room that smells like an outhouse.” They had to use their towels to soak up the water that had leaked onto the floor. Gay threw a fit, but was stuck in the outhouse. Finally, eventually, amazingly they did make it home to Florida, physically and emotionally the worse for wear, suffering delayed stress syndrome. “We have no respect for leaders who believe the bottom line is more important than human lives.” Welcome to America!

I note that extraordinary precautions were taken to guarantee that Phil and Gay did not bring the Virus into the USA. So how is it that it quickly spread here, with a quarter million dead and still counting? Had similar measures been taken nationally at the outset, America could have avoided both the horrendous illness and death count, and the economic devastation. The Obama administration left a blueprint for handling a pandemic—which was ignored. The virus was fake news that would soon dissipate on its own. When belated lockdowns occur, there are street protests. Folk demand their right to spread the mischief to their neighbors and friends. Skeptics dying of it beg for the magic medicine to abolish this hoax. Ignorance really can kill you. Are we a society of idiots? The light at the end of the tunnel we hope is not the lamp of an oncoming locomotive; it is the Vaccine. I understand that there is a takeoff on a Dolly Parton song, “Jolene”: “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine/ I’m begging of you, please go in my arm/ Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine/ Please just keep me safe from COVID harm.” Dolly Parton made a one million dollar gift to help develop that vaccine. There is evidently more to her than her appearance. I remember the joke she told on herself, that she came from the mountains of Tennessee, and she brought the mountains with her. I always did like that song; now it has new meaning.

I got new programmable ergonomic keyboards, and am now using them for my novel writing, my incidental notes, email, and this column. I am still getting used to them, but already my maddening typos as I change keyboards are decreasing. I use the original Dvorak key layout, the one that existed before the computer industry arbitrarily changed the punctuation, apparently just because it could, and it has been a constant hassle as updates mess up my system. With the programmed keyboard, it will no longer matter what games the programmers play. They did succeed in taking away my macros, but maybe that’s the end of their mischief. Or am I deluding myself, like those who ignore the Virus?

We had another trail cut around the edge of our tree farm, so now we can get anywhere on it with the Mule ATV. We hope to have things like picnics by the shore of Lake Tsoda Popka, as it borders us on two and a half sides. We discovered an illicit deer hunting stand we hadn’t known about, and a number of fine cypress trees with their surrounding knees. When I was young it was thought that the existence of cypress knees was a mystery, so I figured it out for myself. Cypress grows typically in muck, in areas subject hurricanes, so they protect themselves from the high wands that try to blow them over by radiating their roots out, finding the surface of the water or mud, and making sharp turns back down. The knees. Thus they have a circle of supportive roots extending well out and that keeps them stable. They also have thin profiles, giving the wind little purchase. They are smart handsome trees, and I like them.

I remarked a column or three back how my dreams seem unmemorable, if I can remember them at all. Well, I had one. I was checking our long drive, and my companion was driving the Mule. Then she got caught in Reverse and veered crazily, finally crashing into the neighbor’s brick house. There was not much damage, but the neighbor and her children came out. I told her it was our fault and we would cover the cost of any repairs. Then I remembered something, and said “I trust you know this is the second time we banged your house today. Oops, no; the first time was in a dream.” Then I had a realization. “In fact, so is this time.” And I woke up. As I tried to place the confused elements of the dream, I realized that it must have been MaryLee driving the Mule, because we didn’t have it when my wife Carol was alive. But we have no neighbors in sight, and no brick walls, and no children; it must have been our former property, over 30 years ago; that neighbor did have children, but no brick house. But we had no ATV then. So it doesn’t seem to make much sense, in the rational level. What sense it makes psychologically I can’t say. That my present life is a mishmash of losses, new things, and irrelevant memories? Sometimes I wonder how Wife #1 and Wife #2 would get along, if they could meet. Would they like each other? But where would that leave me? In an awkward position, perhaps.

We continue with our Sunken Garden. I bury our kitchen garbage in it weekly, letting it compost. The Pink Hibiscus plant I grew from an accidentally broken branch is now thriving, fully protected from predators at last, and flowering again. The Papaya tree is putting forth new leaves, flowering, and forming fruits, but they are falling off after a few days. I don’t know whether that’s normal. Some flower plants are shutting down for the winter, but others continue. The old wildflower seeds I planted never came up, but there are some weeds, I mean genuine wildflowers. The lettuce I started in the hydroponic setup and later transplanted to the Garden finally went to seed and expired, but the tomatoes continue. Those who are interested in gardening can check a couple more links. One is https://www.simplegrowsoil.com/. The other is https://wellgardening.com/the-science-of-composting/ I think there’s a lot to be said for home gardening, of whatever nature, flowers, vegetables, but no, not marijuana. And, yes, composting for recycling of organic waste. Maybe this helps mitigate the damage mankind is doing to the natural realm.

Clippings: item in the newspaper says lightning “superbolts” can be a thousand times as bright as regular ones, and five times as hot as the surface of the sun. Wow! Our area is near the thunderstorm capital of America; I hope those bolts stay clear of my little tree farm. A mystery silver colored monolith was found in the Utah desert, eleven feet tall, three sided, stainless steel. Who erected it there? It dates back at least to 2016. Ten days after it was spotted, it disappeared. Who took it away? The pictures show what looks like a giant ogre face behind it; maybe that’s a clue. Is there life on Venus? Phosphine gas in the atmosphere might be produced by living microbes; there are not many inanimate processes that could account for it. Maybe the alien monolith placers have a base on Venus? Essay by Dahleen Glanton, who is black, says “I’m all for healing. But if you call me the N-word, I’ll never forgive you.” She doesn’t much like the B-word or the C-word either. “It is not incumbent on the target of hatred to reconcile with the hater. Nor am I the one who needs healing the most. It’s the haters who are rotting with vitriol.” Damn well told, Dahleen. Racism, like sexism and ageism, remains endemic in the world. If I could wave a magic wand to abolish a category without remaining trace, I would target the bigots. That’s my B-word, rather than the one that refers to a lady dog. Letter in the local newspaper suggests that we can eliminate the need for toilet paper by purchasing an available toilet seat that has a built in bidet. That interests me. One of my pet peeves is toilet paper that comes apart in use, as most brands do. Astronomers may have found Hell. This is a planet 200 light years away, K2-141b, the size of Earth, orbiting very close to its star with brightside temperatures of 5,400F and darkside minus 328. It has 60 mile deep lava seas, 3,000 mph winds, and rocks rain from the skies. No they don’t yet have guided tours, but maybe you can get in line for tickets when. Star Trek dates back over 50 years. Now it seems there are new versions, like Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, and Star Trek: Lower Decks. That last is an animated series being watched by all the cool people. Sigh; this is the first I’ve heard of it. Maybe some year I’ll be cool enough to get to see it. Some folk claim that hot water can freeze faster than cool water. It is called the Mpemba effect. I never believed it, but it seems that now there is a study that may prove it. Bring it on, claimants. Do deep space wormholes exist? You know, like black holes that connect different parts of the cosmos so that maybe you could jump to other galaxies instantly? I am a skeptic, though I use them in my fiction. One of my concerns is that you might make the trip and emerge a tiny fraction of the size of atom. Let someone else try it first to be sure of the decompression. Does life exist on other worlds? Article in NEW SCIENTIST 29 August 2020 suggests that maybe we should broaden our concept of habitability beyond earthlike worlds. Planets very different from ours might support life very different from ours. Even some orphan worlds cruising through space without stars. There might be hundreds of billions of them in our own galaxy. One might even be our own lost Planet Nine, stolen by the sun’s nefarious sibling. Not necessarily related is the fact that astronomers have discovered the first planet outside our galaxy. M51-ULS-1b is 28 million light years from us, in the Whirlpool Galaxy. Now we can all be jealous of those who reside in a more scenic galaxy than ours. The touted Paleo diet, supposedly that of early hunter-gatherers and therefore ideal because we evolved on it, may not be all that great after all, article in NEW SCIENTIST 3 October 2020 says. It may cause you to biologically age, compared to the norm, maybe shortening your life. Not that other diets are necessarily better; folk on low-carb, high-fat diets may have biological ages two years older. Drinking more than minimum alcohol also ages you. Even eating organic food does it. So what is beneficial? Vegetarianism. This pleases me. I turned vegetarian at age 18 not for my health, but because I didn’t like hurting animals. But I’m glad to learn it is healthy. I am an octogenarian, but am told I look like a septuagenarian, and can act younger yet, as my wife can testify. Who is healthier, men or women? PARADE indicates that the case is mixed, with men having more illness in a lifetime, but women suffering more depression and later dementia. Women do live longer, and that may be what counts. I wonder whether the way men try to protect women helps. I love the look and feel of women, and want them to achieve a better position in our sundry society.

Here’s wishing all my readers and maybe a few others a happy holiday season. Death to the Virus! As poet Dylan Thomas put it, do not go gentle into that good night.

PIERS

Jamboree 2021

HI-

I have mentioned that I seldom remember my dreams, and those I do remember usually aren’t much. But once in a while I do discover novelty. Here is one I had the morning of DisMember 8, 2020. I was a pro wrestler, up against a larger man. I figured I could take him, but I would have to be careful. You know, skill rather than blunder, for all that pro wrestling is an act, a kind of stage play put on for a credulous audience. Then I noticed that he had no trunks on. This is not normally the kind of show wrestlers put on, though in the old days, circa the Greeks of three thousand years ago they did compete in the Olympics naked. I’m a bit sorry I wasn’t around to watch the women’s events. I inquired, but he didn’t seem to understand. I am reminded of a TV skit I saw once where a man had a banana in one ear. His friend tried to tell him that, but couldn’t seem to get through. Finally the man said, “I can’t hear you; I have a banana in my ear.” So I gave up on that and tackled him with a judo throw to bring him down. I felt something at my feet and discovered a pair of sneakers, not belonging to me or my opponent. I picked them up and put them over the edge of the sunken arena, the setting evidently drawn from the sunken garden we have now, and called out to the officials “Do these belong to anyone?” I don’t think I got an answer, so I set them down and returned to the match. My opponent had changed, and I realized that this must be a tag-team match. He was evasive, so I moved my arms vigorously, trying to get hold of him, and someone called “Are you all right?” and I woke. It was MaryLee, who said I was waving my arms in my sleep. I explained about the dream. I don’t know where it came from, as I was never a pro wrestler. I took judo classes for three years, and co-authored half a dozen martial arts novels, but that’s hardly the same. So I do on occasion remember odd dreams.

I now have three programmable ergonomic keyboards, one at each computer I use, so that I no longer typo quite as villainously. As I believe I have mentioned before, I type touch using the original Dvorak keyboard layout, dating from before the programmers messed with it, so I am surely one of a very small minority, and anyone trying to use my computers would soon be driven as crazy as my critics think I am. Now I have it my way, and am satisfied. In fact this ERGODOX (ergodox-easy.com) keyboard is like a computer in itself, with about five levels, including one that makes the keyboard emulate the mouse, and one that has the QUERTY layout. I recommend it to those who have had similar struggles with the anonymous programmers from Hell.

I completed writing Xanth novel #47 Apoca Lips, she of the potent kiss, and am making notes for #48, tentatively titled The Ugly Nymphs. The thing about nymphs is that they all look pretty much alike, lovely bare girls who scream cutely, kick their legs high, and fling their long hair about. They are good for only one thing, and love it, and don’t need clothes or smarts for that. They are ageless, and have no memory of the prior day. Female fantasy partners with none of the balkiness of real women. But there is evidently a foul-up in the Nymph Works, and three of them turn out ugly. One has hair that looks like tangled seaweed; she actually belongs in the sea. Another is smart, which makes her mind ugly as it gives her foolish ideas about independence, purpose, and other feministic heresies. The third has a magic talent of seeing one day into the future, which ruins her for nightly memory erasure. How can these problems be fixed? That will surely be what the novel is about. Stay tuned. With luck and fortitude I hope to make it to Xanth #50. What was that sound? Oh, just a group puke by my critics.

At this stage I have been remarried eight months, and yes MaryLee and I are happy. Except that she came down with shingles, a later complication of chicken pox, and has been in intermittent pain that disrupts her activities and her sleep; I have to watch where I touch her, which is a frustration for newlyweds. We trust that in due course she will mend, and the pandemic will pass, so that we can finally celebrate our postponed honeymoon. We had a nice small Christmas together with Daughter Cheryl, but otherwise remain under house arrest, I mean, on virus lockdown. We’d like at least to go out on the Kawasaki Mule ATV to explore the crannies of the tree farm, but she can’t do a shingle thing at the moment. Yes, I still miss Cam, her nickname from her maiden name Carol Ann Marble, my wife of 63 years, and there are constant reminders of her around the house. One example: in earlier times we had four plastic cups, one for each member of the family. Mine was blue, matching my blue eyes, which in my age have largely faded to gray, like my beard; Cam’s was brown, for her brown eyes and hair. But my cup eventually developed a crack, so Cam gave me hers. Now when I drink a cup of water, as I do every hour so as to keep my urine diluted so I won’t get another kidney stone—kidney stones are like hurricanes; when you experience one, you never want another—I think of her. She is gone but her cup remains, clothed with its memory. There’s a semisweet sadness there. But I can’t bring her back, and I am getting on with my life. That is the way it has to be. MaryLee understands; she is now living in a house whose every detail was crafted by another woman. They say that in second marriages, folk would rather marry a divorcee than a widow/widower, because the newcomer can never measure up to the image of the dear departed, while the divorced partner is relatively easy to deal with. So I have no trouble competing with MaryLee’s Ex; she tells me that I am more of a man in my 80s than he was in his 20s. Surely an exaggeration, but I can live with it. Still, MaryLee is slowly carving out her niches here that are truly her own. Such as her office, converted from our long unused spare bedroom; she is the first and only woman to set up shop there.

Our Sunken Garden continues. But a cold snap came, and took out some of the leaves of the plumeria plants; we are hoping that more will grow. The papaya and pink hibiscus are okay. Outside, our Christmas Cactus plants had over a hundred fancy flowers. Those are the ones we rescued from three fragments the opossum dropped when raiding them before. This time I enclosed them in chicken wire, and with that protection they have prospered. It’s a constant fight to preserve our innocent plants from the forest raiders, but we are getting there. Yet still none of the old wildflowers I planted have come up, only ones like dandelions. Sigh.

I exercise regularly; it is one of the secrets of my longevity and health. But that, too has its complications. I used to run three miles, three times week. When we moved to the tree farm I tried using a treadmill, but it broke after three times, so I went to an exercise cycle, but it broke in due course, so I went to an exercise rower and it broke. Apparently these things aren’t built to actually be used. So I jogged the 1.6 mile round trip to fetch my newspapers in the morning, and that worked well enough, except that every so often I would trip and fall, always landing on my face. So a couple years ago I slowed it to a fast walk, and I haven’t fallen since, but I may just have been lucky. I used to do archery for arm exercise, but I hated losing five dollar arrows when they went their own ways instead of the target where I aimed them. Finally I switched to twice weekly Chore Hours, doing the jobs I would not get to on my own. That cleaned up the drive, getting the brush clipped back, the yards cleared, the study cleaned up, and so on; it was one of my smarter notions. Sometimes it provides supplementary exercise, such as Christmas Day when a dead pine tree with a trunk almost a foot in diameter fell across the drive. Daughter Cheryl and I got it clear, mainly using a long pry bar. I also do supplementary exercises, using 8 and 20 pound dumbbells. Also the bow, which remains operative without the arrows, drawing it 20 times right side one day, 20 times left side the alternate day. It is set at a 55 pound draw weight, which isn’t a lot, but at age 86 I am satisfied to carry on with that. My object is to keep doing it as long as I can, not trying for more, just maintaining that level of strength. Left side continues okay, but the right side is a challenge, because the muscle in my back that holds the bow in place has faded out and now it pulls forward and around, so that I can’t complete the draw unless I do it rapidly. Why this should be the case when I used it regularly for over twenty years I don’t know. So it’s a constant nervous effort, and I have to repeat draws that are not quite complete before the bow comes all the way around. It is a frustration. Apart from that I believe I am about as healthy as an octogenarian can be. My father lived to age 93, and that is a target for me. My wife MaryLee thinks I should try for 100 and be just as eager to grab her as I am now. We’ll see.

I exercise in significant part for my mind. The best way to have a healthy mind is to have a healthy body. As far as I can tell my writing ability remains sharp; as I have said, if that skill starts declining I want to be the first, not the last, to know it. But there are early signals. Too often I can’t remember the particular word I want. It is there in my memory, but I can’t access that memory. For example years ago I wanted to make something for supper, but I couldn’t remember its name. Finally I told Cam “It is round and flat, and we put mushrooms on it.” She said “Pizza.” That was it. This past week I was trying to remember the brand name of a chocolate. “The lady rode a horse through town, naked.” MaryLee said “Godiva.” See what I mean? It is really bad when I can’t remember the necessary descriptions for the missing word. Yes, it happens to everyone, but I am concerned by the increasing frequency. Suppose some day I want to write a novel, and I can’t remember the word “novel” or long “story”? I live to write, and dread the prospect of ever being unable to do it.

Then there’s my hearing, which has faded somewhat, so I got hearing aids. They worked but about a month ago the left one stopped working. I continued to use the right one. Then one evening it was gone. It must have dropped out of my ear unnoticed; maybe when I was driving the Mule out for the mail, and is gone. Sigh. These things are designed to be almost invisible, so that strangers don’t know you’re wearing them. I think I’d prefer having some that are obvious so I can’t lose them. I am old and don’t mind showing it; to me age is not a shame but an indication that I’ve been around a while. Why hide what I am? The alternatives are fakery or death, neither of which appeals to me.

And the clippings. I remain months behind on my magazines, but I do go through the local newspaper daily. Here is one from December 2, about a parallel between Bigfoot and QAnon. Our local version is the evil smelling Skunk Ape, splashing around Lake Tsala Apopka, known as Lake Tsoda Popka in Xanth, and we may even have our own Tsala Apopka Monster to rival the Loch Ness Monster. When the monsters are fake, why not? But this article is about a related phenomenon: what kind of person truly believes in Bigfoot or QAnon? Now that interests me. I am a total skeptic on the supernatural. I make my living from fantasy, but I don’t believe it. It seems that a Republican congressman from Virginia, Denver Riggleman, is investigating fantasy belief and conspiracy theories. He even self published a book about the subject, Bigfoot — It’s Complicated. My guess is that he couldn’t find a traditional publisher, they being hideboaund. Pockets of America are falling into conspiracy wormholes such as QAnon, the “boogaloo” movement ( I have not heard of this before), and President Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. The author concludes that like the Bigfoot hunters, they see what they want to see. Facts oftentimes don’t matter. To have this attitude seriously affect politics can be alarming. Riggleman has been an Air Force intelligence officer, so surely has a pretty sharp insight into the way people think. This objectivity was considered a betrayal of his political party, when he spoke up, and he got squeezed out. It seems that today’s Republicans don’t much like common sense. Not that Democrats are necessarily better. As a registered independent for 60 years I scorn them all.

Remember the Mystery Monolith? It disappeared shortly after being discovered in Utah. Then similar ones appeared in other parts of the world. Now one has appeared made of gingerbread. A lesser mystery is local, here in Citrus County, Florida. When they moved an old shed they discovered that it was supported by grave markers of former military servicemen. Huh? It turned out that these were ones that should have been destroyed when new ones were installed, 17 years ago. Too bad they were left face down in the dirt. If there is an Afterlife, there must be some angry ghosts. There was an obit for Charley Pride, country music’s first black star. I was not aware of him, not being much into country music, but I note that he was my age, born in 1934. There are fewer folk of my generation than there used to be. Maybe age has something to do with it. There has been a local sign in a yard that has recently attracted some attention. ETERNITY IN HELL IS A LONG TIME! Now some folk are taking offense, thinking their religion is being smirched, and they want the sign taken down. It doesn’t bother me; as an agnostic I don’t believe in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory. But if someone wants to state the obvious, that eternity anywhere is a long time, why not? We do theoretically have freedom of speech. Maybe someone should put up another sign saying something like IT’S A SHORT TIME, YOU MORON. Hark! The vaccines are coming. Let’s hope they stifle the pandemic and allow normalcy to return. Meanwhile in Xanth we have a pundemic, causing pundemonium, where folk get pundigestion and emit such foul puns that nobody can stand to be near them. Don’t worry; it seems likely to be years before Apoca Lips sees print, so you are not in immediate danger of mind rot.

More seriously, we have in the past mentioned useful sites, though I have been cutting back on that in the interest of focusing on this site’s real purpose: to promote my books. I’m a commercial writer, not a philosopher, as this column may indicate. So here is a passing mention of the American Addiction Centers, americanaddictioncenters.org, a leading national organization that is dedicated to helping people with their mental health and substance abuse problems. They provide free books of statistics on addiction, explaining how to find free rehab centers. Also free Virtual Support Meetings hosted weekly by a person in recovery. I know that holidays can be tough on folk in trouble; I feel it in my grief for Cam, who can’t share the festivities. Here, perhaps, is the help you need.

They are testing robot dogs in Florida to see how useful they will be in war. They were designed by Ghost Robotics. No you can’t have one to guard your house; prices start at $100,000. I am waiting for when they make robot men, so that living men don’t have to fight in wars. In the Anne advice column is a letter from a man who married a fourth time, and his wife and three exes get together with their husbands amicably for family events. That’s a good way to do it, if you can. A prominent AI (Artificial Intelligence) researcher is leaving Google, because it seems they put profits ahead of ethics. I remember when Google advertised to hire the very smartest folk; too bad their bosses aren’t smart enough to appreciate the value of ethics. Article in the October 10 2020 issue of NEW SCIENTIST titled “The balancing act” says we are becoming less steady on our feet. That’s mischief; balance is one of the defining qualities of the human species, as I explore in my GEODYSSEY series, with such odd incidental effects as permanent breasts on women, something unknown elsewhere in the animal kingdom. The Tampa Bay Times lists the early downplaying and denial of Covid-19 virus as the Lie of the Year. I am inclined to agree, but with a caution that this newspaper’s decisions aren’t always apt. Remember when President Obama, introducing the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, was asked about competing insurance? He replied that if you liked other insurance, you could keep it. Then some shady companies concluded that the strictures required by Obamacare, such as not rejecting applicants for preexisting conditions, and actually paying the claims when they came, made it too difficult to do business their way, so they went out of business. That meant that their policy holders couldn’t keep them. And the newspaper called that Obama’s Lie of the Year. See what I mean? Dairy-free yogurt has arrived. I have now tried some, and it tastes much like regular yogurt and has similar nutritional value. Good for it! Now let’s do the same for milk, meat, fur coats and all. Yes I am a lifelong vegetarian, nudging toward vegan. Hollywood is said to be in panic because the pandemic has caused the death of the cinema houses. However, TV streaming is taking its place. The business will simply have to reorient. The Hightower Lowdown reports that in a blind survey that presented the choice of living in a country with high income inequality like the USA or one with modest inequality like Sweden, 92% of Americans, including the rich, preferred Sweden. The 1918 to 1919 pandemic of the Spanish Flu is estimated to have killed between fifty million and one hundred million people worldwide. That’s way worse than covid-19 so far. But checking the mortality rate in developed industrial countries, it was about two percent. I think covid-19 is running around three percent. There’s a mysterious light in space. When astronomers add up all the known sources, they account for only half the light that exists. So what is the source? I would have thought that a source of light would be readily visible, but I’m not an astronomer. Maybe Dark Matter is not so dark after all. Of course I remain a skeptic on that; I don’t think Dark Matter even exists. Article in the October 31 issue of NEW SCIENTIST says we are on the cusp of a new age of sail. No, not on earthly seas; in space, where giant sails can catch the solar wind and similar radiation by other stars. Sigh; I fear I won’t be around for that tourist cruise. Here is wishing all of us a return to a new normalcy and a satisfied future. I do believe we are turning the corner as we leave 2020 behind.

PIERS

FeBlueberry 2021

HI-

I declared a moratorium on reading novels last year, so I could get my own writing done. I finished writing Xanth #47 Apoca Lips, then got into another collaboration, so my time remains squeezed. But I am also starting to read, hoping in due course to catch up on that backlog. I am not necessarily reading the novels in the order received, but more by convenience and mood. It has been over a year since my wife Carol died, and sieges of grief occur as they choose, though I have remarried in the interim. It is possible to feel grief and love at the same time, and my wife MaryLee accepts that. She still suffers nightmares about her Ex, though that was a quarter century ago and he is dead now. We understand each other’s past histories, and support each other as we can, both of us being very glad we found each other. This time of the coronavirus siege and political upheaval would have been far more difficult for each of us, were we alone. So don’t expect complete sense from me at this time.

I read The Dragon Gate by Randy Ellefson, whose massive nonfiction world building trilogy I reviewed in 2017 and 2019. Now he is trying his hand at fantasy, and I was curious to see how that monstrous research translated into actual fiction. Mixed; he is not exactly Tolkein, but he does have an original take on the standard fantasy theme of ordinary people abruptly launched into a fantasy realm where they achieve greatness. In this case it is not one but four folk, friends Ryan, Anna, Eric, and Matt, who visit Stonehenge in England as tourists. Ryan is big and strong and rich; Anna is a beautiful blonde; Eric is a deadly knife thrower, and Matt is a smart techie, but they are just having a good time. An arc of fire appears and Stonehenge manifests as it was in its prime. Then they are in the fantasy realm, costumed as heroes, with a mission to close the Dragon Gate so that no more dragons can pass through it and ravage the land. They are welcomed to Olliana, in the world of Honym, where they are taken as champions. Uh-oh; it seems that somehow these relatively ordinary folk have been cast as real fantasy heroes, when they lack the necessary magic powers and indeed have no real idea what’s going on. They are forced to fake it, to survive until they can get home. The story is complicated, but gradually they discover how to manage. For example, atheist Anna learns how to communicate with a real goddess and gain necessary help. They finally do succeed in closing the Gate, but it turns out to be less simple than that. They have become heroes in their own right. They eventually do make it home, but find that the mundane lives they had known before are no longer satisfying. They have been bitten, as it were, by the hero bug. There will be more in future volumes. This should be worth your while.

Incidental news. I promised MaryLee warm Florida winters. Why else would a woman come to the backwoods to be with an octogenarian man? Now we’re getting cold fronts, and she says “Well?” Sigh. We have been married nine months, and apart from that, we’re fine. They now have several coronavirus vaccines, but it will be months before they filter down to peons like us, so we’re remaining under lockdown. Maybe, possibly, eventually, ultimately, finally, at long last, this trial will pass, and I’ll get to take MaryLee out to shop, to the beach, to eat out, to the big tourist attractions, to ride on a sightseeing train. Who knows, we might even manage a honeymoon, some distant day, before we’re too old to go out at all. But we are cautious about such ambitious dreams, in these interesting times.

My interest in politics is not great; I’ve always been a registered independent. But the two Georgia senatorial races were interesting, as they finally gave the Democrats control of the senate, by a squeaky margin. I understand the Republicans bottled up 300 House bills, preventing reform, but we should be seeing changes now. The Trumpist rear guard is threatening what amounts to revolution, but I think they will be taken increasingly unseriously.

I continue to exercise, but that’s not perfect. Normally I pull the 55 pound draw-weight bow 20 times right sided one day, left sided the next day. The left side remains okay, but first the right side suffered loss of my ability to hold it firmly in place as I draw, so that the bow swings forward, messing up my draw. Apparently the relevant back muscle just gave out, which I can’t say I understand. Then I came down with what feels like tendinitis; maybe the needle nicked the tendon when I got my flu shot at the turn of the year. The pain stopped me from even trying to draw. After two weeks I tried bracing the bow against a door frame so it couldn’t swing out of position, and then I managed to draw it. One time. So now I’m doing one right side draw a day, and as the tendon heals I will go to two, three, and so on eventually back up to 20. I don’t want to aggravate the tendon by pushing, I mean pulling, too hard too fast, but neither do I want to lose my arm muscle, so it’s a compromise. My other exercises are okay.

I am back to reading, as the above review suggests, but will take time to catch up on the backlog, as I am a slow reader. At the moment I am reading the sexy Radley’s Labyrinth for Horny Monsters, by Annabelle Hawthorn. Most of those monsters are female and shapely and hungry for sex. I’ll review it next month, when I finish reading it. I also continue writing, now being in a collaborative novella. The protagonist is devising a way to translate the DNA code to readable English. What will it say? I still write to paralyzed Jenny once a week, and keep up with snail and email. The Sunken Garden continues, though a number of the plants have shut down for the winter. The Mexican Heather still shows its purple flowers, the tomatoes are flowering madly, and the volunteer dandelions are flourishing. Outside, our lone Azalea is flowering nicely, as is our Turk’s Cap Hibiscus. I now drive the Kawasaki Mule ATV daily to fetch the mail. MaryLee used to ride with me, until she came down with painful shingles. So I am staying busy, just not newsworthy. Should some freak of luck ever put me back on the bestseller lists, that would have to change, lest I get buried in mail.

And the pile of clippings of things of passing interest to me. I learned new word: “smishing,” which is the illicit using of text messages to get your personal information. Such as getting Netflix free for a year; just click the link and fill out the form. Don’t even click No or Stop, because that verifies the activity of your phone number. Newspaper article by Michael Hiltzik explains why he never agrees to disagree: because some opinions are just wrong. He uses Lamarck’s theory that acquired characteristics can be inherited as an example. Interesting, because they can be inherited, via the epigenetic system. It clears in a couple of generations, but the children really can suffer from the sins of their parents. And of course refusal to even consider an opposing viewpoint can lead to bigotry. Even in science. How many authorities dismiss the idea that fluoridation is a health hoax out of hand, when the truth is foreign to their belief? But in general he is correct; it can be useless to debate bigotry. Even his own. Article in the 7 November NEW SCIENTIST suggests that dreams may be far more profound than generally thought, because they improve the generalization of acquired experience. That is, if you sit on a thumbtack you learn not to do that, but generalization can help you avoid sitting on other uncomfortable things, a broader education. It concludes that maybe the invention of fictions allowed us to get the benefit of dreams when we are awake. That got my attention, as I earn my living by writing fiction. It says “Maybe art is also pleasurable for humans because we are constantly being overfitted to reality.” If I understand that correctly, and I’m not sure that I do, we need the changed perspective of the arts to give us a broader understanding of reality. I feel that the arts are what distinguish the human kind from the animal kind. Art makes us human. Including the appreciation of fiction. If dreams facilitate that, more power to them. I hear on the radio’s daily weather reports what the local temperatures are. One site is The Villages, a retirement community. A newspaper article says it is the nation’s largest, with 120,000 residents. Wow! It is considered a utopia, yet many of its residents are unhappy. My guess is that the realities of approaching death are closing in on them despite appealing diversions. Decades ago my wife Cam and I seriously considered moving to a retirement community, but concluded that golf and bingo were not our thing, and we settled for our tree farm. Still, I can see the appeal. Article in NEW SCIENTIST 14 November 2020 on the great population debate. “Is the coronavirus pandemic just the latest indication that there are too many of us on the planet?” We are coming up on 8 billion people, and heading for around 11 billion in 2100. Less than two centuries ago average life expectancy was around 40. Here I am, age 86, and I am by no means exceptional. Is there a kind way to curtail the deadly trend? One way is to educate women globally and give them equal rights, so they won’t have to bear more babies just because Joe Schmoe won’t bother to use a condom. But “Right across the world, we see women’s rights being curtailed by people trying to increase the population.” Ouch! The best answer seems to be to give people cheap, easy access to modern contraceptives. I am inclined to favor global airborne contraception, so that only those who take steps to counteract it can be fertile, and every child would be wanted. But formidable religious groups would oppose that, and it is probably politically unfeasible. I suspect we are doomed to perish as a culture and perhaps as a species as we march over the cliff of fertility.

