jrderego

[jrderego]

Stop Giving Away Your Writing, Dumb Ass

Robert Heinlein established the rules of writing back in 1947.

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you write.

3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.

4. You must put the work on the market.

5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

In some of his other essays he also says in response to rule 3, that the editorial order better come with a check. This isn’t to say that everything we create is perfect but that significant changes to content should be after an agreement to purchase is made and only then. This doesn’t mean that we stop editing… LOL… A common take away from this rule when I talk about it with other writers. We are always editing.

I bring this up because it’s important that we writers not forget that we are selling our labor when we submit stories for publication. Good, bad, or other, it’s our labor. And finding the right markets or paying markets is a lot of the writing game. Market research isn’t my favorite thing, submitting doesn’t make me happy, and receiving rejections is… well… I don’t care anymore as I’ve received enough to wallpaper a room.

One of the aspects of writing that doesn’t get a lot of page space here is the ongoing relentless market research and submissions that are required to get work seen (and with podcasts, heard) in the wide marketplace. I follow a few different fiction opsn submission groups on Facebook where I do a lot of hunting for places to send stories. There are a few of these and they are really helpful especially if you have a specialty story or are from a specific author subgroup these are great places for REALLY specific anthologies on both sides of that coin. I have found some great indie mags there like Planet Scumm. It’s easy to find an anthology market with a cool theme that might spark a story idea, and really whatever skein of speculative fiction you write there is probably an anthology for it. Seriously! It’s almost like the, at least science fiction, short story market has become more varied on the low pay side than how current professional science fiction magazines are currently. This is good and bad. It’s good in that there are more markets that will look at your stories. It’s also good, in that I’ve seen at least some of these anthologies in actual physical Barnes and Noble bookstores so they aren’t being published then achieving only pocket sales numbers through the publisher’s website or Facebook friends list or whatever. I am sure the editors of these face the same sort of struggles that we self publishers do, namely getting these into a store, generating interest and ultimately making book sales. 

Where the anthology market has its problems isn’t in the editorial bent or style of theme of the books it is the expectation from a lot of them that authors will submit for “name recognition” rather than actual either money or copies of the anthology.

Harlan Ellison has an excellent rant about working for no pay. Every writer should listen to him and record this as an MP3 and keep a text version of it on their computer to read every time they do market research. Lately these have been soliciting stories for “charity” and often no mentioning what that charity is… But that isn’t the issue really, it’s that because these are “charity” anthologies that writers should be happy to submit for no reward other than a publication credit in an anthology that no one will read. There are a lot of them out there who offer as payment - a PDF copy of the anthology. 

How good is that? Not good at all. It is impossible to fill my car with gas on a PDF copy. It is hard to generate interest among my pocket sales group to buy anthology that I am in without even a physical one to show them. I’m in several anthologies that paid me just in a physical copy of the book, and for all intents and purposes that is at least something that is physical and has some measure of intrinsic value at the absolute lowest level of pay for effort.

Writing short stories is hard. It takes time and skill and a continuous refinement of skills and approach to stay engaged in the market until, like when you’ve landed a few pieces in Asimov’s you can get by on name recognition and can play all over the market. Until then being aware of what these markets are is really important. Depending on the rights that the publisher is buying you may be literally giving away a short story that, if you’re anything like me, has taken tens of hours to complete. But, as P.T. Barnum said, there is a sucker born every minute. There are writers who submit work that they have slaved over to anthologies that won’t sell and won’t pay them for name recognition that doesn’t exist on a science fiction anthology about, for example, sea monsters. 

To quote Harlan Ellison, “Tell that to someone, a little older than you, who has just fallen off the turnip truck. There is no publicity value of my essay being on your DVD.” Substitute in “short story” for essay and anthology for “DVD”.

Stop submitting to these things and they will go away. It is the only way to drive them out. Starve them of content, make them pay. Back when I was successful in selling stories into the podcast market there was a new editor with a new cast that advertised he wanted short stories under a certain limit for no pay and exposure only. He announced this in one of the podcast forums and was roundly corrected until he offered at least a token payment of $5.

5$ isn’t NOTHING. It’s not a lot, but it is a recognition of your work even if you are ultimately working for pennies an hour. $5 is pay. An anthology that has 30 stories in it would pay out $150 at five bucks per story. If you can’t scrape together $150 to pay for content, then stop publishing and do something else.

Short story writers, you know you can take the story that you slaved over and polished and make awesome and if all else fails put it up at the Kindle store for .99 and make a couple of bucks off of it more than you will ever make of a charity anthology. 

When writers submit their hard work for free it reduces the value in the marketplace for all of us who are actively trying to sell our work. Cut it out.

Harlan says it better than me. 

In other notes, it seems to be a week or two for arguing on the internet. This one is a Heinlein specific argument. I like Tumblr most of the time and spend some time reading and occasionally commenting on other writing content here and there. In one such case the OP was asking about recommendations for something to introduce their 14 year old non-binary child to science fiction and fantasy. I recommended Have Spacesuit Will Travel and Tunnel in the Sky along with fantasy standards Tolkein’s The Hobbit, and Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydian all of these books are good entry points for a teen to enter science fiction and fantasy reading. The reply I received was that Heinlein wasn’t “appropriate” because his writing was full of content that was “racist, misogynist, eugenic, and enemy of the LGBTQ community.”

Heinlein in the Modern World

In the spirit of discussion I asked where I might find examples of said concerns as I was a pretty avid reader and always looking for where a different viewpoint might be coming from. Was there something I missed in his writing? But alas, like so many other commenters who step in, the commenter only restated their position and told me to do my own research etc… 

I guess the short reason I’m even posting this is because it irritated me. There is always room for criticism of stuff and Jeez-Louise I am certainly always interested in another interpretation of something I’ve read and written about. At least give me that rather than the knee jerk reaction “this isn’t appropriate” with absolutely nothing but some shouted concerns that literally aren’t reflected in any of Heinlein’s books that I’ve read. I get that it's easy to say "this was written in the 40s/50s/60s by an old white man therefore it must be everything wrong with that time in history... But in Heinlein it's demonstrably not the case. I admit too that some of his prose can be dated, some of his interactions as well are a product of the time when they were written but to write if off wholesale is just... I don't know... disappointing. Admittedly the commenter who prompted this makes drawings of other people's characters... so I guess it's apropos of the state of Tumblr.

But, god it’s annoying sometimes.

