bok

I put the space heater away last week. It had been a couple of weeks since the furnace's "fresh-air" system had sucked in smoke from the neighbor's fireplace. So what just happened when the furnace kicked on? Yes.

So now my throat itches and I have a sudden headache, and I've had to turn the furnace way down, close my heating vent, put my air filter on high, and drag out the electric heater. Bleeping caveman neighbor and his polluting fire.

Tony's traveling companion had promised — lamented, really — that he would be regaled with libidinous entertainment in the djinn palace. It might have been impressive to a native of this alternate dimension where the Arabian Nights were real.

“To a citizen of the United States, accustomed to a nineteen dollar radio for music, TV girly shows and the Radio City Music Hall as seen from a dollar-forty seat, practically any bathing beach in summer, and an occasional burlesque show over in New Jersey, the thing was pathetic. […] Tony was moved to homesickness. There is an art in doing the bumps. There is a definite technique to the striptease. And the djinnees, willing workers as they were, didn’t have it.”

A 1954 novel mentions "TV girly shows"? One wonder exactly what shows would qualify.

Back to the same doctor as last week. But where last week's visit was in and out, this time there was a 35-minute wait until I got in to see the doctor. And it was a busier day, with a dozen patients in the waiting room, none masked. #CovidIsNotOver

There's still the sign saying staff is required to be masked. I went into the bowels of the busy building for my test, encountering a lot of people. Compliance was bad:

2 receptionists + 10 nurses + 3 doctors = 1 mask

Exactly one nurse had a blue surgical mask on. #WearAMask

In the Ring of Fire novel Letters from Gronow, Philip Fröhlich was a legal clerk trying to become a horror writer (inspired by the translated works of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft and the like appearing in Der Schwarze Kater [The Black Cat]). He had to watch his budget, so he kept a journal of his expenses, with most days looking like:
 
28 March 1635
Wednesday
 
Breakfast —
1 cup morning broth 1 pfennig
1 wheat roll 3 pfennigs
 
Supper —
1 sausage 2 pfennigs
1 mug beer 1 pfennig
 
 
These appeared hundreds of times over the course of the book: they made an impression. Which is why I thought of them, since I'm drinking a cup of broth myself. I have a procedure tomorrow, and no solid food is allowed today. Such fun.

●●○○○ Beyond a Swim - Stan Muir (ss) 2021
Joeline got up very early in order to drive to her nudist club, the better to be able to get in some laps in the swimming pool before anyone else showed up. Which is why she was annoyed when a man jumped in and also began swimming laps.

Joeline wasn't thrilled when Jim and Tammy later tried to set her up Matthew, the man who interrupted her quiet swimming. Joeline was still recovering from her mastectomy and breast reconstruction, and while being a nudist was helping with her body issues, like her longtime-nudist friend Sonia had said it would, Joeline wasn't ready for romance.

But this is a story in a romance-themed naturist fiction anthology, and momentum takes the story along, without much content.

●●●●○ Bear Head {Dogs of War 2} - Adrian Tchaikovsky (nov) 2021
At the end of the first volume of this trilogy, Bioforms — cyber-enhanced, genetically-modified animals uplifted to sapience — were beginning to get the rights of personhood, with Collars (neural hardware that ensures obedience and loyalty) outlawed. Forty years later, the pendulum has swung back, and controlling Bioforms is the hot topic that politicians and pundits use to distract people from climate change and economic troubles.

Professor Honey Medici, the over-engineered bear from the first book, continues to fight for Bioform rights, and general rights of people against their controllers. But she's old, and tired, and one day gives a speech that goes too far. She talks about the game and the metagame.

The rules of the game suggest that the people that do real things and know their jobs should be the ones to get promoted. But that's not how reality works. The bosses are the people who can schmooze higher-ups, who can look like they work hard and know things, but in fact don't.

This was fine (unless you were a called-out metagamer), but then Honey said that the metagame applied to society, too. That had drawn the notice of Warner S. Thompson, candidate for the Word Senate Seat of Alabama-Virginia¹, a man marked for bigger things. Except he was less a man than a raw id. He could say things and do things, but he had little intelligence, little humanity, little sense of self. He was a parasite, and he knew he'd been seen. Honey had to die.

