Mastodawn

●●○○○ Yellow Streak Hero - Harlan Ellison (ss) 1957
Charles was the sole inhabitant of the Scanner base, and had been for 24 years. He would be for life, the Computer having picked the people least likely to go insane. (After the madness and murder that resulted when two or more were selected to crew a base, one became the norm.) The was likely an Enemy out there, and humankind had to know about it.

●●●○○ Son of a Witch {Lefty Feep 6} - Robert Bloch (ss) 1942
Lefty buys a carpet at an auction. The owner had asked him to bid up the price so the other bidders would spend more, but they'd dropped out. Later, a a man demanded to buy the carpet from Feep, but he refused. Thence ensued the usual chaos when Lefty found out the man was a warlock, and he would go to some lengths to obtain the flying carpet.

●●●○○ The Stock Car Race {Behold: Humanity! 15} - Ralts Bloodthorne (nov) 2024
Atrekna continue to take over worlds, and the Terran Confederacy continues to take them back. Terran Descent Humans currently remain over 99% extinct from an Atrekna psychic attack that unedited their DNA, but steps are being taken to bring them back from the Sentience Upload Disaster Storage System, if that could be repaired.

We also learn that Earthlings exist, a faction of humankind that set out in slowships after Earth was Glassed. They can sense when Atrekna sink a solar system to change its sun and time flow. They object, and stop by to nova the star.

Many more facets of this hundred-stranded story continue, sometimes with several books between appearances, so I'm stuck thinking "I know that name, but what species are they and what's their plot thread?". Still, it's an absorbing series, and I hope it gets completed. Supposedly the author has late-stage cancer.

●●○○○ Entangled Vision {Agent Adams 03} - Tim Tolbert (ss) 2025
Mika invents the Quentum Photon Reader, which allows her to tease out unheard-of amounts of information from starlight. Attached to a backyard telescope, and using a complex computer program to handle the data, she sees unbelievable¹ things: life on many worlds, and a technological civilization only eight light-years away.

As is the norm in these stories, Agent Adams of the CIA shows up and there's a meeting between him, the young scientist, and her mentor. He says all this is amazing, and he'll pass the information on to the top levels of government, but for now everything should be kept under wraps.

●●●◐○ Concerns of the Second Sex - Pavarti K. Tyler (ss) 2015
In an alternate US where women have nearly zero rights, a fourteen-year-old girl has had no suitors in the month since her first period. Her father considers whether to sell her to a factory or sell her as a surrogate. Her mother, at the cost of her own life, helps Helen escape.

The guide her mother had arranged brings Helen to an estate where men and women, and Black and Chinese and White people, interact with more equality. It turns out the estate is run by Helen's father's thought-to-be-dead pants-wearing sister. Mister Calvin had been willing to let his eccentric sister run her secret shelter, but when it usurped his prerogatives over his own daughter, well…

●●●◐○ Army of the Undead {Invaders 3} - Rafe Bernard (nov) 1967
This novel is not split into multiple episodes, as the previous two books, but is a single story. It also is odd, in that it seems set late in the course of the TV series, when David Vincent had people who in government and industry who believed that the Invaders existed, yet also seems set before the series, in that the Invaders portrayed are quite different from how they were shown on screen.

These Invaders are primarily incorporeal, and can influence human minds. In this tale, they're pulling a trick like the #Mysterons did in Captain Scarlet, arranging accidents to kill people, and then reanimating the bodies to possess them. (The Mysterons create new bodies via "retrometabolism" and just leave the old bodies lying around.)

The Invaders have done this thousands of times, and control most of Auto City. Their plan is to destabilize the country by sabotaging all the new cars. David Vincent figures things out, and finds out that the Invaders have adapted Earth tech to broadcast lifeforce via a radio tower in Serenda Valley to control their reanimated slaves. Naturally he wins out in the end, though at this stage of the series, he needed dozens of helpers to do so. Yet somehow, a week afterward, only a few recalled what happened, it was so unreal to them.

●●●●○ The Soul Buyer - Keith Laumer (ss) 1963
The Norn falls to Earth as a cosmic spore, which grows and grows, consuming bacteria, then insects, then small animals, then eventually everything, before starving and converting its body to spores, which it blasts into space to start the cycle anew.

The Norn is an atemporal, mindless being, using its psi powers to react to events past, present and future, and influencing people. Tony Adair is a gambler who, for the last two months, hasn't lost a single game of cards or dice he's played. The Norn reacted to his future by changing his present to distract him into not being a threat.

When an alien from another world interferes, he accidentally counters the Norn's manipulation, and sets in motion steps that lead to Tony saving Earth.

●●●●○ Betty Knox and Dictionary Jones in The Mystery of the Missing Teenage Anachronisms - Jack Campbell (nvt) 2011
One again, Jack Campbell [John Hemry] writes a story of a messed-up future that has to send people back in time to alter its past. (Again, it's a story with a single, mutable timeline.)

In this case, the time travel works by sending people's minds back to rewrite their younger selves (in the manner of the Middle Falls stories by Shawn Inmon). The problem is that all the forever chemicals and other substances released by uncareful use of technology is messing up human reproduction and destroying the environment.