[jrderego]

Rest In Peace Dave Thomas, Long Live Pere Ubu

I was introduced to Pere Ubu in 1991 when I was a "format show" DJ at WKKL the college station on Cape Cod where I went to school. The record Cloudland had been released a little earlier and we had a slow as molasses music director so it was still in the rotation clock even though it had come out at least a year before I got my Saturday morning show. The song we had in rotation was Bus Called Happiness.

A good tune for sure, but at the time not enough for me to really become amazed by their range and longevity. See, when I started DJing it opened me up to a whole new world of music. Acts that I had never heard of were suddenly in regular rotation for me that would not cross over to the mainstream MTV audience for months or sometimes years. So in that sea of new experiences, Pere Ubu was lost.

Who are Pere Ubu, You Ask?

I'll let Dave Thomas one of the founding members, and until last weekend, the only surviving member of the band.

Pere Ubu have been around since the mid 1970s and ultimately helped define the "post punk" movement before the punk movement really started. Their first real record, The Modern Dance has some of my favorite weird, rocking, stripped down, essence of punk songs like Non-Alignment Pact.

Previous to Pere Ubu, Dave Thomas was a founder of the short lived band Rocket from the Tombs. Some of the songs they created, and later rerecorded as Pere Ubu are some of the best of their early output.

By the time I really discovered them I was already an adult, with kids, and possibly even already widowed. I was reading something on the internet and it mentioned them playing live in Denmark and there was a link to a live video of them performing Waiting for Mary, the real single pushed off of Cloudland.

I vaguely remembered it, or at least remembered playing something from that record as a DJ. I watched the video, then another, and another, live, studio, interviews, and the world of Pere Ubu just opened up to me. I hunted every record I could find, and there weren't many to be found! One of the things with weird outsider music like this is that people don't sell their used copies, and new copies aren't really printed all that often. So, once Dave Thomas was selling these directly it was easier. Though Pere Ubu is still at the top of my list of records whenever I go used record hunting.

I was fortunate enough to see Pere Ubu twice live - 2013 and 2017. By then Dave Thomas' health was in steep decline and he was performing from a chair. That said he and his band were able to put on an amazing show.

That blurry blob in the middle there is Dave Thomas in 2013. The second show in 2017 was better attended and in a slightly larger venue. Their records are very much outsider music, for every Final Solution there is a Lonesome Cowboy Dave and all of their records are different and strange. The lynchpin holding it all together was Dave Thomas. The last record of theirs was 2017's Trouble on Big Beat Street. This throws back some towards their most acclaimed record, "The Modern Dance" from 1978.

This is Pere Ubu in the last iteration that I saw, 2017, doing arguably their most famous song, Final Solution.

I have my records. I have my memories. I'll always have Pere Ubu.

Rest in Peace, Dave Thomas. I'll miss you.

[jrderego]

New Bunch Of Stuffcast

The Door Into Summer Podcast is up!

[jrderego]

Heinlein Marathon - The Door Into Summer

Robert A Heinlein 1957

Introduction and Initial Thoughts

I started this book immediately after finishing Tampa by Alyssa Nutting and as I said in the review of THAT book the change in tone was so incredibly sharp that it made me emotional. The Door Into Summer is one of the late Heinlein Juvi’s from his transition out of strictly teen boy oriented fiction into more mature and refined storytelling. Like Podcayne of Mars and Double Star so there is some more adult themed stuff in here.

At any rate I had a great time reading this one and it’ll be reflected in the star rating at the end. 

I have written a time travel story or two and while they can be fun to work in, genre wise, they are HARD to get right. Paradoxes abound, and it’s not unusual to write yourself into one that the story literally can’t survive no matter how much fixing you try do to. So it doesn’t surprise me that there are only a few really well regarded time travel stories, at least in novel form, that I’ve run across that don’t paradox themselves out of existence. In the case of The Door Into Summer it doesn’t even bother addressing the one big paradox that it creates, and normally this would drive me away from the core of the tale. However, I have recently leaned via erstwhile physicist and all around media guy Neil Degrasse Tyson of the “Jinn Particle” that is, something that exists in the world that wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a time travel paradox and it is a thing that can only exist in the time travel paradox. Jinn particles don’t have to have mass, but they can be an event, or something tangible but not physical. You can learn about this the same way I did here! 

And this book is a great exploration of the Jinn  Particle phenomena.

So where are we in the Heinlein Marathon? A little better than half way throught the original list of titles I put here so that’s something! My goal is to try to do one of these every quarter or so for 2025. I also have another marathon project to work on in the same vein as this. My son bought me the first 60 or so of the Destroyer novels by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir and I am going to read those and give it the same sort of treatment that these get. I don’t know if I’ll do them also at the Bunch O’ Stuffcast, but you never know. The Destroyer books are a howl, and so short they take maybe two hours to blast through. 

But enough about that, let’s get into The Door into Summer.

Podkayne of Mars - ⭐⭐ Starman Jones ⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Cat Who Walks Through Walls ⭐ Methuselah’s Children ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Double Star ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Starship Troopers ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Friday ⭐ Tunnel in the Sky⭐⭐⭐⭐ Waldo ⭐⭐⭐ Sixth Column⭐⭐ Stranger in a Strange Land⭐⭐⭐ The Door into Summer←You are Here! I Will Fear No Evil The Green Hill of Earth The Man Who Sold the Moon Revolt in 2100 Have Spacesuit Will Travel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Characters

Dan Davis - an engineer and inventor

Belle Darkin - Dan Davis’ love interest, also Miles’ love interest, also a terrible person

Miles Gentry - Dan’s partner in a small robotics company

Pete - Dan’s best friend, also a cat

Frederika “Ricki” Heinicke - Miles stepdaughter

Chuck Freudenberg - Dan’s friend and another engineer

Hubert Twitchell - A scientist who has invented time travel

John and Jenny Sutton - Nudists who befriend, and then create a company around, Dan

Plot Summary

Again, I am going to try to be frugal in my description here - something I usually fail at - because I don’t want to spoil this book. The Door into Summer is such a fun read that you should read it before you read the review even… or, at least, watch the movie from 2021 (more about that below!).

In short, this is a time travel story. Time travel has been a feature in Heinlein’s work before, especially in the short stories like All you Zombies, and would be featured later in stuff like The Cat Who Walks through Walls. But this is the only novel that I’ve read yet or know about in his collected works that explores two types of time travel in the same story. But, as always I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start where we start.