A cave man has appeared in Minnesota: Zug Zug, enclosed in a block of ice. Also maybe his long-lost companion, Zarah. No, they aren’t real; they are sculptures commissioned by an ad agency. But why not? Maybe somewhere in an alternate reality a modern man and woman are presented in stasis to be admired by cave men. Not necessarily related is the indication that the human body temperature is dropping. It is now about half a degree C lower than it was around Civil War times. It seems to be a sign of health. Research suggests that hallucinogens can be highly effective treatments for anxiety, depression, addiction, and trauma. Many are illegal now, but there’s a push to decriminalize or legalize them. The benefits could be phenomenal. For example, 80% of smokers could quit with such therapy. January 2 NEW SCIENTIST has an article on AI, that is, Artificial Intelligence, by Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of DeepMind. He hopes that they can solve AI, fundamentally understanding intelligence and creating it artificially. Already it has cracked one of the hardest problems in biology, determining the shape of proteins as their component amino acids fold themselves into complex 3D shapes. There are 10 to the 300 power possible configurations for a single protein, so you can see why this is a challenge. But that’s just the start. There may be dozens of breakthroughs in the next decade. Hmm—could one of them be the solution to the population problem? More power to you, Deep Mind! Another article in that issue is “Measuring up the Universe,” by Stuart Clark. How big is it? The farthest we can see is about 93 billion light years, but the universe is surely bigger than that. We just don’t know, and ours may be just one of multiple universes, immense bubbles of galaxies, the inflationary multiverse. Is your head exploding yet? If not, you probably aren’t paying proper attention. Promiscuity is linked not only to venereal disease, but also to higher rates of cancer, especially for women. Junk food makes you stupid; saturated fat and added sugar, mainly. SCIENCE NEWS for 12-5-2020 article by Maria Temming says that there is a purple and green glow in the sky known as STEVE that they can’t figure out. It’s not an aurora, and it’s really weird. So if your name is Steve and you’re weird, maybe that’s why. 5 December NEW SCIENTIST article “Our Restless Minds” by Simon Baron-Cohen suggests that the human capacity for invention may relate to autism. That’s another attention-getter for me, because autism runs in my family and I fear it could be stalking me. This suggests that autism isn’t genetic happenstance, but is entwined with our capacity for invention. I am about as inventive as the next speculative fiction author, as my body of fiction shows. Could this be a benefit of lurking autism? That makes me nervous. It seems that empathy relates, which is, oversimplified, the ability to feel another’s feeling; and so does systemizing, which is the ability to make sense of things. It helps to have both circuits, and I believe I do. I feel for people, animals, plants, and favored tools, and I want to understand everything in the universe. Is that too much? If that’s autism, I can live with it. THE WEEK for 1-22-21 has an editorial by Theunis Bates on the nature of American culture. He suggests that the storming of the Capitol by 8,000 pro-Trumpists has been called entirely un-American, but actually they were everyday Americans fed a diet of conspiracy theories, who believed they were doing the right thing. He points out that violence is a fact of American life. “The US has the highest rate of mass shootings in the Western world and a gun homicide rate 25 times higher than those of similarly developed countries.” He is making uncomfortable sense.

When my wife Carol “Cam” died in 2019, I joined a local Hospice bereavement group. I haven’t mentioned it much here because its proceedings are private, and for ten months it has been in abeyance because of the Virus. But today we had a meeting of the very few participants who remain after that layoff. I want to share a statement the moderator brought in, by an unknown author, that is in the public domain. “Grief/ Never ends…/ But it changes./ It’s a passage, not a place to stay. Grief is not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith—It is the price of love.” This seems true to me. I have been there, and am paying that price. I also thought of an analogy to a statement on a plaque intended for a different purpose, but that I think can apply here. “Fate whispers to the Warrior ‘You cannot withstand the storm.’ The Warrior whispers back ‘I am the storm.’” Grief seems hard to withstand, but we handle it because we have no alternative. We are perforce Warriors. I still miss Cam, but I know she is not coming back, and I am getting on with my life. That is the way it has to be.

PIERS

Marsh 2021

HI-

Doug Harter has updated the Xanth Character database (XCD) with Skeleton Key. The XCD is available in both PDF and HTML versions on the website. That is Xanth #44, about the alien cuttlefish child Squid, who looks, acts, and thinks exactly like a human girl, and is told she is the most important person in the universe. She brushes that off, of course, but it turns out to be true. It has now been published, and there are three more Xanths in the pipeline. So why are you wasting your time here, when you could be reading it?

I read Radley’s Labyrinth for Horny Monsters, by Annabelle Hawthorne, the second in the Horny Monsters series. There was a time when lady writers wrote relatively gentle fiction. As I put it , the lady writer takes the reader by the hand and leads him into the scene, her wonders to behold. The male writer picks the reader up by collar and crotch and hurls him into the action. Of the two, the latter tended to attract more readers. This was especially true with respect to sex in fantasy. Well, times have changed, and today the ladies can heave as well as do the men. This book is an example. There is more groin-grabbing sex here than I recall seeing in any fantasy novel, except for the first one, Radley’s Home for Horny Monsters, which I reviewed in Jamboree 2019. Mike Radley inherited a house filled with monsters who tend to be female, shapely, and eager for sex. Pretty much a man’s dream, except that there are hostile forces that want to screw him in a far less enjoyable manner, and he has to somehow defend the house against their formidable magic. That action is frequently interspersed with quite varied sexual engagements, described in rich detail. For example, Mike makes out with Abella the Gargoyle, who folds her wings and softens at his touch so that she doesn’t feel like stone, especially inside. She gives him oral sex while penetrating her own vagina with the tip of her tail for added effect. Another time he has vaginal sex with a nine inch tall fairy, Cerulia. How? Well, she stretches, becoming like an ardent condom, her head and breasts swelling like balloons as he ejaculates. Another time it is with Lily the Succubus, who changes forms during it, so that she looks like several of the other girls in turn. See what I mean? The sex is hot and heavy and multifaceted. But there is a solid story here too as he fights his way through to a narrow victory over the forces of evil. Also some pertinent thoughts. “The idea of sex as a luxury, no different from wine or cigarettes, was wrong. The sex he had with all these women was an expression of their bonds, something that brought them closer. Yet, because it was with so many different people, it was frowned upon, anathema to a functional society. Somewhere along the way, mankind had labeled sex as dirty, something only to be enjoyed in a certain way with certain people.” I think that’s damn well told. Sex is a natural part of mankind and other animals, and it performs a social role in addition to propagating the species. So I recommend this novel and this series for action, sex, and thought. My only caveat is that there are so many characters that it is tricky to keep them all straight. I finally noted them on a paper as I read, about 30. I believe it would help to include a list of characters and their types. Lily–succubus. Naia–water spirit. Jenny–magic doll. Beth–real estate agent. Zel–centaur. Cecilia–banshee. And so on. Then the reader could flip to that list to get clear which maiden Mike is sexing at the moment. They are all highly individual characters, and deserve to be kept distinct.

Next book on deck is Veilfall, by Adron J Smitley. It’s close to 400,000 words, and I am a slow reader, so I may read and review just the first novel-length part, Cursive Love, in next month’s column. Last year, when reading and reviewing novels prevented me from writing my own, I called a halt. Now I am resuming, slowly, trying to be fair to the several backlogged authors. I will say at this time that this is one compelling story. If you are into fantasy, look it up.

My wife Carol died in 2019, and I am getting on with my life, as my remarriage indicates, but there are tag ends that continue, pulling at my heart strings. I came across my old accounts, from May 1959 through December 1978, eighteen and a half years. They are penned and penciled, one little page a month. I need to provide a bit of background. I spent two years in the U.S. Army, which institution does not necessarily follow the rules. It was said that there was the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way. True words. When I declined to sign up for monthly savings bonds, because we needed the five dollars a month they cost to live on, hell broke loose. I had been denied leave time to visit my family back east because I was too valuable as a math and survey instructor, but when I balked at the supposedly voluntary sign up, the other battery instructors, including those who lived off-post as I did, were required to report daily for 5:30 AM reveille. They thought that would put pressure on me, but the other men told me they were glad to do it, because they didn’t like being forced into something against their choice. I was removed as an instructor and kicked out of the battery. I wound up pulling weeds as I learned a new job, sending up weather balloons. I was denied promotion, so that by the end of my Army stint an associate who had been one of my students ranked me. That loss of promotion cost me fifty dollars a month. It was said that the Army couldn’t make you do something, but it could make you wish you had. Yes, that five dollars a month we needed cost me ten times that. I did fight back, to a degree; I went to the battalion commander with a charge of extortion against the battery First Sergeant. As I recall, we talked amicably for something like two and a half hours while the other personnel marveled. I suspect the commander enjoyed talking with someone who had a mind and fortitude, for a change. I remember he asked me what I truly wanted in life, and I said I wanted to write. He said I was narrow. I wonder whether he ever learned of my later career as a writer, and maybe reconsidered which of us was narrow? I suspect the sergeant was shaking in his boots, because he was guilty, but in the end the Lt. Commander declined to act, though privately yielding the justice of my case. He, too, was constrained by the realities of Army existence, and canning the sergeant would have made severe ripples that just might have prejudiced his own next promotion. In the Army you toe the line, or else, whatever your rank. So that was that, and eventually I did sign up for the bonds, and our meager savings declined accordingly. When I got out of the army, one of my assets was $56.40 in bonds, but in addition was the money from the leave they had not given me; they had to pay me for it, and we lived several months on that. So there was May 1959, my first entry, showing $61.40 in the bank, $56.40 in bonds, and $10.00 cash, for a total of $127.80. For June it was up a bit, to $198.63. Up another notch for July, $320.81. We were gaining, thanks to living rent free in my grandmother’s house, and about $100 a month from my portion of a trust left by my late grandfather. $820.54 for September. We were getting rich! Then it dropped to $222.97 for October as we made a down payment on our house. But I had landed a good job and our totals started nudging up again. In the next year we got close to $3,000, but it tumbled when we paid cash for a new VW car. Then in May 1962 came the worst day of my life: I lost my job, Carol lost her baby stillborn, the third such loss, indicating that we were unlikely ever to have surviving children, and my doctor informed me that my concerns for our future were all in my head, that I was worrying about nothing. So I was imagining my problems. That got me ridered, that is, excluded, on my health insurance for “all mental disease.” Get it? If the doctor can’t diagnose it, the patient is crazy. It was, of course, not imaginary; it took me decades to run it down. It was low thyroid function, and one little pill a day fixed both my chronic fatigue and my depression. Fortunately my severance pay sustained us for a few more months. Soon we agreed on a trial year of writing while my wife worked, she now being unpregnant, the agreement being that if I had no success I would give up my dream and focus on earning my living more realistically. Then in December 1962 I got paid for my first story sale. It is right there in the accounts, $20.00. So I had the start of my writing career, thanks to the Monkey’s Paw of the death of our baby. But it wasn’t enough, and I returned to work, teaching English. I hated it. Then in May 1966 I retired again to writing, and in a couple more months managed to sell my first novel, Chthon, which I had written in fragments over the course of seven years part time. It was a long and difficult uphill climb from there, but the records reflect it, figure by figure. So who cares about old accounts? I do. My life is pinned there, like a butterfly on a board.

James Gunn died. He was one of my favorite authors, back in the day, with stories like “Breaking Point” about folk on a space mission pushed to the mental breaking point by alien minds, and “Wherever You May Be” about a girl with phenomenal psionic powers, but only when she was unhappy. So a psychologist played up to her, getting her to love him, then cut it off, plunging her into misery, so he could study her. Then hell broke loose, as she used her powers to read his mind and discover what he had done. I got to know Gunn personally, and liked him, and it turned out that his son was a fan of mine. He was 97. Ben Bova died at age 88. I knew him personally too, as another writer, and liked him. He became editor of ANALOG in 1971 until 1978. The old order passeth, and I am sorry to see these parts of it go. Incidentally, I learned of these losses from LOCUS, and note with bemusement that I received the January issue February 4 and the March issue one day later, February 5. Maybe the mail is finally speeding up, now that the election is over.

I continue my exercises, of course, working around my limitations. My sore tendon has torpedoed my right side bow drawing, but I am able to do it by bracing the bow against a door-frame. I limited it to one a day, lest I aggravate the tendon, but on the day I was eighty six and a half I raised it to two, and to three today, the first of March. We’ll see. My other exercises are okay. Folk tend to avoid meaningful exercise as they age, while putting on weight, and that is a ticket to decline and death. My father exercised all his life, but around age 90 must have had a small stroke that took out his health consciousness circuit. He stopped exercising, seeing no point in it, and started overeating, and by the time he died at age 93 he weighed too much to stand on his feet. This is not a route I mean to take. For one thing, I promised MaryLee ten good years, so I have to make it to at least 95. She wants me to try for 15 years. Should I?

I received a special report edition of Equedia, a sort of business newsletter whose pronouncements I take with a mouthful of salt since it dismissed the developing Covid-19 crisis as an ailment no worse than the flu that would soon fade away. Half a million American deaths give the lie to that. This time it has a provocative opening. What if your phone can alter the way you feel, so you can dial yourself alert, calm, happy, or whatever else you wish? Without having to ingest substances. Maybe that is about to happen. With the rise in depression and background mayhem occasioned by the Virus, something like this could become quite popular. It seems this device, developed by Hapbee Technologies Inc., is wearable and temporary. That is, when you turn it off it fades in fifteen to thirty minutes, so you are not locked in to a mood. I am dubious, but can see the advantage of turning it on to Sleepy at night, and Alert in the morning. I wonder if there is a setting for Sexy? I will be interested to see if this comes to anything.

The 16 January issue of NEW SCIENTIST has an article by Robert J. Sternberg titled “Rethinking intelligence.” It suggests that standardized intelligence testing is narrow, self serving, questionably scientific, and ultimately self defeating. I, as a child who took three years to get through first grade (undiagnosed dyslexia may have had something to do with it) but eventually got out on his own and became a highly successful writer, agree emphatically. Standardized categorization tends to exclude original thinkers. One of my favorite examples, oversimplified, is the question what is the closest planet? The keyed answer was Mars. Well, first the question is misphrased, because planets are not stationary in space, they are in orbits, and without telling exactly when you are looking, you can’t say whether Mars is on Earth’s side of the sun, or on the opposite. So it should ask what is the closest orbit. Then there is a problem because the orbit of Venus is closer to that of Earth than the orbit of Mars; the maker of the test had his information wrong. But both answers are fallacious; the closest planet is Earth, so close you can touch it. So I did not score well on this type of test. A professor explained to me that the test was of intelligence, not facts, and those who gave the keyed correct answers were more intelligent than those who did not. I fear he wasn’t savvy enough to be familiar with the term self-fulfilling prophecy. I had to get away from this sort of thing before I could make my mark on the world, and of course my standardized critics still think I’m stupid. As I put it in my funny fantasy, I’m an ogre, and ogres are justifiably proud of their stupidity, but they do make their mark on their environment by twisting tree-trunks into knots and teaching young dragons the meaning of fear. Now you know.

My wife MaryLee is from Tennessee. I looked at one of her magazines, THE TENNESSEE MAGAZINE, put out by the Gibson Electric Corporation. So it is essentially an advertising publication, but such things cans have interesting aspects, and this one’s not bad. Its editorial says that in February 2000 the National Academy of Engineering compiled a list of the twenty greatest achievements of the 20th century. Television was #3; Airplanes were #2; #1 was the electric power grid. I, like most folk, hadn’t thought of that, but when you consider the mischief wrought by a power lapse, it makes sense. It seems that North America’s power grid has been called the most complex machine ever built. It is a trillion dollar web of generation stations and millions of miles of power lines. I have learned something.

And my accumulation of clippings. They are halting a $1 billion electricity transmission corridor through sparsely populated woods in western Maine because of legal action. A more rigorous environmental review is sought. While I don’t oppose progress, I do support the environment, so I will be interested to see how this turns out. Citrus County, Florida, where I live, has some lovely scenery, but socially it is a conservative bastion with some frustrated liberals like me hoping for better days to come. Letters in the local newspaper for February 27 argue the case, with one referring to the “despicable opposition” to Trump, and another saying that in failing to convict Trump they have trashed the rule of law and the Constitution. Another says that the senators are cowards, knowing Trump is guilty but not daring to act on that belief. “They cannot choose a candidate with character, morality, integrity and honesty to run for POTUS because they fear Trump and his minions.” Another letter condemns an obituary for the late Rush Limbaugh as blatant proof of bias, I think because it hinted he was a bigot. The larger report in the newspaper said “What he did was to bring a paranoia and really mean, nasty rhetoric and hyperpartisanship into the mainstream.” Yes. All in one day. The newspaper runs a weekly column of quotes from the left and the right. I normally agree more with the left, but not always. Remember, I have never registered with a political party, neither of the big ones being liberal enough for me. But this time the Right remarked that George Orwell objected not only to fascism and capitalism, but also to the supposed worker’s paradise of communism. Because he denounced the delusion of Stalanism, he drove away friends and sometimes had trouble getting published, but was ultimately proven correct. Yes indeed; at one point I taught his Animal Farm to high school classes, a penetrating exposure of the reality of communism. That’s a story of how the animals revolted and took over the farm, with the pigs as the new leaders, but the pigs soon became indistinguishable from humans, and the other animals were more oppressed than ever. So in my view those “liberals” who condemned Orwell for that were idiots. He saw things pretty much as they are.

Newspaper item says that one in six Gen Z adults identify as LGBT, a small but rising share of Americans. I suspect it is reality, formerly suppressed because of social disapproval. As I put it, I am adamantly heterosexual, loving the look and feel of women, and I have no intention of changing. I assume the LGBT folk are similar in their orientations, so I follow the Golden Rule and accept their lifestyles as I hope they allow me mine. The sexual spectrum is broad and devious, and should be accepted as it is, not with parts condemned. Well, I might have a problem with those who prefer sex with corpses, or extreme sadism, or rape, so maybe keep those away from me; I guess I am not that liberal. Another item says that “technostress” is being experienced among older adults. That is, feeling overwhelmed by all the new technologies. It seems that I am not the only one who comes from another century and gets confused by the newfangled gimmicks appearing on the scene. In my day phones made and received calls, cars had running boards, women wore skirts, and a popular commercial cereal was called Cherioats. What happened? Another item describes ice volcanoes on Lake Michigan. Wow! They used to be found on the planet Pluto. Maybe some moved. Another says that the recent election process went smoothly in Florida, and the GOP is moving fast to make sure it doesn’t happen again. They feel that too many Blacks are voting, imperiling Republican power. A letter in the newspaper by Charles Shinsky says that solicitation calls are out of control. He received a call informing him that he had a computer virus. He replied that he never had a computer, but the calls continued until he counted 68 of them. I believe he has a case. I say yet again, the authorities could stop robocalls and such if they wanted to. The question is why don’t they want to? Article in SCIENCE NEWS for January 30 says it is time to define despair and its risks. Well, yes, but when the Virus wipes out jobs, impoverishes people, and kills half a million in America, while politicians wrangle about measures to maybe help a little, I can see there is reason for despair. Article in NEW SCIENTIST for 12 December titled “Here’s looking at YOU” says that arguably you only become a person when you can reflect on other people’s view of you. It has an interesting illustration showing a girl on the sidewalk looking at her cell phone while others are entertaining themselves picnicking on the hillside beyond, resting, playing, chatting, and so on. All of them are the same person. Yes, there may not be much difference between us, could we but understand each other better. I have wondered whether consciousness itself could be like a flame that lights assorted candles that are our different bodies, really the same thing in slightly different settings. We each think we are unique, but are we really? Item in THE WEEK for February 26 is about the cyberweapons arms race. There’s a big global market for backdoor access to crucial software. This may be the clearest and most present danger facing the world. This makes me nervous. Another article in the same issue is titled “What the Know Nothings didn’t know.” It seems that circa 1850 there was powerful political force that roughly resembled the Republican party of today. It was secretive; when asked for their views and political plans, they replied “I know nothing.” They seem to have been against immigration–as an immigrant myself I bridle–and they accused Catholic priests and nuns of strangling babies and holding young women against their will. QAnon, anyone? Then they faded out, but their spirit evidently remains. A news report says that Donald Trump made 30,573 false or misleading statements while in office. Another report indicates that the true number of Covid deaths is 44 percent higher than the official count in America. I am not surprised. Article in the 30 January 2021 issue of NEW SCIENTIST described gaslighting, the term originating from a 1938 movie Gaslight, wherein a man convinces his wife that she is losing her sanity by doing things like dimming the lights in their house and telling her she is imagining it. Beware, especially if you are doubting your sanity; you are not necessary going crazy. The same issue tells how scientists are trying to locate extraterrestrial civilization by spotting Dyson spheres, where a globe surrounds a star and captures all its radiating energy. Such a thing is unlikely to happen naturally. But let’s not be too quick to contact such a civilization if we find it; they might regard us as vermin to be eradicated. They just might be right.

David Fletcher and I completed our collaborative novella The Genetic Code, a bit over 20,000 words, and I sent it off to my agent for marketing. Suppose you could translate the DNA code into English, so anybody might read it and tinker with it? Maybe it will happen. Then I wrote a short short story, “Fly the Fly,” a sequel to “Walk the Walk” and “Ride the Ride.” Mainly I am keeping busy, as I slowly orient on my major project for this year, my geothermal novel Deep Well. If I do it right, I may help show the way to eliminating air pollution and the resultant global warning, my bit of good before I leave this scene. This morning I attended the Hospice Bereavement meeting, as I still miss Carol, my wife of 63 years. My present wife, MaryLee, understands. It is possible to be in grief and love at the same time. This time the moderator brought a statement by one Julia Cook I will share: “Grief is like a snowflake. Sometimes it comes one flake at a time; other times it comes like a blizzard. It melts away, but it always comes back. Just as each snowflake is unique, each person experiences grief in their own unique way.” True words.

And to you folk freezing up north: spring is coming. I promise.

PIERS

Apull 2021

HI-

Mannison Press published, as of Apull 7, a neat booklet containing a trio of stories I wrote for them: “Walk the Walk,” wherein a lonely little girl rescues a little walking skeleton boy and acquires a friend; “Ride the Ride,” with a man and his inner child are terrified of a fearsome amusement park ride and are saved by a woman who turns out to be a ghost; and “Fly the Fly,” where the little girl and skeleton boy get lost by a mean will-o-wisp are are rescued by an odd boy — the inner child, and his new stepmother, the ghost who helps children. The booklet is titled Read the Read, with Three Tiny Tales by yours truly. We’ll have an ad for it on this site, if we can manage to post it properly. You should enjoy it, if you like children and ghosts. Check it anyway; Mannison has other mini-books that may interest you.

I read Cursive Love, which is the first part of Veilfall, by Adron J Smitley. The full book is 650 densely filled pages, and I am a slow reader, with a number of other books waiting, so I had to compromise by reading just this much at this time. Banzu is a master swordslinger and a Soothsayer, who has the power to greatly accelerate his animation, making an opponent seem to be standing still. That’s deadly. But there is a kind of curse on Soothsayers, that if they indulge the Power too much they may get locked into it, then go on a berserker type rampage killing foe and friend alike. His uncle Jericho is the only other surviving Soothsayer, and they know that eventually one of them will have to kill the other. Into this picture comes the lovely woman Melora, a Spellbinder with special powers of her own. She needs Jericho’s help, but that’s not necessarily something he can afford to give. He takes off on a mission of his own, leaving Melora with Banzu, whom she treats with contempt, not knowing he is another Soothsayer. It proceeds from there as they gradually get to know each other and start falling in love. Then it gets savagely ugly. The narrative is effective, but the language is a bit odd, with words not quite correctly used; my advice is to tune out that aspect and go for the story, which is as hard-hitting as they come. Combat, death, and worse, proceeding without letup. This is the beginning of a mighty story.

I have been slowly orienting on my big project for 2021, my geothermal novel Deep Well. Geo as in the earth, Thermal as in heat. My hope is to make it so compelling that readers will be converted to the appreciation of this form of energy, and start demanding that it be seriously utilized, thus sparing our planet further air pollution and the resultant global warming that is a significant side effect of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas. Yes, electric power is nonpolluting, but its generation may be another matter. Nuclear power is dangerous because accidents can possibly melt a hole in the crust of the earth, or terrorists could steal nuclear materials to fashion a bomb to blow up a city, and even at best the spent fuel is dangerously radioactive. Nuclear fusion, in contrast to nuclear fission, is much safer, but also more complicated and expensive to develop. Solar power is free and nonpolluting, but works only when the sun shines. Wind is erratic; much of the time the air is still. Hydropower dams up rivers, messing up nature. The tidal variant, harnessing the power of waves and ocean currents, seems good, but what if the currents change? So fusion looks good, maybe int five to ten years. But the heat of the deep earth is universal, effectively limitless, everywhere, nonpolluting, free, and will endure as long as the world lasts, literally. All we have to do is tap into it. Hence the deep well, drilling down as far as five miles, though in some areas it is close to the surface and a five foot deep well might do it. This what I am studying, hoping in due course to do my bit to help save the world from the folly of fossil fuel. Yes, this is only one of the ways that humanity is destroying the world as we know it, perhaps not the most critical one; the destruction of the environment occasioned by the meat industry is another, and sheer overpopulation is another. So I am a vegetarian verging on vegan, and limited my family to two children, one of which survives. I can’t tell others what to eat or how many children to have, but maybe I can help show the way to alleviating global warming, if anyone will pay attention. The latest sports scores seem more important to most folk than saving the world.

GeoVision — Harnessing the Heat Beneath Our Feet is a government report from the Department of Energy, DOE. Some sample quotes may suffice. “Geothermal energy is secure, reliable, flexible, and constant. It offers the United States a renewable source for power generation as well as heating and cooling of homes and businesses.” “Energy is the heartbeat of America. It touches everything we do every day — from life at home, to work and communication; to critical infrastructure that saves lives in hospitals, strengthens our natural security, and transports us to new places.” “The use of geothermal energy also offers important benefits to the nation, including grid stability, greater diversity in the portfolio of affordable energy options, efficient heating, and reduction of air pollution.” But at present geothermal power, free as the source may be, is more expensive than other forms, so there is work to be done. Just simplifying regulation could help considerably. About half the cost is the drilling of the wells, and of course deeper wells will cost more. Near Yellowstone National Park shallow wells will do; in Florida where I live, deep wells will be needed. Basically, cold water is pumped down via an injection well, and hot water is pumped up via a production well. The hot water is used as it is in other types of conversion, running turbines to generate electricity which can then be used for whatever is needed. Details can get complicated, but this is the essence.

I also read two children’s books on the subject. No, I am not frivoling away my time; at my age, time is my most precious commodity. It is that if you want to research a new subject, a children’s book is relatively simple, making the basics easier to understand. Then with that grounding you can proceed to the more challenging concepts. One book is Geothermal Energy — Alternative Energy, by Laurie Brearley. On the cover it says “Lava from eruptions at Mount Etna can reach a temperature of up to 2,102 degrees Fahrenheit (1,150 degrees Celsius)!” Yes, lava is hot, and that is what the deep wells drill down to. The back cover says that Earth’s inner core can reach temperatures of 12,600 degrees Fahrenheit (7,000 degrees Celsius.) Inside it makes the point that geothermal energy does not have to be turned into electricity to be useful; it can also heat buildings, whether a school, an office, or a home. It tells how about 95 percent of the buildings of Reykjavik, Iceland, are geothermal heated. The volume is profusely illustrated. The other book is Geothermal Energy — Harnessing the Power of Earth’s Heat, by Mariel Bard. This, too is mostly colorful pictures. “Earth is made of layers. People live on the outermost layer, called the crust.” It also has a caution about how some methods or power production are comparable to fracking and can cause earthquakes. So watch it.

I also paged through a book I was given, on a different subject, though it might be said to generate its own form of heat.

Sensual Erotica 100 Best Photos, by David Dubnitskiy, a photographer in Ukraine. The pictures are all of young women in various stages of undress, none of them pornographic, the centerpieces of implied stories. For example one is titled “Choosing of a summer scarf,” showing the svelte woman holding the almost transparent material in front of her, her lovely nude body barely (sorry) concealed. Another, “Sophisticated purity” shows the clothed woman leaning forward to pick up a pan of material, her evocative breasts showing as her decolletage dips. “Please help me to open, you are a specialist!” shows a woman lifting her skirt to show her chastity belt with a padlock, as the locksmith tries to figure it out. A naughty one, “Fishing,” shows one woman casting her line, but the back fling of the hook has taught the hem of her companion’s dress, hauling it up so that her bottom is exposed, to her horror. Perhaps the naughtiest is two poses. In the first, “Let’s play strip games?” the well endowed seated woman is looking at her cards. In the second she is bare. “I lost. What next?” seeming not at all afraid of the answer. In my judgment, the young women of Ukraine are as appealing as any women anywhere.

I read Captain Arnold & Other Tales of the Abnormal, by Arthur M. Doweyko, whose prior books I reviewed here before. This is an illustrated collection of 17 pieces, mostly stories or fragments, and one essay. The first is “Captain Arnold and the Zantharian Invasion,” featuring nine year old Arnold, who has some sort of condition that twists his back, makes his breathing difficult, and makes him a klutz. He is cruelly teased by other children. His nurse, Nina, is a literal robot. She is very supportive, playing games with him without looking down on him. He falls asleep and dreams he is Captain Arnold, with a fine muscular body, the last hope of Earth to defeat the invading Zantharians. His first officer is Nina, now human. His dreams are better than his reality. Other stories have odd time travel, space travel, and weird happenings. Reality is seldom what it seems. In one story a human brain is grown in the laboratory, but it lacks the experience of living folk. In another a man travels back in time to change things, but it doesn’t work out as expected. In another, folk are on a seeming death march, but which march is it? In another a boy invents a translator that enables him to read the thoughts of his dog–and other people. Others don’t believe him, except for one girl who abruptly expresses her love for him. As I read I began to wonder about my own reality. In “Guardian Angel” it is literal; she really is guarding him, in her fashion. At the end she appears to him as a lovely woman. She may be about to tell him the whole story. The concluding essay, “Five Reasons to Wonder,” presents thoughts on the Universe, the Nature of Matter and Consciousness, the Origin of Life, Existence, and Awareness. Is the Universe aware of itself? Now I wonder. I can’t say I properly understand these stories, but that may be the point: they are meant to make you wonder, to question what is real, and not just safely in the volume. To jolt you out of your cocoon of normalcy.

I read Quantumly Yours! And Other Journeys from Afar, by Jacob William Watters. I reviewed this author’s Curbside Assistance and An Eye of Another Color in prior years. This is another collection of poems. I don’t claim to understand poetry, especially not free verse or blank verse, so I may be missing some points here, but I do try to pick up on the essence if I can. This volume did not move me especially, until it came to poems of grief. Then it registered, because I remain in grief for my wife Carol, nicknamed Cam for her initials, who died in 2019. Yes, I have remarried, and am getting on with my life, but the hole in my soul has not yet healed. So it is apparent that poetry, like humor, does best when targeted to the reader. Of special interest is the introduction, which describes how the author experienced horrendous complications from a car wreck in 1997, and how widely his emotional states differed. “For approximately 18 months I lived in a strange and beautiful place maintained by organic juicing, 2-3 hours of yoga daily, and meditating between 3 and 8 hours a day.” In that time he never slept. Then he got the mercury dental amalgams removed from his teeth and his body detoxified at an ever increasing rate, leading to burnout. He also survived over a dozen surgeries on his head, from the car wreck, which devastated his life. So the poems emerged from a troubled existence. What follows is some sampling, interspersed with some of the thoughts the poems triggered in me. I suspect that other readers will have different thoughts.

“Particles” draws a parallel between quantum particles and people, the one no more individual than the other. “Riverfront” draws another parallel between us and a river. “…And in us all the river flows.” I have to agree; I regard a river as a process, and life as a process. “Somatosensory,” which starts “Within the touch of a single finger resides a tiny eternity/ Complete as any universe,/ As intricate as the cosmos.” This seems true to me, albeit a bit mind stretching. “The Quasar” warns “Space farers be wary!” Indeed, you don’t want to mess with a quasar. “Mathematically Speaking” makes the point that infinity can occur in small places. “Subtle Motion” starts “Life is a subtle motion,” Indeed. “Alight With Life and Glow” relates to a friend and how this brings “Something wonderfully out of nothing.” “How Halsey Haunts me” reflects on how his musical friend inspires him as he feels the need to keep a part of her heart. “Little Pup” is thoughts on a little puppy on the day of mutual discovery. “Far From the Web” has a thought that made me pause. “Why do we focus almost exclusively on thinking/ When it seems we think so poorly?” “I am reminded” has another thought: the sight of an empty swing saddens his heart as he remembers losing his child. Yes, eleven years after her death I have daily reminders of my elder daughter Penny. The following poem “Unfulfilling Harboring” follows up on that. “Grievous Misdeeds” remarks on the damage done to the body by mercury fillings, becoming savage, concluding that Jesus says to forgive them, but Jesus didn’t suffer this. “To the Wife I Never Had” “You are the lover to whom I never lied,” sad about loving a phantom who could never be his wife. The final section of the book has poems written earlier in his life, such as in college. “I still Don’t Know” wondering whether creativity sets off a potential bomb of insanity. I, as a creative writer, have wondered similarly uneasily about the link between genius and madness. I try to get as close to the first without straying into the second. But suppose they are the same? “Ants” may have tiny brains, yet outsmart the housekeeper who tries to abolish them. “As If We Were Children” is expressed in paragraph form, in the manner of an essay, concluding “So when it comes to love, love one another as if we were children.” “Dusk is She” personifies dusk, somewhat like a phantom lover. “Jelly Belly Kisses” is paean to the feminine figure. “Lover’s Reunion” follows up. “I miss your touch,/ So much I ache from the absence.” Sometimes I wonder if the distaff side feels similarly about the male touch. And “Seven Wonders of the World” concludes that more can be seen in a single girl than all those Wonders. “The Forever Distance” considers the self. He wonders where the sun went, and his companion says it just set, but the moon’s up. “‘Oh…’ did the black hole of my depression suck away the sun?” “…never a dull moment in my mind/ Never a peaceful instant to myself” “Is there anything that could close the distance of forever?” “Yes… just for Her to reach out, to want to seek/ but I don’t know if she even realizes her own desires…/ I had to lose my sanity to find mine…” “‘Oh-no…’ her voice resounds so dreadfully,/ that even her tears begin to cry!” As I said, I don’t properly understand poetry, but these thoughts resonate.