Which is how the story shifts to Mars, where Jimmy, a low-level worker, a biomod human, gets mixed up with things far bigger than himself. Things that include Bees, a distributed intelligence that was sent to begin the terraforming of Mars, but who's gone her own way. And who might be tiring of humans trying to wipe her out, just because she once did something environmentally sensible that cost rich people money. Both Honey and Thompson ended up on Mars, sort of, and the scale of the conflict got bigger.

●●●○○ This Town Ain't Big Enough {Blood 1} - Tanya Huff (ss) 1995
Fourteen months into Vicki Nelson's vampirehood, a much older vampire shows up in Toronto. The ex-cop former PI wasn't having that on her territory, especially when the undead woman murdered two people in a very public way. She must die.

Naturally her human boyfriend, Detective-Sergeant Michael Celluci, didn't want her to interfere with police business — or get killed. Henry Fitzroy (Vicki's maker, now living in Vancouver), agrees with the latter, saying Vicki wasn't strong enough. But of course Vicki doesn't listen…

●●○○○ Eating the Goo-ies - Jake Berry Ellison, Jr. (ss) 2018
One day, the men of the world began producing black semen. (Men being men, it took two weeks before one went to a doctor.) There was concern, and eventually it affected all men. Then came the first baby fathered by such a man. She was coal-black: “black hair, black skin, black eyes, iris and sclera, black teeth, black gums, everything.”

During the first year, there were riots, and infanticides soared. By the end of the second year, all babies were being born deep black. People adjusted. Some said God had gotten tired of racial bigotry, and had altered humankind. Things more or less went back to normal. Until five years later, when some of the children began killing and eating their parents…

●●●◐○ Problems of Succession {NBL Solutions 2} - Ted Bun (nva) 2020
The second Naked Beach Lady Solutions book sees zaftig nudist Melody approached by the Chief Constable's wife, whose niece has a problem. Hafina comes over to explain it to Melody, and as happens so often and easily in these novels, both women end up nude, enjoying a swim and some sun on Melody's private beach, and then some wine and food delivery while they discuss the case.

It seems Hafina's niece, Felicity-Ann, married Lord Andrew Roffham, who recently died in a freak accident. His will leaves management of his estate to his twin brother Henry, until 10-year-old Barty comes of age. Except there now seem to be all manner of money troubles with the estate, despite Andrew having shown Felicity-Ann a few months before he died that he'd put away quite a sum, enough to handle almost any problem.

Melody hires librarian Susan — wife of Detective Sargent Gerald Hastings, former junior partner to Melody’s late husband, Detective Inspector John Fabricant — to look into the Roffhams. Susan reports to Melody with some interesting information. (And does so in the nude, with wine and food, since that's the norm Melody induces in other people.) One thing Susan finds out from some recent public photos, is that Henry seems to look as if he's being beaten up fairly often.

So, yes, you've figured out Henry now. It's a novella: there's not room for red herrings. Another thing Melody finds out is that she's not the only person on the case. Andrew and Henry's Uncle Alistair was called in by Felicity-Ann's butler Harker (who'd served in the military with the Brigadier, who'd gotten him the job) to look into the business. And, yes, Melody gets Alistair to be a nudist, and he even goes to a nude beach with her. They have a two-week fling, same as Melody did with a man she met in the first book. A pleasant bare mystery.

●●●◐○ The Himalaychalet - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1949
Oona and Jick had rented a cottage in the mountains for the season. Unfortunately, some Martian musicians had rented the nearby chalet, and their zulcitret music sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. Worse, Oona had mentioned this to Mrs. Worthington-Weens, who resided in a nearby cottage.

WW advised meditation to rise above the annoyance, and she came — daily — with her personal guru to lead Oona in a meditative session, which involved her poking Oona in the ribs when the younger woman forgot the appropriate response to the chant.

Jick had an idea, and called in a friend. Davis brought over an old ultrasonic machine. He set it up to point at Mrs. W's place, and within a day she moved out. A difficult day and night for Oona and Jick, since the old machine leaked back-eddies, which had the couple alternately terrified and depressed for a day. Still, it worked, until…

●●●●○ Hatchery of Dreams - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1961
Proper Bostonian Giles Wardwell wakes up to find Joan (his fifteen-years-younger wife) missing, though the note she left saying she was taking a break from their marriage contains several phrases she would never use. In a daze, Giles searches the house, going so far as to enter her crafts room — which contains an incubator with a basketball-size egg in it.