Meet Dan Davis, he and his cat Pete, are drinking in a local bar after a bad business meeting in which Dan has been swindled out of his half of the company he founded. Hired Girl Electronics is a two person shop where Dan and his partner Miles create and sell labor saving robots into the commercial/residential market. The most popular ones are task specific, one washes windows, for example. The big one though is a robot housekeeper named Flexible Frank. Dan founded Hired Girl with an army buddy named Miles Gentry. Miles handles the business side of the business and Dan manages all of the engineering and robotics. Managing the day to day office operations for both of them is Belle, a woman who would become both Dan’s fiance, and later Miles’ wife.

Belle is the villain of this novel, by the way, and while it’s easy to write the sort of fork-tongued she-creature who uses men for their money by trading on her looks and sexuality, Heinlein makes Belle a pretty well rounded character.

Anyway, Dan and Pete have decided on 30 years of cold sleep, that is suspended animation, after a palace coup where Miles and Belle screw him out of his interest in the company as they plan to sell it to another company called Mannix enterprises. So, in a fit of anger and some element of drunkeness he signs himself up for 30 years of suspended animation. Dan invests all of his remaining money in the Marshal insurance company that contracts out to the cold sleep business at Sawtell Industries. But, since he’s been drinking the cold sleep place won’t let him get into the tube until he’s sobered up considerably. He is told to come back tomorrow with a clear head. Thus, Dan and Pete decide to have one last discussion with Miles and Belle about the stuff that’s happened. First though he mails his stock certifications to Miles’ stepdaughter, Frederica “Ricki” Gentry with instructions that on her 21st birthday all shares in Hired Girl that belonged to him not belong to her. Both Miles and Belle are terrible people, Belle more than Miles as she is the one who planned and executed the coup so she could have controlling interest in Hired Girl. It was here who facilitated the sale of the company and all of its Intellectual Property, including the prototype of Flexible Frank, to Mannix Enterprises.

They drug Dan with something that makes him super suceptible to hypnosis and once Belle realizes that Dan going to sleep for 30 years is just as good, if not better than killing him and having to dispose of his body, they tell him to go to his appointment as scheduled and get frozen. In the midst of this both Miles and Belle fight with Pete as Dan struggles against the drug with which he has been injected. Pete escapes out the back door and Dan returns to the cold sleep facility and puts himself to sleep for 30 years. Belle changes his contract with the sleep facility to change the insurance company that bonds the procedure to one owned by Mannix Enterprises, where, we learn, Belle was involved in hiding some of their assets. Master Insurance is their name.

Dan awakens without Pete in the year 2000, learns he’s broke as his insurance policy contract was forged and changed to Master Insurance from Marshal insurance, which went bankrupt during the “crash of 87” with Mannix Enterprises. The facility where he awakened, Sawtell Industries, is a contract cryogenic facility that is effectively paid in full by the insurance company so they are required to carry out the term of the cold sleep and revive the person and get them prepped for life in whatever time in which they awaken.

Dan also realizes that the nurse who is helping him out of cold sleep is a robot much more sophisticated than, but possibly springs from, Eager Beaver, his prototype that Miles and Belle stole from him. There are also other products in the line, Nanny, and Winwally, and some others all of which are like Flexible Frank/Eager Beaver but way, way more sophisticated, there are other models too, receptionist robots, and nurses, and all manner of home servant. These are all manufactured by Aladdin Corporation. A company Dan has never heard of. Dan is also presented with several phone messages from a “Mrs. Schultz”, a person he doesn’t know. The messages are urgent and have started to come in directly on the day he was defrosted.

The future of the year 2000 is different for sure than the world of 1970 that he left, but for the most part, absorbing the “sleepers” as they are known is a relatively seamless practice. Dan learns that while he doesn’t have any assets, that Hired Girl exists and is in the artificial companion appliance business but someone else owns it, and all of the technology he remembers creating is owned by Aladdin Enterprises, there is little for Dan to restart his life with.

That doesn’t stop him though. As he is a sleeper and is entitled for 5 days of room and board at the facility, he takes a payout and leaves, determined to restart his engineering/invention business and figure out what happened to all of his previous work, Miles, Bell, and Ricki. Ricki, he learns, is married and he tries to track her down but gives up after a few days because she might also be dead. It’s kind of unclear to Dan as he doesn’t remember Ricki’s real last name. As she was Miles Gentry’s step daughter she always went by Gentry, but that isn’t her real name.

Belle, it turns out, spent some time in jail for embezzlement, she is not broke and living in a terrible dirty apartment. She is also no longer pretty and has a booze and pills habit. Miles died from diabetes two years after Dan was frozen. Mannix went bankrupt while she was embezzling money so they never bought Hired Girl. She accuses Dan of being in love with Ricki (which he is…). Dan leaves here eating happy pills in her apartment, never to return.

He gets arrested for vagrancy, but a somewhat kindly judge helps Dan get a job smooshing cars into blocks to be melted into steel to me made into cars in a perpetual cycle of weird commerce that he finds baffling (as do I). Dan sets out to find out what happened to Hired Girl after he was put to sleep and learns that they are still in operation and that Mannix never purchased them. Instead they licensed out the technology of the Flexible Frank prototype to Aladdin Industries. Dan visits the company for which he is still revered but not a shareholder as his shares that he initially mailed to Ricki through the Bank of America were never transferred.

There is a lot of convoluted stuff here about how he gets a job as a demonstration engineer for the marketing department of Hired Girl because he is the founder and inventor of Flexible Frank, he gets a small machine shop and engineering area and even a best friend, Chuck, with whom he can chat about his engineering ideas. He learns that Hired Girl licenses the technology to make the current iterations of Flexible Frank work from Aladdin Enterprises - a company that came into existence only a few weeks before he entered the cold sleep. 

Before long he realizes that the patents for the updated Flexible Frank, and an automatic drafting table that he uses, are awarded to him but these were after he was put into cold sleep so he is looking for someone else named D. B. Davis who, coincidentally, might have been an engineer who worked on robots and drafting tables. 

Dan is never confused by this information as he works with it like an engineer does. He takes it all apart to see what is needed and what isn’t then acts on what is needed. 

Before long he’s found a disgraced doctor who has created a time travel machine and hoodwinked him into sending Dan back 30 years and two weeks. Back before he was frozen and aware of what the future holds, Dan makes friends with a nudist couple (John and Jenny Sutton). John is a patent attorney that Dan convinces to open a company called Aladdin Enterprises. He assigns his Hired Girl stock to John as capital to start the company with the proviso that it be assigned to Ricki on her 21st birthday. 

He’s also brought back about $1000 in gold back from the future and makes that part of the capital start up money. He then goes to visit Ricki at a girl scout camp where he recovers the stock that he gave her, tells her he is going into cold sleep for 30 years. 