My mind wanders yon & hither; any little thing can set it off exploring devious pathways. Here’s an example. MaryLee mentioned an old song with the words “Casey would dance with the strawberry blonde, and the band played on … He married the girl with the strawberry curl, and the band played on.” That song never meant much to me, but this time I wondered, is that all that matters about a woman, the color of her hair? If she had been a dishwater blonde, would Casey never have noticed her? What about character? Intelligence? Dancing ability? But of course from across the room appearance is most of what there is to judge by; the other aspects can be learned as the acquaintance develops. Who was Casey? What did he have to recommend him to any blonde? Could he have been Casey at the Bat, the baseball player who struck out, ruining the joy in Mudville? “And now the pitcher holds the ball,/ and now he lets it go/ And now the air is shattered/ By the force of Casey’s blow.” Alas he missed the ball, and the game was lost. In that culture winning was all that counted. He must have sunk into a mottled funk for days. Until a friend urged him to divert himself by going to a dance. Reluctantly, he agreed. And there without a partner was this gorgeous Strawberry Blonde. She recognized him, of course, Mudville’s former hero, but had never had the temerity to approach him. She did not blame him for striking out; she had had her own misfortunes. She supported him when others were still condemning him. So they hit it off, and they married, and in due course had a little girl. But he remained blue from the memory of his failure. So the child was not a strawberry blonde, but a blueberry blonde. Or maybe he was Casey Jones, the notorious locomotive engineer who died in a phenomenal crash, leaving his strawberry blonde wife blue. And what about the band? Was it related to the one that went down with the ship, bravely playing on as the Titanic sank? So many stories out there in the ether, waiting their chances to be told. MaryLee played me the song, as it was sung in the TV series Chicago Hope. What an intricate melody!

Which in turn reminds me of her Smart Phone. I am, as I have said, before, from another century, not yet quite caught up with all the technology so familiar to natives of this century. In my day telephones hung on the wall, the receiver attached by a cord, and you dialed the number on a sort of rotating disk after you heard the dial tone. For a few years I had a phone phobia; the devices did not work well for me. Long distance calls required an operator, who would tell you how much money to put in for a timed call, and it could be hard to get one. My roommate at high school got fed up with my hesitancy, so he decided to show me how to do it right. So we jammed into a phone booth and waited for the dial tone. After twenty silent minutes he gave it up in frustration. He never chided me on that score again; I had demonstrate my jinx. Now I have a cell phone, where I can punch out the number and verify it on the screen before making the call, no operator needed. That pretty much ended my jinx. I remember a naughty cartoon showing a man jamming his finger into the pay phone’s coin return slot, goosing it, and the distant operator jolting out of her chair. But my cell phone is primitive compared to what MaryLee has. She can play music on it, shine a light from it, look up words in its dictionary, fetch and send text messages, play a TV show, pay her bills, snap pictures, check the weather, get the news, explore the fabulous Twitter realms, write story text; I think she can even make and receive phone calls. Who knows; the day may even come when I get my own Smart Phone, if I can afford the monthly fee. But I’m not sure how I feel about having a device that is smarter than I am. I already have enough trouble convincing my computer that I, not it, is the master of my house.

Creatures: last spring a Chuck Will’s Widow used to perch near the house and serenade MaryLee endlessly at night. Farther north there is Whippoorwill, but here it is Chuck, with a distinct Widow conclusion. Then it moved on and she missed it. Now it is back. She did spot research on her magic phone and learned that it is about a foot long, ugly, and eats things like hummingbirds. Ouch! The romance is gone. We have deer on our tree farm, which we don’t allow to be hunted; one day three crossed our drive right in front of me as I puttered out on our Mule ATV. This morning I saw two. I am cautious about saying “Hi, Deer!” because I don’t know how I would react if one said “Hi, Darling!” back. And just now, as I typed these paragraphs, (a few days ago), a squirrel ran through our bedroom, down the hall, and disappeared, freaking MaryLee out. Now we have nothing against squirrels, but we don’t want them in the house. It’s not their natural habitat. We don’t want to hurt it, just get it out. But we can’t find it, let alone catch it. I am thinking maybe a have-a-heart trap. MaryLee hopes the Chuck Will’s Widow doesn’t get into the house and fight with the squirrel. Now she and her correspondents are pondering what to name it. Rocky, as in Rocky and Bullwinkle? More anon, when. And now next day: I found squirrel droppings around the house, including my computer work area. Cheryl spied two squirrels in our Family Room, but couldn’t get them out of the house. So later I saw one in the living room, I opened doors, and herded it into our sunken garden enclosure, then outside. I don’t know whether I saw two squirrels or one several times, but I think they finally escaped to the outdoors. We hope so. I did see one go out the doorway. But odd noises still sound, suggesting that either one remains, or they have a secret access. Maybe the chimney, though that normally is reserved for the chimney swifts. This of course is what passes for adventure among seniles, I mean seniors like us.

Plants: We have been having 90F highs, and the plants are responding. We tried growing cherry tomatoes in an indoor aerogarden, but they soon outgrew it, so I transplanted them to the sunken garden, where they are doing well enough. When my collaborator Julie Brady visited last year, before the pandemic developed, she gave me a potted cherry tomato plant, and now it too is in the sunken garden. It is thriving, extending out over twelve feet, producing hundreds of flowers, and now starting to grow tomatoes. We may have more than we can eat, in due course. The wildflower seeds I planted did not come up, but we do have wild flowers that came in with the soil we used to fill the garden. One is growing six feet tall with multiple clusters of yellow flowers. Cheryl used her smart phone to snap a picture and ID it, as it is not in my Weed Book — whatever I want tends not to be in supposedly comprehensive books — and it turns out to be a Butter Weed. There is also a nice wild flower coming up around our front gate. Cheryl nailed that one too: Twiggy Verbiscum. The leaves radiate out on the ground, with a single stalk rising about four feet with pretty yellow flowers growing from it. Another I haven’t identified yet has nice blue flowers. Nature is grand, if you take the trouble to meet it. Meanwhile our tame azalea has finished its spring flowering, and the Turk’s Cap Hibiscus is declining; at its peak this season it had 120 flowers. We’ve had as many as 6 flowers a day on the Pink Hibiscus in the sunken garden, the one I rescued as a broken off branch; the caterpillars got the others, but this one, protected, is thriving. The season for Star Jasmine is just starting, with one or two or half a dozen flowers a day; last year it peaked at over 400 a day, and this year might be 500, if I can count them accurately.

Exercise: I still can’t draw the bow right side in regular manner; my arm pains me, cutting it off. But I can do it with the bow braced against the door frame. I started last month doing three draws, moved to four at mid-month, and am now doing five. That may be where I stop. I think five should be enough to maintain my arm muscle, and that’s the point. The maneuver is awkward, and is abrading the varnish off the frame, so there’s no point in pushing it. The left side draws remain strong. I also use 8 and 20 pound hand weights, and I speed-walk. My doctor seems amazed by my health. All it takes is exercise, eating right, sleeping right, good company, and using my brain. Others could do it, if they had the discipline.

There is also Chore Hour, which took the place of my former archery sessions, twice a week. That’s when I do the jobs that I never get to otherwise. This morning, it now being Thursday Apull 1th, as I amend and edit this column, I tackled two chores. The first was to clear out the debris that has accumulated before the unused fireplace, because that’s where the remaining squirrel seemed to hide. I discovered five hardcover and trade paperback books that my wife Cam must have either read or planned to read, neglected because she is gone. Bleep! another surprise reminder of my grief. And a 1992 1600 page Sears catalog she will never order from now. Plus of course boxes of papers. The fireplace has a double guard, mesh and plastic, which was open. So I closed it. If the squirrel can climb up inside the chimney and escape, fine. If not, we’ll have to try again to herd it outside. We are not in the business of killing squirrels. That fireplace was never used for a fire, because the flu had been improperly installed and could not be properly opened. For the last decade or so the chimney swifts have nested in the chimney every summer, and they are welcome. I believe they fly to South America in the winter, as it is summer there then. The second job was to iron a patch onto the elbow of my heavy shirt. I had sewn the tear, but it was jagged and tripartite and I could not do it well, and it re-tore. So this time a patch. I dug out ironing board, iron, and patch, read the instructions, and managed in due course to muddle along and do the repair. I am wearing that shirt now, and we’ll see how long this lasts. What, you ask whether I don’t have a woman in the house? Yes, my wife MaryLee. But I do my own repairs, as I do the main meal, supper, and the dishes; I did not bring her in as a maidservant.

I continue to research and make notes on my Deep Well project, but it’s slow, because the material is complicated. I see the salvation of our planet as requiring action on several fronts; eliminating fossil fuel pollution is just the one I am focusing on at the moment. Geothermal energy will do it, if it can be instituted despite the idiocy of global politics. The other main candidate is Nuclear Fusion, which is a different creature from Nuclear Fission. Fission is splitting atoms; Fusion is merging them, in the manner of the sun and stars. They are working on it. One estimate is that if nothing is done, global warming will cause the sea level to rise over 500 feet, drowning the state of Florida. I live in Florida, but doubt I will see that, because I’ll be long since in Heaven if my fans are to be believed, or in Hell if my critics govern, or Oblivion if my agnosticism prevails. So if any of you meet me, Above or Below, you may say “I told you so.” I very much doubt that will happen.

Xanth #45, A Tryst of Fate, is set for publication this OctOgre. and naturally fate poked a finger in its eye. The copyedtor asked about the spelling of a name in the credits, Liegh Anne Harre. Should it be Leigh? I have it as the former, but I am adept at typos and could have gotten it wrong. It is an alternate spelling, but most are ei rather than ie. It is not incidental; she suggested the title. But that was in 2005, sixteen years ago; it took a while to use up other titles. I checked my back correspondence, delving into the moldy archives, but the two weeks surrounding her letter were missing, probably filed out of place. There are few things so lost as a misfiled paper. Par for my course. MaryLee checked the name with her magic phone, and it was spelled Leigh. But is it the same person? So if you are reading this, Ms Harre, please let me know. Or if someone else knows her, tell me. Meanwhile we are correcting it to Leigh, hoping for the best, or maybe the least worst. Fate will surely have its way.

I received a sample copy of THE EPOCH TIMES. This newspaper claims to be independent of any political party, free of bias. That interests me, as I like to know the truth, whatever it may be, and am turned off by the evident prejudice I see too often in the media. The headings of the articles are intriguing. “With Supreme Court’s Non-Decision, Citizens Must Reform Electoral System.” Indeed; the majority vote has been thwarted more than once in presidential elections, leading to incalculable mischief. “Cancel ‘Cancel Culture’ by Protecting ‘Political Ideology’ in Civil Rights Laws.” Yes, as a registered small “i” independent for over 60 years I agree. “The Delusions of a Marxist Professor.” And so on; provocative headlines. But there was a faint odor. So we checked it via Smartphone, and learned that this is actually a far rightist mouthpiece, posing as objective. Too bad; I had been tempted.

I used to read myself to sleep, but recent events, such as the loss of my wife and new marriage, changed that, and the bedside magazine I was reading languished. But now I can report on the November-December 2019 THE HUMANIST. I am a Humanist, as Humanism reflects my beliefs as accurately as any contemporary organization does. Some samples: “Philosophically speaking” by Brody Armstrong addresses the question of how can we be sure that the universe we know is not fake, a mere simulation? We can still live out the lives we find ourselves in as joyously as possible. His advice: “Carry on as we have been until it all goes black…” Thanks; I’ll do that. “Humanism 101” by Roland A Duerksen mentions how religions have messed with basic human responsibility. “There is an alarming worldwide trend (as exemplified by Trumpism is the US) toward repression, ignorance, and crudely capitalistic selfishness” … “To be a true humanist is to take on the challenge of choosing good over evil, not just in our personal lives but in empathizing and identifying with all people. Humanists must now take the lead in moving humanity to responsible action.” A review by Ron Capshaw of The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. It seems the hypocrisy practiced by the government in that novel has in the intervening fifteen years spread and become more homicidal. I think I’ll skip that one. A review by Howard Schneider of Machines Like Me raises the question what is a human being? What about a robot virtually indistinguishable from a living man? My own fiction has conscious, feeling robots who are like another race of mankind and need to fight discrimination. I believe those machines are coming. Mark Dunbar reviews the nonfiction The Case Against Free Speech by P. E. Moskowitz. This is not a joke; there really is a case. With inequalities of power and wealth the rich can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make their positions known, while those without power are harassed and surveilled by the police. We already censor speech in favor of other values, such as privacy, property rights, and economic efficiency. Suppose a neighbor breaks into your house to berate you endlessly about your religion, or lack of one, in the name of free speech? How can you regain your privacy without violating the First Amendment? Or in an example too recent for this issue of this magazine, suppose someone running for president claims, without evidence, the election was stolen and incites a mob to raid Congress with mayhem in mind? Isn’t that free speech? I admit that this review makes me reconsider my ardent defense of free speech. Total free speech may be anarchy. But how can we safely limit it? All this and more, in just one old issue of one Humanist magazine. I suspect the world would become a better place if everyone became a Humanist.

Clippings: Volkswagen will change its name to Voltswagen for US. Oh? We were enthusiastic VW Bug supporters, circa 1955-75, but they stopped selling it an the USA and we discovered the Toyota Prius. Then came the scandal of faked emissions. But if they get a good electric car we’ll consider it. Meanwhile this smells like a joke — and later turned out to be one. The price in lives and dollars of the pandemic in America has outstripped WWII. We could have avoided it had we not had a Fake News president in office. Huge changes are needed to keep nature and Earth okay, a report says. Indeed, but I fear we are doomed by idiot politics across the world. Column by Eugene Robinson 3-14-21 is headed “Waiting for the GOP to come to its senses is a mistake.” Yes, I suspect that only the extinction of the GOP will suffice, in the manner of the Whig party of yore. Disney is trying to enforce pandemic safety rules, but workers get yelled at, pushed, and spit on. My feelings about Disney are mixed, but this is disgusting. They are being condemned for trying to do the right thing? What is the matter with their visitors? Don’t they know that this is America, where folk try to cooperate for the common good? That there is a brutal pandemic? Apparently not. Just as ogres are justifiably proud of their stupidity, these folk seem proud of their ignorance. Column by Nicholas Goldberg titled “Can I lose my landline yet?” He says it has been calculated that in 2020 there were 45,866,949,500 (that’s 45 billion) robocalls made to US households. “I swear most of them came to me.” Another item says that in February Americans received more than 4.6 billion robocalls, up 15% from January. So it is still getting worse. Today a majority of American households have a cellphone, but no landline. Among younger adults that figure is 76.5 percent. So he plans to cancel his landline. It does seem that robocalling will drive the landline out of business. I say again, the authorities could stop it, if they wanted to. Why don’t they want to? Ditching the landline won’t stop it; I am starting to get nuisance calls on my cell phone. Article in NEW SCIENTIST by Adam Vaughan says that hydrogen has long been a candidate for a clean fuel revolution. Can it finally make the grade? Maybe, but it does have problems such as transporting it to where it is to be used, as it is voluminous and leaky. But we’ll see. Another NEW SCIENTIST article by Michael Le Page says that a while back, actually 680 million years, it was cold. They call in Snowball Earth, as the planet was mostly covered in ice. Even the seas around the equator mostly froze. It seems that tiny photosynthetic bacteria encountered a bottleneck and had to mutate to get out of it. They succeeded, fortunately for us. Article by Graham Lawton says that when the future looks back on the century from 1950 to 2050 they will see a great acceleration of rapacious, unrestrained plundering of Earth’s natural support systems. but with luck there will also come the era of the Great Restoration, where humanity learns how to live sustainably and in harmony with nature. I certainly hope so, as we are presently destroying the world we live in. One in THE WEEK says scientists are learning to talk with lucid dreamers. That’s when you are asleep, and dreaming, and you know you’re dreaming and you can change it. The trick is to talk to the dreamers and get answers back. So far only a minority succeed, but who knows where this will lead as it develops? Maybe instead of watching a TV set we’ll be able to got to sleep and dream and truly be in the story. THE WEEK also reran a piece from the Washington Post indicating that tens of thousands of Americans look for support as their family members disappear down the QAnon conspiracy-theory rabbit hole. Not that I want to be uncharitable, but maybe we’re better off without those nuts. Article in a local magazine titled “When Route 66 Ran Through Citrus County.” I live in Citrus County, Florida, and I used to enjoy the TV series Route 66, so this interests me. It seems that the TV version of Highway 66 could extend to any locale they wanted, and Episode 87 had them in Citrus County, visiting the Weeki Wachee mermaid show just south of here. One mermaid had an abnormally large lung capacity and they wondered if she could be a real mermaid faking it as a pretend mermaid. I suspect that large lung capacity translated to a big bosom. Article in SCIENCE NEWS wonders if the mid ocean upwellings are pushing continues apart. Well duh! That has been obvious for decades. And THE WEEK again remarks on America’s falling fertility rate. It seems the pandemic is causing a baby bust. They have discovered a sea slug that self decapitates, ditching its head, which then grows a new body. The conjecture is that this is their way of getting rid of parasites. Could that be what QAnon is trying to do? Citrus County Sheriff Prendergast saw a man throw trash on the road at an intersection, so he pulled him over and made him pick it up. Now we could just do that with all trashers. PARADE for 3-28-21 has a feature on actress Sharon Stone. I’m not much into actresses, no pun, but I notice her because she was in Total Recall, the Schwarzenegger movie which I novelized, circa 1990. She made her fame two years later, crossing her bare legs in Basic Instinct. I liked that sequence. Now I learn that she has had troubled history, with a strained childhood, a stroke in 2001 that for a while cost her her ability to speak and seven years recovery, and of course some time out of Hollywood. But she’s back now, and raising millions for charities. More power to her, even if she puts on panties and never crosses her legs again.

PIERS

Mayhem 2021

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I am at present alternating my reading and reviewing novels with my reading of research books for my serious novel Deep Well. I read Geothermal Engineering Fundamentals and Applications, by Arnold Watson. This is highly technical, and frankly beyond my complete comprehension. It has pages of technical formulae and related discussion that only a mathematician or geothermal engineer could understand. For me it makes the point that developing geothermal energy is not a simple matter of drilling down to hot rock, bringing the heat up, and using it to generate electric power. That is the essence, yes, but there’s nothing simple about the application. So this is not a text I recommend to my readers who seek escapist fantasy. Nevertheless, it does have value for me. I learned a new word—as an octogenarian I experience that less often than I did in my twenties—“pluton,” meaning a solidified bubble of magma. If it reaches the surface before cooling it is a volcano. If it remains below, it’s a pluton. If you happen to be drilling in that vicinity, it behooves you to know, lest you encounter a forming pluton and trigger an inconvenient eruption of fiery magma. So it behooves you to survey the region before you start pricking balloons, as it were. Another thing I picked up on is that if you fill your pipes with super-hot water that will explode into steam the moment the pressure eases, and you open a valve, then abruptly close it, there will be a pressure knock not just right there, where your pipe is braced for it, but along the entire length of the pipe, virtually instantly. So it could burst out in another place, maybe steaming some innocent passing blonde. She wouldn’t like that, and it could ruin your date. And another: the CO₂ emission of oil is about 70% of that of coal, and natural gas about half, while geothermal is under a tenth of coal. Since that’s what mainly causes global warming, that’s something to think about before investing in a new coal plant. Geothermal energy can be complicated, but sensible.

I read Heroes of Perpetua by Brian Clopper. Three children, age about 11, Lou, Nelson, and Hugo, discover odd things, such as a bat hanging by a prehensile tail from a branch by daylight, black flying snakes, and a walking statue. The snakes attack viciously, but the heroes are able to destroy them by touching them to the statue. The statue turns out to be the Wizard Itzel in the body of a golem made of mud and sticks. Then Hugo talks mentally with an owl, who explains that the three of them have magic. The Wizard generates a portal that takes them to the magic land of Perpetua. The adventure proceeds from there in reasonably standard fashion as they encounter friends and enemies, struggling to figure out what’s what. A girl who helps them turns out to be an enemy agent, though she just might be changing sides. In the end they manage to defeat the enemy, and return to their own realm, Earth. The creatures are myriad, unlike those of fantasy, and the magic is devious as the author demonstrates his endless imagination. This is technically a juvenile, but with so much action that it is compelling regardless of classification.

MaryLee and I have been on home lockdown for a year. Now at last we are starting to get back out into the larger world, which it turns out still exists. So far, just the Post Orifice, grocery store, filling station, and a Walgreen, but as time passes we hope to progress. We bought cake and eye scream for our anniversary and celebrated a passionate echo of our wedding night. We will surely go further once we remember how. Meanwhile our supposedly placid lives seem to be a constant turmoil of minor but frustrating time consuming interruptions. Whatever we need to do requires something else first. We’d like to just hug each other and tune out the complex world, but the world has other ideas.

The sunken garden has realized that spring is coming; I suspect that the 90 degree days gave it a hint. Apull is normally a dry month here, but we got a 3.2 inch thunderstorm. The four plumeria plants had suffered when I didn’t protect them against a winter 38 degree low, dropping their leaves, but now new leaves are growing, and with luck they’ll be flowering again. The purple Mexican Heather never stopped flowering. The papaya tree is flourishing, flowering and fruiting, and in time those fruits should ripen. The cherry tomato plants I transplanted to the garden are producing dozens of little fruits that we add to our salads. One tomato plant has spread out, oh, maybe twelve feet from its origin, surrounding nearby flower plants, and is trying to climb out of the garden. Okay, I am watching to see how far it gets.

A man came to my door and said he was doing asphalt drive surfacing, but an order was canceled and he had two truck-fulls stranded. Could I use them? Now this smelled like a scam, but I decided to gamble on its legitimacy, because our three quarter mile drive has worn somewhat in the past 33 years and it’s a lot of effort to keep shoring it up with gravel. I gave the go ahead for one truck-full, and looked at what they were doing. It certainly seemed professional, as they leveled and graded the surface and applied the asphalt. So I okayed the second truck-full, and now we have about 420 linear feet of new surface, covering the worst of it. There has been rain in the intervening two weeks and it is standing up nicely. It cost a pretty penny, over ten thousand dollars, but that’s the price of such work. The drive does seem improved, to that limited extent.

I wrote a short short story on request for an anthology of doll stories, “Octo,” about an octopus doll who is rejected by the other dolls because he is not like them. Then a marauding rat comes, threatening to destroy them all, but Octo fights it off at great cost to himself. He is literally all torn up. Then the other dolls are sorry, and find a way to reward him. It will appear in The Secret Life of Dolls, published by Mannison Press. They have also published Read the Read, my trilogy of tiny stories “Walk the Walk, “Ride the Ride,” and “Fly the Fly,” as I mentioned here last month. So if you want to learn what you didn’t know about dolls, look for that volume, when. Meanwhile I continue to research, slowly, for my geothermal novel, Deep Well. It’s amazing how complicated digging a hole can be, as I mentioned above.

A newspaper feature 4-25 covered the fight over the future of transgender athletes. This isn’t just prejudice. Physical men who elect to change to women can still have male style muscles and systems, giving them an advantage in competition. For example, Terry Miller was an average ninth grade athlete in Connecticut. Then he/she came out as a transgender girl, and won three state championships, broke two state records, and won two titles at an all-New England meet, beating the fastest girls from six states. Elsewhere women’s world records arc threatened. Gender equality is fine in theory, but in physical sports maybe there should be a transgender category. I suspect that if needlepoint or cake baking were competitive among boys, a girl who transitioned to a boy would have an advantage, though not as obvious.

Clippings: Religion seems to be waning in the USA. Around the turn of the century about 70% belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque; now it’s 47%. Globally, the most secularized nations, like Scandinavia, Australia, Canada, and Japan are among the healthiest, wealthiest, and safest. As a lifelong agnostic I’m not surprised; religion really is, to an extent, the opiate of the masses. Science is generally more sensible in the real world than faith, especially when there is work to be done. Money: since 1985 Wall Street bonuses have grown 1,217%. If the minimum wage had kept pace, it would now be $44.12 an hour. As it is, the number of billionaires has grown by nearly a third during the pandemic. The Equedia Letter, a pseudo business publication, is now concerned about the amount of debt the US government is taking on. You know, like trillion dollar bailouts for the poor who lost their jobs in the pandemic. But I don’t see them concerned about the trillion dollar tax cut for the rich that Trump engineered. Maybe I missed that paragraph. A private Florida school refuses to employ vaccinated teachers. Trust Florida to be in the vanguard of nonsense. As a resident since 1959 I like the physical climate better than the social/political climate. Article in NEW SCIENTIST for March 13, 2021, titled “Why quantum is relative” by Carlo Rovelli, that I hardly understand, suggests that things are real only as they interact with other things. We think about things as having absolute properties, because that seems true in our experience, but our horizons are limited. It also suggests that thinking of the world in terms of relations might help us understand the nature of consciousness. That, as regular readers of mine may remember, is one of my buttons. I’d like to know the nature of reality, of life, and of consciousness, and hope to learn those things before I interact with the bucket that says KICK MEE. Yes, I know; I hear the snide voice of my illustrious critics saying “Lotsa Luck, Moron.” I’d like to send them that bucket to play with. Article in the February 27 issue of NEW SCIENTIST titled “A trillion dollars to fix the world” by Rowan Hooper plays a game of imagination. Imagine you have inherited such a fortune and want to use it to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. What is the best way to spend it? What about eliminating world poverty? The life expectancy of the world’s poorest folk is 15 years lower than that of the richest. They have experimented, giving one-time gifts to poor folk, and they generally spend the money wisely to improve their lot. They may get better educated; a woman who has never been to school has four to five more children than one with 12 years of education. Another effort is to stop climate change. We need to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a massive scale. That’s something I am focusing on, by encouraging the world to eliminate air pollution by converting to geothermal energy instead of fossil fuels. Another is to cure all disease. Universal health care is by far the best way to gain on that. I suspect there are many other ways that a trillion dollars could improve the world, could the money just be wrested from the greed-heads. And a third NEW SCIENTIST article, this one also from the February 27 issue, “The first urbanites,” by Laura Spinney. I’m a fan of ancient history; it’s not all cluttered up with the names and dates of autocratic kings that conventional education thinks is relevant. In fact my major series, GEODYSSEY, relates, trying to cover global history for the past eight million years in an interesting manner. Alas, readers were more interested in funny fantasy. I had not encountered this Trypillian culture in my research, which predates the Mesopotamian cities and maybe early China too. It seems to have been quite a phenomenon.

Yes, this is a relatively short HiPiers column. I’m busy learning about the strange new world out there. Maybe I’ll be in finer fettle in the future.

PIERS

JeJune 2021

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If you pounce immediately, as an early reader of this column, you can buy the electronic edition of my naughty novel The Sopaths for a penny under two dollars. It’s on sale JeJune 3. The world runs out of souls, because of overpopulation, and babies start being born without them. They grow into children without conscience, and that’s deadly. They will stop at nothing to get whatever they want, not excluding sex or murder. A sopath in a family means the death of the others, because if a parent tries to punish a sopath, the sopath will find a way to get rid of that annoyance permanent. The only way to stop it is to kill the sopath. The central family consists of a man, a woman, a little boy, and a little girl, each of which is the sole survivor of their former family. Each fully understands the others, as few others do. Then, would you believe, they adopt a sopath. Then it gets complicated. This ain’t Xanth. Oh, you want Xanth? Then go for Xanth #40 Isis Orb, on similar sale the same day, whose story was suggested by a ten year old girl. No, it’s not a juvenile. Isis is, among other things the Goddess of Sex. You should like it, if you’re well over 10. If you’re not over 10, maybe wait for the next sale.

I received a book in the mail They Thought for Themselves, by Sid Roth. The accompanying letter informed me that Sid is an Israeli-American Jewish man whom God has extraordinarily blessed. He had a dream in which he was instructed to write a book about ten amazing Jewish people. He did, and there are now well over two million copies in print. “You may wonder why I am sending you this book as a gift. It is because I believe it will give you the tools to achieve greatness. If you follow the advice of these ten Jewish people, I believe you will obtain the same results.”

Okay. My cynical take on this is that he wants to garner more reviews that could increase the book’s popularity and boost its copies in print to three, four, five, or more million. Obviously I am a late addition to his promotion list. Reviews and publicity can be fickle. Chance, to a considerable extent, governs success, in books and in life. But I don’t object; as a long-time pro novelist I understand the challenge of promoting promising books. So I decided to read it and see for myself. I don’t need instruction in thinking for myself, and I doubt Sid realizes how successful I have already been. I hardly need new tools at this late stage in my octogenarian life, but let’s consider his case. As a lifetime agnostic I have had little interest in religion except to keep it the hell away from my door, but my mind is open. I see adopting a new savior or new religion not as thinking for oneself so much as going to a new spiritual master, which is pretty much the opposite. But I meant to read and understand their take on this. I am not against religion, merely independent of it. I do know Jesus in my fashion; he was a character in my tri-part novel Tarot, and I respect what he stands for. In fact I believe that if Jesus came to this world again, he would prefer my company to that of a number of the pastors, ministers, or priests who preach in his name. He has little stomach for hypocrisy. If we shook hands he would feel and respect my power as I feel his, and he would not condemn me as an unbeliever though knowing me for one. More on that in a moment.

The thing about these ten Jews is that they all did something that their religion disapproved; they came to worship Jesus, or as he is known here, Yeshua. The main distinction between the Jews and Christianity is that the Christians regard Jesus as their savior, while to the Jews he is just a passing prophet, if that. Jesus was a Jew, as were his disciples. When it was decided that a person did not have to become a Jew in order to follow Jesus, it opened the floodgates of Christianity. But some Jews do recognize Jesus. They are called Messianic Jews. We learn their stories here.

There is far too much detail in this volume to cover in this commentary. What these folk have in common is their conversion to Jesus. They were raised as Jews, and remain so; they merely feel that Jesus is indeed the savior that the Bible, in the form of the Old Testament, predicted. Recognition of Jesus is what empowers them, sometimes dramatically, as in being healed of paralysis by him, sometimes merely intellectually. I liken it to falling in love; they fell in love with Jesus. I was especially impressed by the story of Rose Price, who was raised as a child as an Orthodox Jew in Poland. She was ten years old when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, soon banned from school, then confined in a prison camp. She had to work all day at a factory, operating a rifle bullet machine. Her family was gone. She cried until she ran out of tears. She prayed for deliverance, but got no answer, and concluded that there was no God. She got transferred from one concentration camp to another until she was sent to Bergen-Belsen and then Dachau. They were tortured. They were forced to dig sugar beets out of almost frozen ground with their bare hands, and her hands were bleeding badly. They were given a one quarter of an inch thick piece of bread a day to eat, and it was 80 percent sawdust. She stole a sugar beet to eat, and was punished by being hung up by her hands and whipped with a cat-o’-nine tails. Another time they were lined up naked to see how long it would take for their blood to freeze. She survived only because several others fell on top of her and their bodies kept her warm. Another time she made the mistake of smiling, and was put in a sewer tank for 24 hours. Twice she was selected to be shot, but she ran away and hid in the woods. When they were finally liberated in May 1945 she needed 27 operations. She had lost nearly 100 relatives and would gladly have seen Germany and Poland bombed to oblivion. She came to America, got married, had children, and participated in the local synagogue though she hated God. Then her daughter announced that she believed in Jesus Christ. This was another horror, because the atrocities had been committed in the name of Jesus, punishing the Jews for killing him. Then her husband converted, making him a traitor to her too. She was losing her second family because of this Jesus. She was ready to meet Jesus, and kill him. But in the interest of learning what she was up against she sneaked down to the basement and read the New Testament in a locked room. She learned that Jesus was actually gentle man, not a killer; the Nazis had misrepresented him. She prayed to him, and felt a big stone rolling off her back. She cried and finally felt clean. Then she knew Jesus was real, and made him her Messiah. Then Sid Roth, who assembled this collection, contacted her, and she reluctantly agreed to speak at an event for Messianic Jews. She spoke of forgiveness. And several ex-Nazis approached her and asked for forgiveness. One had been in charge of punishment at Dachau. Somehow she managed to forgive them. As she was about to leave Berlin, one of them came up to her and said that after she prayed with him, he had his first night’s sleep since the war. The Lord had given her the strength to do it.

And that is just one of the stories in this volume. The others have different takes on it, some of which are eye-opening. There is nothing shallow here. So does this empower me to go to Jesus or to accomplish greater things in my life? No, but I appreciate how others could benefit. Here is my take on it. Jesus is a personification of an ideal, rather than a literal man, who may never have existed. There is no record of him in Roman times. But assuming that he was real, and that his spirit lives and is ready to return to the world, will he do so? I think not. Because if Jesus came again, and took physical form, and saw the horrors of this present world, the things preached and wrought in his name, the violence, the greed, the hate, the hypocrisy, none of it remotely similar to his actual message, his tears would flow. And if he tried to reform it, to make this world a truly Christian realm, the powers that be would crucify him again. They are not ready to give up their power, money, or prejudices for the sake of the Kingdom of God, any more than the Romans were. This present world is not fit for him. No, he is not coming again, at least not at this time. He is benign but not stupid. Maybe if more good works are done in his name, improving the spiritual climate, he might reconsider. Maybe.