Two travelers were sent back, and as far as the future can tell, vanished. (This is a very Time Trax thing, I suddenly think.) Two more ninety-somethings, Betty the chemist and James the game designer (who was selected solely because he went to the same high school, and could protect Betty), were sent back to 1964 to find out what happened, and hopefully complete the original mission of nudging the world onto a less toxic path.

●●◐○○ Case of the Sullied Songstress {Miles Grant 3} - Jack Dearborn (nov) 2016
The minor case in this book is PI Miles Grant surveilling a construction site for a company suffering thievery of building materials. As he watches from his seedy hotel, he listens to the radio and hears a report of a nude woman's body being found in a nearby county. After he wraps up the pilfering case, he reads in the newspaper a similar report from a different county.

Then he's hired by a man whose niece was dumped in a vacant lot, nude and strangled (but not to death!), and Miles is soon chasing a serial murderer, since the girl fears the killer may return to finish the job if it's found out that she survives.

When Miles finds out the connection between the slain women, he learns that his wife Shirley is surely on the killer's list. Regrettably, the motivation of the killer (and his associates) is stupid beyond belief, and the story shudders to a mindless end.

━━━━━━━━━━
Cumulative 2025 totals as of Week Thirty-Three:
198 ss | 24 nvt | 04 nva | 80 nov | #books
━━━━━━━━━━

Noticed something recently. KOReader says this is Week 32 of the Monday through Sunday ISO week it uses. My computer, also running on a Mon–Sun ISO week, says it's Week 33. Calendar-365·com agrees that the week just past was Week 33, since it uses a Sun–Sat week.

I'm using my computer's system, since I type this there.

━━━━━━━━━━
[1] I literally don't believe a bit of it. And it's not like the story's resolution made it worthwhile.

bok Aug 1

Descriptions of the novels, repeated from the weekly posts. Footnotes have been removed, so some parts lack further explanation. For descriptions of the shorter works, see the weekly posts. #BokBooks

●●●●○ A Half-Built Garden - Ruthanna Emrys (nov) 2022 #hopepunk
Climate change has wounded Earth, but in 2083 humans survive in three cultures. The watershed groups of the Dandelion Revolution care for the planet and each other, slowly restoring the planet. The nation states that many have turned their back on continue in greatly reduced capacity. And the corporations that devastated Mother Earth survive on artificial islands.

Then aliens show up, claiming technological civilizations inevitably kill their birth planets. It happened to them, but now the two races of their original solar system have millions of space colonies. It happened to three other races, but they got to those planets too late to save the inhabitants. Now it's happening to Earth, and they'll save humankind no matter what humans want.

●●●◐○ Murderer Invisible - Philip Wylie (nov) 1931 #vintage
A very tall and ugly – but genius – man went into finance, and was nearly bankrupted by some rivals. Then he went into biochemistry, and invented a potion that made him permanently invisible. No one would ever make fun of his appearance again, and he would have his revenge.

He murdered the three businessmen who ruined him. Then he set his mind on ruling over the country in a scientific manner, going on a campaign of blowing up buildings until the government capitulated.

On another front, Carpenter faced the problem of Daryl (the foster-niece whom he'd set his mind on having) and Baxter (the one-time assistant who loved her), both of whom would oppose him with all their resources.

For a 1931 novel, Daryl was an active participant in the struggle. When captured by Carpenter, she strung him along for days, making him think she might come to love him, and it was she who figured out how to capture him. (Granted, the method was obvious, and I was wondering why no one had already used it, but still…)

●●●◐○ Vengeance - Jennifer Foehner Wells {Confluence 5} (nov) 2018
Darcy, escaped human slave and genetically-modified drudii, has been freeing other slaves for years, along with her other ex-slave comrades, using her ex-captor Raub's ship. She's looking for Adam, who was kidnapped with her, but sold separately.

Darcy's gathered a small fleet, since she keeps the ships of slavers she dispossesses of their cargo. After more than a decade, she manages to find out that Adam is still alive. She also finds out that she didn't kill Raub, and that the madman – all he wants to do is kill a drudii in hand-to-hand combat, earning himself the title of Kappyr – has had himself rebuilt, and he's also re-obtained Adam, whom he's genetically remade in his own image. Darcy will win or die trying.

●●●◐○ The Crossing {Assiti Shards} - Kevin Ikenberry (nov) 2022
A squad of ROTC cadets from 2008 end up in December 1776 just before the Battle of Trenton. Having lost an M-16 rifle to a Hessian mercenary, they're obligated to help Washington's troops in order to save the fledgling country.

With the help of a gunsmith and his daughter, they make contact with Washington's army and help him make Trenton a resounding victory. The story looked set up for a sequel, but one hasn't appeared yet.

●●●○○ Survivors - Terry Nation (nov) 1976
When Terry Nation created the British TV series, the producers had different ideas on how the show should progress. Nation stopped writing for the show mid second season. This is the story as he would have written it. Parts are the same, parts much different. We keep Tom Pryce (could've done without), but omit the second appearance of Vic in the quarry. We keep Jimmy Garland, but children John and Lizzie aren't here.