Giles decides to question her friends, with whom she plays bridge every week: Mary Nurse, Margo Cory, and Alice Redd. It may pay to note that all of these surnames came up in the Salem Witch Trials. As he visits them in turn, Giles finds each woman more than a bit odd, that each seems to be suffering — cursed, one might say — and that each is clutching a different weird animal — stuffed, they claim.

When Giles notes the hatched egg in her apartment, Alice tells him to go home and wait for Joan's egg to hatch. Following Grizzle will be his only chance to find his wife. Giles will find that there are people worse than witches, such as the Un-American Affairs sorcerers keeping Joan captive.

●●○○○ Gratitude Guaranteed - Kris Neville (ss) 1953
Robotic surgeons had taken over from human surgeons years ago, and Eberhard Harrison still resented it. He worked at Cuddly Pets now, installing Schroeder Bypasses and Dappleby Blocks into animals — mostly lions and tigers, since big cats were popular now — turning them into loyal and obedient animal companions.

Then Harrison had an idea. New supercomputers had bioneural components, and the components should work on them. So he staged a fight, destroying some components in the process, but not before pocketing a pair. He then quit before he could be fired, and got a job with a biocomputer maintenance company.

Eventually, his new firm got a call to fix Bessie, the brain that ran the Moss-Eagleberg ultramarket, and Eberhard inserted his components, giving himself full ordering capability, without associated billing or records.

Then Eberhard and his wife Mignonetta got busy ordering. Unfortunately, Bessie was too grateful. When Eberhard ordered one piano, she sent two, and so on. Things quickly got out of hand. The story had some interesting bits, but it's too contrived, and at least a third too long.

●●●○○ The Orchid and the Oak - Mel Cowan (ss) 2025
Alistair Finch was a top architect of a prestigious firm. The high-pressure job had nearly driven him to a breakdown, until he'd found an outlet two years ago: spending weekends at Whispering Oaks naturist village, where he was just "Al". Transitioning back to wearing the expensive suit at work every Monday was brutal, but Finch survived.

Then, after a big success, management at Sterling & Vance decided to have a mandatory team-building retreat at Serenity Valley, an upscale glass-cube-cabins resort bordering Whispering Oaks. The two resorts shared some hiking trails and a stream leading to a forest pool.

Finch's two worlds collided when the rich folk took a hike, and encountered the nudists, and began to make snide comments, and Finch was left to make a choice.

●●●◐○ The Wrong Number {Ambassador to the Stars 01} - David Collins (nov) 2023
I like Collins' Artifact series, so I thought I'd try some more; he has many. Skipping the war ones, this seemed like fast, light adventure. The book begins in a similar "regular guy just stumbles into alien stuff" way.

Steve White is 24, fresh out of the military, living with his parents for the summer until he starts college on the GI Bill. He visits the pond he played at as a boy, and happened to be standing between three white rocks when someone 43 light-years away dialed a wrong number, and the "rocks" teleported him to another planet.

He's greeted by a tall, deep-blue semi-insectoid Amazonian woman, Countess Petra GunMuller, and the short grey-skinned transporter tech who misdialed. By the rules of the League, as the first of his species to transport to a world of one of the 72 Races — now 73 — he was the Ambassador of Earth assigned to the Pathless world Zigiproll.

Pathless techs take his iPhone and modify it, so now it can suck in human media from the internet at a prodigious rate for later sale: humankind can make a fortune from this, and as ambassador, Steve gets two percent. He buys a six-seat spaceship, and appears in orbit (the stones project a cone into the sky for larger objects), parking near the International Space Station to get NASA's attention.

The same type of dealings that happened in the early Artifact books go on, with Steve and Cobalt (the Pathless royal larva who underwent directed metamorphosis to the form of a human woman to be his partner in maintaining the Pathless-human relationship) dealing with the US government and military, and so on. Light, fast adventure.

●●○○○ Mr. Boy - James Patrick Kelly (nva) 1990
This tale has a lot of "weird for weirdness's sake" stuff in it. Peter Cage — "Mr. Boy" to his friends — is stunted: he periodically gets a medical procedure to keep him physically twelve years old forever (or at least as long as his rich mother keeps paying for his rejuvenation).

His mother is mostly a sheet of skin over a scaffold, forming a two-thirds-scale Statue of Liberty. His best friend, Stennie, had had himself twanked — gene-modded — to look like a yellow stenonychosaurus.