I read Geothermal Energy – Renewable Energy and the Environment, by William E Glassley, as part of my research for my future novel Deep Well. This is a comprehensive textbook by an author who seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject. It does get into pages of formulae intended for more technical readers than I am, but it did also introduce me to notions I need to consider for my novel. Such as that the temperature rises about 1 degree C for every hundred feet depth. “In fact, the amount of energy, in the form of heat, that is present a few thousands of feet below the surface is more than enough to satisfy the energy needs of every nation of the world many times over.” It establishes that not only is the human population of the world rising phenomenally, the energy use per person is also multiplying. This is of course mischief. “Electricity generation alone accounts for nearly half of all greenhouse gas emissions.” Coal, oil, and natural gas are the main culprits; geothermal is wa-a-ay cleaner. However, getting that heat to the surface is not just a matter of drilling a hole in the ground and piping it up. Too deep a hole can melt the drill, for one thing, and there can be toxic chemicals. This book goes into detail on all of it. But it is clear that hybrid geothermal systems – that is, those that also take advantage of wind and solar power – can indeed save the world from the dire pollution now being generated.

But life is not just study and work. MaryLee and I watched the DVD with the first season of the current Star Trek series Picard. We understand that some Star Trek fans don’t like it, but we found it interesting, if complicated to get into, and it winds up the season with real power. Characters from the prior series appear, such as the shapely former Borg Seven of Nine. Essentially, Picard is now older, nearing the end of his life, and wants to do something to rectify a serious injustice. A daughter of Data, cloned from a single survivor cell, beseeches him, but then dies, so he searches for her sister, as two of them were made. That leads to assorted adventures. First he has to obtain a ship and crew, off the record. By the time he accomplishes the mission, he dies. But they manage to salvage an aspect of him, ready for the next season. This series is, to my mind, notable for the human feelings it evokes. We come to care about the characters. I do recommend it. We also watched a couple more episodes of Futurama, and that was fun as usual. I like the sexy one-eyed Leela, and that crazy robot has his points.

The Sunken Garden continues. The papaya tree is flourishing, and the-pink hibiscus salvaged from a broken-off branch is doing better than any of the original hibisci did. The little potted tomato plant that collaborator Julie Brady – Dream A Little Dream – gave me, now in the Garden, has pretty much taken over half the area with branches extending as far as 20 feet, and has produced maybe 200 cherry tomatoes. Meanwhile MaryLee bought some Maverick Mix mini tomatoes of different colors, liked them, saved the seeds, and I planted them in two pots, and about 20 plants are growing. And back in the Garden a cold snap in winter – yes, it happens, even here in sunny Florida – stripped the leaves from three of the plumeria plants. I hoped they would re-leaf come spring, and lo! They did. So you can see we have our little excitements, senior citizen style. Meanwhile The Tennessee Magazine, which followed MaryLee when she moved to Florida, had an article on no-till gardening that can be done with little time and effort. Basically, you mulch to stifle the weeds. Oh – for those interested in doing similar I learned of a new link for composting: https://yuzumag.com/how-to-compost/. The website includes an in-depth piece on how to start composting, illustrated with useful infographics, including one of exactly what you can and can’t compost. Yuzu Magazine is a website that focuses on composting and sustainable living, hosted by Veronica. She is trying to get 1,000 people to start composting. Maybe you can be among them.

We also enjoy grocery shopping, after being on home lockdown for a year. We do go masked and observe social distancing, nervous about the Virus. Publix has a shopping cart with a seat, so that I can push it while MaryLee rides, which saves her from getting worn out shopping. We typically spend over a hundred dollars. In my day in the other century similar shopping ran about ten dollars. The government claims that there is little inflation, but even a “low” rate adds up across the decades. I remember when I first got married – to Carol, in 1956 – I figured we needed $50 a week income, so I got a job that was a dollar an hour, 50 hours, and survived. I believe the minimum worker pay has increased somewhat since.

Covid-19 vaccination shots have been slow to reach the hinterlands and mine has not yet caught up with me, but I trust it won’t be long now. I don’t like the threat of the Virus, with its death toll and Long Covid lasting symptoms. Meanwhile scary stories about the shots are circulating. One is that there were over 3,500 deaths and 12,600 serious injuries reported between December 14, 2020, and April 23, 2021. Yet the government is dismissing such reports with a bare minimum of scrutiny, and mainstream news outlets have agreed to not allow any news critical of the shots to reach the American people. It says that though the Johnson & Johnson vaccine does have issues with blood clots, it is actually the safest of the three vaccines now being offered to Americans. Okay, if I have a choice, that’s the shot I want. I hardly trust such private reports, but neither do I trust the government. Governments routinely lie when it suits their purpose, such as not alarming the sheep in the pen when shearing or butchering time approaches. I wish there were a reliable source of Truth, regardless of its nature. Alas, I haven’t found it. No, I am not going to start believing in God for that. He probably has better things to do than answering the questions of sheep.

I have remarked before on The Equedia Letter, an unregistered investment adviser published by Ivan Lo. I certainly don’t trust it, but I do consider what it says, just in case. It says we should not trust the system, or-the governments. I do agree with it to that point. It doesn’t trust the vaccines, and suggests that Covid-19 is really not that big a threat. Neither does it trust reassurances about the danger of inflation. So it is striking on different sides of my belief and unbelief. Mainly, this issue says that a massive boom is coming, but that it is fueled by massive debt, and that is dangerous. That the top three banks are all participating in riskier mortgages. That credit card standards are loose. That the global “green” push will require excessive capital expenditures. That precious metals will play a role in economic growth while acting as an inflation hedge. But it hints that inflation is about to take off. Okay, I take much of this with a significant grain of salt. But neither am I sure it’s all wrong. As they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I suspect that wild economic times are in the making, and we’d better be careful.

Clippings and such: I received a letter with my name backwards proffering life insurance, saying “Our records indicate that you are between the ages of 50 and 85.” I am 86. Why do I distrust their insurance? The Hightower LOWDOWN says that we put the robot Perseverance on Mars to probe the planet’s watery past, just in case there was life. But meanwhile folk in Texas are running out of water. Human bodies are 60% water, but 96.5% of Earth’s water is undrinkable salt water, and half the remaining 3.5% is deep underground or locked in polar ice. So of course the huxters – oh, all right, today it is hucksters – are zeroing in on this precious commodity, a trillion dollar market opportunity. It will become expensive, unless governments start acting for the welfare of their people. Don’t count on it. Maybe the answer is equipment to glean water from the air. Perhaps related is an article in NEW SCIENTIST for 3-6-2021 by Karina Shah titled “Complex life’s days are limited.” One billion years from now our aging sun will heat up Earth’s atmosphere and it will contain little oxygen, making it unsuitable for complex life. But I have a suggestion: refine the oxygen from water. You know, H₂O, or one Hydrogen with two Oxygen. Oops, I forgot; the hucksters have priced water out of reach. Sigh; we’re doomed. SCIENCE NEWS for 3-13-2021 has an article by Laura Sanders titled “Our Brains, Our Futures” which says that we may never understand brains in the way we understand rainbows, black holes, or DNA. That gives me a quirk of a smile, because we hardly understand those things anyway. Who has ever seen the hidden colors of the rainbow, like polka dot, barber pole spiral, or plaid? You have to visit Xanth for such sights, and it’s not easy to get there. Regardless, they are now drawing detailed maps of the neural highways of the brain, and discovering that the dot on the map is less important than the roads leading in and out. They hope to learn how to change the brain’s circuits in ways to alleviate Parkinson’s disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression. Um, but would that eliminate my obsessive-compulsive need to write? That would depress me. Letter in the local newspaper by Cecil Casterelli, 5-7-2021 headed “Mother’s Day not for cows.” It says that our dairy cows have their newborn calves torn from them at birth so that we can drink their milk. The cows are locked indoors chained to concrete floors, impregnated artificially, and when their milk output drops they are ground into hamburgers. She recommends replacing milk with nut and grain based substitutes. Amen to that! This month I tried Ripple artificial milk, and it is getting close. I am nudging closer to vegan, and trust I am not at all alone in that. The recent ransomware attack that shut down the big fuel pipeline was done by the criminal Dark Side. Evidently it is extending its mischief form the Star Wars universe to ours. The survivors of Covid die sooner. That makes me nervous, as I wait for my vaccination shot to come. One estimate of the1918 flu is that it caused 500 million infections and 50 million deaths. Covid-19 seems less worse so far, but we have not yet seen the end of it. Article in THE WEEK says that even mild obesity makes the infection worse, and 69% of Americans are overweight. One more reason I keep my own weight down, at the level it was when I was in college. And in the week for 6-4-2021 an article exploring the mystery of the “Havana Syndrome,” when dozens of diplomats and CIA officers at the embassy there began falling ill with vertigo, headaches, fatigue, hearing loss, visual disturbances, mental impairment, and other symptoms. Then it happened in Europe, Australia, China, and other places. We suspect the Russians, using some sort of targeted radio frequency including microwaves aimed at the head. A virtual hammer-blow to the brain, maybe. Ugly business, and things may complicate once our experts figure it out and start doing it back to the other side, while of course denying that we are. Politics ain’t beanbags, it has been said.

Interesting letter in our local newspaper by Chris Conklin, titled “Build a floating solar plant.” He says that large solar (photo voltaic) plants are being built around the world, such as one in Morocco that will send electricity to England via a 1,200 mile underwater cable, eventually providing 7% of England’s electrical energy. That made him wonder about doing something similar locally, such as floating solar panels on our various Tsala Apopka lakelets. In Xanth of course those are Tsoda Popka lakes, each sub-lake a different flavor. He calculates that ten square miles of solar panels could produce ten million kilowatt hours, or twice as much as Citrus County normally uses. The main challenge would be storing this power for night time use. Well, a geothermal unit might provide night time power, and batteries are improving. I am researching geothermal power as a means to save the world, but I support other clean power sources too, and this looks good. Article in Tampa Bay Times for 5-23-2021 by Dalvin Brown says IBM says a new chip might one day quadruple your cell phone’s battery life. Okay, what might it do for day/night battery power? I’d love to see Citrus County get the Hades off fossil fuel, just as I’d love to see it get off cruelty meat. Another article in the same paper, by Matthew Cappucci, describes a new kind of home built by Delta Homes that can withstand a category 5 hurricane and still look good after the storm passes. Hurricanes do strike Florida on occasion, and their season is nigh upon us. I can tell you, as one who has lived through a hurricane, that it is one experience you never want to have again. At this stage of my life I doubt I’ll be building a new house, but if I ever do, I will keep this in mind.

Until next time, then–

PIERS

JewelLye 2021

HI-

As I remarked last year, I am a writer, and when other things crowd out my writing, I have to act to recover my working time. I try to get seven hours of sleep each night; big chunk of time, but necessary. Eating several meals a day, ditto. My wife MaryLee takes time; that’s a given, for marriage. Shopping regularly for groceries takes time; since we’d get hungry if we didn’t, that’s another given. I exercise regularly, for my continuing health; more time expended. Writing letters and handling email takes, time, especially when the balky email program, Thunderbird, loses my letters in progress, but staying in touch with my base is another necessary thing, for me. Doing chores like maintaining the property, ditto. I play some Mahjongg tiles each day, which I regard as perhaps equivalent to meditation, relaxing me and stabilizing my rampaging thoughts. So I don’t get a lot of daily time for my writing. Reading and reviewing the books of other writers I have done through the years as a favor, but this now competes directly with my writing time. So it still has to go. I regret this, as the books are worthy, but so it must be.

However, a compromise. I have two books by Daniel Christopher June. They are not novels so much as compendiums of thoughts and reactions to the complications of personal life. They are The Allays of Master Play, published in 2020, and For Care of Crea, 2021. I am going to glance in them more or less randomly, and share with you what I find there, together with my own reactions. For example, in Allays #484: “Because I am nothing I can dare everything. Because nobody listens, I can say as I wish.” I suspect that applies to many of us. #531: “I recall a polemic of a fellow student at Michigan State University philosophy club: ‘Why would we bother eating meat, which is morally reprehensible, considering it offers only five minutes of satisfaction?’” The author’s response is that that five minutes makes us feel good all night. Um, as a lifelong vegetarian now bordering on vegan, I don’t much like that response. Are we to be morally reprehensible for a few minutes of pleasure? How does that speak to the honor of mankind? #586: “The soul is invented by pretense of discovery. The theologians, pastors, gurus, scientists, philosophers, and psychologists all tell us what we will discover within.” Surely they do, but do they really know? I doubt it. #766: “Life is too important to be taken seriously; we only lose the game when we care too much.” #941: “From glints and gleams we stitch a whole.” #1040: “I chase the will-o-wisps from book to book, through read and reread tomes to volumes I never touched, following a phrase, following a whim through her echoes, seeking finally that absolute blessing: inspiration.” #1176: “Music and math are the two poles of language.” And in For Care of Crea, #1: “In youth, we wore clothes to hide our beauty; in old age, we wear clothes to hide our ugliness. So with our words, the clothes of action…” #386: “I dislike the story of the virgin birth of Jesus. Christians snoot their noses at the popularity of the holiday they themselves stole in the first place – December 25^th had nothing to do with their gospels! – and they speak of the ‘true meaning of Christmas’ as if they alone have a right to the holiday and they alone can determine its meaning. It begins with God the Father using the Ghost to put his Son into a virginal human, without her permission or even her knowledge…” #435: “Editing is endless. So is organizing. I am spending my night fussing over this messy basement.” #443: “I read of a psych experiment that ran something like this: students entering the lab were given an innocent glass of water, a small refreshment before the study officially began, a glass of water also innocently laced – unknown to them – with an anxiety-producing chemical…” Then they were led to believe that it was nervousness about the experiment, or something in their diet, or that God was angry with them. I can’t say I like this kind of prank. #452: “A surefire way to write a fantasy novel, or a sci fi for that matter, is to say ‘Here is a world where X is the case. And our protagonist is the exception.’” Yes, I did that when I made Xanth a land where everybody had a magic talent, except, seemingly, the protagonist. #549: “If you wish to disarm a man, compliment him. If you wish to disarm a woman, insult her. His ego, her vanity: have at it!” Wow! Could I have changed my life had I had such insight? I hope not. #565: “My childhood and adolescence were haunted by one question: What is wrong with me? What makes me different…” You and me and the world! #583: “There are layers to our Belief. There is what we do, what we say we believe, what we think we believe, and what we actually believe.” #597: “Everything is true. Whatever is possible to be believed is the image of truth.” As you can see, there is provocative material here. If these pretty much random peeks stir your interest, Google the author or the titles so you can see about getting the full treatment.

Mannison Press published my 50 page booklet Read the Read, featuring three short stories relating to children, wherein a little girl befriends a walking skeleton boy, a man and his inner child fall in love with a supportive ghost, and girl, skeleton, and inner child become playmates. Your children or inner children should like this mini collection; I dare say it is not typical children’s fiction. I like Mannison Press; they are local, and they publish some nice books. Look them up.

I have a fairly broad vocabulary. Sometimes it goes beyond my dictionaries. For example, pie, pied, to mess something up. To pie a computer would be to make it inoperable; it has been pied. I recall the word being common in my day, but my dictionaries never heard of it. Does anyone else know of it?

MaryLee and I have now been married fourteen months. At times I still marvel at how my life has changed in the past two years, and the same is true for MaryLee. Had the pandemic come slightly sooner and trapped us apart—we wince to think of it. As it is, the pandemic did cut off our honeymoon. Some day we hope to travel and see interesting parts of the world. Yes, we are Senior Citizens; fresh wedlock remains a wonder regardless.

Piles of solicitations come in via any avenues they can find. Robocalls now pester my cell phone as well as my land-line. I tried looking at a picture that arrived on my cell: naked young woman, legs spread wide toward the camera, available any time. For some reason MaryLee preferred that I delete it. Email ads like one from Elite Singles. “Expect the unexpected in 2021: Love.” Thanks, no; I already have that covered. There is CFI, Center for Inquiry, say “We know nonsense when we see it,” and gives persuasive examples, such as QAnon, claims of the paranormal, and alternative medicine that can’t pass a double blind test. One of the more active snail mail solicitors is the Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC. They systematically track all the American hate groups. It is appalling how many there are, in every state, and yes, right here in my area. Ku Klux Klan, Neo Nazi, Racist Skinhead, Anti Immigrant, Anti LGBTQ, General Hate—this is America? It’s shameful. They also discuss “accelerationism,” the claim that the entire economic and political system must be dismantled through apocalyptic race war. They want a “cleansing fire” of violence as they eliminate democracy and invoke Hell on Earth. I hope they never succeed. In a thought experiment I picture asking one of them “What would Jesus say?” and he would respond “We got rid of that loser-loving radical long ago.”

One of the fundamental assumptions of science fiction is that there are aliens out there with advanced technology. Indeed, they may be here among us, maybe watching to make sure we don’t get out into the galactic civilization with our poisonous racism and destructive lifestyle. Maybe they are getting ready to invade and use us as a meat farm. I am skeptical about that, because unless there is a way to bypass the limitation of the speed of light—wormholes, anyone?—it simply would not be economic for them to mess with us. We may be lucky that the universe is so big. But they could nevertheless be watching from a distance. Astronomers calculate that there are 1,715 stars in our neck of the woods, and hundreds of probable Earth-like planets circling those stars that just might support advanced life forms, and that have an unobstructed view of Earth during human civilization. So maybe we had better see about reforming, so as not make too bad an impression, if it is not already too late. Perhaps related is a report on the enduring mysteries of contemporaneity UFOs. Mostly they are inventions or confusions, but not all of them. There is something there, but what is it?

Juneteenth: an interesting and worthwhile new holiday, June nineteenth, commemorating the end of slavery in America. It turns out that slavery did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation, or even the end of the War of the Rebellion, i.e. the Civil War, since Texas did not then acknowledge the authority of the Union. But finally it did catch up to them, and every slave was freed. Thus officially ended the abomination of slavery, at least in this part of the world. There still seem to be some who haven’t quite gotten the word, as the racism cited above continues. Maybe slavery should be restored, this time with the racists and haters becoming the slaves.

I’m old fashioned, and one of the ways it shows is that I read the newspaper. One thing annoys me: in my day a fundamental tenet of journalism was when you use an acronym, that is, capital letters in lieu of the original words, like SNAFU instead of Situation Normal, All Fouled Up – yes I know, some may think I have one of the words wrong; to them I say “Foul you!” — the first time you spell it out so that those not conversant with it are not baffled. Today they don’t necessarily bother, so that I am left confused. No wonder circulation is declining.

I continue slow work on my serious novel Deep Well. Slow because I am old and the nuisancey incidentals of daily life like eating, sleeping, grocery shopping, and email demand time, and being newly married takes time, and the technical research can be mindbendingly complicated. So I made a decision to make it a collaboration. My collaborator is Nicholas Young, who has had hands-on experience with geothermal power. His input is invaluable, and I am sure it will be a better novel than it would have been had I continued to wrestle with it alone. It will be a steamy story, because of the super-heated steam that runs the turbines.

The Sunken Garden continues. The Pink Hibiscus that grew from a broken branch of the original plant, ironically the only survivor of the four we planted, is thriving, now that it is protected from the ravages of the wilderness, sporting lovely seven inch wide flowers and growing as tall as I can reach. The Papaya is growing so big we fear it will collide with the screen ceiling, and its fruits are ripening. The little Cherry Tomato plant we were given has now taken over the shallow end of the garden, covering, oh, maybe 400 square feet, and branches have climbed the old pool steps and reached ground level. It helps that JeJune here now has about 15 inches of rain, more than the prior months of the year combined. We are also growing tomatoes inside, using artificial light, that sprouted from seeds saved from exotic little fruits plus a plum tomato that rotted before we could eat it. Most of the little ones seem to sprout and die soon, unfortunately, but some are bravely hanging on. There is interest and sadness even in routine vegetables, when you give them a chance. MaryLee marvels how I care for the welfare and feelings of such plants, but accepts it. I am not exactly a garden-variety writer.

Clippings and such: The Equedia Letter says that a boom in the price of silver is coming soon. But I remember in the 1980s when similar authorities were certain silver was about to skyrocket. Instead it sank, relative to the price of gold. IRS – that’s Internal Revenue Service, you know, the dreaded tax collector – indicates that the wealthiest Americans pay little in income taxes. The billionaires pay about 3.4%. Compare that to what you pay. Yes, when I became a bestseller in the 1980s we learned how taxes really work. I remember my annoyance when I realized that the government was taking 39.6% of my money when I earned it, and 55% of the remainder when I died and my estate passed on to my heirs. Yes, there was an exclusion of the initial amount, but they pro-rated the estate tax to take more, until that exclusion was eaten up. My sympathies are generally with those on the lower parts of the totem, but there is a case to be made for the upper reaches too. So we had to learn how to play the game to keep the taxman out of my pocket to a reasonable extent. My wife Carol, who handled our accounts, bawled me out: “You’re making too much money!” But her ire somehow seemed to lack force. I am no longer a bestseller, and my income is not what it was, but I remember those days with mixed sentiments. Should the US start taxing wealth? One analysis indicates that having to pay taxes every year would have cut Warren Buffett’s wealth by 85%. Citrus County, Florida, where I live, showed some touching sentiment. A local boy, Jeremy, a bright and nice guy, has Tourette’s Syndrome, and is subject to seemingly random sieges of body twisting and exclamations that disrupt his life. But the cost of surgery and follow-up treatments would be $130,000 plus additional costs. So the community is working to raise the money for him. If you want to donate, visit philroyallegacy.com/jeremys-journey, Sex therapist Lisa Butterworth has had clients who belong to the Mormons, officially known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter/day Saints. Now she has been kicked out of that church. What was her crime? She wrote a letter condemning a church decision to excommunicate a woman who supported removing the stigma around pornography, masturbation, and same-sex marriage, that has been signed by over 800 mental health professionals. Okay, again: what would Jesus say? My guess is that he would weep at what the Mormons are doing in his name. Perhaps they should remove the name Jesus from their title. Article in NEW SCIENTIST by Dean Burnett discusses the science of grief. Theoretically it is predictable, with five stages: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. But it is far more complex. I agree, as I am not yet beyond grief for my wife Carol, a year and three quarters after her death, though I have remarried and am getting on with my life. As the author says, the pandemic lockdown complicates it further. Time supposedly heals all wounds, but in this situation some may get worse. In fact I am not aware of being in any denial, or being angry, or bargaining with any supposed god, but depression is there, and reluctant acceptance. A huge segment of my life is gone. I attended a local Hospice bereavement group, and it did help, but the pandemic pretty well wiped it out and I lost most of the books on grief I had loaned to other members. Regardless, the group was worthwhile. Article in the THE WEEK reports that there is no safe level of drinking. That has been my conclusion, and is why I gradually got out of even token social drinking. It’s not that I fear alcoholism; I have never been drunk or otherwise addicted. It’s that alcohol in any amount is bad for the brain, and I value my brain. Another article in THE WEEK says that hackers are wanted, the good kind; a labor shortage in the cyber security industry is undercutting companies’ ability to guard against breaches. So if you’re a hacker, here’s your chance to leave the Dark Side and get legitimate. NEW SCIENTIST, again, has an article by David Robson that indicates that the brains of the smartest animals are remarkably like our own. Even small brains can have general savvy. I think even insects can have feelings. I’m not sure about rotifers. NEW SCIENTIST again: review of the book The New Breed: How to think about robots by Kate Darling says we would do well to think of social robots as animals. Yes; I have gotten to know and love a number of sentient robots in my novels. They are people too. And one by Jo Marchant explores the health benefits of exercise in a pill. I believe in exercise, and believe that this is the main contributor to my apparent health at age 86. I do it for my body and my mind, and not from any delight in it for itself. So if I could take a pill that kept me just as healthy, what then? It seems that 31% of people are physically inactive; could they suddenly rival me in health by taking the pill? I’m not sure how I feel about that, but it certainly is worth exploring. And NEW SCIENTIST again: article by Colin Barras says that four clay artefacts (British spelling) found at an ancient site in Syria have what may be the earliest alphabetic writing ever found, 500 years before we thought. Maybe a 3450 year old inscription. And sleep: a recent study indicates that failure to sleep seven to nine hours a night can lead to heart disease. Your body uses sleep time to repair damaged tissues, fight infections and illnesses, and lets your brain process the day’s events. Too little sleep can lead to high blood pressure and possibly diabetes. Yes, I do my best to get seven hours sleep a night, but there are so many things to do that it’s a struggle. “Anne offers advice” column on depression says that this is not something you can just smile and dismiss. Don’t I know it! I suffered depression for decades, until getting the levothyroxin low-thyroid pill that abated it. It definitely was not all in my mind. Neither was the depression suffered by countless teens I have heard from in the past, some suicidal. Treatment for major depression is about 65% effective. Folk like to claim that depression is easy to fix. They don’t know what they are talking about. I liken it to a bottomless pit. I stood a fair distance from it. Those teens stood closer. Those that got too close fell in and are gone. Sometimes it is literal. One girl told me how she planned to throw herself into the Grand Canyon when her family visited it. But when they were there she lost her nerve, and didn’t do it, and was disgusted with herself. Newspaper item: “The Political Establishment Doesn’t Want You to Know the Economy is Rigged.” That stirred bipartisan outrage—against the whistle blower who revealed it. Par for that corrupt course. Abandoned cats create crisis on Brazilian island, Ilha Furtada, Island of the Cats. Pets left behind by the pandemic are put there. Some say not to encourage them by feeding them, but that would condemn them to death because there is no other food on the island. It remains a problem. Newspaper article by Amy Scherzer titled “Develop the storyteller within you.” Yes indeed. It is my thesis that the Arts are what distinguish Mankind from Animalkind, such as Painting, Sculpture, Song, Dance, and of course Storytelling. I am biased, because I make my living from storytelling, but I am more than ready to defend my thesis. Stories evoke imagination, teach children vocabulary and ideas, and pacify otherwise unruly crowds. Jesus Christ was a storyteller. Radio became modern storytelling, then Television, Movies, Role Playing games, and so on. We are made of stories. Newspaper article titled “Our Other Pandemic,” by a trio of authors says that 2020 had the deadliest gun violence in decades, but so far 2021 is worse. Incidents were 58 per day, and are now rising. Well, if you put guns in the hands of idiots, what do you expect? Other countries practice some gun control, but America essentially lets every nut have his gun. Yes the Second Amendment allows guns—if you join a militia, where there will be some training and discipline. Why not implement the whole of that amendment, instead of just the deadly part?

Oh, let’s start a new paragraph, just in case anyone is reading this far. A Florida story tells how a woman married her sweetheart. Two days later she donated a kidney to his ex. Why do I suspect the ex does not resent the new one? Traffic deaths rose during the pandemic, and the number of Black people killed rose 23%. Folk were driving faster on emptied highways, and infrastructure in poor neighborhoods is worse. Also Blacks tend to have the kind of jobs that can’t be done from the safety of home, so they have to be out in the danger zone. Carbon dioxide levels have hit a new high. We’re just not going to stop polluting until we wipe ourselves out. Meanwhile the West is suffering megadrought, dryness that lasts for decades. Water is running out. This will impact farming as record high temperatures continue. June 2 was the 134^th birthday of Citrus County. There are juicy related stories; this county has had its scandals. Now there’s a thriller movie, Feral State, set here. I wonder if I can make time to see it? Snoozing octopuses seem to slip in and out of dreams. Why not? Octopi are people too. Maybe they are dreaming of the future when global warming causes the sea to rise and cover the continents, and octopi will rule the world. It turns out that artificial cells can grow and split like living bacteria. They tried eliminating all the irrelevant parts, and it didn’t work, so they had to put parts back until the cells started growing. This reminds me of modern education, where they seem to prune back irrelevancies until it is deadly boring and the kids can’t stand it and don’t learn much. Maybe these legal efforts to ban things like the broader aspects of sexuality should be curtailed, so the kids are not channeled into bigotry. It turns out that nicotine provides memory benefits. As a man who was widowered by the long-term side effects of his wife’s smoking I am cautious, but of course you don’t have to smoke to get nicotine. An Australian prison had to be evacuated because it got overrun by mice. A hospital in that section of the world had trouble with mice attacking the patients. Interesting; in my day there were things like mouse traps and cats. Now there is a 6,000 mile boat trip that circumnavigates the eastern third of the United States that goes mainly on rivers. You can do it comfortably in a year. A condo tower in Miami collapsed, burying many whose bodies have not yet been found. Investigation is indicating that there were structural problems the owners were slow to address because fixing them would have been expensive. The strange behavior of a subatomic particle called the muon is hinting that the standard model of physics does not explain everything. Interesting. Actually I’m not sure the standard model explains gravity. Article in NEW SCIENTIST about how to improve your brain suggests that you see to the health of your guts with things like probiotics, which I do. That you watch what you eat. That you exercise. That you keep in touch with others. That you learn a new skill. That you get enough sleep. And that you do what makes you happy. Well, I try. Bill Maher of HBO’s Real Time is promoting a new word: Progressaphobia, defined as a brain disorder that strikes liberals and makes them incapable of recognizing progress. Well, I’m a liberal, and I do see progress, but also much that still needs to be done, like eliminating the last vestiges of racism, sexism, and determined ignorance. Article says that charities for the rich do donate – just not to the needy. Yes, that’s a problem. More than a million nonbinary adults live in the US. That is, folk who do not identify exclusively as male or female. And migraines are more than a headache. I am no expert here, but my mother suffered from them, and my wife does. Disassociation, auras; it seems like a science fiction malady. I hope science is able to come up with a reasonable treatment.

PIERS

AwGhost 2021

HI-

When it comes to going wrong, Florida is no slouch. As the Delta Variant of the Covid-19 virus spreads in America, our governor the Trump clone is opening things up and blocking policies like mandatory masks and social distancing, so Florida is leading the resurgence of new cases. In fact, one in five new American cases is in Florida. THE WEEK had a lovely cover for 7-23-2021 showing the anti-vaxers marching with signs declaring freedom from masks and vaccines, plunging off a cliff. Two of them in midair are shapely young women. Male that I am, somehow it seems worse for a pretty girl to expire than a dull man. I got my first vaccination shot at the local Publix in JeJune, and my second in Jewel-Lye, Moderna, but MaryLee and I still wear masks in public and keep what distances are feasible. We never had a proper honeymoon, and hope that if the Virus ever fades away we can travel a bit, eat out, attend things like amusement parks, and generally act like newlyweds. At least, as I have remarked before, if you have to spend a year or more on home lock-down, it helps to be freshly married. No, we are not masked and social distanced in bed.

I read the news, columns, comics and such in the daily newspaper, keeping up in my archaic fashion. As I have also remarked, I come from another century and am slow to pick up on the conventions of this one the way the natives do. If I ever do watch the news online, it would probably be the Naked News, if it still exists. Yes I know, I come across as a dirty old man. To which I respond, why is a normal male interest in attractive young women considered dirty? My standard question on indecency is whether the body of a person shown as God made it is considered obscene. What does that say about God’s designs? Anyway, I was amused by one day’s Pickles comic wherein he was trying to write her a love note, but had trouble with the spelling, so that first he called her Sweaty Pie, then Angle Face.

I dream constantly when asleep, and sometimes when awake, as when I wish the powers that be in the film/TV industry would discover Xanth. But normally my dreams dissipate the moment I wake. up. But one recent one I remember. My dentist told me that I needed serious work on a tooth, and told me where to go to get it done. This turned out to be a blank building on a city street, without door or entrance. So I went to stand almost touching the wall, and I realized the panel before me was changing, becoming a kind of elevator. It bore me inside, where bright signs flashed, informing me that the procedure would take 38 minutes or cost $38,000. That did not freak me out, as a dreamer tends to accept the reality around him. Soon I found myself lying on a panel, recovering from the procedure, MaryLee lying beside me, maybe holding my hand reassuringly. Then I woke, and was bemused, because I now wear dentures and have no natural teeth. So what was with this dream?

In LOCUS for July was a review of a book on Roger Zelazny, by F Brett Cox. For those not familiar with Zelazny, I will say that back in my day he was a meteor in the Speculative Fiction genre, winning praise and awards galore, perhaps best known for his Amber series. He was younger than I, a contemporary writer, and you might think I would have resented the way he got all the attention while I was largely ignored. But this is what I call my Zelazny lesson: it is hard to resent a person who is constantly praising you. He always said how good a writer I was, and not just to me. We were friends. He died from cancer in 1995, and I was sorry. I note that his critical reception declined as his popular acclaim rose. I know how that is; I was a contender for awards until I became a bestseller; then forget it. Nobody likes me except the readers. So Zelazny faded, I think in significant part because the cancer sapped his writing enthusiasm, but he was indeed a good writer, and yes, we probably shall not see his like again.

Also in this issue of LOCUS is the column by Corey Doctorow, who generally has an insightful take on the undercurrents of the world. This one starts off “I care about monopolies for exactly one reason: self determination. I don’t care about competition as an end unto itself, or fetishize ‘choice’ for its own sake. What I care about is your ability to live your life in the way you think will suit you, to the greatest extent possible…” He goes on to describe how outfits like Facebook are coming to control our illusion of choice. We would do well to understand his point, lest we lose our freedom to live by our own choices instead of what the big corporations dictate. This mischief is closer than you may think. Our world is quietly whimpering out. More on that anon.