Dan then recovers the prototype and designs for Flexible Frank during the fight where Pete is scratching up Belle and Miles. Dan retrieves Pete, stuffs his car full of Flexible Frank and heads off to the cold sleep.

He awakens 30 years and six months later at Sawtelle, with the correctly contracted Marshall insurance company with Pete, reunites with Pete and with Ricki, and everything is put right. He even awakens with an idea for a robot named Proteus Pete.

Dan has found his door into summer.

Heinlein’s Government Stuff

There’s none in this one. The only authority figure at all is the judge who helps Dan get a job crushing cars. There is some discussion of the weird way that the cars are built but never sold then crushed and melted and made into more cars that aren’t sold. This is couched in his discussion of economics, which Dan says he doesn’t understand. I think Heinlein was trying to explore the irrationality of a captive domestic economy but it is a little hard to penetrate.

Heinlein’s Weird Ability to Make the Eventual Mundane Before It Was Invented

Heinlein describes at CAD stations in this, his Drafting Dan as described is pretty much a computer aided design station. He also has tablets, like iPads, that show news and entertainment information with a touchable screen.

Finally, he predicted the change in currency from the gold standard about 20 years before Nixon ended it for real. This allowed for cheap “industrial gold” that he’d use later in the story to fund his time in 1970.

What I Liked

I LOVED this book. Part of it I am sure is that I had just come off of Tampa, but I read this book three times in two weeks. There are several reasons for this. This is Heinlein’s best use of language in everything of his that I’ve read. Dan may be an engineer but he has the voice of a poet, a good one, with dozens of quotable lines in here. The central metaphor of seeking “the door into summer” made me so happy to see carried through. There is a breeziness in the writing that, although this is still in the juvi period, never read’s like it’s targetted at young readers. 

Heinlein includes, I think for the first time, some ideas that he would describe in much greater depth within many of his later books. For example - 

John and Jenny are a nontraditional couple. Dan arrives in the past at the nudist colony where they frolic. It’s suggested not long after they all meet that they might also engaged in swinging. Dan certanly seems like a third romantic partner at times, not that they have a lot of page time together as a throuple, but these things would go on to be explored in Stranger in a Strange Land, and books beyond.

There are some cool ideas introduced here that aren’t important to the story but they are to the world building. Grabbies are movies in which the theater is able to manipulate gravity during the show to make the presentation more imersive. There is a lot of language that doesn’t make sense to Dan so it never makes sense to us, which increases the sense of disconnectedness that Dan has in the year 2000. Heinlein takes time to give us a few paragraphs of news headlines and they are pretty funny in their use of made up works.

Time Travel

So time travel comes in two forms here, the cold sleep where time passes normally and the traveler doesn’t participate in it because they are frozen, and instantaneous where a massive amount of power (in this case the “FULL POWER OF A UNIVERSITY!!!”) can send an object back or ahead in time. Both are one-way-trips. The way they do the second one here is filled with hand-wavium, and I am totally okay with that. I’ve read over the pages where Dan and Dr. Twitchel discuss how time travel works - essentially it’s a loop but not a closed loop - and I was okay with that. It means the rest of the story works without creating a time paradox to unscramble. Twitchell shows off his machine by sending two of Dan’s coins into the timestream, both of which have been marked by Dan so they can be identified. Both of them disappear. Then, sort of like a regular magic trick, Twitchell pulls one of the marked coins from his pocket. He said he found it on the stage a week ago and knew that he was going to operate the time machine again in the future. 

Now is the future. 

The second coin probably went into the actual future, but the idea gets dropped pretty quickly. I admit to reading this over and over and it still didn’t make sense to me. I don’t understand what happened to the second quarter. But then, I never was a fan of magic anyway…

Problematic Stuff

This book usually gets brought up negatively for the relationship between Dan and Ricki. In 1970 Ricki is 11. Dan mentions in the year 2000 being in love with her since she was 6. There isn’t ever really a suggestion of impropriety but the central romantic relationship is between a prepubescent girl and an older man. It is Riki that professes her romantic love for Dan when he reveals that he is going to put himself in cold sleep. The movie, which we’ll talk about in a bit, gets around this. Still, Ricki is the most important character in the book as she is the impetus for Dan to do literally everything he does. Ultimately they are both outcasts with little connection to immediate family Ricki is an orphan, and Dan is a man out of time, and the one family member they both cling to is Pete the cat.

Heinlein makes a pretty good Mata Hari type villain out of Belle and describes her downfall in surprising detail. A reader could argue that she is effectively one-dimensional and a convenient villain, I mean, she immediately tries the same spiel on Dan when they meet after he awakens. Miles could easily have been the villain of this story but Belle’s use of her sexuality to get to both of the partners in Hired Girl is pretty important to being a villain.

Could This Be a TV Show or a Movie?

Holy shit, it is! I had no idea this had been adapted, and in Japan no less. This is a Toho production. There are some updates to make the technology more in line with future stuff now, so no robotic window washers or ornate drafting machines. This one has androids. And you know what, I am okay with that. The structure of the story is nearly identical to the book with names changed as it’s a Japanese film. The character maps are 

Dan Davis - Soichiro Takakura

Belle Darkin - Rin Shiraishi

Miles Gentry - Kazuhito

Pete - Soichiro’s best friend, also a cat

Frederika “Ricki” Heinicke - Riko Matushita

Chuck Freudenberg - Pete the android

Hubert Twitchell - Professor Toi

John and Jenny Sutton - Taro Sato and Midori Sato

Amagalm character - Goto, the owner of the Japanese version of Hired Girl and also a robot inventor. He also has the original prototype of the Eager Beaver.

The addition of Pete the android is a nice touch and condenses several characters who help Soichiro adjust to the future, which is a little further ahead than 2000. I think it’s like 2029 that he awakens from cold sleep. Pete is a fun character because he’s an innocent, and he also provides a couple of clues to how the time travel stuff will work out, but it’s revealed slowly and organically in the story. The big differences between the novel and the film is that Pete the android travels back in time with Soichiro and he becomes the fish out of water. Pete is the most recent version of the Flexible Frank/Eager Beaver and we first meet him when Soichiro is revived in the future. When Soichiro asks for Pete the cat, but there is no cat to awaken, he instead is presented with Pete the robot. It is a lot of fun. The time travel stuff is clarified a little with Professor Toi having a back story that makes more sense to the story, in that he was disgraced after developing a way to control gravity and accused of stealing from the government program that he was working on. Only after someone mysterious funded his research in time travel did he make the machine that sends Soichiro back to 1998. What I love so much about this adaptation is that it treats the source material with a lot of respect. There is an addition of time pressure to get everything coordinated because of the short window between when Soirchiro goes back to 1998 and when he is double crossed and frozen in Mannix. In that time he has to recover the stock certificates, rescue the Eager Beaver prototype, meet Goto and sign his magazine, give his money to Professor Toi to fund his research, and rescue Pete. He also needs to find Riki. It gives a nice “beat the clock” element to the story. To reinforce it, Pete is only assigned to serve Soichiro for 5 days.