The plot is that Comrade, Mr. Boy's hacked android assistant, has stolen (as a stunting gift) an autopsy photo from an encrypted database, and now an AI lawyer is after Mr. Boy, continually popping up when Mr. Boy is in virtual reality. Also, Mr. Boy — 12yo in body, 25yo by calendar — has met a teenage girl (for whom he's both too young and too old) who is stirring new feelings in him.

So, star-crossed young lovers at odds with their parents, plus a bit of crime and consequences. Growing up can be hard.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Nineteen's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
149+7 ss | 09+0 nvt | 08+2 nva | 39+2 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Since those states don't share a border, it must be the whole AL-GA-SC-NC-VA swath, possibly including Florida, though that might get included with the Caribbean.

The ebook I'm reading just got shorter. Halfway through there was a formatting error where the font size didn't reset to normal after a section of enlarged text. After adjusting the book settings to counteract that, it dropped from 1300 screens remaining to 700 pages left.

Forgive me, Mother Nature, for I have laughed at an AI music video where Harcourt Fenton Mudd — backed by a whole lotta Stellas — sings about how she's Completely Unavoidable. #StarTrek

The annoyance of brushing your teeth and having the rechargeable battery in your slimline electric toothbrush die mid-task, forcing you to finish manually, like some caveman… 🪥

The yard remains covered in the tiny tulip-shaped things from the tree. I've looked online to see what they are, but I don't know the proper terms to find an answer. #trees

Another doctor's appointment — isn't getting old fun? — and this time there's a sign by the receptionist's window, saying that staff will be masked when interacting with patients.

3 nurses + 2 receptionists + 1 doctor = 0 masks.

The sign also requested that patients mask. I saw four other patients, none of them masked. It is to sigh. #WearAMask #CovidIsNotOver

◍◍◍◍◍ 1632 and Beyond #4 (4 ss) ⁓March 2024⁓
Three Ring of Fire Tales plus a Ship People one.

●●●○○ Fire on the Mountain ⁓ Bjorn Hasseler
There's a fire in the student dorm blocks on Calvert Hill. Floods of refugees meant there were over 5000 students at Grantville High. That meant there was also young love, accidental pregnancy, and parents who wildly overreact.

●●○○○ A Knight’s Tale — Therapies ⁓ Edith Wild
Teens Amalia and Maggie are having cookies after school when gunfire breaks out. Forces have just slaughtered the workers renovating their home, and the two girls — one grazed by a shotgun blast, the other with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis — must hide or flee. Annoyingly, this tale ends on a cliffhanger, and the next part isn't in the three more issues I have on hand.

●●○○○ Another Country Heard From ⁓ Jack Carroll
A business group from Amsterdam studies all the knowledge coming out of Grantville, and realizes they haven't heard of any group working on building new radios capable of voice transmission, not just adapting existing uptime tech. They track down General Electronics and offer them much-needed funding. That's it. A contract is signed, and the story will continue some unknown number of issues from now.

●●●◐○ The Birds of the Muses ⁓ Iver P. Cooper
To afford rent on the Queen of the Sea, Melissa Hoffman must get a job, and she has only two skills: a business degree she never used, since she married a lawyer straight out of college; and her hobby of beekeeping. So she sets up a company to bring honeybees from Greece to Trinidad to pollinate the new crops being grown there. Her Greek courtesan neighbor joins the company and helps get funding. {end of magazine stories}

●●○○○ Scars and Prejudice - Hannah Steenbock (ss) 2025
Ben had extensive scars from a bomb in Iraq. Melody's scars were from a drunk driver who totaled into her car, also starting a fire. The pair meets at the physiotherapy center they both go to. Ben invites her for a date, forgetting to tell her it's at a naturist resort. When Melody realizes where they are, she's furious. She makes Ben take her home, and stops talking to him.

A few days later, after their separate sessions, Melody is heading for her car when her purse gets snatched. Ben manages to stop the thief, the police are called, it's a whole thing. Ben invites Melody to Circle of Life Camp again, and the pair find that they love each other, extensive scars and all, and no one comments on their appearance.