Last column I remarked on the verb “pie/pied” that I was sure existed but wasn’t in my dictionaries. As I have remarked, I have no belief in the supernatural, and I suspect this annoys it, so it gets back at me in little ways, like vanishing common things from existence. This has happened to me all my life, and pie is merely the latest example. Well, a reader sent me A Letterpress Lexicon, Part 3, which has it. It seems that it is a term for metal type that has become all jumbled up. It says “Obviously, sorting pied type is a time-consuming job.” So that’s where fate hid what I suspect was a more general term, maybe in the manner of the Pied Piper of Hamlin, not realizing that my readers are smarter than I am and can sometimes ferret things out of obscurity. So this time I wasn’t finked by the fickle finger of fate, or dinked by the dangling dork of destiny. This time. But fate is a most challenging antagonist. One of the classic bits I remember is from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated from 11^th century Arabic literature by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859: “The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,/ Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,/ Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” Beautifully true words. Once Time or Fate have spoken, History is final, giving the Finger to those who object. Except in Fantasy, with time travel, though that can run afoul of Paradox.

I am reading little these days, apart from the daily newspaper, my news and science magazines, and correspondence, as I move slowly through my now collaborative serious novel Deep Well. But I did steal time to read the small anthology The Good, the Bad, & the Cute, published by Mannison Press as a minibook, because a story of mine is in it. I like to know the company I keep. This is subtitled “The Secret Ways of Dolls.” These twelve stories reveal things we did not know about dolls, who are not necessarily very nice when you get to know them. In fact some are downright vicious. This is no children’s book. Most of the stories are fantasy, but one is maybe science fiction, as a doll helps steer a spacewoman straight so she can make it safely to Mars. Some, I think, I do not properly understand, such as “The Daily Isabelle,” by one of the editors, Ronald Linson. Grandma has a doll, Isabelle, that mysteriously changes outfits every day, amazing the protagonist, five year old Emily. She loves that doll. When she is ten, Grandma dies, and Emily inherits the doll. She takes it out of its cabinet – and suddenly Grandma is alive again, and Isabelle no longer changes. Three years later Grandma dies again, and Isabelle resumes changing daily. So it seems the doll extended Grandma’s life, but I’m not clear how. Okay, Reader who is smarter than I am, so buy this book, read the story, and explain it to me. Maybe along the way you will find other stories here of interest, including mine. You do want to know about dolls, right?

I am a workaholic, but I can have trouble getting things done. Sometimes it seems that whatever I have to do, I must do something else first. Today, Sunday, I am trying to complete and edit this HiPiers column. But first I had to call the newspaper circulation department to inform them that one of the two newspapers I subscribe to was not delivered. I got an endlessly repeating recorded message that they are closed on Sunday. I finally left a recorded message. Will I get the newspaper? I am not sure they really want that to happen. Meanwhile today is Chore Hour Day. When I stopped doing archery, in part because I was losing two many arrows in the dirt when the refused to go where I aimed them, I dedicated the time to Chores, and that has really paid off, as I do make progress on things that would otherwise be neglected. Today, among other things, I cleaned out ovens and stove “eyes.” They have been gathering fallen bits of food for decades, and I thought they could endure a few more years, but MaryLee gave me the Word. Women aren’t necessarily reasonable about such things. Married men will understand, while married women may mentally peer down their noses at me and say “Decades?!” So my time is cramped, as usual.

I received a booklet responding to the top ten objections to the Gospel. I am agnostic, with no particular concern for the Gospel. I looked at it, and have to say I regard this screed as specious. I could take it apart item by item, but what’s the point? Believers will not listen to logic. I also saw a book being given out free at the post office, so I took a copy. It is The Enemy Unmasked, by Bill Hughes. It turns out to be not a thriller but a semi-political screed. It starts “The United States of America is at the brink of total collapse. Once a great and powerful nation, the United States is now in free fall to disaster from which she will never recover.” It goes on to say that it is evident that a Divine hand was protecting and guiding America, but now, as with the Romans, it has ceased to be good, and will no longer be great. What happened? A significant part of it is the malign influence of the Illuminati and the Jews. Need I go further? I don’t disagree with all of it. As they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. For example, the Patriot Act should be thrown out. Yes indeed! For those who don’t know, I regard that Act as one of the most unpatriotic pieces of legislation ever enacted. You think you have financial privacy? You don’t. Because the Patriot Act requires financial institutions to give the government your figures, and to not tell you they are doing it. Their Privacy Statements are works of fiction. They are required to lie to you. So yes, America is in decline, but I think not entirely for the reasons this book says.

Clippings: they have found fossils in Canada that are 890 million years old, 350 million years older than they thought existed. This keeps happening; they assume that history must have started with whatever scientists or archaeologists find. Scientists are stumped by what’s killing songbirds in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Washington DC, and eight other states, like the blue jay, starling, grackle, cardinal, robin, finch, sparrow, bluebird, red bellied woodpecker, chickadee and wren. They get swollen eyes and erratic flight. You don’t suppose they are tuning in on contemporary politics and suffering repulsion? The national debt is worsening, hardly helped by the Trump tax cuts. Republicans blame it on Biden, but it goes back two administrations. There is a real gun made to look like a Lego toy. Lego wants that to stop, understandably. A woman stole a man’s dog. Then she had remorse and returned it to him. He had offered a reward for the dog’s return, but used it instead to help pay for a recovery program for her fentanyl addiction. I like that man, and maybe that woman too. The Virus vaccines cause some complications, like blood clots, but that risk is about four in a million, while the risks of Covid-19 are far worse. Article in NEW SCIENTIST FOR 1 May, 2021 (Did I mention how I have trouble keeping up? As the saying goes, “The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get!”) titled “The Wisdom of Trees” suggests that trees communicate with each other through their roots, and may have consciousness. The following article indicates that we are making progress against malaria, but the Covid-19 pandemic is messing it up. Vegetarian news: it seems that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Al Gore are among the big names backing Nature’s Fynd, a startup developing meatless burgers, dairy-free cheese, chicken-less nuggets, and other products using a fermented volcanic microbe derived from Yellowstone National Park. This should reduce cruelty meat production and aid the fight against global warming. More power to them! Internet circulated story “The carrot, the egg, and the coffee bean” says that when you boil them, the carrot becomes soft in that adversity, the egg becomes harder, and the coffee bean changes the water around it. Which are you, when times get tough, a softener, a hardener, or a changer? The Equedia Letter says a massive disruption is in the making as a Chinese social network is poised to change the world. Tik Tok is taking over the internet. But I wonder about such electronic networks. What happens when the hackers go after them? I would rather not be dependent of them for my news, entertainment, and social life, and certainly not my privacy, lest it all be skunked by anonymous pirates. There’s a new craze: Onewheels, futuristic skateboards with a single wheel. That certainly looks like fun, were I about 70 years younger. They found a chalk carving of a huge naked man with a stiff erection, dating back over a thousand years ago. It is near the village of Cerne Abbas in southern England. I wish I could see the woman who aroused him to his thousand year hard-on. She must be some creature. It may be the cerebellum that separated us from the chimps, rather than the prefrontal cortex. NEW SCIENTIST for 7-10-2021 explores the ten biggest questions about consciousness. That’s one of my buttons, which is why I read it out of turn. First they wonder what it is, how a 1.3 kilogram organ the consistency of tofu can generate the feeling of being. But in all this discussion I did not see the answer, which is feedback. When perception looks at itself perceiving, it becomes self aware. When machines become conscious, that will be the mechanism. When a scientist wins the Nobel Prize for figuring that out, remember where you read it first, though I did not originate it. HOMETOWN CITRUS, a newspaper supplement, describes Monkey Island, where they put surplus monkeys. They feed them twice a day and let them be. Makes me wonder whether the planet Earth is the equivalent God set up for surplus humans? THE WEEK wonders how close we came to Trump disaster. “We now have even more evidence that Trump was unhinged, and viewed laws, rules, and norms as ‘irrelevant.’ If Republicans choose to support another Trump run in 2024, it will be ‘crystal clear what they are signing up for.’” I suspect it will be the death of their party. And it seems that Neanderthals and humans mated often, 45,00 years ago, according to new DNA Analysis. Then Neanderthals went extinct 40,000 years ago. Could human women have been too much for them? My guess is that the advancing humans killed the men and made bed-mates of the women. That’s how it’s done, in warfare. Not nice, but effective.

Until next time, hoping that I get more interesting as I age. I’m not far short of 87 now.

PIERS

SapTimber 2021

HI-

The AwGhost HiPiers Column suffered a glitch when posting here; apparently the internet wasn’t functioning correctly and our geek was unable to upload for several days. I received concerned queries from fans. This is to assure them that I remain functional and as ornery as ever; these things happen.

We have been busy here, with all manner of minor but time consuming complications, so when Hurricane Ida formed, we just didn’t have time for her so we sent her away. I hope the folk in Louisiana aren’t wroth with us. The rule on hurricanes is that every one of them aims for me, but its eye isn’t very good, so usually it misses. Then it heads for Virginia where my paralyzed correspondent Jenny lives. Ida, thwarted, headed for Tennessee, thinking to catch my wife MaryLee there, but she is safe here with me. You have to be alert to avoid hurricanes. In the Land of Xanth Ida is a princess; maybe they will meet.

The author sent me a copy of her coloring book What Cheek! by Rosemarie Neumayer. Website www.rosemarieneumayer.com. I understand that coloring books are big these days, and not just for children. This one is Adult, in the sense that the anonymous social powers that be require you to hide it from children, who are not supposed to have any idea that things like cussing, dirty words, excretion, or s*x exist, and whose innocence is supposed to be preserved, if possible, until they die of old age. I was never very good at following those strictures. This copy is inscribed “To Piers, Thanks for warping my sense of humour. Without you, this book wouldn’t have been possible!” So if you are under the age of whatever, skip the rest of this paragraph, lest you be warped. Which makes me wonder about Warp Speed in Star Trek. What are they secretly doing out there in space? Children beware! The first coloring picture is of the head of a horse with a horn, saying “Bitch Please I’m a Unicorn.” The second is “Balls!” whose picture is of a candy ball vending machine, with the balls having a ball. The third is “Go Fly A Kite” with the kitist getting electrocuted by lightning traveling down the kite string. Well, he should have known better; just because Ben Franklin did it doesn’t mean it’s entirely safe. The fourth is “Who are you calling a F*cking Fairy Princess?” with a cute little winged girl. The fifth is “Money Talks and Bullsh*t Walks,” with small pictures of a five dollar bill saying “I’m not cheap!” and a walking turd being harassed by flies. And on, with “Grow a Pair,” “Limp Dick,” “Twat Waffle,” “I don’t give a flying F*CK about it!” and my favorite, a cowgirl riding a little cloud in a storm, titled “Thunderc*nt” (my asterisks throughout this paragraph). So next time you get caught by a storm, you’ll know where the thunder is coming from. Be wary of getting under it and looking up, you know, up-skirting, lest you get an electrifying eyeful. And on through more, concluding with a rocket being launched, “F*ck Off!” So if you have time on your hands and naughtiness on your mind, buy this book and get cracking. I mean, coloring. It will drive the ASP (Anonymous Social Powers) nuts. They might even shrink a pair.

About asterisks: they can be useful for veiling obvious crudities without in any way concealing their essence, as demonstrated above. Fake decency. They can also on occasion speak for themselves. I may have mentioned this in a prior column; my senescent memory is chancy. But for those new to these intemperate ramblings, I learned the word from the astrologer Marc Jones, whom I knew personally, when I was young. He showed me a little poem I have remembered. “Mary had a pair of skates/ With which she loved to frisk./ Now wasn’t she a foolish girl/ Her little *” Read it out loud, pronouncing the asterisk, to your maiden aunt and give her a heart attack, you vulgar *ss.

Things catch my eye as I wander about the house. I can discover items I never knew existed. That’s what comes of living into my dotage – I had my 87^th birthday AwGhost 6^th – and suffering fading memories. One is a series of booklets, lessons of a JOURNALISM COURSE, lessons No. 4 through 10. I mark things when I receive them, and these are marked 2-4-70, which means I’ve had them 51 years. There does not seem to be a date of copyright. From where? Only the letter A, which I think means my father Alfred, who was alive then. They were published by The Regent Institute, Regent House, Palace Gate, London. The topics are Writing the Short Story, How to Get the Right Touch, How and When to Specialize, Journalism for Women: Humorous Writing – um, does that meant that women were not taken seriously? – Profitable Sidelines, What NOT to Write About, and How to Increase Acceptances. I glanced through randomly, and their advice seems generally on target. The length of a short story is between 1,500 and 7,000 words. It is a dramatic representation of a single episode, complete in itself. Begin with a crisis. The characters are not puppets; they think for themselves. The best way to characterize is indirectly, showing rather than telling. When you finish writing it, read and revise it at once. Then put it away for a few days and revise it anew, because you have a slightly changed perspective. Then market it. I can’t fault this advice; it is essentially the way I do it. Skipping on to the last booklet, How to Increase Acceptances, I see it starts “Writers who wait for inspiration are not numbered among the successful free lances.” Amen! I knew early on that I could not afford to wait for ideas, or to suffer Writer’s Block, so I learned to summon inspiration at will and to abolish Block. I also knew that if I allowed my parameters to be governed by the tastes of my maiden aunt (the one who expired above), I would soon wash out. And of course the critics. I remember reading about a successful author who then foundered. Why? He listened to his critics. As I like to put it, a critic is a work of art finely fashioned from feces. Yes I know, there might exist somewhere on some obscure astral plane a worthwhile critic, but what are the writer’s chances of finding that one among the myriads of mouthy ignoramuses? Better to ignore that will o’ wisp and do it my own way. Anyway, it was fun going through these lessons, half a century later, but they won’t do me much good, because the first three are missing. So maybe I’m doomed to be a failure. My critics will have a gleeful party, having predicted this at the outset.

Another thing that caught my eye was on another bookshelf. I have a database of my books, about three thousand in my library, and I update it periodically as new books come in, so I can find them when I need them. But the part of the house that my wife Carol kept is unindexed. I saw a small brown book there, and checked it, and lo, it was The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald. Because it wasn’t my book I don’t have the date and source of it written on the back cover. I think it must be from her father, who was a U-U minister. I’m glad to have it. I have commented before on The Moving Finger. Now I discover it is the source of another popular stanza: “A Book of Verses underneath the Bough/ A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou/ Beside me singing in the Wilderness—/ Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!” What a lovely thought.

Songs are among the memories that run through my mind at odd moments, such as when I’m making supper, washing dishes, handling email or heading out to fetch newspapers or mail from beyond our gate three quarters of a mile away. Sometimes I can remember every word; more often only snatches. One day it was “Waltzing Matilda,” the Australian song that starts “Once a jolly swagman camped beside a bilabong, under the shade of a koolibah tree…” if I have the spelling right. He poaches a jumbuck, which he hides in his tucker bag, and gets caught by the warden: “You’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me.” A fun song, with the odd Australian words. Obviously waltzing Matilda means accompanying someone involuntarily, like the swagman getting arrested. He escapes that by plunging to his death in the bilabong, and now you can hear his ghost “You’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me.” But here is my question: who is Matilda? My Names book says Mathilda(sic) means brave in battle. Another says Matilda is a Latinized form of a Germanic personal name of an early German queen (895-968), wife of Henry the Fowler, noted for her piety and generosity. Okay, but that doesn’t fit the Australian scenario. How did her name become a cruel waltz?

Back in Jamboree I developed pain in my right arm, preventing me from doing my exercise bowstring draws on that side. So I braced the bow against a door-frame and was able to do it that way. Finally in AwGhost I managed to do one draw away from the frame. A week later I did ten draws, essentially recovering, after seven months. I’m glad to have that back. I exercise regularly not to improve my fitness but to preserve my muscle, stamina, mind, and perhaps my life. When a neighbor expressed surprise at seeing me exercising vigorously at my age, I replied that I wouldn’t be my age if I didn’t exercise. I believe the average lifespan for American men is about 79 years, maybe less now with the pandemic, so I’m pushing the limit. I also keep my weight down, try to get seven hours sleep a night, and exercise my mind with reading, writing and games. I married MaryLee when I was 85, and told her I hoped to give her ten good years. So I’ll be annoyed if I don’t make it at least to age 95. You’ll come a waltzing MaryLee with me. Incidentally I received an email solicitation from EliteSingles, a dating service. I’m not sure how to tell them I’m married without breaking their heart. China’s lonely hearts are finding romance with AI, Artificial Intelligence. Were I not married I might be interested. My novels are populated with friendly lady robots. Did I mention games? I used to play Free Cell, which I regard as the best solitaire card game extant. Five years ago I switched to Mahjongg, a game of matching tiles. Now I have switched back to Free Cell, and it remains outstanding. Every card is exposed in the initial layout, and theoretically every game is winnable, but some are real challenges. I often block up, then take the option of starting over. So far I have managed to win every game I played, eventually, though the times range from four minutes to forty minutes. Sometimes I play for hours, which disrupts my writing schedule. I pride myself on my discipline, but Free Cell, like MaryLee, can mess it up galore. Women and cards, ever a man’s nemesis. Sigh.

I have mentioned the Sunken Garden in prior columns, our replacement for the swimming pool. It continues to thrive. Some plants fade out, but the papaya tree is reaching for the top of the enclosure, about twelve feet up. I hope it eases off soon. It is madly fruiting, but the fruits seem to rot before they ripen. Maybe its second season will do better. The pink hibiscus, grown from an accidentally broken off branch on the original plant we bought, is now about eight feet in girth, and flowering constantly. The tomato plant, after producing hundreds of cherry tomatoes, is dying off, but we have a number of little plants growing in pots, from tomatoes we planted. Some potatoes MaryLee bought to eat developed eyes, so I planted them, and now have about fifteen plants in a big pot. I will be interested to see whether they eventually make new potatoes. My vague memory is that the second year they go to seed instead. We now have volunteer ferns spreading across the garden, plus some that rise on a central stalk then branch out into about seven fern leaves. Are they a variety of fern? Also a brief volunteer flower plant that had lovely round yellow petals. So yes, the garden is interesting.

Related is a letter I received from Daniela Gonzalez, who sent a link to her piece titled “Benefits of Having Composting Toilets at Home.” https://porch.com/advice/benefits-composting-toilets I believe in composting toilets; they make ultimate sense, compared to the flush toilet that washes gallons of potable water into the sewer while the country is running out of it. We planned to have one when we built this house in 1988, but then learned they are illegal in Florida. That seems almost as crazy as the way our current governor is trying to prevent schools from using masks, with Florida already leading the nation in new Covid cases. It’s as if legislators want to do as much harm as they can. Whatever happened to the mission of facilitating the welfare of the people and the nation? Fortunately many school districts are defying such nonsense.

Every so often I receive a letter informing that my website is inferior, and the writer will improve it for a price. Actually I run this site as a promotion for my novels, and as a service to my readers who crave information about publishing or details of my warped thinking. So trying to use key words or special devices to improve my ranking on Google or Amazon are beside the point; readers who look for me will find me. So I ignore notices like this.

I continue to check out vegan alternatives to animal products, as I nudge ever closer to veganism. There are several brands of yogurt that are fine for me, like Chobani, Silk, and SO Delicious. Alternative milk has been slower, for me; some tasted thin. Then I tried real milk again—and it tasted thin. Hmm, could there be a subjective component? Perish forbid! (That was a phrase my mother used; I find it apt, 30 years after her death.) Then I tried a high fat one, and it tasted too thick. So I think fat is the key. But I note that while one regular one was vegan, their high fat version wasn’t. About five grams per serving tastes about right to me. Close ones are Ripple, Publix, Mooala, Oatly, Simply, and Silk. I like the personality evinced by the Oatly carton, which even clues you in on which sides of it are interesting or boring, and has pictures you can color in. Sorry, they’re not into thunderc*nt fare. No need to be bored unless you really want to be. Now I’ll start zeroing in on price and nutrition. Stay tuned, would-be vegans; this could get interesting.

On alternate mornings I do my exercise walk. It used to be an exercise run, then later an exercise jog, but after I fell and smashed my face one more time, nigh three years ago, I slowed it to a fast walk. You might think that would be dull. Not necessarily. Sometimes I see deer or a gopher tortoise, or a rabbit, or other passing wild creature. Once it was a pair of otters. During this column I encountered two white-faced cows, who had evidently found a hole in the neighbor’s fence and come through to sample our wares. One-was standing in the middle of the drive gazing at me. I approached her carefully, aware that this horned animal probably weighed about eight times what I do. She started to spook. I spoke reassuringly to her and walked on by. In due course the owner should discover the hole in the fence, or the missing cows, and do something about it. Meanwhile we’re getting along. I’m keeping our gate closed so the cows don’t wander out onto the highway where the speeders govern; that could get messy.

I continue to work slowly on my serious collaborative geothermal novel, Deep Well. We are destroying the world as we know it by polluting our atmosphere using fossil fuels, causing global warming, and we have to stop. Geothermal energy is one way to accomplish that. Yes I know, far bigger outfits than anything I can muster are similarly concerned, but I want to do my bit before I kick that nefarious bucket. You know, the one that says KICK MEE but for some reason no one wants to oblige it. So I hope to help popularize the solution that too many “experts” seem to be blind to. Myriad things constantly intervene to take my time, but I am nudging along at my tortoise pace. Remember the fable about the tortoise and the hare…

Clippings: buncha items in THE WEEK for 8-13-21. Missouri Governor Mike Parson pardoned folk who waved guns at racial justice protesters. Republicans cheered the gun wavers for doing it. Meanwhile the same governor declined to pardon two black men serving life sentences after being wrongfully convicted. Smells like racism to me. In 2012 Rev. Paula Stone Williams came out as a transgender woman. She was promptly fired and shunned and even hated. That smells like sexism or worse. A medal winning gymnast Aly Raisman says that USA Gymnastics is rotten from the inside out. Molestation is wholesale, as Simone Biles revealed. That smells like exploitation. America is supposed to be the land of the free, with liberty and justice for all. It seems it isn’t. In the past decade the “retail apocalypse” has shrunk the middle class, and stores are going out of business. It is not clear where we are heading, but I worry about a return to feudalism, where a few filthy rich barons lord it over a myriad dirt poor serfs. Billionaires are increasing, and so is poverty. Pandemic aid dropped the number of poor Americans 45 percent, but that aid is ending. How could America endure abolishing the poor? Meanwhile Donald Trump raised $82 million in the first half of 2021, in his quest to return to power. The pork industry is in trouble because new rules require pig pens to be big enough for the animals to turn around, and only four percent of them are. Vegetarianism, anyone? Vegan pork will soon be more widely available. The police shot and killed 1,021 people in 2020, the most on record. It doesn’t say how many were black, but I suspect a majority. Was Jan 6 a coup attempt or just a riot? The answer depends on the political party you serve. I find it sad that politics now defines justice, rather than the merits of the case. From their Wit & Wisdom quotations: “The past is never where you think you left it,” writer Katherine Anne Porter. Pegasus Spyware enables clients to steal messages, photos and location data, even from supposedly secure systems. It is a serious global security threat. My rule of thumb is that when you go online, you are vulnerable, and you are fooling yourself if you think otherwise. It is one reason I seldom go online. Cartoon: man in a DON’T TREAD ON ME shirt being trodden on by the Virus. Drinking half a glass of beer or wine may lower the chance of a repeat heart attack by 50%. Interesting, as elsewhere the indication is that any alcohol is bad for you. What is the larger picture? Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is thought to contain more water than all of Earth’s oceans together. Maybe we should send a space tanker for some of it. Facebook has nearly 3 billion active users, and puts the goal of world domination above any concern about misinformation or the spread of deadly hatreds. In some countries nearly two thirds of the people get their news from Facebook. The message is clear: Facebook will never fix itself. All this from that one issue of THE WEEK. I do read it with interest.

In the newspaper news: someone once took a picture of a naked baby swimming in water and used that picture on the cover of the Nirvana album Nevermind. Billboard ranked the cover #7 on its list of the 50 greatest covers of all time. Now that baby is 30 and is suing the band for child pornography. That’s the first I’ve heard of a person considering himself pornographic. Statistics: consuming a single hot dog can shave 36 minutes off one’s healthy life. A hamburger costs about 7 minutes. But eating nuts can add 26 minutes, and a peanut and jelly sandwich can add 33 minutes. Have I mentioned the benefits of vegetarianism? How many octogenarian cow carcass eaters do you know? Folk are now playing the game of “cornhole.” Interesting. In my day that word meant anal intercourse. I guess the language changes while I’m not looking. I remember a dirty joke, um, never mind. Letters evidently by Democrats point out how Republicans voted against the multi trillion dollar infrastructure bill as too expensive, but never protested the Trump seven and a half trillion dollar tax cut for the rich. That smells redolently of hypocrisy. Another says there is nothing conservative about spreading lies and misinformation or trying to overturn a legitimate election. As I like to put it, the phrase “principled conservative” has become an oxymoron. That’s too bad. True conservatism has aspects to be recommended, like dignity, honor, financial responsibility, respect for tradition, and family values. It is sad to see those spurned in favor of greed, power, and racism. Article in NEW SCIENTIST for 22 May 2021 (yes, I’m still running behind) titled “Mind-altering moves” by Caroline Williams suggests getting on your feet, running or walking, as that reduces straight-line thinking and allows broader more creative ideas to flow. Indeed, I have gotten good ideas for my fiction during my exercise walks. They also generate turbulence in the blood, rushing it up toward the brain up to 15 percent faster. Try to synchronize 120 steps and 120 heartbeats per minute. Another recommendation is to get strong, as physical strength is linked to higher self esteem and a feeling of being capable in all walks of life. It also helps abate depression and anxiety. Also, dance; nature designed us to do it. When we synchronize with other people we get emotionally closer to them, which is nice. Breathe; inhaling for 5 seconds, exhaling for 5 seconds fill the lungs’ air sacs most efficiently, diffusing more oxygen into the blood. It can also lead to an altered state of consciousness. Straighten up; this seems to be good for a positive mental attitude. Finally, stretch; this can help reduce inflammation. I do exercise regularly, covering most of these bases; maybe now I have a better idea how they help me. Another article in the same issue by Richard Webb, who interviews Kimberly Nicholas, who wrote Under the Sky We Make, whose thesis is that if humanity has any hope of tackling climate change, it needs to take action in this decade. She is angry about the fossil fuel industry’s denialism, a misinformation campaign decades old. She feels we need to shift to a plant based diet, too. Amen! Another article touts hydrogen; if solar or wind power is converted to hydrogen, it can be stored indefinitely and used at any time. This is another worthwhile avenue. America lags behind other countries here. The quantum dilemma: maybe this way they really can devise unhackable codes. But there are cautions, such as whether this will facilitate criminal activity. NEW SCIENTIST draws a parallel: do we ban fire because it can kill people, or find ways to harness it for mankind’s benefit. I suspect that the use of fire is fundamental to our species’ dominance of the world. Maybe quantum is the next significant tool. Comic strip “Pickles” for AwGhost 19 has him trying to fold a fitted sheet. She demonstrates how to do it, and suddenly has it neatly folded. He calls that a miracle. Yes indeed. Remember my mini story of a militant feminist approaching me at a convention saying “You claim to do the housework,” thinking to catch me in a lie. I answer “Yes.” She demands “Can you fold a fitted sheet?” I rant “No one can fold a fitted sheet!” Whereupon she goes away, satisfied that I really have encountered that monster. Okay, maybe in a comic strip someone can neatly fold a fitted sheet, but not in real life. Which in turn reminds me of another comic, “Rose is Rose,” wherein Rose’s mother tosses the whole basket of just-dried laundry into the air, and it lands all neatly folded. More magic, of course. Newspaper article on Publix, the local grocery chain, now numbering almost 1,250 stores across the Southeast, saying it is a shopper’s happy place. Yes it is. We shop there and love it. One example: I needed a bottle of a particular vitamin, so my late wife Carol and I stopped at Publix, located it, and went through the checkout line with that one item. The cashier saw it, paused, walked away, then returned with a clipping of a three dollar off sale on that item that we hadn’t seen. Thus something like seven dollars became four dollars. We would never have known had she not caught it. Are we dedicated to Publix? Oh my yes! It seems that sharks almost went extinct 19 million years ago. Science doesn’t seem to know why. Maybe it’s a glitch in the fossil record. You know the way they thought that fish Coelacanth was extinct for something like 60 million years, until a fisherman caught a live one. Maybe the fossil record needs to clean up its act. A tiny cube of human brain contains 130 million neural connections. Now there is an online tool to map it in three dimensions. Maybe in time they’ll get good enough to put a similar brain into my fictional female robots, making them indistinguishable from real woman. Then we couldn’t live with them, and couldn’t live without them. So maybe stop just short of that. As with the quote by Leela, the lovely one-eyed woman of FUTURAMA (no, I wouldn’t kick her out of bed!): “Please try to understand. You’re a man. I’m a woman. We’re just too different.” And one more from NEW SCIENTIST: it is important that we start believing people when they ask for help with their mental health. Yes indeed. Mental stress is largely invisible, but it can lead to suicide or other destructive behavior. It seems that celebrities don’t endure the stresses of overcrowded housing or concern about where their next meal is coming from, but can suffer loneliness and persecution, you know, like being hounded by the press. MaryLee spot researched Princess Di, and that’s a horror story. The seemingly perfect woman was in a private hell. Anyone can have a mental problem, and deserves help when it is needed.

Let’s conclude with the weather. For my birthday MaryLee gave me a weather stick. This is just a one foot long dry twig that is set up on an outer wall. When it angles up, that means fair weather. When it droops down, wet weather. I set it up, and lo, it works. Today as I edit this column the stick is pointing down, and so far it has rained two inches and hasn’t finished. If it starts to flood here, we may have to take it down; enough is enough.

PIERS

OctOgre 2021

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For those who came on my scene later than 1982, I have had a reasonably rough course as a writer. When I demanded that my publisher give me an honest accounting and royalties on my first published novel, Chthon, I never got them; instead I got blacklisted, false stories were spread about me, and a writers organization, I suspect many of whose members were also getting cheated, essentially sided with the publisher. A former officer even wrote me a stiff letter bawling me out for maligning the finest publisher in the world. It seems that writers in those days were not supposed to have the temerity to demand that publishers honor their own contracts; they were supposed to smile and say “May I have another?” But after six years apparently that publisher cheated the wrong person, got sued, and the proprietors had to flee. It was bought out and fresh personnel were installed. The new editor, now in a position to examine the real accounts on his own novel there, and discovering that he had been cheated of more than half his royalties, now understood the case with me, and invited me back. After the worst mental struggle of my career—whether to in effect forgive six years of malignment for standing my ground—I decided to give it a try. That turned out to be also the best decision of my career, because that reformed publisher not only gave me honest accounts, it greatly enhanced my performance in the field. Stories had continued to circulate about me, but my sales skyrocketed. One of the stories was that I was being an ogre at fan conventions—when at that time I had never even been to a convention. That annoyed me, so I made an ogre the protagonist of the next novel I wrote. That was Ogre, Ogre, and it became my first national New York Times bestseller. So I renamed the month it happened to OctOgre, 1982, and no longer objected to being called an ogre. The Oct is to show it’s the eighth month of the year, but remember, ogres are justifiably proud of their stupidity, so it may be off by a month or two. Ogres aren’t so bad when you get to know them. Now you know.

Enjoy the month and read my current Xanth novel, #45 A Tryst of Fate. I doubt you have seen one quite like this before. The protagonist, Squid, who is actually an alien cuttlefish tourist emulating a human girl so well she now identifies as human, learns that she has been brutally murdered on an alternate future Xanth time-line. With the help of a Demon she goes there, catches the killer, who is a vicious golem, and punishes him by making him become the protagonist, a position he must maintain until she forgives him for killing her. That’s one tall order. The rest of the novel is from his perspective, and it involves the secret life of cancer, romance with a woman who gets uglier every time she does her job, a Mundane nuclear crisis, an ancient dinosaur baby, and a BEM (Big-Eyed-Monster) king who likes grabbing attractive human women. By the end, not only is the golem reformed, he meets Squid again and dances with her. Now try to tell me this is a rehash of junk that bored you decades ago. If you can do that, you must be a Critic. They are so sharp they don’t even need to read Xanth to know that it is derivative dribble.

A current story I heard about is that there is a Xanth movie and TV series in the works. If there is, I know nothing about it. I think what happened is that in the past there have been plans like this, that then crashed. IMDB, the Internet Movie Data Base, had fabulous reports that if implemented could have put me in Stephen King territory. Would it were so, but alas, there is nothing. So don’t believe anything about me or my works that you don’t read here, and even then, be cautious. Yes, I am properly jealous of all the big deals that are going to other writers, while none have come my way, yet. When/if they do, I will let you know. Yes, I think that fabulous movies and series could be made from my books, ushering in a New Age of Filmdom, but I am not the one who generates them. I’m only a novelist. I don’t know why my works are being avoided. Maybe it is because I am competently represented, and mean to see that the terms are honored, and the movie powers that be don’t like that any better than the book publishers of yore did. I think there will eventually be a deal; I just hope it happens in my lifetime so I can enjoy it. I really don’t want to follow the course of Philip K Dick, a great and halfway crazy writer, who got really famous only after he died. That’s par for the course, but I will be annoyed if that happens to me. Too bad I don’t believe in ghosts, or I’d haunt up a storm. Maybe fans who do believe in spooks will do it on my behalf, when.