Abby doesn't leave the story after the first season of this three-section novel. There's far less turnover of characters, and the group stays smaller. And instead of partially restoring the old civilization by bring back electricity in Scotland, Abby's group heads for warmer climes in Europe, figuring they have a better chance of rebuilding a new civilization where they needn't focus on surviving six months of winter.

A rather stiff tale, IMO, but interesting to read nonetheless. And the ending is dark indeed.

●●●◐○ Dark Futures {New John Connor Chronicles 1} - Russell Blackford (nov) 2002
We follow two timelines: One where Sarah and John Connor, and Miles Dyson, succeeded in destroying the latter's research in 1994, and one where John talked Sarah out of attacking the building where the T-1000 would expect them to be.

In the latter ("Skynet's World"), Miles Dyson survives, and Judgment Day happens in August 1997. Sarah and John are living in an armed camp in Argentina, and the T-1000 they avoided doesn't find them until 2003.

In the former ("John's World"), Dyson dies, Sarah and John hide out in Mexico City, and there's been no Judgment Day as of 2001, when they face an advanced TX-A, which can split into multiple killing units. They get help from bio-enhanced Resistance fighters who traveled back from after their Judgment Day in 2021.

Timelines are a mess in Terminator – story segments are set in six different times, mentioning three different Judgment Days – but surprisingly the two separate plot lines don't cross in this book, though I fully expect them to later in the trilogy.

Don't try to understand what's happening, just accept the story as a fast-moving adventure tale with lots of fights and shootouts. I don't find this T2 trilogy as good as the one I read by SM Stirling, but it's okay.

●●●●○ Up-Time Pride and Down-Time Prejudice {Ring of Fire} - Mark H. Huston (nov) 2019
A Grantville young woman, skilled at mathematics and chemistry, is hired by a Tyrolian count (the richest man in the world) to educate children and young people in uptime math and science. Mary's life in the castle was suitably exciting, with one junior noble who resented all uptimers for upsetting the world scheming against her, and a hunky one who was interested in her. Add in several kidnapping attempts and some court intrigue and you get a decent tale.

●●●○○ The Invaders {Invaders 1} - Keith Laumer (nov) 1967
In this book based on the 1960s TV show, David Vincent didn't learn of the aliens by turning off the highway to rest when he was too tired to go on. No, the industrial architect who advised managers how to expand their production lines and factories, noticed various odd items being assembled in some small factories he went to. Picking up the items, he found he had the basis for a disintegrator gun.

The novel is presented in three episodes, with the first covering David's discovery of the aliens, their discovery and capture of him, his learning more about them, and his subsequent escape.

Next up, David wonders if a UFO group that's about to make a big announcement actually knows something. This leads to a madman thinking David is an alien, and taking him to the madman's insanely booby-trapped mansion. The real aliens track David down there, and the madman and David work together to kill the aliens.

The third segment concerns a meteorite swarm, which David suspects may be concealing an arriving Invader ship, based on conversation he heard in the previous episode. With the help of a soldier who'd previously encountered aliens, Vincent was able to obtain a military vehicle and blast the Invader ship when it landed.

●●●●○ The Surrogate Affair {Stewart Grant 01} - Jack Dearborn (nov) 2023
Stewart's teaching job went away, and there were no openings, so Stewart got a license to be a detective, like his recently retired father Miles used to be. Stewart's first case is a parental kidnapping: the father didn't bring his son back after his weekend of custody.

The issue is that the mother seems uninterested, and her father who's paying Stewart would be just as happy if the case proceeds slowly, since he has a bank merger in process, and doesn't want any publicity.

Also, twenty-something Stewart has met a woman. A waitress, like his mother was when his father met her. He introduces her and her mother to his family, all of who are nudists. His sister even manages a nudist camp. Things initially go well, but then… Set in the 1970s. #mystery

●●●◐○ An Evil Hour {New John Connor Chronicles 2} - Russell Blackford (nov) 2003
John and Sarah stormed Cyberdyne in 1994 and Judgment Day was delayed, but the company recovered, and by 2001 Skynet was being built. Bio-enhanced Resistance fighters helped them stop that, but not until after the T-XA (Terminator model that followed the T-1000) programmed some humans to be loyal to Skynet and to rebuild it. And one of those humans, CEO of Cyberdyne, was given the ability to inject nanites into others to reshape their minds and motivations.

This volume is mostly the Connors and the surviving Resistance fighters dealing with the aftermath of the 2001 assault on Cyberdyne, and tracking down the programmed humans. On their side is a genius scientist who worked for Cyberdyne, who's smart enough to think around the anti-human/pro-Skynet nanite programming the TX-A imposed on her.

On the timeline where the Connors avoided the 1994 fight, the 1997 Judgement Day happened, and John grows up to be a Resistance leader. Decades later, humans destroy the Skynet base in Colorado – and send Kyle Reese back to 1987, and the reprogrammed T-800 to 1994 – only to find that a backup Skynet base awakens in Europe and restarts the fight. Weakened by the fight, they need help, so they send back a T-799 (a blonde female T-800) to get help, and it hooks up with the other timeline's John and Sarah, who travel forward.