It is clear that writer Tomoe Kano has a deep love for the story. Primarily a romance movie writer, this film lays a little more heavily into the romance between the 23 (or so) year old Soichiro and the (in 1998) 17 year old Riko that it doesn’t feel as weird when she expresses her love for him. Director Takahiro Miki is primarily a romance movie director and the pacing of this film is much closer to a teen romance film than a wham-bang-science-fiction picture, but I think that also plays to the book’s central spine, namely the relationship between Dan and Riki.

If I had to describe the book and the film in one word it would “gentle”. And you know what, I am on board with that!

It is on Netflix as of this writing and is absolutely worth a watch (or multiple watches). 

Conclusion

Absolutely solid book and film. Can’t recommend it enough! This brings me back to the idea of the Jinn Particle. In this story the designs for the updated Flexible Frank and other devices already exist when Dan exists the cold sleep. Thus, he must have already traveled back in time from 30 years in the future to create them and the Aladdin Enterprises company before. That means that the plans and all of those devices are effectively only able to exist because of or inside the time loop that he’s created. Now, there is some philosphical hemming and hawing over whether time is linear or not in this story, and Heinlein pretty much shrugs his shoulders and plows back into the story and I am okay with that. The question to take away is, at least with regard to time travel, is what happens to the other Dan? The one who was awakened in 2000. The Dan who traveled back to 1970 was refrozen and awakened in 2001. Six months after the other Dan was originally thawed. Is this a continuous loop? Is Dan trapped like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day or is Time linear that the loop stay in the timeline and the difference between the first awakening and the second is enough to break the time paradox?

I’ll let you figure that out on your own. But, really, read this one, I loved it.

Final Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

[jrderego]

100 posts!

[jrderego]

Podcasts About Books and Other Writing Stuff

Not only do I read and write a lot, I do a lot of walking. It’s one of the few exercises really good to keep my heart disease stable(ish) and when I walk I listen to a lot of different podcasts. Normally I listen to humor, history, music, and political podcasts but lately I’ve found a couple of science fiction book review podcasts out in the wild. I thought, wow! Great! Someone else doing what I am doing only with way more episodes and apparently a ton more time than I have. 

I subscribed to a couple of them, listened to a few episodes of each, then unsubscribed. I was bummed and for a couple of reasons. I make my gateway into stuff like this to find a book that I’ve read and liked among the catalog of episodes and I listen to see where we agree and disagree. In the case of the two different podcasts I disagreed. The book reviews I explored were Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and Starship Troopers - as stated here, my all time favorite book - Robert Heinlein.

I definitely didn’t expect all three podcasts to have such negativity towards all three books, the discussion of Roadside Picnic was a sort of forum discussion with a couple of folks who enjoyed it and one who didn’t. The accompanying podcast about the film version, Stalker, devolved into name calling. It wasn’t awesome. The other podcast was a british guy and a german woman discussing science fiction books that only the british guy has read. So the cohost sort of plays the color commentator to the other host. I like this setup and it was sort of how we used to do it on TWWWBLY (by the way that is still be reposted each week so go listen if you haven’t). The big complaints about Starship Troopers was that it wasn’t action packed enough and it wasn’t satire enough… you know, like the movie was… and while the host did a little research on Heinlein for his review it was almost all from a cursory read of the Heinlein or the Starship Troopers Wikipedia page. I know Starship Troopers is a polarizing book, Heinlein knew it too, and wrote several articles about the book and the ideas within it. All you have to do is hunt around for them a little and you’ll find some, like “Who are the Sons of Patrick Henry” where he explores the idea of powered armor as a metaphor for nuclear weapons when presented with a potential army of soldiers vastly larger, in the case of the time period, China and the USSR. Either way, they appreciated its place in science fiction history but prefered more modern books. As for The Road, the host railed about it being a shit book and unreadable, cliched trash, then revealed he didn’t finish it, and finally that he doesn’t read books he listens to them. His cohost asked incredulous questions and joined in poo pooing Cormac McCarthy’s writing as “art writing pretending to be dystopian science fiction” and while I don’t give enough of a shit about his taste to write a rebuttal, it did illuminate a question that I’ve been wrestling with for a while. Namely, is reading different than listening enough that when discussing work is it like discussing two different things? As if two people are looking at the same painting but are seeing differnet brush strokes.

At any rate, it doesn’t matter. I was irritated by both of them that I stopped following them. One of them was defunct as of 2019 so that was a pretty easy choice, but the other is still going strong at like 550 episodes.

As for the reading vs. listening discussion, I generally don’t think there is much of a difference at least for discussing the story, between the two but when it gets into the discussion of the writing then it is. Take The Road as an example, and I have experience with Cormac McCarthy having read All the Pretty Horses, Cities on the Plain, and Blood Meridian. Much of McCarthy’s work is in the modern western genre, like, cowboy stories, or stories set in the old west. They are beautifully written genre fiction. The Road is also genre fiction and manages on the page to convey the slow death of all things with the death of language, first with missing punctuation, then with shorter sentences, smaller ideas, and eventually a smaller language pool of words. All of that is captured in the TEXT of the book but not in the audio version. I’ve said before on the Bunch O Stuffcast that I read and listened to Blood Meridian and while I marveled at the writing I couldn’t keep the events of the story straight as I could get lost in reading and rereading gorgeous paragraphs and studying how he created images etc… and when I listened to the book the story became front and center and I wasn’t lost in the language, all of the events and excitement fell into place. 

Same painting, different brush strokes.

I’ve picked up a lot of modern science fiction short stories lately as I still am trying to figure out what editors are buying in the very limited paying markets. I’ve picked up and anthology of 5 issues of the magazine Planet Scumm and I am enjoying it. I have a story in their slush pile and I was intrigued enough to order the anthology. It’s a monthly or quarterly or something. I love the way it’s laid out and it has a cool cover. I also picked up the most recent version of Asimov’s, that I read a few stories in then gave up on, and the most recent issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction which turned out to be Summer 2024, so I think they might be dead now. 