Meanwhile MaryLee and I have been married a year and five months, and we still feel like newlyweds. We’d like to get out and do things together, such as taking scenic train rides, but the deadly shadow of the Virus stifles that. So necessary things like doctor’s appointments and grocery shopping are about the limit. The visiting cows are still with us. I named them Cora and Clarabelle, the one with the horns. They are helping me keep our three quarter mile forest driveway clear of foliage. The summer monsoon season brought about 48 inches of rain to the tree farm, and the surrounding water rose up to about an inch from our driveway, but we haven’t flooded apart from temporary puddles. Then it abruptly stopped, the season ending early; but it will take months for the water to recede. And last time I mentioned returning to playing Free Cell, the best of card solitaire games. It diverts me from the stresses of the day and puts me in the mood for writing my novel, or letters, or this column. It also represents a kind of mental exercise, which is good for a person my age. At 87 I am verging on dotage; ask any critic. Most games are fun. But every so often I encounter a tough one, and that can hang me up indefinitely. I just can’t let it go un-won. Compulsive? You bet. I am surely on the autism spectrum, and this brings it out. I understand that there is now a movement to classify autism not as a mental aberration, but as a special type of intellect, as some famous folk are on it. Okay, I wouldn’t mind joining their fellowship.

Minor incident that happened in this time of column writing: when I returned from my morning exercise walk – I no longer run, as I tended to trip and fall on my face, which spoils my looks, such as they are – and went to weigh myself in the bathroom – yes, I track my weight, keeping on the lean side, for my health – I spied an inch or two thick ball of dust. I nudged it with my foot, and it moved. So I picked it up in a jar and put it into a plate of water beside the sunken garden. Sure enough, under that dust was a cute little green tree frog who must have strayed into the house and gotten dehydrated and shrouded in cobwebs and dust. What an ugly fate! It rested in the water for a while, recovering. Two hours later it was gone, so it must have improved enough to go looking for bugs to eat. I’m glad I was able to save it. I am a vegetarian, bordering on vegan, because I value life in most of its forms, mosquitoes and biting flies excepted. I trust the tree frog will go after them.

I dream, as far as I can tell, continuously when I sleep, but I seldom remember them. This is natural, because as I see it conscious experiences have to be analyzed, classified, cross-referenced, and filed in memory, and much of this is done in dreams. So putting dreams themselves in that hopper is ultimately self defeating; they are not meant to be remembered, as they are part of the memory process. But once in a while one tears loose and becomes memorable in its own right; then it is duly handled and stored for future reference. It’s sort of like a doctor getting sick and needing to get hospital care as a patient, which can be an eye-opener when they discover how it feels to get brushed off when you are in pain. That’s how reforms occur, and illnesses formerly dismissed as imaginary get taken seriously. I know, having after decades gotten my diagnosis and medication for low thyroid, no longer called fanciful. Our minds are ultimately practical as well as feeling, and that is as it should be, to make us human. In this dream MaryLee and I were traveling, so it must have been post-pandemic. We slept side by side on an airport couch, and woke to find the sun shining. It was time to catch our flight. But I needed to use the toilet, so MaryLee waited while I entered the unisex restroom complex. There were no markings on the doors, just complicated diagrams I couldn’t understand, so I guessed at the door and entered. The diagram that then appeared seemed to indicate I was heading for a bathtub, which wasn’t where I wanted to pee. Then another person joined me, and it didn’t seem to be MaryLee. “Are you someone I know, or a stranger?” I asked her. She indicated the latter. “I am unfamiliar with this complex, and may be going wrong,” I said. Then I woke and found myself beside MaryLee in real life. For some reason she didn’t remember the airport sequence. I hope the woman in my dream found what she was looking for, even if it was only a bath to pee in.

I handle my email by printing out incoming notes and letters, penning my answers on the printouts, then in due course transcribing those notes to the electronic form, sending them, and downloading the next incoming batch. Promotional material sometimes claims I receive hundreds of letters a day. Not so, though sometimes it feels like it as ads, bulletins, and phishing notices pile in. It’s more like ten actual letters on a typical day. When I go online it takes about a minute to connect. I am a workaholic; I can’t stand to twiddle my thumbs waiting that endless minute doing nothing. So since the email computer is in my library, I check my books in that section, and they can be interesting, as I wouldn’t have collected them otherwise, for example there’s Harold Lloyd’s Hollywood Nudes 3-D!, I bought in 2005 for about twelve and a half dollars. 150 pages of guess what, nude starlets in 2D and 3D. I think my favorite is Marilyn Monroe posing near a fountain in 1953, but there are plenty other bare beauties. Sometimes, would you believe, I even overran my minute. The book next to it is PLAYBOY 50 Years the Photographs. There are some nice nudes there too. My favorite may be a full breasted bare manikin with luxurious brown hair. The first thing I notice about a woman is her hair. Why these books are in the technology section I am not clear, but that’s the way the Library of Congress classified them, and I used that to organize my library. There are many other interesting books there, but I suspect they are of less interest to casual browsers than nudes are. Like health books, and for those who ignore them, Final Exit, about how to die when you choose, rather than when your money runs out at the hospital. If I learned that I was slated to die in pain or with my mind obliterated, after medical costs impoverished my family, and there was no way to avoid that fate, I would consider such a resource, the medical establishment to the contrary notwithstanding. I believe that every person should have the right to live a decent life, and end it cleanly when that makes sense. Is that really revolutionary? That’s why I hesitate to condemn the gun nuts, because a gun guarantees choice in death.

We have now completed the first draft of the serious geothermal novel Deep Well. At just over 40,000 words, it is short, but what counts is its impact on the reader. My agenda, as I have remarked before, is to help persuade the public that geothermal energy is the way to go for abating the disaster of fossil fuels and slowly healing the planet. We can save the world if we act now, but we won’t do it unless the public gets behind it and defies the special interests that are more interested in pollutive profits than public welfare. So there is an intense interpersonal story line, and technical material that I hope will be both accurate and understandable by the average reader. We’ll see.

The Equedia Letter comes to me unasked, and I treat it with caution, especially since they blew it on the Virus, supposing it was a temporary threat that would fade in a coupla months. That’s rightist propaganda, giving away their claim to objectivity. But they do have some interesting thoughts. 9-12-2021 starts “Everything they told you about gold and inflation is wrong.” They remind us how it is said that gold is the perfect hedge against inflation. That an ounce of gold will always buy you a decent suit, and this has been true for thousands of years. But. America used to peg the dollar to gold; you could always exchange your dollars for gold or silver at a fixed rate. But America’s gold reserves couldn’t keep up, and in 1971 President Nixon cut the tie. That gave inflation free rein. Gold went from $35 per ounce to $70, and then to $650. It peaked at over $2,000. Then crashed. Money is now controlled by the bankers and politicians, and the world is awash in debt. So maybe it makes sense to own some gold or other precious metals; I do. I like platinum; it’s a P metal, and I tend to identify with P things, because of my first name, Piers, which means rock. I like to think that my rock is a geode, dull on the outside but with fabulous crystals on the inside. Don’t trust gold or metals too far. They don’t pay interest, and you can’t eat them. Certainly don’t rely on the government to look out for your interest, financial or otherwise. Remember, you’re not a lord, but a peon. Maybe think of that as a pee-on. Now you know your place. That’s not necessarily golden rain sprinkling your head.

Clippings: newspaper article by Mac Stipanovich says that the Delta virus variant is derailing Florida Governor DeSantis’ agenda. He has been trying to be a Trump clone, hoping to run for president in due course, pretending the Virus is a bogus threat. He even forbade the schools to require masks. It is almost as if he wants to kill as many children as possible. Fortunately some school districts are defying him. A trial judge ruled that the governor exceeded his authority in this respect. So Florida may survive despite the governor, though in significantly worse state than would have been the case had common sense ruled throughout. New Scientist clipping I discovered when cleaning up dates back to May 2003, about sink holes. We do have them in Florida, including here on our tree farm. Most are slow, as ours are, but some are fast, swallowing cars, houses, or people. It is thought that sinkholes were the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. More recently the magazine reviews a film, Breaking Boundaries:The science of our planet, by John Clay. This explores the degradation of our world. We humans need to change our course now, before we make our home base unlivable. Denying that there is a problem won’t cut it any more. In the 19 June New Scientist, Giles Yeo addresses the trouble with calories. It has been thought that a calorie is a calorie regardless where it comes from, the amount of energy it takes to raise 1 liter of water by 1°C. Now we know that it is not as simple as that. It takes work to digest that calorie, and much of its energy is converted into heat. Proteins are less efficient in this sense than fats, so you’ll get fat slower on proteins. The same issue says the rival theory to Dark Matter, which is Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND, is failing a key test. Now I’m a fan of that other theory; I don’t believe that Dark Matter exists, and that’s why they are having so much trouble finding it. But this says that galactic evolution matches Dark Matter, not MOND. Sigh; I’d hate to see it lose out. But if they actually find a particle of Dark Matter, I will reluctantly acknowledge it. Item in THE WEEK for August 27 says they have discovered a 105 million year old fossil of a new species of pterosaur – you know, the flying reptile – in Queensland Australia. 23 foot wingspan, 40 razor teeth, a spear-like mouth, a virtual dragon. In the same issue, they may have discovered a stellar system with five planets only 35 light years from us. That’s practically next door, galactically. One of those worlds might be habitable, and have life. When we discover warp speed travel, maybe we should go take a look, and colonize it if it’s unoccupied. And a third item, saying that climate change has led to almost complete loss of stability in crucial Atlantic ocean currents that could ironically bring an ice age to Europe. They need the Gulf Stream, and that may falter. The Ask Marilyn column for 9-12-2021 mentions how to solve a traditional park sized maze: adhere to either the right or left wall, going where it takes you, and eventually you’ll reach the exit. Of course in fantasy that will take you by the Minotaur in the center, who will happily gore you to death, so be careful. Sunday newspaper item remarks that governments around the world are giving more aid funding fossil fuel projects than to programs to cut the air pollution they cause. This is of course folly. But governments tend to answer more to special interests than to the global welfare. That must change.

Clippings continued: local newspaper column by Amy Douglas of the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office says to beware of smishing. That is a vicious method scam artists use to gain access to your money. For example, a text message claiming that your debit card has been compromised or suspended. You must provide your card information in order for the card to be reactivated. Don’t do it. If you are concerned, call the card issuer, using the number on the back of the card, not the one provided by the fake notice. They’ll know how to handle it. Sunday supplement on tree houses, 9-12-2021, with a picture of the most elaborate one imaginable, a virtual three story castle in fairyland. Others have double beds, air conditioning, and a full kitchen, using several trees. Oh to be a child again! Newspaper article 9-15 in the Citrus Chronicle titled “How to spot signs of cyberbullying.” I essentially don’t go online except for email and haven’t encountered this personally, but I feel for the victims. I was small as a child; in fact when I graduated from ninth grade I was the shortest person in my class, male or female, so I got to know bullies from the underside. Actually it wasn’t so bad once I learned how to fight; I figured I could take any kid within ten pounds over my weight, and others soon enough verified this. But there were bigger boys than that. At any rate, today I don’t take much guff from bullies, as some publishers have discovered. But I still feel for the victims. It seems that today internet bullies send intimidating and/or threatening messages to victims, some of whom commit suicide as a result. Research has shown that a quick and consistent response to bullying is effective. Parents need to watch out for signs of depression or odd behavior in their children, and take what action they can. In my story “Picture” in Relationships 8, a mother enlists the help of a savvy neighbor boy to alleviate bullying on the school bus. He puts a pain hold on the bully while speaking gently to him, and that bully soon knows that he’d better get the message. The story is a shocker, but not for that reason. Read it and see. Newspaper cartoon 9-19-2021 shows two people gazing at a gravestone. “He died doing what he loved… not getting vaccinated.” Hey, it turns out that cows are as good at potty training as children. No, that doesn’t mean we mean to make Cora and Clarabelle house pets. Now Republican controlled states are curtailing local health powers, passing laws against mandating vaccination or masking. Are they absolutely crazy? Covid-19 deaths in America have now passed the total for the prior pandemic, the 1918-19 Spanish Flu. Is Thanatos, that is, Death, a Republican? A malicious TikTok fad has hit schools, encouraging kids to commit vandalism, mostly in restrooms, for bragging rights. Newspaper article 9-22-2021 describes how the hack of the favorite internet company of the right, Epik, which provides domain services for outfits like QAnon, Proud Boys, and other instigators of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, enabling them to broadcast hateful messages behind a veil of anonymity, are supported. I suspect this expose will be huge.

Clippings continued: Newspaper article by Jennifer Rubin titled “How Trump mobilized women – including me” says she had always voted Republican for president, but crossed party lines to vote for Hillary Clinton. Then watched in horror as the Republicans embraced a racist bully bent on undermining our democracy and promoting white Christians’ quest for political dominance. She saw conservative intellectuals wind up lauding a detestable figure who repudiated principles and positions that once animated them. She saw conservatives who demonized Bill Clinton swoon at the feet of a serial liar, adulterer, and racist whose cruelty became a central feature of his presidency. She says that at least Biden does not use the White House to enrich himself or punish enemies. Her top priorities remain the preservation of our democracy and reaffirmation of objective reality. What an indictment! Then “The Ugly Truth” by Richard T Hughs remarks on the less than glorious side of American history. As a teacher of honor students he thought that some of them would have heard of how after Pearl Harbor the federal government rounded up 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two thirds of them American citizens, and incarcerated them in relocation camps ringed with barbed wire and guarded by federal troops. Understand, these folk had committed no crime, other than of having Japanese ancestry. It has been called America’s darkest hour. It isn’t; even this teacher seems not to know of how close to a million disarmed German solders were systematically starved to death in internment camps after the war, as I show in the factual background for my novel Volk, which for some reason no publisher wanted. He asks “The question that begs for an answer is, why? Why such ferocious resistance to the truth?” He points out that we tell ourselves that the United States is nature’s nation, wholly innocent, tuning out things like the brutality of American slavery and the near extermination of the native people who lived here long before the Europeans arrived. He says that all Americans should tell the truth about race, our history, and ourselves. Amen! As a naturalized citizen I’d like to see America become as great as it thinks it is.

Clippings, continued. Couple political ones, newspaper 9-29,2021. One says the GOP must help on the debt debacle it helped create. Yes it should, but that would require some financial responsibility, and those words seem to be foreign to that party today. Another article says that Biden, our oldest president, may be considered interim, but he is in effect swinging for home runs in multiple areas, like giving nuclear powered submarine technology to Australia as a check on China’s growing navel power, helping Americans buy electric cars and build charging stations as a way of fighting climate change, going for high speed trains on heavily traveled routes, and trying to expand Medicare benefits and reduce prescription drug costs. More power to him! Also 9-29-2021 “Anatomy of an attack” exploring the devious ways a far-right militia group planned the violence of January 6; it seems it wasn’t mere happenstance. And back to New Scientist for 7-24-2021, article by Sapphire Lally titled “Where does gold come from?” No, not from Ft. Knox; where does it originate? Many elements are made in stars, but now it seems that it may date from the fiery demise of the universe’s first stars. But that doesn’t account for all of it. Hmm—could it predate the Big Bang? That would be weird. New Scientist for 6-26-2021, Ian Taylor says that magnetic fields dating back to that time would transform cosmology, and now astronomers think they are on the brink of such a discovery. I will be interested to see what develops there. There’s such a huge amount we don’t yet know about the universe. Even up close there are mysteries, such as red regions on planet Pluto they can’t explain. I hope I live to see the answers.

Until next time, those of you who remain awake. I am 40 magazines behind, and need to take few days between novels to catch up on them. There just might be something interesting there, no?

PIERS

NoRemember 2021

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This is the month of NoRemember, because it comes late in the year and dull-witted ogres like me have trouble remembering it. I think the Mundanes have another name, but that hardly matters, as only folk with some intelligence know it.

We completed Deep Well, a serious short novel of about 45,000 words whose purpose is to promote awareness of geothermal power as the most viable long-term replacement for the pollutive fossil fuels. Yes, solar, wind, and water power are good, and I support them and want to see them developed, but geothermal is better overall. Because the technical aspects are formidable, there is a strong personal plot line to hold the interest of the reader whose main concern is entertainment. In capsule, the geothermal specialist March, a smart and handsome man, is waiting in a college park for the office to open so that he can interview for the position of geothermal professor, when a trio of pretty college girls walks past. One is white, one is Black, and the third is Asian. The white girl, April, glances at March, and he falls instantly in love with her, per the song “There is a Lady.” Yes, he knows this is foolish, and he is not a foolish man, but somehow it happens. Surely something similar has happened to you on occasion. Only to discover later that she is lesbian, and can’t love him the same way. The other two make plays for him, trying to distract him from April, and he is sorely tempted, but April is the one he loves. He gets the job, and the three girls are in his class. Then it gets complicated, for they turn out to be far more than innocent coeds. They represent powerful families who seriously intend to change the world and have the connections to do it. March is to be their instrument, and he is wary of balking them, for good reason. But he can’t marry April, now that he knows, refusing to put her through that torture, though she is willing to suffer it for the sake of the important geothermal project. What to do? Well, you may consider reading the novel, when. There’s more than romance there.

Sometimes MaryLee and I feel a bit cursed. This month our land-line phone has been out, because the line through our tree farm is underground and heavy rains flooded surrounding areas. Most of the incoming calls were robo anyway. As I have said before, the authorities could stop that nuisance if they wanted to; why don’t they want to? So my main avenue of communication with my fans and business associates became email. Then our fire alarm system went wrong, constantly beeping though there is no fire and we replaced its batteries. So we are tuning it out, for now. Then the email computer, always balky, essentially turned itself off. So MaryLee called our geek, but his car was out of service, delaying him. So no email as I type this. Then last night there was a power blink that set all our clocks to blinking warningly. Yes, I can reset them, but it takes time and I know from past experience that doing that triggers another power blink. The curse, you know. Meanwhile MaryLee and I went grocery shopping, and when I backed slowly out of the parking spot, my eye glued to the reverse camera, bang! I collided with another vehicle. MaryLee was watching too, and didn’t see it either. Apparently there was a blind spot in the camera. Only a fender-bender, but that put us into the complications of notifying the police, who were busy elsewhere, and the insurance companies, who were on off-hours recordings. MaryLee is tackling it, so she’s the one going crazy at the moment instead of me. Did I mention the curse? As I have explained before, I write fantasy, I don’t believe it; I have no belief at all in the supernatural. That annoys it, and so it gets back at me, as this paragraph demonstrates. On our next grocery run MaryLee got out of the car to make sure there was nothing to bang into. Then on the way home a big beautiful sand hill crane was standing in the road as I rounded a curve; I swerved to avoid it, but then there was opposing traffic limiting my space. Then the bird took off, so there was no gory contact here. But obviously the curse was still trying. Our geek finally got here, and managed to download three days of email. Sure enough, there were communications from my Deep Wellcollaborator and my agent that needed attention. But the system still is not fully operative, and I can’t answer those emails yet. MaryLee used her Smartphone to contact my agent, but the other backlogged email is still waiting. I also have a novel to send to my proofreaders, but I can’t reach them. And my monthly end of the month Family Letter to my wider family; I can write it but not send it. Putting this HiPiers column online could get delayed, causing my fans to fear that I may have gone to boot the bucket in Xanth that says KICK MEE. Did I mention the curse? I wonder whether annoyed vampires go after horror writers, or ghosts haunt murder mystery writers, or amorous spirits try to break the hearts of romance writers? It might be part of a pattern I have been slow to perceive, being a stupid ogre.

I got some curious email before the machine quit. One routine letter I answered – and my answer bounced with the notice that I am blacklisted at that address. Oh? The site is <bl.spamcop.net>. Does anyone know anything about it? As a general rule I don’t like blacklisting, having been a victim of it in the 1980s. My impression is that it is generally the blacklisters who have the wrong of it. Certainly in my case thirty years ago I was being punished for being honest, and I don’t think any of those blacklisters have bragged about it since. So this has a smell. Another one was from RIGHTHWING.org, which claims to represent the majority interested in protecting truth, justice, and the American way. “We are the mortal enemy of misinformation, extremes, corruption, fake news, racial division, environmental assaults and the disarmament of Americans.” I was invited to claim my CVS gift. Thanks, no thanks, folk; my impression of the contemporary right wing is that it opposes these things, except for supporting the free availability of guns, so that the criminal carnage can continue. Why should the Virus get all the gory, I mean glory for the rampant death toll?

And a positive one: an Aussie fan, JJ TOKYO, clarified the mystery of Waltzing Matilda. Matilda is a nickname for a backpack. Waltzing in that age meant gypsy life on the road. So waltzing Matilda means hiking from one town to another, living out of a backpack. Thank you for that information! He also inquires whether I am suspicions of the covid vaccine; do I think this is part of some kind of global reset? No, but I might be a bit suspicious of the origin of covid-19, which the relevant governments seem to be concealing; but the vaccine, imperfect as it may be, is our best answer to the pandemic. I’ve had my first and second shots. My main suspicion is of the motives of those who openly refuse to get vaccinated or to wear masks in public, thus spreading the virus and causing many more deaths. They have a right to believe in global hoaxes and to do as they do, but when they actually attack those they see wearing masks they are impinging on the freedom of others, so apparently it is only their own destructive freedom they care about.

I have been discussing cryonics with correspondent “jt.” Cryonics has nothing to do with crying; it is the process of freezing ill folk so they can be stored indefinitely in a vault, until such time in the future as the cure for their illness exists, so they can be thawed, made well, and live out their full healthy lives. I am a skeptic about this, but there seem to be good answers. The article “Why Cryonics makes sense” by Tim Urban covers it in detail. The analogy drawn is that you get news that the plane you are on will crash in 15 minutes and everyone aboard will die. But it happens to have a shipment of parachutes. They are experimental and may not work. Do you gamble by using one, or stay with the plane and die for sure? Most folk would prefer to gamble. Now suppose the ailment you face is eventual death by old age. Maybe in the future they will conquer mortality. Do you gamble on cryonics to take you to that future? The article gives twelve steps, beginning that you choose your cryonics company, passing through #9 being revived, and concluding with #12 eventually die for real, because no one with any sense really wants to live forever. Life would at long last get intolerably boring, with everything worth doing long since done. I can go into the interesting discussion along the way if readers express interest. It is indeed something worth thinking about.

The Equedia Letter keeps coming. I keep thinking of horses, but that’s Equine with an “I.” The one for 10/3/2021 discusses “Live Commerce,” which is a system to buy directly from the farmer or manufacturer, cutting out the middleman. You see it on TV, click the buy button, and it will be delivered to you in hours. This system is spreading like wildfire in China and is coming to Europe and the world. Watch for it. 10/10/2021 says we may be on the brink of a global blackout as we run out of fossil fuels before renewable sources take over. They don’t seem to recognize that geothermal energy could suffice, if full effort were put into it NOW. The one for 10/17/2021 says that the world’s central banks are turning off the money taps, and how to invest to survive the coming fiscal squeeze. The one for 10/24/2021 says the world’s leaders have finally taken action, budgeting trillions of dollars to shift away from fossil fuels for good. Oh? In America President Biden may be trying, but he’s getting blocked in Congress on the grounds that it’s too expensive. Saving the world is too costly? But I still see no mention of geothermal energy, which makes me wonder whether the equines, I mean equedians, are serious or merely ignorant. Maybe they don’t have horse sense.

I have pretty much settled on Oatly as my choice of cowless milk. I like its taste, and I like its attitude. Here is a quote from one box: “The cold, hard world of customer feedback. ‘Stick to oat milk.’ We get it often. ‘Why don’t you just shut up about what you think and focus on your own products.’ Well, if your only reason for being is to make money for your shareholders, then that is a generic and safe strategy, but it is certainly not ours. If you want to build a better society for people and work to ensure the planet we live on continues to live past our limited time here, then it makes perfect sense to share what we think is important, like treating people equally and fairly, producing food that is nutritional and sustainable, and opting for plants over animals as a source of nourishment. If that’s not something you are into, that’s okay. Freedom is such a wonderful thing.” There are other thoughtful messages on other cartons, as well as coloring pictures, songs, and even humor. Plus The Boring Side, giving the required nutritional statistics. If these people weren’t into safely feeding folk, they might have become silly fantasy writers. I will let them be, not wanting the competition.

And on into the boring side, I mean the clippings and fellow travelers. I received a solicitation to sign up for life insurance that covers funeral costs, addressed to Jacob Piers. “Dear Jacob, our records indicate that you are between the ages of 50 and 85.” Maybe mister Piers would be interested, but I am already 87 and not getting younger, as far as I can tell, not having gone the cryogenic route. So their records don’t impress me much. A newspaper item lists the top ten states for Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) enrollment. Florida is #1 with 2,120,350. California is second, with 1,625,546, and Texas is third with 1,291,972. The Republicans have been striving mightily to abolish Obamacare, but haven’t succeeded. Yet. They really seem to hate anything that helps the common man. Item in THE WEEK for 10-29-2021 says there are strange signals in the Milky Way galaxy. Is it a new class of stellar object? As an SF writer (I started in science fiction, eons ago) I have a suggestion: it’s an alien culture trying to get our attention. Maybe they are advising us to get the Hades off fossil fuels and quit overpopulating our limited world, if we ever hope to join their more enlightened culture. But we are of course tuning them out. Fake news, you know. The same issue has a discussion of “gender dysphoria,” which is the psychological distress people suffer when their biological sex doesn’t match their gender identity. You know, she’s trapped in a male body, or he in a female body. How would you like to be caught that way? A generous half a percent of Americans suffer that. Recent statistics indicate that in 2008 one in 2,000 boys were brought up as girls, and that number soared to 1 in 20 now. That’s a hundredfold increase. Some doctors are afraid to mention the subject because of the ferocity of the backlash from LGBTQ activists. I appreciate the sensitivity. I am a man who loves the look and feel of women, but that doesn’t mean I want to be one. The Hightower Lowdown issue for September 2021 discusses the state of unions in America. The media tend to ignore it, but unionism is rising. I approve; I think the increase in poverty is largely because the bosses succeeded in reducing the power of the unions so they could suppress wages and get more money for themselves. Yes, there can be corruption in unions, but the answer is to clean it up, not to abolish unions. Now, with as many as four million workers a month quitting their jobs, maybe they will gain some respect. I remember how in the 1950s when I learned that I was being paid about 45 cents an hour as a restaurant worker, I quit. Wouldn’t you? Sure there are minimum wage laws, but somehow they don’t always seem to apply to the jobs a person can actually get. Newspaper article about the worst slaughter of Native Americans by US soldiers, the Bear River Massacre of 1863. You don’t see that mentioned much in the media. Americans want to believe that America is and always was perfect. Would it were so. October 6 item in the newspaper says that a Facebook whistle-blower warns about the risk to kids, as the company prioritizes profits over safety. More government overrsight is needed there. Newspaper article October 10 about The Villages, Florida’s monstrous retirement community, with about 79,000 residents. It seems they don’t like seeing folk under age 55 on their premises. Review of a book The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty First Century, by Amia Srinivasan. “The chasm between what we say and what we do has always made sex an irresistible topic.” It covers issues surrounding consent, pornography, and the #MeToo movement. This looks like a book I’d like to read, if I had time for reading books. Astrophysicists have discovered an abundance of large organic molecules in the Milky Way. Maybe life exists elsewhere in the galaxy. To which I respond Duh! Of course it exists. We just don’t yet know its form. I’m on the mailing list of SPLC, The Southern Poverty Law Center. They even send me re-subscription notices, though I never subscribed. They track hate groups and bigotry, and there’s a lot of it. “The recent attempts to censor what educators can teach about race and racism threaten students’ right to high-quality education.” “We are seeing teachers across Florida and the country who are facing persecution from their school districts for teaching the truth in schools and for creating safe leaning spaces for all children.” As a former Florida school teacher, I approve SPLC’s effort. Item in THE WEEK for 10-15-21 lists the Innovation of the Week: an 11 foot tall 3D printer that builds objects layer by layer from a digital file. In this case it pours “lavacrete, a proprietary concrete mix” in-long swirls “like a massive soft serve ice cream cone.” It is printing new homes on site in Mexico. Same issue has a note on a planet orbiting three stars. Now that’s one ambitious planet! It seems that the pandemic is causing folk increasingly to drink alcohol alone to numb anxiety and loneliness. I have never been much tempted by drinking, as I value the clarity of my mind, but I appreciate the perils of living alone. That’s why I sought a companion, when I was widowered. Newspaper article 10-17 titled “Our Constitutional Crisis is Already Here,” about the threat to our democracy represented by Donald Trump. It’s scary. He plans to run again for president in 2024, this time with laws in Republican states that effectively disenfranchise opposing voters and maybe exclude as fraudulent any Democrat votes. They are weeding out honest officials who prevented this from happening in 2020. “Many conservatives have revealed a hostility to core American beliefs.” Yes, as I have remarked before, conservatism is not what it used to be. It has become a monster. Perhaps related, Trump is going to roll out a new media venture to challenge the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Disney that barred him from lying on their platforms. We’ll see how TMTG, the Trump Media & Technology Group, fares. The local newspaper ran a chronic ad for Diva Night, with the silhouette of a young woman with a bright star on her bottom, as if she is breaking wind. That must have been some event! Rich folk are infamous for hiding their wealth out of the country, to avoid taxes. Now a trove of documents known as the Pandora Papers have been leaked, showing how some of the world’s richest people are hiding their fortunes in secretive trusts in South Dakota, about $360 billion. Maybe the tax folk should have been looking closer to home. There is a rising number of “deaths of despair” in the USA. My guess is it’s a side effect of the pandemic. I hate being besieged by the Virus. It prevented MaryLee and me from having our honeymoon, for one thing. The global death toll has now passed five million.

I was 50 magazines behind on my reading. As I completed Deep Well I took time off before starting Xanth #48 Three Ugly Nymphs, and tackled that backlog. Then the Curse took hold, messing things up, but I have gone through 20 older magazines and maybe next column will remark on items of interest there. Can’t do it now, having found a window of opportunity to get this colum placed. Quick, before the curse strikes again.

PIERS

2021 Dismember

HI-

Doug Harter reports that the Xanth Character database has been updated through #45 A Tryst of Fate. In my senescence I don’t keep properly up with such listings, and depend on the excellent volunteer labor of fans like him. Xanth has so many characters now that I have to use the database myself to identify ones I’ve forgotten.

Lawrence Millman, a contributing editor of the magazine FUNGI, has been interviewing me for an article. His attention was attracted by my novel Omnivore, which features the manta, an alien species representing the third kingdom in the form of advanced slime mold which resembles Earth’s variety in the manner the human being resembles an amoeba. That is, slightly more advanced. There is the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the fungus kingdom, and perhaps others like the bacteria and viruses. Here on Earth we see only the more primitive forms of life, but the manta are advanced mobile one footed sapient creatures who vaguely resemble the ocean manta ray of Earth. But they run on land or water, seeming to float. Therein lies a story, which you can read in the novel. Lawrence wondered how I came to orient on the fungi. Well, my grandfather Edward H Jacob was known in the 1920s as The Mushroom King, because of the success of the Jacob Mushroom brand of edible mushrooms he started. He sold out his business two weeks before the Crash of 1929. I’m not sure whether he was astute or lucky. At any rate, his fortune paid for much of the education of his children and grandchildren, including me. So I felt I owed something to mushrooms, and gave them a place in my novel.

FUNGI magazine is impressive. You might in your ignorance suppose it would be dull and slimy, but this is hardly the case. The Fall 2021 issue has informed articles about the subject, and beautiful pictures. Earth may be backward compared to the planet of the manta, but there’s, well, a whole kingdom there to admire. Some fungi look like flowers, which actually they are, in their fashion. That is, flowers are the naked reproductive organs of plants that the purists for some reason don’t freak out about, and most of the mushrooms we see are actually the fruiting organs of the greater masses underground. Unlike plants, they can grow without light. There are pages of spectacular fungi, some the familiar toadstools, others like colonies of, well fungi. Some are like colorful paintings. The cover features Threats to Fungi (and all Life). Indeed, the fungi are a rich part of life on our planet, and what might wipe them out would surely wipe out the other forms. I, for one, suspect that fungi could represent the salvation of the world by providing versatile food emulating the meat and potatoes we currently eat, without savaging nature or cruelly sacrificing innocent animals. So yes, we should pay more attention to the third kingdom. There are recipes, and articles, among them one indicating that Covid-19 makes some patients more vulnerable to fungal infections. Another suggests that fungi could be the answer to the problem of accumulating waste plastics. So there’s plenty here of interest to those who care about their own health and that of the world. I don’t find a website, but there’s an ad forfungimag.com/store to check the book Amanitas of North America. Maybe the site before /store is it.

The Equedia Letter keeps coming. I never subscribed to it, and am cynical about both its competence and its ultimate purpose, as I tend leftist while it tends rightist, but there are items of interest. For example, the issue for November 28, 2021, explores the bypaths of the Federal Reserve, otherwise known as the Fed, whose mission is to ensure price stability, holding inflation to two percent, and to enable the highest feasible rate of employment. Equedia views this with suspicion, saying that those who opposed it, like Lincoln and Kennedy, got assassinated. Maybe, but the implication is suspect. It is like saying that if you burp, the sun will rise tomorrow. True, but not cause and effect. So read with caution; implication is not fact. Congress wanted financial stability, so created the Fed in 1913, and it has had its impact ever since, doing its best to maintain a level field. There seem to be those who don’t like that.