After the Connors help older John, they decide to go to the future where the bio-fighters came from, a timeline where Judgment Day came in 2036, where Skynet woke up late, after having been deeply tied to all global transport and defense systems. That will be the end of the trilogy.

●●●●○ Lock In {Lock In 1} - John Scalzi (nov) 2014
The Great Flu killed 400 million worldwide, and a late-stage complication, Haden's Syndrome, left many people "locked in", conscious but unable to move their bodies in any way. Some 4.35 million people in the US are that way. They use neural nets implanted in their brains to embody themselves in android form. A few thousand Americans also became Integrators, their brains altered in such a way that a neural net could let them permit Hadens to pilot their bodies for when they want full-human experience.

This story is about a new Haden FBI agent who becomes involved in a weird murder case. An Integrator who may have killed someone, a group creating rogue Integrators, political and economic maneuvering after Congress had cut Haden funding, more.

●●●●○ Miles Grant, Private Investigator {Miles Grant 01}- Jack Dearborn (nov) 2014
#Mystery set in 1952. Ex-Navy radioman Miles Grant, 28, gets drunk after his wife divorces him and takes his two kids, his house, and his bank account. He awakens to a cop pounding on his door: his newly-ex wife has been shot dead.

Miles soon solves that case, following it up with one where a wife wants him to follow her likely-cheating husband. He was, but with whom is surprising. Miles begins to get close to Shirley, a waitress at the diner near his office. His next case is finding a sailor who went missing a decade ago. Miles manages that, too, but the case wasn't what he thought, and Miles is shot.

Shirley's mother is a nurse, and when Miles gets out of the hospital, he recovers at the house where Shirley lives with her parents. Miles eventually proposes, and Shirley accepts. Then Miles sets out to catch the person who shot him. #mystery

●●●◐○ Enemies from Beyond {Invaders 2} - Keith Laumer (nov) 1967
Laumer once again presents a volume that's structured as episodes of the TV show. In "Survivor", David Vincent learns of a Mexican fishing ship destroyed in the Gulf. The survivor blames a disintegrator beam from below. David manages to get a friend in the Navy to use his sub to confirm structures on the sea floor, then destroys the undersea dome with the help of a lost torpedo.

"The Allies" has the Gulf coast attacked by waves of creatures. First are a cross between seals and eight-legged horses, with crocodile jaws. David rescues a young woman, and the pair flee in the wrong direction, ending up in an abandoned hotel. There they face the first creatures, followed by pterandon-like creatures, and then leaping spike-balls. Through various traps and the unlikely help of swarms of rats, they survive.

"The Clairoyant" has an old man contact David. Lal can sense Invaders, and he learned of David by reading their minds. He both warns David, and begs him to seek peace with them. The Invaders turn the meeting into a trap, and naturally Lal dies, since no evidence can ever survive an episode.

In "The Telescope", the United States is sending Explorer spacecraft to the Moon. All that go near Copernicus Crater malfunction. David suspects Invaders, and enlists Philip (his scientist friend from the first episode in the previous book, who ended up being injured and getting amnesia) to help him. They hijack an Explorer, and use its rover to approach the crater. They see an Invader installation, but of course Invaders on Earth destroy their transmitter and all the records they made.

bok Aug 1

#Books and #stories for #JulyReads. | Tag to mute: #BokBooks

Thirteen novels:
●●●●○ A Half-Built Garden - Ruthanna Emrys #hopepunk
●●●◐○ Murderer Invisible - Philip Wylie #vintage
●●●◐○ Vengeance - Jennifer Foehner Wells {Confluence 5}
●●●◐○ The Crossing {Assiti Shards} - Kevin Ikenberry
●●●○○ Survivors - Terry Nation
●●●◐○ Dark Futures {New John Connor Chronicles 1} - Russell Blackford
●●●●○ Up-Time Pride and Down-Time Prejudice {Ring of Fire} - Mark H. Huston
●●●○○ The Invaders {Invaders 1} - Keith Laumer #TieIn
●●●●○ The Surrogate Affair {Stewart Grant 01} - Jack Dearborn #detective
●●●◐○ An Evil Hour {New John Connor Chronicles 2} - Russell Blackford
●●●●○ Lock In {Lock In 1} - John Scalzi
●●●●○ Miles Grant, Private Investigator {Miles Grant 01}- Jack Dearborn #mystery
●●●◐○ Enemies from Beyond {Invaders 2} - Keith Laumer #TieIn