●●●◐○ As Holy and Enchanted - Kris Neville (ss) 1953
Nick was a lonely man who tried to see the bright side of life. Every Sunday he got up early to watch the sunrise, and then walked about in the park. One day he saw a bird tumble out of a tree. Nick picked up the injured bird. He gently felt its wings to see if it were injured, and heard a voice behind him saying “Hello.” The bird flew off.

Nick turned and saw a beautiful young woman in a white summer dress. Mona found everything — trees, the fountain, pigeons — fascinating. Nick ended up taking Mona to a diner, where she carefully copied what he did. But sometimes she said odd things:

⎡   Suddenly she asked, “Did you notice the sunrise this morning?”
   “Yes,” he said.
   “It was a beautiful sunrise. Robert does them for Nebraska — do you know him? – and he’s very good — but I don’t know: this one, this morning: I think they must use more colors, down here.”
   He felt his throat constrict.⎦

They also went to a matinee, where Mona rested her head on Nick's shoulder, and the couple held hands. But it was not to be.

●●●◐○ The Anaheim Disease - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1959
1918 was a bad year: the world war, the deadly flu pandemic, and the threat of Prohibition hanging over Anne and Will's small vineyard. Worse, while Anne was still recovering from a bad case of flu, Will reported that Anaheim Disease had struck three of their grape vines. Will had burned them (only saving a sample to bring to the university), but who knows if that would save the rest.

Then there was a vehicular accident, and a man with a bump on his head showed up at their door, and Anne's telepathy, heightened by the flu, revealed that they had even bigger problems. The man was an alien, and his ship had been spreading the pandemic, since it was easier to colonize a world when there were no natives. Fortunately Anne figured out how to save the human race.

●●◐○○ The Case of the Quaker Quarry {Miles Grant 21} - Jack Dearborn (nov) 2022
A wealthy clothier hires Miles to find his missing college-age daughter. An interview with her roommate reveals that Annalise took some outfits with her, and her teddy bear, so she wasn't kidnapped. Miles investigates, and finds the young woman sold the car her parents gave her, using the money to buy a plane ticket to Los Angeles.

Miles finds out that Annalise, who was into theater, had talked about meeting her agent, whom Miles manages to track down. It's revealed that the man is more than just an agent, that Annalise is a prisoner, and that the man had plans for her. Oh, and that, as normal, clients don't tell you the important stuff.

The mystery part of the novel is workaday, if a bit sleazy. I know that the Miles Grant series ends three books from now, after a case that made Miles fully retire because it was too much. I wonder if we're descending toward that.

The flirty nudity part isn't great, because Miles traveled to Los Angeles alone, leaving Shirley back in Seattle with her mother. Miles does encounter a nudist couple he met before, upon a nudist cruise, but they just come across as sad, and the fact that the man had the questionable contacts needed to find the skeevy agent didn't help.

●●●●○ Tendeléo's Story - Ian McDonald (nva) 2000
Chaga seedpods reached Earth before Tendeléo was born, but it wasn't until she was fifteen that the nanite/biote invasion affected her personally. The Kilimanjaro patch spored, with one of the pods landing twenty kilometers away from her village.

Chaga spread at a methodical fifty meters per day; her village would be swallowed up in four hundred days. Tendeléo sneaked out with her younger sister one day, since she needed to see for herself the fate of her village. They managed to get a ride partway, and walked the rest of the way to the expansion line, where the two girls found a mobile town on a herd of giant trucks, where United Nations scientists studied the invading extraterrestrial ecology.

One scientist, bored from working for years and discovering nothing useful, gave the two girls a tour. They saw various rooms of techs, and climbed a tower to see the advancing ecosystem, a collage of wild shapes in many bright colors, vaguely like a multi-story-tall tropical reef on land.

Tendeléo's town was swallowed thirteen months later, as expected. Losing his church and flock broke her minister father. The family was moved to a refugee camp. Tendeléo looked for a job, and ended up working for a criminal, smuggling Chaga material from her boss to Nairobi hotels where American companies hoped to use it to strengthen their industries.

Her boss knew they'd fail and they'd end up destroying themselves. But until they did, they paid well. After that, the Chaga encroachment on Nairobi made Kenyan society collapse. Tendeléo blackmailed the American she was dealing with, getting herself chipped and earning evacuation, eventually ending up in England. That lasted a while, before she ended up deported — Chaga contamination — and her boyfriend followed her back to Kenya, where they joined others in realizing that an alien invasion treated people better than corporations.

◍◍◍◍◍ May begins.