Nicholas Young and I completed the collaborative novel Deep Well at 45,000 words and it is now being marketed. Its thesis is that geothermal power is the most feasible present answer to the devastation being caused by the use of fossil fuels, which includes global warming that is disrupting plant and animal cycles, and the rise of the oceans. Literally saving the world. I hope we succeed. I will be starting Xanth #48, Three Ugly Nymphs, soon, escaping for a while into the frivolous realm of fantasy. Meanwhile the huge nonfiction book Hilltop Farm, by Piers Anthony Jacob and Teresa Jacob Engeman, brother and sister, is being self published at last. We tried over a hundred traditional publishers, literally, and none wanted it, but we feel it deserves to be made available for readers whose interest goes beyond who fights or sleeps or laughs with whom. It consists mainly of the wide correspondence of Alfred and Norma Jacob, 1941 – 1945, as they set up a pacifist back-to-the-earth communal farm. In the background was the idea that World War II was apt to destroy civilization – that might indeed have happened if Nazi Germany had gotten the atomic bomb before America did – and the world would revert to barbarism. Trained, informed people would be needed to bring survival skills like farming and animal husbandry back. So Hilltop Farm was somewhat isolated from the mundane realm, but it was for the purpose of preserving the best of society from destruction. Fortunately civilization did not collapse, but unfortunately inner tensions caused the project to collapse. Today, over three quarters of a century later, only two participants survive: the children, now octogenarians. We really did not contribute at the time, but we remember. If the perils of Utopian dreams interests you, do a search for Hilltop Farm. It’s a big, beautiful book, and there are truths there you won’t find in funny fantasy.

More than two years have now passed since my long term wife Carol Ann Marble, Cam to her friends, died. I am happily remarried to MaryLee, and life with her is hardly dull, but I do still miss Cam as I encounter her things around the house and handle the myriad catalogs and solicitations that still come to her name. Also the endless email she used to process. They say you don’t get over such grief; you learn to live with it. That’s true for me. Sometimes I wonder what Cam would have thought of the Covid-19 pandemic, the January 6 attempted insurrection, and the general state of the world. Perhaps her departure was well timed, sparing her those.

THE WEEK for September 24 had an article on abortion: is the end of Roe v. Wade coming? So-called conservatives have stacked the Supreme Court, and there is an abortion case coming. I don’t like abortions, having suffered the loss of our first three babies technically by abortion though it was never our choice. There was a septum in her uterus that forced premature expulsion. I never liked the notion of a living human being of any age being killed. But the antiabortionists don’t seem to care about the welfare of the babies, only punishing the mothers for the sin of having sex, though of course they don’t put it that way. I approve contraception; they generally don’t. I approve providing monetary assistance for impoverished mothers; they don’t. Forbidding abortion doesn’t stop it, it just sends the desperate mothers to the illegal providers, with a high rate of maternal death. So stifling legal abortions makes sense only as punishment. The story is that the anc>ient> Hebrews discovered that they were losing believers to the neighboring temples that offered free sex with luscious priestesses to converts. Hard to compete with that! So they made sex itself a sin, and that carries through to today though they don’t admit it. It’s a religious ban, and doesn’t belong in a secular society. Newspaper column by Caitlin Myers says that restricting abortion access restricts women’s lives, with average child care costs of $10,400 per year for an infant. About one in four women will obtain an abortion in her lifetime. She concludes “Whatever one personally thinks about abortion, it is absurd to suggest Roe could be overturned without drastic consequences.” Ah, but sin must be punished, no? Especially when the woman is poor. This should be interesting and ugly as it plays out.

Dateless printout I discovered when cleaning up some of the piled papers that magically accumulate wherever I pause, like an endless snowfall. A poem by Chris Upward, “The Classic Concordance of Cacographic Chaos.” It starts “Dearest creature in creation/ Studying English pronunciation,/ I will teach you in my verse/ Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.” As you can appreciate if you speak English, those four similar spellings have four different pronunciations. It continues for over five pages of examples. “Does” has an asterisk saying “No, you’re wrong. This is the plural of doe.” The long poem concludes “Finally, which rhymes with enough, Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough?? My advice is: GIVE IT UP!”

Letter received without a return address on the envelope, only the words TIME SENSITIVE: RESPONSE REQUESTED IN 7 DAYS. Those are not good signs. Sure enough, it was a push poll, the kind designed to use prejudicial language to evoke particular answers so they can claim that most respondents agree with their stance. So here is a sampling, together with my push poll reactions. Question #1. “Have you seen the impact of Joe Biden’s inflationary policies on the price of gas, food, housing, or other goods and services in your area?” I remember when Barack Obama came in and spent big money to pull the country out of the abyss it was plunging into because of Republican mismanagement, and of course the Republicans blamed him for the crisis they had caused. Now President Biden is trying to save the country from the disastrous Trump mismanagement, and getting blamed. Question #2. “Do you believe the liberals defied science and went too far locking down many parts of America and killing jobs during the pandemic?” Oh, you mean the pandemic that Trump loosed upon the country by pretending it was fake news, so that it was infinitely more widespread and deadly than it should have been? And you still object to measures to diminish it? Question #3. “Do you support the radical Left’s efforts to bring Big-Government Socialism to America?” You mean the trillion dollar bills to create jobs and repair our deteriorating infrastructure, thus benefiting the common man? That effort really gags you, doesn’t it. And so on. Question #14. “Do you support Republican priorities including free markets, individual liberty, fair trade agreements, job creation, a strong military, and secure borders?” Oh, like drastically cutting taxes on the rich, or taking away the children of families fleeing persecution in their own countries? The “Survey” concludes of course with a solicitation for $3,000 or less. No, I did not fill it out, suspecting that my response would be burned before reading. I’m a liberal immigrant who identifies with the lowly common man, in case you haven’t yet caught on.

Now clippings, then back magazines, a related region. Newspaper item on a local woman who entered a residence, took off her clothes, and proceeded to hug, grab and sit on the laps of the men there. She refused to stop, and got arrested. Sigh; too bad they didn’t have a news camera there, so we could all see it and judge her mental state for ourselves. Newspaper headline “How to avoid buying a house that might be haunted.” One indication is if a death occurred there. My wife Cam died here, so maybe this house is haunted. I love ghosts, but I have no belief in them. The Hightower Lowdown for November 2021 remarks on cultured meat. Not the plant based variety, but the lab grown stuff deriving from actually living cells. I admit that that makes me queasy. I’m a vegetarian verging on vegan, and meat from living but non-sentient flesh is ugly borderline. Sure, no live cows are carcassed, but… The same issue introduces me to a new word: monopsony. That looks like a typo for monopoly, but it’s sort of the reverse. Monopoly is the control of the sale of products by a very few corporations; monopsony is the control of the purchasing of products or services offered by many, like the way many farmers have very limited markets. Neither situation is much good for the welfare of the common man. More from the box of Oatly oat milk: “Another side of our packaging providing no reason at all why you should try this product.” I disagree; their humor is a reason. They do seem like my kind of folk, meatless and halfway mad. From THE WEEK: the Justice Department is suing to stop the publishing merger of Penguin Random House acquiring Simon & Schuster for $2.18 billion. That makes sense to me, as a writer, though I have real respect for Penguin Random House, having worked with them as a writer and an investor in the early self publisher Xlibris. The income of the average professional writer is at poverty level, because publishers have the leverage. I escaped that, but mainly by luck; the system itself is ugly. The arts, including writing, are largely controlled by the mercenary interests, an ill state for creativity. Also THE WEEK: the Delta variant of Covid-19 is sinking hopes for a quick economic recovery. Yes, and now there is another variant spreading, OmiGod, um, I mean omicron, and we don’t yet know if the existing vaccines cover it, but there is doubt. Cute cartoon in the newspaper showing the baby next year arriving, in the form of a little death skeleton with a scythe labeled omicron. There’s a new kind of house arriving at Citrus County, and I assume elsewhere: the container home. You know the shipping containers they use for national and international goods? Put two of them together to make a residential house at maybe half the price. Looks somewhat like a house trailer, outside and inside, not beautiful, but practical. I understand the average family can no longer afford the price of an average house. Maybe this can ameliorate that. Question in NEW SCIENTIST: How does a photon know to travel at the speed of light? Answers vary, but one is that since the photon is light, it travels at its own speed. Another is that what we call a photon is actually an interaction of magnetic fields. Between those interactions, photons don’t exist. Which makes me wonder how a nonexistent thing can travel. Comment in THE WEEK that as gas prices rise, electric vehicles become more appealing. Indeed; at such time as recharging stations are common, I’ll be really interested. SCIENCE NEWS ponders the demotion of Pluto as a planet. Yes, it orbits the sun, it has several moons, it has weather of a sort; what more is needed? Of course I am biased in favor of P planets, aligning with my first name. THE WEEK remarks on the new James Webb Space Telescope will be a hundred times as powerful as the Hubble. It will peer at the edge of the universe. I really look forward to what it will show. THE WEEK also says that in 1909 the top ten percent owned 60 percent of the country’s wealth. Now it owns 70 percent. Any attempt to make the rich pay more is stifled in Congress. Is anyone surprised? Money talks, politically. PARADE says that people who exercise regularly usually sleep well. Yes, I do, and do. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a 10,000 mile wide storm the planet Earth could fit into, is between 200 and 300 miles deep. That’s actually pretty shallow. Imagine a puddle 10 feet across and three inches deep. That’s the shape of it. Iceland is getting serious about scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere. But to do the whole job would cost five trillion dollars a year. You’d have to burn a lot of coal to finance that effort. Better simply to cut carbon emissions, via conversion to geothermal power. What is a metaverse? NEW SCIENTIST says it’s a shared online space that incorporates 3D graphics, either on a screen or in virtual reality. Now there is a metaverse called OASIS. This promises to be entertaining, as technology advances to enable it. I fear I would be a sucker for it, and my writing would suffer. I’m sure I’ll like Star Trek: Lower Decks at such time as I catch up with it, too. NEW SCIENTIST also had a feature on what the world will look like when we’ve taken the steps needed to limit global warming. This is set in the year 2050. It predicts a big shift toward plant-based diets, but not quite vegan. Which is exactly where I am now. That may be just as well, as I’m not sure I will live to 2050. I’d be 116 years old. And one on consciousness, one of my buttons. “Without it, there is no world, no self, no interior and no exterior. There is nothing at all.” But the article doesn’t really define consciousness. Ever thus. It seems that telling the truth can be a firing offense. A Georgetown University law professor was terminated for musing out loud that many of her Black students tended to have the lowest grades, not the only one let go. Such folk get attacked as racist for saying the obvious. Maybe that’s easier than tackling the problem of inferior treatment of Blacks throughout so that they are ill prepared to compete with privileged whites. I’m white, but I got a good taste of second class treatment in schools, being a foreigner learning the American culture, and poor, thus excluded from the rich kid perquisites. I did not shine in school, but did enormously better when I got free of that system, as some may have noticed. A letter in the newspaper recommends the Fair Tax system. That’s a new one to me. I tend to favor the Flat Tax, which requires everyone, rich and poor, to pay the same rate, but maybe the Fair Tax, which is not an income tax but a consumption tax, is better. I will ponder. A new video, the Tampa Baes, is an unscripted documentary about twelve local lesbians. As a heterosexual male I like their look and wish them well; they are as entitled to their orientation as I am to mine. After all, we both like the look and feel of women. But one caution: I understand the word “bae” is Danish for poop. Yet in my day poop was also a word for truth, to get the real poop. A different slant: in the Dear Abby column for 10-13-2021 a Scotsman who often wore the traditional skirt-like kilt had complications. Women would lift his kilt, exposing him. Some would scream with glee and become physically aggressive with their hands. Once one ripped off the kilt, and the police were going to charge him with indecent exposure. What? I trust that the Baes would agree with me that this was wrong. Women don’t like men ripping off their clothing; they should return the favor. The State of Florida seems to have a poor notion of the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech. When Florida restricted the right of minorities, seniors, and the poor to vote, the League of Women Voters sued. Three University of Florida professors were going to testify as expert witnesses, but the University forbade it. What? There’s going to be a reckoning. Florida was still part of America the last I heard. Let’s act like it. Climate change: I learned from a newspaper article that peat when burned is a bad polluter. It stores as much as 30% of all the carbon locked in the soil, and burning releases it. Leave it in the bog! The Annie offers advice column for August 5, 2021 (yes, it must have gotten lost in my papers for a while) remarks on a useful word, “Frenemy.” That’s when a persona who is supposedly your friend torpedoes you in public. “Wow! You have a big nose.” This is called shaming, and it is a form of bullying. I am agnostic, but I would say that your nose is the size God made it. I believe Jesus would agree.

I mentioned before that I read educational magazines, but distractions following the death of my first wife Carol caused me to get about 50 magazines behind. Now I am working on that backlog, and have cut it down to about 20. I have set myself the task of getting it down to zero before I start writing my next Xanth novel. This is my discipline; unlike other writers, I don’t have to force myself to write, I have to force myself to NOT write in order to do other necessary things. They are all good magazines, or I would not subscribe to them. Here is some comment on what I am finding there.

One is FREE INQUIRY, representing the secular, that is, nonreligious side of Humanism. “We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.” “We are committed to the separation of church and state.” “We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health care, and to die with dignity.” “We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility.” “We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.” “We are engaged to the arts no less than by the sciences.” There is more, but this provides a basis that indicates why I, as an artist with words with an active interest in science, am a humanist. Also: “For many, mere atheism (the absence of belief in gods and the supernatural) or agnosticism (the view that such questions cannot be answered) aren’t enough. It’s liberating to recognize that supernatural beings are human creations … that there’s no such thing as ‘spirit’ or transcendence’ … that people are undesigned, unintended, and responsible for themselves. But what’s next?” “Secular. Pertaining to the world or things not spiritual or sacred.” “Humanism. Any system of thought or action concerned with the interests or ideals of people. … the intellectual and cultural movement … characterized by an emphasis on human interests rather than … religion.” Again, there is more, but you get the idea.

Another is The HUMANIST. “Humanism is a rational philosophy informed by science, guided by reason, inspired by art, and motivated by compassion.” I love science and reason and the arts, and yes, I believe we should practice compassion. I tend more to secular humanism because I am not religious, but I do not condemn religion. I was after all married for 63 years to a Unitarian-Universalist minister’s daughter. Another is THE PROGRESSIVE, a leftist magazine, celebrating 111 years of continuous publication. The February/March 2020 issue says to prepare for the upcoming civil war. Yes, in the intervening time we have been seeing it, as the rightists try valiantly to destroy democracy. Articles here are titled “Pass Medicare for all – and More” “Build a Fairer Economy” “Build Infrastructure for the Future” “Hold Wall Street Accountable” with a picture of a girl blocking the way of a charging bull; I’m a bit concerned for her welfare. “Take on Corporate Power in Agriculture” “Push for Racial Justice Beyond Race Alone” and “Protect and Empower the LGBTQ Community.” Generally in my ballpark.

I ran out of time before really getting into the magazines. Ever thus. But as you should be able to see, there is real substance there. Some of their articles I found mind shaking. I will cover them next time, if the world doesn’t spin out of place. Meanwhile my life proceeds in its petty pace. For example, I was driving out to fetch mail and close the gate when there was a bump! as if the car had hit a passing stone. I stopped and walked back to assess the damage, if any, but there was nothing. Then I saw a deer lying on its side in the adjacent brush, kicking its legs. Uh-oh; it must have been spooked and jumped in the wrong direction as the car passed, colliding with it near the back. I hoped the deer was merely fallen and not hurt. So I resumed driving, praying that when I returned a few minutes later the deer would be safely gone. And to my huge relief, it was.

PIERS

Jamboree 2022

HI-

This the month when folk are huddling out of the cold, so for the ogres it’s jamboree time. They love the weather normal people hate. As my fans know, I adopted the ogre persona when I was accused of being an ogre at fan conventions, when I had never ever been to one. So I made an ogre the hero of the next novel I wrote, Ogre, Ogre, and that became my first national bestseller. Ogres are justifiably proud of their stupidity, as is surely evident in these HiPiers columns. No, the ogresses are not forgotten; they are proud of their ugliness. The smile of an ogress can curdle milk. Once there was an actress who was assigned to play the role of an ogress. That was a challenge, but she rose to it. She was a good actress. A very good actress. A very, very good actress. Her smile could curdle water.

I took a break between novels, something I don’t like to do, and caught up on the myriad back issues of the magazines I subscribe to. I also caught up on backlogged letters I owed. MaryLee and I started watching TV series and movies. Yes, even those had been squeezed out, along with my book reading. We’ve been busy. Two years after my wife Carol’s death we’re still figuring matters out, because she handled things like email and accounts. I can find it challenging. For example, last month I got a notice that my email storage was full. I figured it was fake news, because I don’t store email, I sort it, ditch the myriad ads, and answer the legitimate mail. Then my email stopped. As far as I can ascertain, while the bleeping program was refusing to send me my email, it piled up in storage until it started bouncing letters back to the senders. There would have been no problem if it had just not interfered with normal transmission. My HiPiers column was delayed, again, until our geek came and found a way to clean out the stacked storage. Then at last service was restored. I don’t know how Carol handled such stunts, but it’s learning curve for me that I think will result in my changing my system to one that actually performs as it’s supposed to. I am tired of having my email server pick and choose which of my letters it will send or receive. I don’t like having to bypass it by asking my wife to use her smartphone to relay important news to my agent. I feel that I should be the one who decides. Yes, I come from another century and don’t properly understand all the ways of this one. Maybe natives of this century are more tolerant of self-willed technology than I am. So be it. I write about independent minded robots in my science fiction, but don’t want them in my computer.

MaryLee and I watched the first two episodes of The Wheel of Time. I have to say that while it has beautiful background scenery and lots of violence, the main story line seems yet to have taken hold. For me, the story is what counts. We’ll match more, in due course, hoping for the best. Meanwhile we watched a movie, The Little Prince. I remember the book from my childhood, a marvelous story of childhood wonder. Remember how the boy drew a terrifying picture of a boa constrictor who had swallowed an elephant? But to others it just looked like a hat. Adults can be marvels of unimagination. I tried to hold on to mine when I grew up, as perhaps my career shows. The movie puts it into a larger story and I think does a wonderful job. This is animation, and the characters are obviously mocked up in their faces, with no attempt to make them look real. But the bodies are more realistic, with the men being lean sometimes to the point of emaciation, and one woman, the little girl’s mother, having a marvelously shapely and sexy figure, especially when she is walking away from the camera. The larger story is how The Little Girl – if she is named, I didn’t catch it – needs to be prepared for the demanding real world, and her mother is determined to get her there by hook or crook. But the child is more interested in being a child. A friendly neighbor man, a former aviator, takes her to the fantasy world where she meets The Little Prince. They both run afoul of sometimes cruel adults, and have trouble figuring things out. It does make you wonder why adults are so determined to make children become as hidebound as they are. It also reminds me of a plaque I bought to share with MaryLee, personalized to us: “It doesn’t matter/ where you go in life…/ what you do…/ or how much you have…/ it’s who you have beside you.” Oh, my, yes!

We watched Sing, an animated movie MaryLee gave me for my birthday several months ago. Did I mention how we got behind on things? Buster Moon sets up for a great singing competition, the winning prize being $1,000 that oops gets typoed as $100,000. Naturally it brings in many entrants. Knowing he can’t pay the prize they expect, Buster arranges to have the theater wash out, literally, and returns to his day job, washing cars. But the dream has taken hold, and he and the contestants manage to assemble a temporary theater. The characters are parodies of many animals, but the singing is real, and individual performers rise to the occasion. For example, one is an elephant girl who longs to sing but gets obliterating stage fright in public. Buster persuades her to tune out the world and sing for herself, and when she does she soon carries the whole audience with her. The show is a wonderful success, and an investor buys it and it will be a regular thing. Sure, this is formula, but formulas exist because they work, and this works. it’s a lot of fun, and I recommend it.

We watched Mrs. Doubtfire, wherein Robin Williams goes drag in order to be with his children. He loves his three children and they love him, but insensitive judges separate them when his wife files for divorce. Naturally things go wrong, such as his (her) blouse catching fire and unavoidable schedule conflicts. Hilarious misadventures, but all ends halfway well when the pretty wife, Sally Field, relents and lets him have daily time with them. The thing is, way back when as correspondents, MaryLee and I discussed movies and it seemed that our tastes were opposite. So we started exchanging movies to see if there was any overlap in the center, like maybe ten or fifteen percent. There turned out to be more than that, more like eighty five to ninety percent. Our acquaintance grew. So now we like to watch movies side by side, as in a manner they brought us together. Romantic, no? Yes we hold hands and cuddle. How else should a movie be appreciated? Sure, I looked more closely at Sally Field and MaryLee looked at Pierce Brosman, a former James Bond, who played Sally’s new boyfriend, that Robin did his best to torpedo. Overall, a fun movie, with some serious undercurrents.

MaryLee and I had a quiet Christmas day alone together. We’ve been married 20 months, but this is still romantic, apart from trying to avoid the siege of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. We exchanged gifts and had a pizza for dinner, not bothering with the usual holiday accessories. As the plaque put it, it’s who you have beside you. I will mention two gifts I got myself. One is a gaudy watch/stopwatch made by Smith & Wesson. Yes, the gun maker. Maybe that’s what intrigued me about it. Will watch makers start making guns now? I haven’t yet figured out all its settings – 21^st century tech, you know – but it’s fun. Which is really the point, no? Fun foolishness. I also got a couple of those bent nail puzzles. The trick is to get the nails apart, not nearly as easy as it might look. One I was familiar with and solved, but while I worked the other several times, I had yet to figure out exactly how I did it. Each time I was trying random moves, and suddenly discovered I had done it, but was unable to reverse course to return it to its original state. I wonder whether that is an analogy of life? However, on the last day of the year I finally managed to truly solve it; now I can get those nails apart or together in seconds, anytime. That’s a great satisfaction.

I had a spot of face surgery. No, not to conceal it, as critics might suppose. There was a brownish patch on my left cheek that seemed to be expanding. I am nervous about expanding patches ever since my daughter Penelope had one that led to her death from melanoma in 2009. So the doctor removed it, and the biopsy showed it was harmless, so I’m home free, as it were. Sorry, critics. The stitches are out and my face is minus a blemish.

I finally caught up on those 50 back magazines. I won’t go into every detail of all of them, but will share the highlights with you, in imperfect order. FREE INQUIRY for August / September 2021 has an op-ed by editor Tom Flynn “Will World Population Drop Far Enough, Fast Enough?” He says that the optimum may be something like the numbers we passed around 1950: a world population of about 2.5 billion, which is 40 percent of the present 6.4 billion, and a US population of 150 million, instead of the present 293 millon. Others feel that even this is too high. I agree emphatically. There is indication that fertility decline will be obvious by 2050, but do we have that much time? One estimate is that by 2100 three in four people will face the threat of dying from heat unless greenhouse emissions are sharply curtailed. Yes. That’s one reason my novel Deep Well pushes nonpolluting geothermal power to replace fossil fuels. That’s hardly the only threat to the world as we know it, but it’s a good starting point. Also in that issue is an article by Brian Bolton titled “Jefferson, Jesus, and Slavery.” I learned to my surprise that Jesus never condemned or even criticized slavery, thus tacitly endorsing the practice. He even recommended whipping disobedient slaves. Paul and Peter also endorsed it. President Jefferson has been criticized for admiring Jesus’s morals while holding slaves himself, but it seems he was consistent with his times and Jesus’s times. And an article titled “Go to Hell,” by Gary Shugar, which suggests that when someone tells you to go to Hell, thank him. If you displease God and get sent to Hell, Satan will probably be nice to you, just to piss God off. If you had stayed in Heaven you would have been committed to asceticism, to contemplating the glory of God. Maybe okay for an hour, but for eternity? You would find Hell a lot more interesting. There you can pig out on chocolate, gambling, alcohol, sex, whatever. The thing about sin is that it’s fun. Then in the October / November 2021 issue I learned that editor Tom Flynn had abruptly died. They ran his final editorial. He was 66. What did he die of? They don’t say. We tried to research it on the Internet but got no answer. Could it have been Covid-19? He surely went to Hell, as he was an outstanding independent thinker and an atheist; God isn’t into that kind. I suspect Tom brought a fire extinguisher with him, but didn’t need it, being naturally immune to the folly of believing he had to be punished for common sense.

The December 2021 / January 2022 issue of FREE INQUIRY has an Op-Ed by Ophelia Benson titled “Is there a Future?” Because the heat of Hell is coming to Earth in the form of global warming. She wished we had a backup planet we could summon. My question is why, when we would just burn that one up too? Millions will die, maybe hundreds of millions. She wishes that she could feel even a little bit confident that the governments and political parties would get their acts together in time to avoid the worst calamities, but she can’t. The airline industry won’t let them, the cruise industry won’t, the automobile industry won’t, and on down the list of industries that keep pumping those fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere. I agree. Again, my novel Deep Well presents an answer, but there’s no certainty that the world will heed it. We may be doomed, despite a clearly feasible solution. Mankind, like a mob, is less intelligent than any of its participants.

Shorter shrift to the remaining raft of FREE INQUIRY issues from late 2020 to the present. Every issue has thoughtful material, but I know that not all my readers are into this kind of contemplation. February / March 2021 has an article by Robert Cirillo titled “Homo Religiosus to Homo Sapiens: Approaching Religion as Clinical Delusion.” It says that many believe that religion is a mental disorder, a form of delusion comparable to superstition and belief in conspiracy theories. What does it offer? People are afraid of death, so it promises an afterlife. People can’t understand the origin and destiny of the universe, so it provides an explanation. You know: God made it in a week. Religion also helps scare people into submission. The April / May 2020 issue mentions how the original Hebrew referred to “young woman” instead of “virgin,” but sloppy translations changed it and church authoritios were of course too dull to catch on. The August / September issue mentions how a new supreme court ruling decimates church-state separation. Yes the religionists are determined to subvert America and make it Christian rather than secular. The April / May 2021 issue has an article by Henry Grynnsten titled “How to build a Conscious Robot.” That’s one of my buttons; I do believe that machine consciousness is possible. This says that there need to be senses that can be bound together in the brain. Probably also a body. Would turning off such a robot be murder? This is getting into difficult philosophy. I feel that one key to machine consciousness is feeling. What is the point in existing of you don’t care? That may be a subject for another day.

Another magazine is THE PROGRESSIVE. It says it champions peace, civil liberties, equality, and justice. I find it sad that these worthy ideals are under constant attack. The August / September 2021 issue says that the magazine is suing Google, taking it to court over its monopolistic ad sales practices, which work to the detriment of small publishers like them. That could get interesting. An article by Amber Perry titled “The Case for Decriminalizing Sex Work.” A sex worker is defined as a person whose work involves sexually explicit behavior. That includes stripping, prostitution, escort services, phone sex, pornography, and webcam modeling. The legality varies from state to state. There are an estimated one to two million sex workers in the United States, and more that forty million worldwide. What do I think of this? I favor decriminalization. When you have a toothache you get the service of a dentist. If your need is lower down, you should be able to go to a sex worker. The police and courts should focus on dealing with criminals who hurt or impoverish people, not those who have a normal interest in sex. Why is it otherwise? Because of the influence of religion, that wants to control your private business. That should stop, The December 2020 / January 2021 issue has an article on the graying of mass incarceration with a graph showing the U. S. prison population aged fifty five and older. In 1993 it was 26,300. in 2000 it was 44,200. 2003 was 58,300. 2005 was 66,500. 2010 was 124,900. 2013 was 131,500. 2018 was 185,110. Are old folk really turning criminal so explosively? Or does the law foolishly condemn things like marijuana for effective pain relief? That worries me. In the February / March 2021 issue a Comment by the Reverend William J. Barber: “There are, after all, real costs to maintaining a vastly unequal economy. Every year we lose $1 trillion to child poverty costs and $2.6 trillion in lost earnings from gender and racial wage gaps; we have lost $1.3 trillion in government revenue by lowering the corporate tax rate in 2017 and $6.4 trillion in endless wars; inaction on climate change may cost close to $3.3 trillion annually, and 250,000 people die from poverty and inequality every year. The cumulative financial costs of the pandemic are estimated to be $16 trillion.” The April / May issue has an article by Melissa Ryan titled “The Enemy Within” saying “State and local Republican parties have been taken over by white supremacists, conspiracy mongers, and insurrectionists.” As you can see, this magazine doesn’t mince words.

I still get IG LIVING, (the IG stands for Immune Globulin) which my first wife Carol subscribed to, as she had peripheral neuropathy, one of the ailments this magazine addresses. Yes, memories of her keep returning, with the nostalgia of a life forever gone, and I have no interest in forgetting her. You might think that a magazine devoted to illness would have little interest for folk who are well, apart from sentimental. Not so. For example, the April-May (Yes, that’s not marked the same as the prior / dates, but I am following the way it is put on the specific magazines. As is said, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. How little is your mind?) has an article by Meredith Whitmore titled “Fighting the Loneliness of Chronic Illness.” It starts “It is safe to say this past year has been difficult for the entire globe. For many, the pandemic’s extended lockdown has resulted in loneliness. The problem is humans are hardwired to be naturally social.” Amen. At least I had the wit to get remarried early in the lockdown, which countered the isolation. The article goes on to say that loneliness is a health risk. It increases a person’s risk of death by 26 percent. It is as bad for one’s health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. High blood pressure increases, coronary heart disease, severe depression, and cognitive decline and dementia. So how should you counter it, apart from catching a new spouse? Learn something new, re-frame your thinking, be grateful for what you have, make friends virtually, volunteer, take pictures, get a pet, find a group with common interests, and other things like exercise and sleeping right. The October-November 2021 issue has another article by Meredith Whitmore – I wonder whether she ever gets teased about not being Whitless? – titled “Why Women Are More Susceptible to Autoimmune Diseases Than Men.” That interests me because my wife Carol had CIDP, Chronic Inflammatory, Demylinating Polyneuropathy, wherein her own immune system saw the fatty myelin sheathing around her nerves as foreign and attacked it. The effect was like stripping away the insulation from the wires of an electric gadget so that she shorted out, and she lost control of her peripheral parts, like hands and feet. Fortunately a monthly treatment mitigated that. But I never suffered from anything like that. How come? Well, men and women react differently to some ailments. For example, the common cold and flu can be more severe for us men. But it is opposite for autoimmune illnesses. Having an extra X chromosome helps women live longer than men, but can affect the immune system. Men have testosterone, which suppresses something called B-cell activating factor, BAFF, and that helps them here. Now we know. The December-January 2022 issue has an article by Erika Lawrence titled “Tips for Improving Your Sex Life.” Naturally that got my attention. I may be old, but I am far from dead, and I still love the look and feel of women. It tackles several myths about sex. Such as that sex means intercourse and orgasm. No, there are many additional ways to explore your sexuality and experience pleasure with your partner. Another myth is that sex should always be mind-blowing. No, it varies. 5 to 15 percent is mediocre. That’s still better than nothing. Another myth is that sex should always be spontaneous. No, long-term couples plan for sex, just as they plan for meals, chores, and social visits. Another myth is that if your partner is not in the mood, he/she is not attracted to you. No, there are times when sex is not an option, such as maybe when flying an airplane or deep sea diving or interviewing for a new job. You merely save your passion for the appropriate occasion. Another myth is that if you fantasize or need toys, you or your partner are not enough. No, such things can enhance the experience, if both parties are interested. Just as the same food can become dull after a while, so can the same sex. Variety really is the spice of life. So there you have examples of interest in a supposedly dull periodical. Never judge too quickly.

I get FOREST NEWS, partly because I have a small tree farm so as to grow wood as fast as my books use it up, but mainly because I do believe that the preservation of the world lies in its natural state. This is the newsletter of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, FSEEE. Policies come and go in the national forest service, as different parties control the government, but there needs to be some consistency and care for nature. A forest is a wonderful thing, and should not be clear-cut to make way for a miles-wide parking lot or to enable a billionaire to double his fortune and to hell with the deer, bears, and flowers, or a giant bonfire to toast marshmallows. So the FSEEE fights for the forest, suing if necessary, and is not very popular in some quarters. The magazines are filled with lovely pictures of natural scenes. An article in the Fall 2021 issue tells how climate fueled fires threaten the sequoias, the world’s largest trees. To minimize the damage they wrapped the bases of the trees in aluminum foil and dropped water on the trees. Giant sequoia trees have withstood fires for millennia, but one recent fire was so bad it killed 31-42% of the trees it caught. The Winter 2021 issue tells of the effort to preserve a keystone species, the whitebark pine. A keystone species is one that others depend on; remove it, and the chain reaction may destroy a much wider number of species. Its pine cones yield seeds rich in fat and protein and serve as a food source for more than 100 animal species, including grizzly bears, squirrels, and birds. The bark beetle is wiping out 95 percent of the large trees in the greater yellowstone ecosystem. Warmer temperatures facilitate the beetles. The trees used to live 1,000 years or more; now they’re in trouble. One more reason global warming has to be stopped.