One novella:
●●●○○ Unlocked {Lock In 0.5} - John Scalzi

One novelette:
●●◐○○ Project Time Machine {Agent Adams 1} - Tim Tolbert

Twenty-four stories:
●●◐○○ Death and the Senator - Arthur C. Clarke
●●●○○ Martian Quest - Leigh Brackett
●●●○○ At the Bottom of New Lake {Warmer 6} - Sonya Larson
●●●◐○ Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee - Fritz Leiber #classic
●●●◐○ Seventh Victim - Robert Sheckley
●●●○○ The Little Man Who Wasn't All There - Robert Bloch {Lefty Feep}
●●●○○ The Hillside - Jane Smiley {Warmer 7}
●●●○○ Naked Ghost Story - P.A. Choi
●●●○○ Old Ventures, New Partners - Nicolas Wilson
●●●◐○ Never Stop to Pat a Kitten - Miriam Allen deFord
●●●◐○ One Long Ribbon - Florence Engel Randall
●●●○○ The Golden Opportunity of Lefty Feep - Robert Bloch
●●●○○ A Big Man with the Girls - Judith Merril and Frederik Pohl
●●●◐○ Ugly Earthling - Elizabeth Chater
●●●◐○ The Maze - A. Bertram Chandler
●●●●◐ Small Moments in Time - Jack Campbell [John Hemry]
●●●○○ Second Variety - Philip K. Dick
●●●○○ A Naked Wish - P.A. Choi
●●●◐○ The Case of the Dow Twins - Edward Page Mitchell #proto
●●●○○ Poor Little Saturday - Madeleine L’Engle
●●●◐○ Youth - Isaac Asimov
●●○○○ 108 Stitches - Tony Bertauski
●●●○○ Lefty Feep and the Sleepy-Time Gal - Robert Bloch
●●●◐○ Helen O'Loy - Lester del Rey

━━━━━━━━━━━
2025-07: 24 ss | 01 nvt | 01 nva | 13 nov
2025-06: 26 ss | 03 nvt | 00 nva | 12 nov
2025-05: 24 ss | 06 nvt | 01 nva | 13 nov
2025-04: 29 ss | 06 nvt | 00 nva | 11 nov
━━━━━━━━━━━

The Miles Grant and Stewart Grant detective novels are interesting, in that they seem to be doing a "case worthy of a book" per year, and after 24 years, Miles retires and Stewart takes over as detective.

The number of novels per month is going up. It used to hover around nine: two per week, with one in the partial week. But I've been reading some shorter books lately, which has boosted the number. Novellas remain rare.

Finally finished all the stories in Pioneering Women of Science Fiction, Christopher Broschell's collection of stories from the 1940s and 1950s.

bok Jul 7

●●●○○ Valence - Jennifer Foehner Wells {Confluence 4} (nov) 2017
The natives of the one-face world on which they crashed fix Jane's two starships, albeit slowly. When done, they find that the villain who crashed on the dark side managed to get away.

Jane and crew head for the capital of the United Sentient Races at Terac to try to get help for Earth and the sectilians. They find the quarantine is still in place, so they're stuck their for two years chatting with government and media.

On Earth, Jane's message that the governments tried to downplay is released by a teenage girl. Teens around the planet start learning Mensententia, the language genetically programmed into all sapient races by the Elder race. World unity grows, though nations fight and kick all the way. A pod of the Swarm attacks the solar system, and after nearly two decades, Earth is barely prepared to take it on, at great cost.

●●○○○ Shango - John Jakes (ss) 1956
A government agent is called in to figure out how rebels from the agricultural northern continent of Valaya are organizing to attack the southern continent, when all means of communication are controlled. Agent Koven succeeds in counteracting the Betelgeuse Bloc provocateur, in a cheap coincidence sort of way.

●●◐○○ The Statue - Mari Wolf (ss) 1953
Lewis and Martha are 87, last surviving members of the first wave of colonists who settled Mars. Their farm was never that successful, they never had kids, and they're tired. Martha wants to go back to Earth, but they haven't the funds. Lewis manages to swing the journey, but not until after their neighbors hold a big anniversary party for them. Earth turns out to have changed even more than the couple…

━━━━━━━━━━ July begins.

●●◐○○ Death and the Senator - Arthur C. Clarke (ss) 1961
A senator who was instrumental in shutting down the US space program ends up with a heart condition that can only be treated in microgravity. The Soviets have an orbital station that can treat him.

●●●○○ Martian Quest - Leigh Brackett (ss) 1940
Earth has been subsidizing colonization of desert Mars, but the giant Khom lizards are decimating the farms, so they will soon stop. A failed chemist may come up with a way to fight the lizards.

●●●○○ At the Bottom of New Lake {Warmer 6} - Sonya Larson (ss) 2018
Sea-level rise has drowned half of Cape Cod, and a high school girl has been diving to recover treasures from flooded mansions. Her salvaged treasures impress the girl she's interested in, and cause tension with the teacher who remembers the old days and thinks she's ransacking.

●●●◐○ Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1958
A temporary glitch in reality allowed an idea from outside to find realization. Five friends were gathered at an abstract painter's studio to watch him paint his latest splatter work. At the odd moment, the drummer member tapped out a new rhythm, and simultaneously, the painter snapped his paintbrush, producing splatters that visually mirrored the new audio phrase.

The Splat came to take over society in the form of printed fabric and floor covering, cards, poster, music genres, more. The anthropologist member of the group finally figured out a means of producing an anti-Splat to restore society to normal.

●●●◐○ Seventh Victim - Robert Sheckley (ss) 1953 #classic
After the Fourth World War, weapons had advances to the state that another war would surely wipe out civilization. Despite that, humans were far from peaceful, and the Hunt was established, where those who wished to kill could do so, under strict conditions, as long as after every turn as a Hunter, they took a turn as a Victim.

A fifth of society ended up participating. This is the story of one Hunt.