In all three cases I found stories that were like outlines of stories that were picked and showcased in these magazines. There were ideas but no plot, or a plot so convoluted and nonsensical that the story was unreadable and the ideas were lost. Some of this may be that a lot of modern science fiction short stories tend to be slipstream which is a sub-genre I just do not get at all. 

I read a lot, a real lot, of science fiction short stories with magazines from the 1950s through last month with a good representative sample of each decade and movement in popular science fiction, and it feels like the genre got lost somewhere around 2005 or 2010 when some newer, younger, editors entered the scene. I don’t know if the work that editors do with writers is the same as it was when John W. Campbell or Groff Conklin were editing, but it is definitely different. Maybe it’s because the editors weren’t writers first or something or weren’t science fiction readers maybe? Feel free to reply to this post if you know the answer. 

I definitely don’t like rereading stories because I can’t make sense of what the author is trying to convey. The “this is science fiction so it should be as avant-garde and esoteric as possible,” approach that will really draw in the dwindling audience for this medium seems short sighted.

There are some other cultural issues in the marketplace that have shifted too and more diverse voices means competition is fiercer. This is very good thing for science fiction and short story writing in general. Traditionally underrepresented writers are having a real resurgence now and a lot of the 21st century shorts that I’ve really enjoyed have been from writers who aren’t like me. 

The story I wrote and submitted to the Murderfish anthology didn’t get picked up but I did get a nice personal note from the editor and he told me that I made it through the first round of choices so that’s something. I have no idea where the hell I am going to sell a story about a juvenile greenland shark, but I am still submitting it anywhere that it might fit. I don’t think I’ve write stuff specific to anthologies anymore, it is a lot of work to end up with a story that is so focused that nowhere else will take it if it doesn’t get picked up by the anthology. I have another story, Two to Tango, that suffers a similar fate. The anthology I wrote it for went silent after submission and as far as I can tell it is now defunct. Space westerns are hard to sell, apparently, as Two to Tango has been bounced 4 or 5 times.

I started this as an intro to the Heinlein Marathon entry on The Door into Summer but at almost 1600 words this’ll be a standalone entry. Heinlein Marathon to appear here in the next few days or so.

As always, my books are available at Amazon, and several short stories are there for kindle readers. I sometimes make these available at no cost, so to parlay an old sci-fi tropey saying, keep watching the skies and you might be able to get one.

[jrderego]

Original Fiction Writers... Where are you?

I’ve been pretty active Tumblr user and blooger for over 11 years now and while I do what I can to engage on this site with other writers and readers (and artists and photograhers as well) that I have come to the conclusion that, at least, for the writers that I encounter here with any regularity that all that anyone seems to write is erotic fanfiction. I don’t see much of people pumping their original stories, novels, anthology sales, or podcasts. It’s weird to me that with such a surfiet of writing outlets that make getting content published so easy, whether it’s the Kindle Store, or self publishing physical books through Lulu or Amazon, or creating a podcast of your own, that there would be more folks with original content here.

[jrderego]

New Bunch Of Stuffcast up

[jrderego]

Tampa - Alissa Nutting: Part 1

I don’t normally abandon books and I don’t intend to start now. I’ve hated certain books so much I sold them to used book stores, donated them to charities, and in one case finished the book and threw it into the trash – Not recycling where if pulped it could be used to make a better book eventually – but into the actual trash so it would be buried in a landfil within a plastic bag that will outlive the heat death of the universe. 

That book was Ready Player One, the absolute worst piece of anything I have ever read and I finished that one out of spite.

I am currently reading Tampa by Alissa Nutting, a book that I came across either on a podcast or heard mentioned in a Youtube video, and the description was intriguing. Namely a fictionalization of a female teacher/very young male student sexual relationship. While this sort of plot isn’t generally up my alley or anything I’ve read and enjoyed Lolita and this book was compared at least thematically to that. Writing wise there are differences as there always are, but Alyssa Nutting has a REALLY GREAT command of the language and her prose manages to be both incredibly readable and while wordy, the nature of the lanuage choices absolutely flesh out Celest, the main character.. In short, her prose is really great.

Plotwise Lolita and Tampa have a lot of parallels, it’s told from the POV of the adult, in this case a newly hired middle school teacher, who becomes infatuated with a very young teen. While Dolores in Lolita was 12, Jack Patrick in this book is 14. Celest, the main character, and Humbert Humbert both trace their obsession back to an event when they were 14 years old, both are in loveless marriages that are meant to provide cover for, and/or access to Jack or Dolores.

At any rate, I will be writing a longer piece on this book when… if… I finish it. I am at about the halfway mark as of last night.

The reason I say if is that the presentation of Celest is so predatory that she quickly becomes unrelatable. Again, I am not generally bothered by controversial subjects in novels, but when a person’s only trait appears to be a singular, barracuda-like, drive to have sex with a boy there isn’t much to grab onto as a reader. The book falls into this narrative structure - Celest thinks about her sex drive, then acts on it, she thinks about how she’ll find the right boy in her class, then she does. The idea I am illustrating is that she telegraphs everything she does, then she does it, so there isn’t a way for her to frame the events in a way that generates sympathy. Lolita  had a darker sheen as Humbert Humbert framed all of his terrible deeds with a continuous assertion that his attraction, then repeated sexual assaults of Dolores, were “romance”. 

Celest is much more like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho when we are presented with everything from his daily skincare routine to his making sausage out of a prostitute in a way that is matter of fact and ultimately non reflective. This also makes it chilling, which Tampa is as well.

If there is one element of Tampa that will most likely keep me reading it the way that Nutting strips away the “romance” framing of Lolita and leaves Celest as a shamless predator at the core of the narrative. 

My History with Disturbing Art: RE Bad Lieutenant

There was a movie that I watched, legitimately, like 35 years ago or something called Bad Lieutenant - Harvey Keitel film, very controversial as the main character is irredeemable. I had to watch that over two VHS rentals because I tapped out half way through as I just couldn’t deal with the torrent of awfulness of the main character. The uncomfortable character buried the plot of the movie so much that nine months later, NINE MONTHS, I found myself ruminating on the film and realized how the plot actually held the film together. I actually yelled out "the bookie was the killer..." which ultimately is one of the drivers of the narrative, but it was completely lost to me under all of the REALLY difficult stuff that made up the rest of the movie.

Nine months to figure out the plot! That’s the power I guess that REALLY negative characters can have on the experience. 

The reason I bring this up as Tampa may be my literary equivalent Bad Lieutenant that will require a break to decompress between one half and the other, and that only in a few months of thinking about what I read, will there be a plot that makes the whole point of the piece matter.

Because right now at the halfway mark it doesn’t.