●●●◐○ Franchise - Kris Neville (ss) 1951
In the early days of space exploration, the World Federation hired a company to move goods and people. The company offered a rock-bottom price for a decade, if they were given an exclusive franchise on space transport; they received it. Thirty years later, E-L Lines was a monopoly, and only they were happy about that.

It fell to Carl, who'd always wanted to be a millionaire, to fix things, by inventing an awkward way to do something pointless.

●●●◐○ The Rotohouse - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1948
Imagine “living zestfully” in a rotating house that has everything. The bathroom had a “perfume shower… Swedish massage machine… [and even] a galooner and aridilier for the hair. […] The kitchen had a comminuter for juices and an electric barbolizer as well as the Vitamineer.”

And yet the Rotohouse wasn't selling, so Abercrombie hired Oona and Jick² — an ordinary 1940s-type couple living in an ordinary scifi future — to live in it for a month, conducting daily tours and singing its praises. Naturally things went wrong. The reviewers Abercrombie said would show up Thursday showed up Wednesday, while Oona was in the shower.

So while the reporter from Homes! magazine is waiting, Oona lunges into her clothes, then runs around picking up discarded clothing. But where will she put them? People look in closets. So she shoves them into the pylon that supports the rotohouse. Which works fine, until the reporter's assistant hits the button to make the house rotate, and it begins spinning faster and faster…

●●○○○ Leaving Almost Everything - Allen Knudsen (ss) 2025
Scott flees a nudist resort in tears, having had a fight with his new boyfriend. He doesn't even bother to dress when he gets in his car, being in a screw-it-all mood.

On the drive home, Scott reviews how things came to this point. How his marriage to a Laura had ended when she said she'd found another man. How after that Scott felt awkward going to the nudist resort Laura and he had frequented, so he'd tried one a bit further away and met Frank.

During the months later, Scott thinks about nudism, and about Frank. About how he'd come to value the former, and dislike that none of the men he'd met since then had done so. And how he should do something about that.

●●●○○ No More Unsworth Manor Nudes {Unsworth Manor 3} - P.Z. Walker (nov) 2020
The concluding book in the trilogy doesn't kill a family at the start of the story¹, which is a plus. We follow the same family from the middle volume: Avery and Tracy Montague, children Charles and Patricia (15 and 13 when the book starts), and their staff and friends.

A minor plot is that Neville Unsworth turns up, a distant relative of the family from the first book. He held that, since he was an Unsworth, Unsworth Manor was his, so the Montagues had to surrender the property. This occupied several letters and visits, and paying lawyers, and the Montague family eventually paid to have their home's legal name changed from Unsworth Manor to Measham Manor, Measham being the name of the nearby village.

The major (though not big) plots concerned nudist happenings. Over the years, the Montagues had made many nudist friends, who dropped in to enjoy the grounds where they could be naked, which overburdened the four-person staff. So Avery and Gerald Brinks (the Chief Inspector for whom Tracy had worked before marriage) sought out and bought some isolated property along the River Mease, which they made into a nudist spot.

The family, and a dozen of their friends, also reenacted a scene from Gretchen Unsworth's diary, and made a trip to the seaside, where the Unsworths had found an isolated stretch of beach upon which they could go nude. When the Montague crew came, they found it was now an active nude beach, which the town was aware of, but took no official notice of.

There they enjoyed the day. While swimming, Avery and Charles went past the textile beach, and found a bathing machine tipped over. Charles and a friend rescued the woman trapped inside, and the nude crew carried her onto the textile beach. The woman and her husband later went to the nude beach to thank everyone, and later became nudists themselves, eventually setting up a second nude beach some distance away.

Not a lot of major happenings in the book. It's most a matter of just enjoying characters and minor adventures, and then getting a misty time jump.

●●●●○ Mimic - Donald A. Wollheim (ss) 1942
This story is the basis of the (much altered) 1997 film of the same name. In this case, Isaac³ talks about his childhood in Brooklyn, and how the kids had “always known of the man in the black cloak.” He lived in a tenement on their street, went out in the morning and returned at night, and was afraid of women.

“When a woman crossed his path, he would stop in his stride and come to a dead halt. We could see that he closed his eyes until she had passed. Then he would snap those wide watery blue eyes open and march on as if nothing had happened.”