He murdered the three businessmen who ruined him. Then he set his mind on ruling over the country in a scientific manner, going on a campaign of blowing up buildings until the government capitulated.

━━━━━━━━━━
Cumulative 2025 totals as of Week Twenty-Seven:
163 ss | 23 nvt | 03 nva | 61 nov | #books
━━━━━━━━━━

I don't think anyone reads these. Used to be every three or four weeks someone would make a comment, but I haven't had any in ages. KOReader will keep collecting stats, but if I'm not getting the slightest response, I might well stop posting these weekly summaries.

Based on the Week 26 figure of 59 novels, it looks like I'll read about 110‒120 novels this year. The shorter works were 156 ss, 23 nvt, 03 nva.

Assume 25 short stories make a novel-equivalent: that's six in the half year, a dozen in the whole. If four novelettes make a novel, that's again six in the half year, twelve in the whole. If three novellas make a novel, that's one in each half year.

The synthetic total for the year would be maybe 115 novels, plus 12+12+2 equivalents; call it a round 140 books. Plus around 20 other stories, a couple of novels, and a half-dozen collections that haven't made the calendar, some of which will, going forward.

bok Jul 1

#Books and #stories for #JuneReads. | Tag to mute: #BokBooks

Twelve novels:
●●●◐○ Fluency - Jennifer Foehner Wells {Confluence 1}
●●●○○ StarShip Down - Darrell Bain
●●●◐○ Remanence - Jennifer Foehner Wells {Confluence 2}
●●●○○ Seventh Artifact - David Collins {Artifact 07}
●●●◐○ Cause and Effect - Christopher Broschell
●●●◐○ Quanty - Darrell Bain
●●●◐○ Inheritance (= The Druid Gene) - Jennifer Foehner Wells {Confluence 3}
●●●○○ Antidote to Venom - Freeman Wills Crofts
●●●◐○ 4th and 10 Line - Ralts Bloodthorne {Behold: Humanity! 14}
●●●○○ The Salvagers {Salvagers 1} - John Michael Godier
●●●○○ Vikings Versus Nazis - Gavin Chappell
●●●○○ Valence - Jennifer Foehner Wells {Confluence 4}

Zero novellas (again).

Three novelettes:
●○○○○ Controller - Jesse Kellerman {Warmer 3}
●●●○○ There's No Place Like Home - Edan Lepucki {Warmer 4}
●●●○○ The Hardest Bargain - Evelyn E. Smith

Twenty-Six stories:
●○○○○ Survival - William McGivern
●●◐○○ Trespass - Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson
●●○○○ Spawning Ground - Lester del Rey
●●○○○ The Fishdollar Affair - R. M. McKenna
◐○○○○ Green Sunrise - Doris Pitkin Buck
●●◐○○ Pipe Dream - Fritz Leiber
●●●○○ Bargain Basement - Charles Fontenay
●●○○○ Time Wounds All Heels - Robert Bloch
●●●◐○ Pandora's Millions - George O. Smith
●●●○○ Egg and Ashes - Frank Herbert
●●●○○ Gingerbread Boy - Phyllis Gotlieb
●●◐○○ Gather 'Round the Flowing Bowler - Robert Bloch
●●◐○○ Counterweight - Jerry Sohl
●●●◐○ A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel
●●●○○ Not Snow Nor Rain - Miriam Allen deFord
●●●○○ The Pied Piper Fights the Gestapo - Robert Bloch
●●●◐○ Rescue at Io {Salvagers 0.5} - John Michael Godier
●○○○○ Coming Attraction - Fritz Leiber
●●◐○○ Sit by the Fire - Myrle Benedict
●●○○○ Falls the Shadow - Skip Horack {Warmer 5}
●●◐○○ The Weird Doom of Floyd Scrilch - Robert Bloch {Lefty Feep}
●●◐○○ Les Meduses - Stacy Ericson
●●●●○ Working on Borrowed Time - Jack Campbell [=John Hemry]
●●●◐○ The Black Kiss - Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner
●●○○○ Shango - John Jakes (ss) 1956
●●◐○○ The Statue - Mari Wolf (ss) 1953

━━━━━━━━━━━
2025-06: 26 ss | 03 nvt | 00 nva | 12 nov
2025-05: 24 ss | 06 nvt | 01 nva | 13 nov
2025-04: 29 ss | 06 nvt | 00 nva | 11 nov
2025-03: 30 ss | 05 nvt | 01 nva | 12 nov

bok Jun 1

#Books and #stories for #MayReads.
~350 words | Tag to mute: #BokBooks

Thirteen novels:
●●●○○ The Third Artifact - David Collins {Artifact 3}
●●●◐○ The Fourth Artifact - David Collins {Artifact 4}
●●●◐○ Ballroom of the Skies - John D. MacDonald
●●●◐○ Challenges of the Deep - Ryk E. Spoor {Arena 3}
●●●●○ In Our Hands the Stars - Harry Harrison
●●●◐○ Relics and Legends - Ralts Bloodthorne {Behold: Humanity! 13}
●●●◐○ Fifth Artifact - David Collins {Artifact 5}
●●●○○ Sixth Artifact - David Collins {Artifact 6}
●●●◐○ Shadows of Hyperion- Ryk E. Spoor {Arena 4}
●●●◐○ The Apocalypse Seven - Gene Doucette
●●●●○ Secondary - Ray Ingles
●●●○○ Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds - Manly & Wade Wellman
●●●◐○ Empty World - John Christopher