And THE HUMANIST, the magazine of the American Humanist Association. I’m not much of a joiner, but I am a humanist, and that defines my world view as well as anything does. The March/April 2020 issue has a letter by Kathleen Stipek saying “don’t think for a moment that protections for unbelievers, which we’ve worked for long and hard, will last if the GOP has its way.” As an unbeliever I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell, other than figuratively, and I never belonged to any political party, but it seems to me that if Satan made a move to take over America, he would start with the Republican party. it’s already halfway there, defined largely by rampant greed and fake religious support. A column by Joan Reisman-Brill discusses a humanist dilemma: donate to the most downtrodden, or to what you love? Help a starving man, or support the arts? it’s difficult. The man might later kill someone. The art might turn out to be finely molded human feces. I believe in the arts; I think they distinguish man from animal. But I don’t think I could let a man starve when I could prevent it. The answer the column gives is “Each of us should give to whatever makes us feel good, knowing that what goes around comes around—often in remarkable and unimaginable ways that don’t show up in any data analysis.” And a cartoon showing drivers in two cars on a highway, one with donkeys, the other with elephants. The lane signs indicate FAR LEFT — CENTER LANE – ROAD TO HELL. The center is subtitled “common sense ahead” while the left and right turns each lead to suicidal drop-offs. The drivers are muttering “Decisions – Decisions” obviously having trouble making them. The September/October issue has an editorial by Jennifer Bardi, wearing a mask, remarking on the apparent whiteness of conservative Christians, who believe that Jesus was white. She says “Okay, not all humanists are even sure Jesus existed, but we all know that as a Jew from the Middle East, there’s no way he was a flaxon-haired blue-eyed white guy.” Yes, I suspect that Jesus was the personification of a set of ideals, the kind of figure meant to animate a particular philosophy. As a novelist I understand this process; it can transform a lecture that will turn off readers into something they will follow and maybe appreciate. So I think Jesus existed, but as a metaphor, and his color is whatever believers choose to imagine. Conservative religion’s notions of him I think would have appalled him. Making war in the name of Jesus? Condemning the poor? Praying in public? Collecting money in his name? Sending people to Hell because they worship Jesus in a different sect? Jesus is surely better off as a metaphorical image, whatever his color. The November/December 2020 issue has an editorial by Jennifer Bardi remarking on preclearance, which was a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that prohibited jurisdictions that had previously engaged in racial discrimination in voting from making any future changes to voting laws or practices without first getting permission from the federal government. It pretty well stifled further discrimination. Seven years ago that was thrown out. Justice Ginsburg wrote in a dissenting opinion “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Since then, Bardi says, voting rights there have gotten drenched, with thousands of polling stations in predominantly Black counties closed, early voting curbed, voter rolls purged, and voter ID laws implemented. My comment? This is an indication of the damage that can be done by a preponderance of “conservative” justices in the Supreme Court. They won’t say so directly, but it is evident that they want blacks and liberals excluded. A note by Karen Ann Gajewski on another subject later in the issue says “In 2019 a UN report warned that nearly one million animal species are now threatened with extinction. Less reported is the fact that scientists believe two fifths of all plant species—including 723 used for medicine—are also at risk.” Maybe God should have issued a preclearance directive to stop mankind from destroying other species? The Winter 2021 issue – it went quarterly – has a graph showing that the 2020 Nonreligious vote went 72% for Biden and 26% for Trump. That’s a growing demographic. Yes, I am in it, and I voted for Biden. He was not my first choice, but he is good enough.

This catches up the magazine backlog. But I checked, and discovered more, older magazines squirreled away in different crannies of the house. I took one at random, and it’s FREE INQUIRY for June/July 2013. There shouldn’t be much of interest in such ancient pages, right? Wrong. Start with a letter from Howard Grimwood relating to the meaning of life and death. He comments on a prior editorial that suggested that if heaven destroys our individuality, it is not a reward but another form of death and therefor can’t make mortal life meaningful. Alternatively, if we survive eternally as ourselves, we will inevitably become bored. Ouch! I am not a believer, but if I were, that would make me question my belief. The next letter, by Peter Janangelo Jr., addresses the same editorial, remarking on its statement that if one removes the reference to an afterlife, this assertion could easily be made about any totalitarian dictator. Yes; God as portrayed in religions references comes across to me as a dictator who craves nothing but power and praise. Article by Hector F. Sierra titled “Beware of mental traps” starts with a quote from William F. Gibson “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I like that. The article says that many people are convinced that the end of the world is nigh, despite the failure of predictions. I am one of them, but I think not in the same way. I fear that atmospheric pollution, global warming, and human overpopulation are relentlessly driving the world as we know it toward the precipice of extinction, unless we act immediately to reverse course. But the special interests may block any necessary reforms until it is too late. This article, as I understand it, is saying much the same thing. Some sample quotes from it should make the point: “…plenty of evidence shows that humans systematically strive not for the truth but for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions.” “…people with a low tolerance for ambiguity and complexity and a preference for simple answers are easy prey to fundamentalists and demagogues (and pundits).” “…not much can (or should) be done to limit freedom of speech, even if it is nonsense.” “…we should stop being impulsive buyers and learn to be savvy consumers not only of material goods but also of ideas and information.” “To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, for every problem there is a solution that is simple, clean, and wrong.” “…start collaborating with their fellow citizens to solve the gigantic problems we all face. If not, we should keep trying until we get it right. Our lives may depend on it.” And an essay phrased as a story, by Fritz Williams. “Dear Lottie” It seems that Tucker Beckdk rather than die had his mind uploaded to a computer system. Now he is writing his wife email letters from that other side. She answers them similarly. This seems like a nice idea to me, as they explore the new realities. His emotions are really not the same as they were when he had living flesh with hormones, but he still loves her. I think this shows the challenges of such an “afterlife”; it really can’t be the same without a physical body as life was before. I commend the magazine for running it. Every issue is a powerhouse of thought. I will surely be picking up other neglected issues in the future.

Other clippings and oddments: my late wife Carol has been dead for two years, but ads are still piling in to attract her attention, notably for shoes. This gives me small jolts of nostalgia. I wonder whether she wears shoes in Heaven? The Author’s Guild put out a general notice calling for interested members to launch a national letter writing campaign to stop book banning. I heartily agree that it needs to be stopped. If you don’t like a book, don’t buy it or read it, but don’t try to stop your neighbor from reading it. That’s interfering with freedom of speech, and if America loses that, we’re doomed. Yes, it is a sensitivity of mine, because my novel Firefly was tacitly banned. Stores refused to put it on their shelves so that readers couldn’t find it. Where it did go on sale it did well. The store owners were deciding what the public should be allowed to read. I received a notice that my Earthlink service was being disconnected unless I clicked their link immediately. But their link was to Ear1hL!nk, with a 1 replacing the “t” and an exclamation point in lieu of the “i.” Fake news. A catalog addressed to Jacob Piers, Northern Sun, had some interesting buttons, such as “don’t quit your day dream” and a gender symbol with male, female, and bisexual projections. Also a poster listing early warnings of fascism, such as powerful and continuing nationalism, disdain for human rights, and rampant sexism. I think we have been seeing that in America. A warning that American deer could become a Covid reservoir. Damn! We have deer on our tree farm, and value them. It seems that climate change is making birds shrink and develop long wings. Curious. A question whether we should boycott the Winter Olympics in China, to protest their human rights abuses. My feelings are mixed. The Olympics are supposed to be free of politics, but China is abusing the Uighurs among others. My protagonist in Steppewas a Uighur, and as far as I can tell, they remain good folk, many of them scholars. Does that government not like folk who know things? How long can human beings live? That interests me as I age. In the in 1860 it was 39 years; in 1920 53, and 78.8 in 2019. The reduction of infant mortality accounts for much of it but not all. By 2050 they figure there will be 3.7 million centenarians. I’ll be one in 2034 if I make it. What about overpopulation, if folk don’t die normally? Such questions make me uncomfortable, as I feel that overpopulation is a significant threat to global health, but for some reason I’m not inclined to commit suicide to alleviate it. Newspaper article titled “What is going on at Blake High School?” That’s in Tampa, Florida. It seems that girls are getting raped there, and if they complain, they get suspended. Whistle blowers are targeted for retaliation. Requests for records are ignored. This is America? Column by a life-long conservative Republican explains why he is leaving the party. “…Republican stalwarts continue to say ‘Trump represents our values.’ If so, we are indeed in big trouble. The Republican Party today – despite all denials – is massively invested in multiple forms of voter suppression, militarism, the primacy of one religion, serving the best interests of the wealthiest and perpetuating an in-your-face false patriotism that possesses a clear prediction for violence.” Yes, to me it smells like fascism, as the poster above warns, or worse. A letter in the local newspaper by George Pratt remarks on political correctness. He quotes Nelson Mandela: “Our world is not divided by race, color, gender or religion. Our world is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender, or religion.” And one by Roger Cullen, who remarks how our Florida governor is doing everything he can to prolong the effects of the pandemic, penalizing those who would help stop the virus by getting vaccinated and wearing masks. “But he’s not alone. Almost every Republican in every Republican-controlled state house is doing the same thing. They don’t want this pandemic to end, they want it to continue so they can blame President Biden for not ending it…” And an article on child trafficking states that 40 of 50 states received F grades for their efforts to combat this illicit industry. 10 received D grades. Only Florida received a C grade. Maybe the graders didn’t hear about Blake High School.

Let’s conclude with a more positive note. I get impatient waiting for my balky email server to connect, so I look at books in my adjacent shelves. Good books, every one, which is why they’re there. One of them is The Ice Cream Connection, by Ralph Pomeroy, telling all about this tasty treat. On page 201 is a painting by Wayne Thiebaud titled “Girl With Ice Cream Cone.” Dull? She’s a well formed creature in a tight bathing suit, sitting with her ice cream cone, and her bare legs spread wide toward the viewer, sexy as heaven. She could serve me a cone anytime. A recent newspaper item says that now there is non-dairy ice cream. I will look for that, as I continue to nudge toward a full vegan diet, even if it doesn’t come with a girl.

Best wishes to all for 2022. May the pandemic pass!

PIERS

2022 FeBlueberry  

HI- 

This is the month when the Redberries are blue with cold, so it is named FeBlueberry in the Ogre Calendar. It is perhaps my favorite month, not for the climate, but because it was suggested by my daughter Penelope, Penny in real life. Penny died of melanoma in 2009 at age 41, an ugly shock to our family and surely to hers, as she left a 9 year old daughter, our granddaughter Logan Stonering. We had lost three babies stillborn in the first decade of our marriage; Penny was the first survivor, for the limited time she had. She changed our lives almost more than marriage itself had. My writing efficiency was cut in half, as I was the one home to care for her while my wife Carol worked in an office to earn our living as I struggled to make it as a writer. Then Penny was gone, at first to college, then to marriage, and then to Heaven, if it exists for we nonbelievers. I am agnostic, but my wife Carol was a minister’s daughter; Penny was Pagan. Blessed be.

Doug Harter has updated the News and Bibliography web pages, and added links to where my books can be bought, at least for Amazon. Remember, I come from another century and don’t know how to do these newfangled things. As with the question where do I get my ideas? From my fans, obviously.

I finally figured out the Smith&Wesson Watch, and am using it. I like it. It lists the Time in Hours, Minutes and Seconds; Day of the Week, Month, and Day of the Month. It has an alarm function. It is also a stopwatch. That’s a lot for under $25. There’s just one mystery the instructions don’t address: there’s a little window to the right of the Day of the Week that looks like a rifle crosshairs that changes patterns every second. What is it for? If someone knows this watch, please tell me. I’d hate to learn too late that it was an avenue of communication with the advanced civilization of the galaxy ready to offer me the key to eternal life and welfare, not to mention saving the world from pollution, warfare, and overpopulation. Speaking of watches: my regular one is a kinetic-wind Seiko with a bezel I use to time town trips, but it is getting old and may not last much longer. Why does that make me self conscious? I discovered my first wife Carol’s watch, still running two years after her death; it is as if a part of her still lives. Ah, nostalgia. I might wear it, too, just because. I married MaryLee; that doesn’t mean Carol is forgotten.

I play the card game Free Cell on my computer to unwind; I regard it as similar to meditation. I think it is the best solitaire card game extant. The full deck is displayed face up in eight rows, and there are four spots to build up the suits from the aces on, and also four empty spaces, the free cells. Cards are played in descending order on the main layout, queen on king, six on seven, etc, in alternating colors. There are no surprises, no good or bad luck, merely brain power as you figure out how to get all four suits built up to kings. It’s a challenge. Theoretically every game is winnable if you play it right. There’s a reset option if you stall out. I have always won if I had time for repeated resets. If I get 15 or 20 cards built up, normally the win is assured. But one day this week I had a weird loss. Three suits were built up to kings, with only the Spades remaining. The 13 cards were spread out across the 12 spaces, including the 4 free cells, but the ace was trapped under the 8. I couldn’t move a card, as all spaces were taken and there were no alternating colors. So I lost with 39 cards out. I reset and played it over, this time making sure to free that trapped ace, and won without difficulty. But what a loss that was! Is that a first?

Our Sunken Garden remains, but the annuals we started with have departed, and only the Papaya tree, the Pink Hibiscus grown from a broken branch, several avocados growing from seeds of our salads, and flourishing purple Mexican Heather flowers remain. I planted six of those; three promptly died, but the remaining three have now multiplied to about eight, constantly flowering regardless of the season. Volunteer Ferns have now largely taken over the rest of the garden. Technically they may be weeds, but they are beautiful and we like them. So they stay. As with life, you don’t necessarily get what you expect, but there are virtues in the unexpected.

I exercise regularly, three times a week for strength, daily for flexibility, mainly with hand weights and walking, having quit running when I fell on my face one time too many. Critics may figure those bashed faces improve me, but I prefer to avoid injury to the extent feasible. Back in 1995 I bought a Grizzly XLR bow set at a 55 pound draw weight. That is, it takes a pull of 55 pounds to draw the string so you can loose an arrow. I took up archery, loosing arrows at a target 150 feet distant, both right side and left side. I worked my way up to a 60 pound draw weight. Later when I got it restrung they ignored my instruction and set it 55 pounds, and I decided what the Hades, that would do. My purpose was to maintain my arm muscles. I have been told that exercise doesn’t count unless you keep building up, but I’m not trying for Mister America, just to hang on to what I have, physically and mentally, as long as I can. After about twenty years I was losing too many arrows in the brush; my aim was good, but damaged fletching caused them to go astray and miss the target. So I quit archery and changed to Chore Hour, getting many dull tasks done. I still drew the bow, but without arrows, merely for that exercise. Last year apparently a flu shot nicked a tendon and took out my right side draws for six months, but I can still do them as I brace the bow against a door frame so it can’t swing out of place, messing up my draw. There must be a muscle in my back that holds the arm in place as I draw, and it gave way. But I never had trouble with the left side draws. Monday I did 20 left side, as usual. Then Wednesday I couldn’t do it. No injury, nothing; I just seemed to lack the strength to draw that bow even one time. Friday I still couldn’t do it, so I made 20 tries, hoping that would exercise the muscle sufficiently. Maybe one day the ability will return. It’s weird having it stop so suddenly. I can still do it right side against the door frame; no change there. I hope that other aspects of my physical or mental life don’t follow that pattern. As it is, my right shoulder has been bothering me for weeks; it’s okay in the daytime, but hurts at night when I’m trying to sleep. A pulled tendon? I hope it’s that simple. Yes I am old, 87 now, but no, I’m not approaching that KICK MEE bucket yet. I hope.  

I subscribe to a number of magazines, as these monthly HiPiers columns show. We also subscribed to three newspapers. One quit distributing in Citrus County, so then there were two. Now the TAMPA BAY TIMES has quit distributing physical copies here. They want me to resubscribe for a year for $392.60 for just the online edition. I’d have to get a smartphone, learn to use it—I believe I have mentioned how I come from another century and am still finding my way into this one—and then spend hours trying to make out the tiny onscreen print with my fading eyesight. I would not be able to tear out clippings to comment on here. I believe I will in due course get a smartphone anyway, but not for that limited purpose. So this is one more thing I will have to let go. The old order changeth.  

I completed the short collaborative science fiction novel Deep Well in OctOgre, hoping that its relevance to the salient issue of the day, global warming, would make it appealing to movie studios and print publishers. Surely they, too, want to help save the world? Alas, there seems to be little interest so far. After the turn of the year I started writing Xanth #48 Three Novel Nymphs, and have completed the first two chapters, totaling about 14,500 words. I’m sure the market will be interested in my continuing frivolous fantasy, if not in my serious fiction. If I thought about it I might say something unkind about the market. In fact I do, further along in this column. Some readers may remember that the original title was Three Ugly Nymphs. Well, when the nymphs discovered that, they objected, feeling that they are not ugly, just different. So they sneaked into the office of the snoozing Dwarf Demon of Titles, crossed out the middle word Ugly, and wrote in Novel, as in original, unusual, different. The Demon never caught on. Now you know. Don’t tell; you don’t want a nymph mad at you. Oh, you are wondering what the story is about? It’s that something is stirring up the Elements, so there are raging fires, soaking floods, devastating storms, and erupting volcanoes and ground tremors. An anonymous Demon must be doing it. A Demon can track regular folk with souls, so the Good Magician recruits three soulless nymphs, formerly good for Only One Thing, who can’t be tracked. They have to find out what Demon is doing it. It’s quite a challenge, especially for folk who have had next to no experience with Xanth culture. They have to put on clothing and pretend to be normal girls. It’s a challenge.  

“BS Foolsbane” sent me his memoir “Once Upon a Time at the Library.” There are aspects of his life I relate to. I have gotten in trouble all my life for trying to be honest and decent and standing my ground rather than be wronged or cheated. The world can be an ugly place. I will call him Mike. He worked for years at a public library, doing the best he could, yet somehow things went wrong. For example the way he lost his job. A woman was using a staff computer, resting her right hand on the desktop next to the computer. Mike used the adjacent phone to call a teacher about a teacher’s collection service that was ready to pick her up. He had a paper in his hand with the phone number. After he dialed and was waiting for the connection he lowered his hand and a corner of the paper brushed her hand. She rubbed her hand and said “Uh.” Mike said “Must have felt like a spider.” That was all. But she put in a complaint, and he got fired. How’s that again? Did she think he was making a move on her? Did the library administration check for the facts before making such a decision? Was fairness even considered? But his job was gone. His career had been peppered with similar misunderstandings. But generally he got along with people, and they would tell him private things. One woman told him that she also worked at a prison, and men there would get raped, go to the infirmary, and have their rectums sewn up. Nobody got disciplined or fired there. A female coworker pulled down her pants to show Mike a tattoo or her upper thigh. Another told him she took a whore’s bath. I don’t know what that is, but it sounds pretty personal. A staff member thought it was funny to call Mike a pederast. Some joke! On occasion he complained to the administration about such things, but nothing was done. It seemed that complaints counted only if they were about him. One acquaintance spot diagnosed him with SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, and decided he was mentally ill. Ouch! As one who was similarly diagnosed and excluded on my insurance for all mental diseases, when what I actually had was low thyroid, I relate. When the manager told him to shelve a cart full of videos, and he did, then next day she told him he had disobeyed her and hadn’t shelved them. If there was mental illness, it would seem to have been in that manager, but it degraded Mike’s reputation. When he repeated to other staffers what a manager had told him, he got in trouble because it seemed it was a secret. When a circulation manager asked him to get her some information, and he did, he got in trouble for leaving his desk. When he complained about his treatment, his Performance Assessment was downgraded from Strong to Satisfactorily. When he wrote a formal complaint detailing his treatment he was told that if he felt he was being treated unfairly, he should quit the job. On and on; this is depressing reading showing a pattern of prejudice against him. Do I believe it? Yes. Remember, I’m the one who got blacklisted in publishing for six years, accumulating I think it was seven unpublished novels, because I had the temerity to protest when a publisher cheated me. It seems that all too often folk prefer to blame the victim rather than the perpetrator. Sometimes I am ashamed of my species, mankind. Yes, once the blacklist was broken and accounts became honest I became a bestseller at that same publisher. Therein lies a key difference between us: I got a remarkable break. Mike did not. But it shouldn’t require a virtual miracle to get fair treatment. So where is Mike now? “My partial pension won’t cover my bills [because he got fired before he qualified for more] so I’m going to have to find some part time job that I am physically capable of doing … It’s just that there aren’t that many jobs for a 60 year old fat man with a bum knee.” This is America? There’s an odor.  

The Equedia Letter keeps coming. I never subscribed, but evidently they like me. The one for December 19, 2021 describes how insiders play the game to get richer. I am not much amused by that game. The one for January 9, 2022, speaks of turn of the year predictions, such as economic and how the Virus will fare. Don’t trust them. It has a nice analogy. “There’s a running joke among statisticians: if a woman loves you more each and every day, by the theory of linear regression, she hated you the first time you hooked up.” As a man remarried for under two years, that makes me a mite nervous. The one for 1-16-22 discusses crypto currencies, concluding they are essentially scam. “These are straight-up Ponzi schemes. And they are pushed by some of the most influential people in our society.” It gives examples. I think I got the message: stay the heck away from those currencies, unless you are an insider out to take the gullible public folk. I sure am not. The one for 1-30-22 discusses how lawmakers illicitly profit from stock trades. A study showed that stocks that senators bought beat the market average by 8.5%, while those they sold dropped. It’s insider trading. When 60 Minutes blew the whistle on this, Congress passed the STOCK Act, banning it. Then they quietly took out key aspects, in 30 seconds, no debate, so the Act became toothless. In one year 48 members of congress were caught violating it. There is a $200 fine. So they can make literally millions, for that token fine. Sure there are investigations, but they routinely fade out without notice, and the game goes on, wrist slaps and all. But don’t you, an ordinary citizen try it; you’ll wind up in prison.

Some time back I remarked on “For Pete’s sake,” the symbols and letters marked on recyclable plastic. It starts with a triangle marked PETE. I approve of recycling; it helps mitigate the environmental damage done by discarded plastic. But over the years our local recycling centers, which handle plastic, paper, glass, and such, have been shut down, and new, less accessible ones set up elsewhere. When those get popular, they too get shut down. It seems that the local authorities want to claim they support recycling while tacitly discouraging folk from actually doing it. But this isn’t about that hypocrisy. It’s that recently I discovered a triangle on a PETE bottle marked RPET. Interesting. Maybe it stands for Re-Pete, made from recycled plastic.

In a letter, the speller challenged “unagented” that I mentioned for an aspiring writer, referring to my ongoing survey of electronic publishers, which are way more open to new writers than are the traditional publishers. One of the suggestions the speller offered was “untalented.” Another was “undaunted.” I like the latter option better. This reminds me when I was asked what my greatest frustration as a writer was, and I answered “Dealing with publishers.” That was one reason I worked to make self publishing more widely available: to provide new writers a better option than tackling the money-minded, hidebound idiots whose idea of art is what makes the most money. Yes, there are sensible quality publishers out there; good luck in finding them.

As mentioned in a prior column, I glance at the books on my shelf near the balky email system. Last time I commented on a book about ice cream, with an appealing picture of a woman eating it. This time it’s All the Things Your Mother Never Taught You by Charlotte Slater. If you’re a housewife and something goes wrong, why let yourself be hung up indefinitely waiting for a repairman to get around to fixing it expensively? Indeed, as a family in the 1970s we got our little girls the usual dolls, but also little tool kits, so that they would never be dependent on some man for an incidental fix. Who knows what a man might want of a girl? That’s rhetorical; we all know what a man wants of a woman, and it’s not her intellect. Some don’t draw the line at a legal age. She needs to be independent as much as feasible. This book is an excellent roundup of practical things a woman can handle for herself, once she knows how, ranging from gluing labels to jump starting a car when the battery dies to burglar proofing her home to fixing a malfunctioning toilet. It seems to cover everything, with pictures and diagrams to make it clear. I recommend having a copy on hand so that when an unexpected foul-up occurs, you can make at least a temporary fix, until hubby gets home. Left field is full of things to mess up a routine existence. We know; we practically live in Left Field.

Clippings: THE WEEK for December 31, 2021 remarks on how the new year holiday is a tradition that goes back 5,000 years. Yes, well before Christianity existed. Similar is true for a number of other holidays, such as Christmas. Christianity simply renamed them to conform to the new order. That’s why agnostics like me have no problem celebrating it; it’s not religious in origin, or if it is, not Christian. Its point is to have fun. NEW SCIENTIST 18-25 December 2021 (we don’t necessarily receive them when they’re dated, thanks to snail mail) has an article by Thomas Lewton titled “Galactic Ghosts” tells how astronomers analyze intricate patterns in the movements of stars that indicate the cosmic origins of galaxies including our own 100 billion stars Milky Way. I suppose it can be likened to stirring new ingredients into the boiling cook-pot. I’d like to see a 3D film animating that monster, with our own star Sol highlighted. We are on a mere speck near the outer edge, pretty much beneath notice. The same issue has one by Leah Crane “’Space Cow’ explosion was probably a failed supernova.” Interesting that even novas can mess up. And one on “Why we laugh” by David Robinson. I believe in laughter. When I attended the Hospice bereavement group meetings, in my mundane personal life, not as Piers Anthony, after my wife Carol died, I often enough made the others laugh, and had no shame in doing it. The purpose of that group was to get past the crisis of grief, learning how to handle the loss, and get on with what life remains for you, rather than mourn continuously. Those meetings did help me, and I hope they helped the others similarly. Okay, the dialogue of those meetings is private, but I think I can give an example of what I mean. The subject came up of the song with the line “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he’s watching me.” I was an agnostic amid generally religious folk. I said that this made me think of how a woman could be walking with God, when something awful happened to her. She tells God “I thought you were looking out for me! What happened?” God replies “Oh, I’m sorry. My eye was on the sparrow.” Yes, that got a laugh. This article says that laughter evolved as a potent and flexible social tool with three key purposes. To show appreciation, to signal connection, and to signal dominance, such as when your boss laughs dismissively at your outlandish idea. Yes, I was glad at last to become a writer and be my own boss, so I could no longer get reprimanded or penalized for someone else’s mistake. I think it was office politics that got me laid off; as most of you surely know, it’s not necessarily enough to do your job right, you have to play the game. It was not a game I liked. Regardless, it seems that laughter can have health benefits. I try to bring laughter to my readers, and not to my critics who guffaw at the very notion that I can write.  

Every so often the “Curtis” comic strip celebrates Kwanzaa with a related story. This time it’s “The Three Maidens and the Water Jug.” It was a time of terrible heat and drought in Ghana. Rivers were drying up, and the people struggled to keep crops, cattle, and themselves alive. With the exception of one hut, which teemed with green foliage. How could this be? Three maidens who were forced to fill their jugs with stagnant water guarded by a dangerous crocodile wanted to know the answer. What follows is the narrative of how they remained mystified despite even stealing the water jug and breaking it to pieces. But when they drank of its water, they started sneezing out feathers, belching live tadpoles that expanded into three-eyed frogs, and hiccuping out baseball sized spiders. Only an honest, friendly neighbor prospered. An appreciative wood spirit was responsible, trading fresh water for cheese. Now that’s my kind of story! I was turned on to the “Curtis” comic strip when I saw Curtis’ friend Gunk, a crazy magic vegetarian white boy from Flyspeck Island. I can’t think why I, a vegetarian from the island of Britain, once insurance ridered for all mental diseases, who made his fortune writing silly fantasy, relate. I loved the way Gunk’s sandwich consisted of two slices of bread with a whole carrot between them.

More clippings: an unadvertised tragedy is the growing number of suicides in the military. They dwarf the number of soldiers killed in combat. I am dismayed but not completely surprised. I served two years in the US Army, 1957-1959, and apart from paying my way during a recession and facilitating my achievement of American citizenship it was pretty much a waste of time. It cost them a phenomenal amount to train recruits, then they treated them so shabbily that they quit the moment their terms expired. This was expensive stupidity. In my case, when I declined to “volunteer” to sign up for a bond investment program, they punished the whole unit, removed me as a math and survey instructor, and finally kicked me out of the unit. They didn’t care how good an instructor I was; the first sergeant had a bet that he could get 100% participation in the bond program, and he was determined to win that bet. I finally reported him to the Battalion Commander. Nothing was done in the open, but I suspect that sergeant regretted his action, because it was hardly legal and now the upper chain of command knew. Naturally I quit the Army the moment I could. But what of those locked in, economically, socially, or because the Army was the only job they could handle? After a time being constantly treated like crap gets to you. Perhaps related is an item in THE WEEK quoting from a column in Vox.com, that suggests that America needs a mass movement to save democracy. The US is no longer a democratic model for the world. Instead we are “sleepwalking toward a disaster” in which the Republican minority rigs the political system in its favor, rendering majority rule effectively obsolete. “Is this what it looks like when a democracy dies and nobody cares?”  

Quote from Margaret Mead run in the local CITRUS COUNTY CHRONICLE: “Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.” True, actually. Customer-owned rooftop solar is a popular and growing source of clean energy in Florida, but it is under attack. That figures. The fossil fuel industry stands to lose if clean energy makes too much progress. Article in NEW SCIENTIST by Margaret Cuonzo titled “The power of paradoxes.” Some statements are both true and false, such as “This sentence is false.” There’s a picture of a triangle whose sides don’t make sense when you try to trace them. I love mental exercises like this.

THE WEEK for January 21, 2022, has an item from Germany titled “You can’t cheat your way to net-zero.” Folk know that natural gas and nuclear energy are not green energy sources, yet the European Commission has decided the only way to hit its goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions is to reclassify natural gas and nuclear power as sustainable. Yes indeed. I note that they don’t even mention the one that really can do it, geothermal energy. Meanwhile in Britain they are so afraid of being called racist that they are ignoring the way Muslim girls there are being abused, raped, and threatened with being doused in gasoline and burned to death, if they tell. Is England becoming a third world country? That situation needs to be cleaned up in a hurry. Web3—This may be the next chapter of the internet. Web 1.0 was the first version in the 1990s; Web 2.0 saw the rise of mega platforms like Google and Facebook. Web3 is a “vision of the internet where ownership and power are more widely distributed.” Lots of luck on that, world; the big boys are not going to give up their power voluntarily. It seems that access to Web3 is still controlled by a few companies with names like OpenSea, Infura, and Alchemy Insights, but new names does not mean a new system.

The January 1 issue of NEW SCIENTIST has a preview of 2022, eight aspects. 1. The rise of supergrids as they get set to use high-voltage cables to connect powergrids around the world. 2. mRNA technology may treat stubborn diseases. 3. Controversy continues over the first drug designed to treat the cause of Alzheimer’s. 4. The Large Hadron Collider is coming back online after a three year shutdown. Will it unravel the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, assuming they exist? 5. TheCOP15 biodiversity summit may help protect more land and oceans. Maybe, but I am reminded how in Britain they debated whether to save the island’s diminishing forests, but by the time they finished talking, the forests were gone. The lumberjacks had cut them down. I suspect this will be a repeat. 6. 2022 could be the year of a quantum computer cracking encryption and solving problems impossible for classical machines. Ah, but will they tackle Global Warming? 7. The coronavirus will evolve further. Yes, especially with the proudly maskless folk spreading it. 8. Exploring space, blasting off for the moon, Mars, and the asteroid Psyche. I will watch with interest, but keep my feet firmly on the ground.

I subscribe to the Hightower Lowdown, one of the “little” publications that doesn’t follow the corporate line. The last issue of 2021 remarks on the power of political cartoons. Ordinary folk may be too dull to read and understand articles, but the point of a cartoon generally comes right through. Boss Tweed in the old days, a wholly corrupt tyrant, desperately wanted the cartoons stopped. “My constituents can’t read, but damn it, they can see the pictures!” Now its the big corporations that don’t like cartoons. At the start of the 20th century 2000 newspapers featured their own full-time staff cartoonists. Today only a couple dozen do. The first Lowdown for 2022 has the thesis that Nature deserves representation. Maybe lawyers should represent the trees, rivers, coral reefs and such. There is a case in Minnesota where wild rice is a plaintiff against the pumping out of five billion gallons of groundwater so Line3 can pass through the region. More power to you, Rice! The battle is here in Florida, too. The Florida Rights of Nature Network is trying to stop the poisoning of the land in Orange County, where Disney World lives, to save lakes, creeks, marshes, and other waterways from degradation that leads to toxic algae blooms and such. 89% of Orange County voters approved the initiative. But Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump imitator who is making Trump himself nervous, sneaked a provision into state law to nullify any local election that grants protective rights to nature. So the battle continues. What’s the will of the people, or the welfare of nature, or the world, when there are profits to be made right here in River City? Stay tuned.

Thus another month in my supposedly placid existence with MaryLee. We have now been married one and three quarters years. When the world stops ending and the pandemic abates, we still hope to have our honeymoon on the beach, and maybe do a bit of traveling. It’s not that we’re tired of each other’s company, but chronic lockdown is for the birds: the buzzards and vultures. I promised her warm Florida winters, then we got a low of 26°F. She should forgive me in time.

Thus another month of yesterdays has lighted we fools the way to—never mind.

PIERS