[jrderego]

Hey all, this book was written by my college pal Victor Infante! I have a copy and it'll be making its way into my critical writing here at Tumblr in the somewhat near future! Grab a copy! I got mine!

Hello! I have no idea if anyone is still following me on Tumblr. Haven't been around these parts in a while! But I have a new book to hawk, and Tumblr is looking like a pretty good forum again these days! My new book "Suffer For This: Love, Sex, Marriage & Rock 'n' Roll." You can read more about it on my website, VictorInfante.com, and order it either directly through Moon Tide Press, Amazon, or wherever you buy books!

[jrderego]

2024, See you Later, 2025 Welcome

Retrospective

I don’t generally do year end wrap ups but I figured it was as good a reason as any to get back into using my Tumblr blog. I was trying to follow some advice about how to grow your Tumblr audience, tried a few of the strategies I saw there that required me re-blogging and commenting on other people’s stuff even if it was only tengentially related to what I write, what I blog, or what I tend to give a shit about.

Well, all of those are deleted now. I kept some of the cool Heinlein themed stuff up because I think it’s cool, and I’ll reblog more of it as I find it out and about opn Tumblr. But, reposting stuff from A03/fanfic authors about plotting, or motivational writing quotes or laments about how hard it is to stay focused on work, or how-to guides for characters or whatever else… Nah. Won’t be seeing those here anymore. 

I’m going to focus more of this on the stuff that made me want to blog in the first place, reading, writing, and sometimes movies or politics. The Heinlein Marathon will continue, but I am going to work in some reviews of the other books I am enjoying and maybe start a competing marathon with some excellent series fiction that my son gave me for Christmas. All of this will be tied more closely to the Bunch of Stuffcast as I try to make that at least a little more regular than ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and probably a little shorter for each to make editing more bearable. Seriously, editing is tedious.

So here’s some cool stuff for 2024

Stories published… well, this isn’t really the same is it, I didn’t SELL any stories into any markets, though I submitted 12 times for seven stories, of them three of them were brand new. 

Books published… I put three volumes out this year, Union Dues: Team Shikaragaki Go! Park Place, and Pleasant Hollow: Stories from the End of the World. I learned a lot doing this, a whole lot. Enough that I am considering pulling a different kind of publishing project together.

Books read and enjoyed… A lot of reading this year. I worked off genre mostly, minus the Heinlein marathon entries - I think there were two in 2024 - Some of the stuff I really enjoyed:

Gas by Bill Kelley - Bill was my college roommate and is one of the most intelligent and artistic people I know, so diving into his first novel was a pleasure. Set on Cape Cod where the oldest gas station anchors a story of self discovery and accepting the legacy of a famous artistic parent. Well worth a read if you can get a copy. Some of this book reminded me of Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. Especially interesting if you like visual arts as they play a great deal in the storytelling here. 

The Widening Gyre by Robert B. Parker - This is one of the innumerable Spencer novels and it was a hoot. I have always liked series fiction (more about that below) but this book helped rekindle a deep interest in writing for entertainment. Parker’s prose is so breezy and fun. I was in and out of this thing in like two hours. Super fun.

Eileen by Otessa Moshphegh - I really enjoyed this one too. It has all the hallmarks of Moshphegh’s storytelling - Damaged main character - Weird main character behaviors as coping mechanisms - Alcoholism - the potential that real world isn’t entirely real and that characters blur the line between real and imaginary. I liked the book so much more than the film adaptation that Moshphegh wrote. It was worth watching one time, and even then only if you’d read the source material. Maybe this is something for a longer entry later this year…  

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein - Er… Not a good one.

Stranger in a Strange Land (unedited) by Robert A Heinlein - You can read my thoughts on that book here. Short version of that review:  I enjoyed it but I think the edited version is better. Heinlein is still my favorite science fiction writer and the marathon will continue in 2025!

Poor Things by Alisdair Grey - I absolutely loved this book within a book within a greater story of a fake autobiography. I saw the film first this time and based on how much I enjoyed that, ordered the book while I was still watching the film. I am glad I did that in this order or I would have HATED the film version as it is so vastly different from the book. Grey’s prose is impeccable and the different voices he offers as narrators of the various segments are incredibly fun and interesting to read. If you saw and liked the film, be prepared for a completely different experience if you pick up the book. Admittedly i struggled a bit to get over the intro in this one, but once I did I could not put this book down. I still like the movie, because I saw it first and understand how it had to be severely altered to make a film, and a compelling film it is. The book is better though.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - The grandparent of all science fiction and for good reason. I haven’t read this since maybe high school and I remember liking it then, but wow did I enjoy this book as an older person. I owe my brother for encouring me to reread it after he read, enjoyed, and raved about it to me. This was the book I read before Poor Things and there are some thematic similarities between both stories, Alasdair Gray took inspiration from Shelley’s work, but for full on readable storytelling it is hard to believe that this book from 1821 reads like Robert B. Parker wrote it. This was another book I finished in two reading sessions because I was so caught up I only stopped when I absoluitely had no other choice. Read it if you haven’t.

I am currently reading I’m Glad my Mom Died by Jeannette McCurdy which is an autobiography of the former child and teen star and her struggles with family and the stresses of being on Nicolodeon kids sit coms. I always enjoyed her work on iCarly, as my kids were fans when they were a lot younger, and she has a good storytelling voice. The book is bleak though. I read that she parlayed this into a novel contract. I look forward to seeing how she writes someone who isn’t her.

I read Park Place, Fleas, and Team Shikaragaki Go! so many goddamn times I nearly memorized them. Ahhhh editing. There are still mistakes in the manuscripts too! Order your today! Only 360 shopping days until Christmas!

I read more short stories than I care to remember. I tend to pick up ANY vintage science fiction mags and digests if I find them out in the world. I still grab a couple of issues or Asimov’s or Analog or Fantasy and Science Fiction that are new releases as well, but if I can find a haul of old ones from the 70s or 50s I try to grab them. So I’ve been carving a path through all of that as the year has gone on too. The difference in storytelling and mechanics is very interesting from decade to decade, and to be fair, I don’t really seem to enjoy the contemporary stuff quite as much, but I have only read a handful of contemporary stories. 

I’ve also written a lot of short stories from a space gunslinger story, to a giant monster story, to a giant robot story, to another superhero story (not Union Dues) to polishing up some older things and shooting them into the market (to die). I’ll keep working these and submitting them because that is what we writers do, right? Right! We write!