One novella:
●●●◐○ The Ghost of Clifton Webb - Greg Kauffman-Starkey

Six novelettes:
●●●○○ Beyond Death's Gateway - Paul Ernst {Doctor Satan 6}
●●●○○ The Lost Kafoozalum - Pauline Ashwell {Lizzie Lee 2}
●●◐○○ The Devil's Double - Paul Ernst {Doctor Satan 7}
●●●●○ The Earth Quarter - Damon Knight (nvt) 1955
●●●○○ The Way the World Ends - Jess Walter {Warmer 1}
●○○○○ Boca Raton - Lauren Groff {Warmer 2}

Twenty-Four stories:
●●●●○ The Thing in the Attic - James Blish
●●●○○ Meeting of the Board - Alan E. Nourse
●●●◐○ The Margenes - Miriam Allen deFord
●●○○○ But the Patient Lived - Harry Warner, Jr
●●●○○ Where There's Hope - Jerome Bixby
●●●○○ Assassin - J. F. Bone
●●●○○ The Ogre - Avram Davidson
●●●◐○ Discipline - Margaret St. Clair
●●●●○ Time Enough at Last - Lynn Venable
●●◐○○ The Six Fingers of Time - R. A. Lafferty
●●●○○ Exhibit Piece - Philip K. Dick
●●◐○○ Timequake - Miriam Allen deFord
●●●○○ An Incident on Route 12 - James H. Schmitz
●●○○○ And Then There Was Peace - Gordon Dickson
●●●◐○ The Little Red Bag - Jerry Sohl
●●○○○ To Each His Own - Jack Sharkey
●◐○○○ Of the Fittest - Betsy Curtis
●●●○○ Esidarap ot Pirt Dnuor - Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
●●●●○ The Grove - Jennifer Foehner Wells
●●○○○ Marley's Chain - Alan E. Nourse
●●●○○ Captive Audience - Ann Warren Griffith
●●●●○ David’s Daddy - Rosel George Brown
●●●◐○ The Shipshape Miracle - Clifford D. Simak
●●●○○ To Pay the Piper - James Blish

━━━━━━━━━━━
2025-05: 24 ss | 06 nvt | 01 nva | 13 nov
2025-04: 29 ss | 06 nvt | 00 nva | 11 nov
2025-03: 30 ss | 05 nvt | 01 nva | 12 nov
2025-02: 34 ss | 00 nvt | 01 nva | 09 nov

bok May 19

●●◐○○ The Six Fingers of Time - R. A. Lafferty (ss) 1960
Vincent woke one morning to find himself living at sixty times normal speed. He spent hours trying to adjust, then went to work – ignoring all the frozen statues on the way – and arrived early. He completed the week of work he was behind on, and then worked ahead, before falling asleep and and on awakening, finding he'd dropped out of superspeed.

Vincent found other people could do as he did, even faster. They gave him hints on how to advance. Vincent could drop in and out of superspeed, and he experimented with it, until what you would expect would happen did.

●●●○○ Exhibit Piece - Philip K. Dick (ss) 1954
George Miller worked at the History Agency, specializing in the Middle Twentieth Century. George was rather eccentric, dressing as the mannequins in his exhibit. One day he walked into his exhibit to change something, and found he could keep walking: a timewarp had opened between the real 1957 and his 2162 fake. George found he fitted better in the simpler age, and ended up moving in. This being PKD, you can guess how that turned out.

●●●◐○ Relics and Legends - Ralts Bloodthorne {Behold: Humanity! 13} (nov) 2024
Herod and Sam-UL have spent two hundred years subjective working on fixing the SUDS system. The war against the Atrekna continues, despite 99.8% of Terran Descent Humanity being currently stuck dead. We get continuing slices of life from the dozens of characters we've been following. Another Immortal is recovered. Unless you've been following the hundred-threads story, a description is meaningless.

●●◐○○ Timequake - Miriam Allen deFord (ss) 1958
When Terry had found out that his boss had framed him for a crime, Terry had lost his temper and killed his boss on the golf course. Fortunately for him, a timequake rolled 8:04pm back to 8:04am again, and Terry could try to fix the day. Unfortunately for Terry, his boss was smarter than him, and ended up winning the redo, without Terry even realizing.

●●●○○ An Incident on Route 12 - James H. Schmitz (ss) 1962
Phil was fleeing a back robbery where a stupidly heroic bank guard and a panicked woman had lead to a shoot-out leaving one person dead, maybe two. His getaway car died on the highway. Since he had to get to Madge at the airport, he set a trap with his car, hoping to snag a solitary Samaritan. What he ended up snagging was out of this world.

●●○○○ And Then There Was Peace - Gordon Dickson (ss) 1962
The soldiers manning the foxholes along both sides of the long-frozen front managed to sneak messages to each other behind their governments back. There would be no more destruction robots on the war field, no more occasional deaths of operators in their shelters. The war was over, and swords could be beaten into plowshares as long promised. But what exactly counted as a sword these days?