Years later, Isaac man had a job at a museum, and had returned to visit his parents, when screams and moans emerged from the man's room. Isaac, the janitor, and a policeman broke down the bolted door, and discovered that he was not at all as they'd imagined, something that made the janitor flee gibbering. Then Isaac saw something even odder and more disquieting a bit later.

━━━━━━━━━━
Week Eighteen's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
138+11 ss | 09+0 nvt | 07+1 nva | 37+2 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction
━━━━━━━━━━

Epub-split three collections, since I've almost finished the Fritz Leiber and Kris Neville ones. Two are newish: The Oldest Footprints and Other Stories by Brian Terence, and The Cabral Discovery & More SciFi Shorts by Jake Berry Ellison, Jr.

The Malcolm Jameson Megapack collection has rather old contents, with all the stories dating from the 1940s.

Ans since I've also almost completed the Romance in the Nudist Colony anthology, I also epub-split an anthology, Classic Masters of Horror: The Pulp Fiction Collection, edited by Christopher Broschell. Though that's more of an extra, since after Romance comes Holiday in the Nudist Colony.

Most of the books were from Kindle Unlimited, though the Nudist Colony books were from Kobo Plus.

━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Note that 'start'. This story takes place in Great Britain from about 1937 to 1943. Three of the four Montagues don't make it out of the war alive.

[2] More continuity. Jick and Oona were the couple from last month's "Dobridust," where Oona was worried about the cleaning machine that Jick smuggled out of the spaceport where he worked. ISFDb·org says there are eight "Oona and Jick" stories. "Dobridust" was the fourth story, "Rotohouse" the sixth, and the final two, "Himalaychalet" and "Neo-Geoduck" remain to be read in the collection I'm finishing up.

[3] Another nameless first-person narrator assigned a name.

I found my grandmother's mint-green milk-glass bowl. It went missing some time ago, and I had no idea where. Turns out when I air-popped some popcorn, it was too much for the big white bowl, so I'd put the overflow in the green bowl to offer to my father. Fine.

Except when he was done, he didn't put it on the deal-with-this corner of his kitchen island. He'd just put it on a bookshelf in the den, and later put a newspaper flyer on top of it, hiding it from me. Only found it when he had me looking for something else on the shelf and I moved the papers.

Me: Alexa, tell #SomaFM to play The Dark Zone.
Alexa: Opening "The Dark Zone: An Adventure Racing Podcast."

It's early dementia, I tell you.

Epub-split a couple of collections. It's cruel to list a story in the Copyrights page, then not put it in the collection. Just caused me needless confusion for fifteen minutes trying to see what I'd missed.

Right, "Oceanic," the way to get me to read your novelette is to begin with a discussion of religion. One where a teen who's just converted to a more fundamentalist form is trying to get his tween brother to do the same. So religion, proselytizing, pressure. Yeah, I no longer care what interesting scifi stuff you may have in the background, I'm out.

Four of the ten novels I read in April.

Blood test today. No other patients there, so nobody not wearing a mask. And the sole blood tech there was wearing a mask, which is practically unheard of these days. A red letter day. #WearAMask #CovidIsNotOver

Plaint about #vampires. I'm reading a book where a human couple is bitten by a vampire couple, and turn into vampires themselves. This is bad. It means that when a vampire feeds from a human, there are two possibilities: drain and kill the person, or turn them by not draining them.

Option one produces loads of dead bodies. One per day or week or month, depending on how often a vampire has to feed. It's difficult to hide a large number of humans going missing; this lessens the suspension of disbelief.¹ (And if a vampire is leaving a trail of bodies, that makes for a less sympathetic character.)

Option two leads to a quickly growing vampire population, which makes the first option even more of a problem. You have to have a system whereby making vampires requires conscious effort.

[1] People who say "it's fiction, don't take it so seriously" or "vampires aren't real, you know" may consider themselves smited.

[0] A separate complaint is inconsistency. Early in the book, it's mentioned that vampires have to be careful about the blood type of the person they're feeding on, lest there be incompatibility. This is idiotic, since presumably vampires were around for ages before blood-typing was a thing. This would mean every time a vampire fed before then, they risked sickness or death.

Even after blood types were known, it'd mean vampires would have to inquire about or investigate their intended victim's blood type. Later in the book, a different vampire says that not only are differing blood types no problem, but that they can drink blood that failed blood bank virus tests with no issue.