I’ve listened to a lot of really good music this year. I’ve redisdcovered my love for radio. Even commercial radio to a large extent provides a pleasant ambiance. I hadn’t listened to local FM radio in a couple of decades at least. But this year I decided to see what curated content I could get from a non internet streaming source. I hate Spottify, Pandora, Apple music etc… so I returned to the receiver. We have a couple of okay local stations here. And, recently my son recently found a somewhat local college station that we can pull in with our home stereo. All good stuff. It has helped me discover some new great music. 

What have I been listening to (in no particular order)?

Boy Genius - The Record. I picked this one up because my daughter has seen all three of the women who make up this supergroup (Phoebe Bridgers, Julianne Baker, and Lucy Dacus) a few times and I’ve heard their solo work on and off for at least the last three years. So, hearing “Cool About It” and “Not Strong Enough” on the radio and how they harmonize just floored me. Each time I heard either of these songs I stopped what I was doing so I could listen. This is a great record. 

Wet Leg - Wet Leg - This is a carryover from 2023, but it hasn’t been out of my playlist since it was released. Funny at times and sarcastic and angry at others it is a great listen.

The (English) Beat - I just Can’t Help it and Special Beat Service. I picked these up after seeing them open for Adam Ant (and absolutely crush it). I Just Can’t Help it is my current gym music and if you know me I don’t change music until I take an extended time off from the gym. So I’ll be buried in Ska, a music type I don’t love, for a long time. That said, these are really great records.

Lots of Muse lately - Their older records are better and more interesting - especially Drones -  but I’ve gone back through the new ones. To quote my friend Bil “This new Colplay record is weird…”

I went on an Elvin Bishop kick and played the hell out of Juke Joint Jump, and Struttin’ my Stuff

The Flaming Lips - a ton of their back catalog that I’ve been picking up here and there on CD and vinyl. I am currently listening to At War with the Mystics as it has my current favorite song on it.

Well, with that said, read lots, write if you write, and listen to music that makes you feel something. Onwards to 2025.

So what's planned for 2025? Like I said the Heinlein marathon will continue. Not sure what the next book will be yet. And I'll maybe write about this series -

What you see on those shelves are 50 or so of Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir's Destroyer series of novels. I remember reading these as a teenager and absolutely loving them. My son, following a conversation about series fiction courtesy of Robert B. Parker's The Widening Gyre, grabbed a lot of Destroyer books from a seller on Ebay and gifted them to be for the holidays! I have books 1-73 with a handful of numbers missing, a couple of "editors choice" thrown in as well, and the novelization of the lousy movie from the 1980s.

So there will be some writing about those and series fiction in general.

With that, welcome 2025 and to anyone still reading, please have a happy and safe New Years and a wonderful 2025.

[jrderego]

Pleasant Hollow: Stories from the End of the World! Available Now!

Hey everyone as a Halloween special I've collected and released the 5 stories in my contest winning Pleasant Hollow series for the low, low price of $1.99 for Amazon Kindle readers.

Enjoy these tales of grit and survival! Not your typical zombie stories by any stretch. Read and enjoy and Happy Halloween!

[jrderego]

[jrderego]

If someone sitting across the kitchen table from you tells you a story about their day, they aren't telling you a story about your day.

1st person present tense sets a tone of immediacy and frames whatever the narrative is through their viewpoint - hence the unreliable narrator type of first person present tence, Alex in A Clockwork Orange for example.

As a writer of 1st person present tense short stories and novels, at least for me, it gives the narrative a prism that can change how events are seen from narrator to narrator or in opposition to how they are viewed in the world where the character lives.

wait do people read first person stories and think they're the ones in the story???

Saw people talking about not liking first person, which is fair, but their reasoning was like "I would not do that" and I don't understand that mindset.

First person stories are still about a character. A character making their own decisions. First person isn't about you???? At least I thought it wasn't. What am I missing? I've always seen first person as just a more in-depth look into a character's mind and stricter POV. Not as a reader stand-in.

[jrderego]

Now Available -

Finally released! The Union Dues collection bringing the Team Shikaragaki stories from podcasts to paperback!

Ok, you know what? Good indie scifi is too hard to find. Book twitter is dead, search engines have severe AI poisoning and Goodreads is owned by Those Guys.

So let's let Tumblr do what Tumblr is best at.

INDIE AND SELF PUB SCIFI AUTHORS DROP YOUR BOOKS RIGHT HERE and lets get reblogging!

I'll start.

I have two books and a novella out. the books are Secondhand Origin Stories and Names in their Blood. On the surface they're scifi superhero novels. At their heart they're family dramas. In the middle they're low neon cyberpunk with political commentary, a bit of midwest gothic vibes, and sometimes a murder mystery. Trust me, it all works together.

They are very queer but most of the angst is not about that. They're also very much about disability but please don't picture some Very Special Episode shit when I say that. This is much angrier and messier than that.

You can find a variety of ways to read or listen to those here, and the first book in the series is free in ebook form.

The novella is Doll's Eye View and is about a sentient AI system trying to pick a more portable body than a skyscraper. It takes place between the two books, which are the first in a 5 book series called Second Sentinels.

Ok, now you!

[jrderego]

I HAD THIS! I bought it for a quarter at a big town-wide yard sale thing! It was hard to play but a lot of fun once the rule set made sense.

Man, every time I try to crack into a wargame, I wind up throwing up my hands in surrender. I am just incapable of enjoying rules sets like this. Which is a bummer, because Starship Troopers (1976) is legitimately interesting because it appears to be radically asymmetrical for the time.

We’re looking at a two player game that moves through seven scenarios, humans on one side, bugs on the other, with a rogue faction of fickle allegiance in the mix. These scenarios work to recreate the major points of conflict in the novel by Robert Heinlein. The human side is fairly conventional, though individual troopers can carry specialized ordinance and equipment (perhaps showing the influence of D&D’s concept of player characters). They’re tough and have a lot of firepower. The bugs, though, aren’t on the board. As with Battleship, their player creates a secret map of the underground hive, with their units only hitting the board if they burrow to the surface. Their big offensive capability is mines that are laid before play — they vary in strength, ranging from one hex to seven hexes. So it seems to set the stage for a tense game of cat and mouse, with the human player trying to flush out the location of the central hive brain and the bugs trying to bait the humans into clustering in the blast zone of a mine. I’d love to play it if I could get over my allergy to bookkeeping, of which there seems to be quite a lot!

That cover art is pretty rad though. The interior art is kind of weird. I dig the collage of in-universe documents in the last page of the rulebook — they really set the narrative stage.

[jrderego]

Robert Heinlein - Starship Troopers (USSR, 1990)

artist: A. Nazarenko