●●●◐○ Fifth Artifact - David Collins {Artifact 5} (nov) 2025
Imagine a video game, where you find treasure and fight foes. And it's pretty easy. Ben and friends rescue two aliens from a failed experimental-FTL ship, and their germ-phobic government doesn't want them back. They find more derelicts, and discover an ongoing war between three or four sides. Meera (the human clone containing the mind of the ancient alien ruler discovered in book one) and Dylan get married.

●●●○○ Sixth Artifact - David Collins {Artifact 6} (nov) 2025
The war from the previous book turns out to be less straightforward than expected, with various members of multiple alien species being controlled by an intelligent plant parasite. The crew eventually befriends a shape-shifting synthetic lifeform.

You don't read a series like this for the actual plot. You do it to spend time with characters you like, and to see what new stuff and new people will turn up. Collins doesn't have the best imagination – so far we have four aliens who look like humans (though you don't want to know about one's reproduction method), and most of the rest are humanoid – but I've been enjoying them, though now I've caught up and will have to wait months between new books.

━━━━━━━━━━
Sick this week. Slept most of two days, did little for three more, still coughing. That meant that Relics and Legends was stretched out a day more than usual, and once I was feeling half normal, I slotted in a couple of short novels.

Cumulative 2025 totals as of Week Twenty:
129 ss | 18 nvt | 03 nva | 46 nov | #books

Tag to block if these reading posts annoy you: #BokBooks

bok May 12

●●◐○○ The Devil's Double - Paul Ernst {Doctor Satan 7} (nvt) 1936
The penultimate Doctor Satan tale sees the archvillain kidnap the two older teens of a distilling magnate. When the rich man can only scrape up half the ransom by the deadline, DS returns the daughter – mad.

Ashton Keane later delivers the other half of the ransom, and uses his hypnotic powers to work his way up the ranks, back to Satan's underground lair. There the amateur detective and the dastard face off against each other with their mental powers. Keane also has an occult hand grenade that releases “the Blue Death of Saint Sartius,”¹ a smoke that hardens to an plastic-like shell on a person, suffocating them.

The Blue Death suffices for Doctor Satan's new lackeys, but the villain escapes unharmed. Of note is that Bostiff, the second of DS's longtime assistants, dies here. (His other assistant, Girse, died two stories back, explaining why Doctor Satan is alone in the final story.) Not the best outing of the series.

●●○○○ But the Patient Lived - Harry Warner, Jr (ss) 1956
In a time when people can live for centuries, and many grow weary of life – but don't commit suicide, for some reason – individuals often hope to catch some fatal disease. Doctor Needzak finds it difficult to go along with this attitude, and often cures people secretly, against current norms for his profession. The board deals with him.

●●●○○ Where There's Hope - Jerome Bixby (ss) 1953
A colonizing ship is on one of the rare habitable planets. Not an ideal world, what with the large dinosaur-like creatures that regularly attack the camp – three colonists were killed yesterday – but life goes on.

Except the twenty-five women of the expedition refuse to bring children into such a dangerous world, preferring to wait five or six years, until it's safer. Something must be done to break the strike, if humans are to make a place for themselves on this new world.

●●●◐○ Challenges of the Deeps - Ryk E. Spoor {Arena 3} (nov) 2017
The Arena, the vast assemblage of Spheres that all FTL travel must go through, forbids AIs and nuclear weapons, among other things. But it allows species to use whatever ”natural” abilities they have.

In Hyperion², some humans were raised to believe they have extraordinary abilities, far beyond that of other sophonts. It turns out that the Arena accepts these abilities as natural to them.

So Sun Wu Kung can command any animal he meets, for example, and is essentially unkillable. And since Marc DuQuesne grew up achieving wonders of superscience in his Skylark/Lensman world, he can do the same on Arena.

This volume sees a war with a huge Molothos fleet, as well as repaying a debt to Orphan by visiting his demigod patron. Also, it looks like an embodied AI from Hyperion has made it to the Arena. Interesting.

●●●◐○ The Ghost of Clifton Webb - Greg Kauffman-Starkey (nva) 2021
When a vintage-movie-loving archaeologist from Oklahoma gets a job at the Los Angeles Museum, he's thrilled to be able to buy the manse that belonged to his favorite star. Until Webb's portrait, still hung over the mantel, starts talking to him (leaving Livvy doubting Dave's sanity). Then Clifton begins wooing Dave in his dreams, dancing with him at a fancy ball attended by all his old friends. Dave considers himself straight; can he escape the attention of the late actor…?

●●●○○ Assassin - J. F. Bone (ss) 1958
When the Aztlan landed on Earth, they telepathically broadcast peace and understanding to the worried throngs surrounding their ship. Later, they did and said all the right things, claiming they were only here to help humans. Daniel, who was high enough in the government to have extensive contact with the aliens, thought it was all a trick. He was prepared to take an extreme step to show others that.

●●●○○ The Ogre - Avram Davidson (ss) 1959
Dr. Turbyfil was the young director of the Godbody Museum of Natural History. Dr. Sanzmann was an elderly language scholar who fancied himself something of an anthropologist. Sanzmann tells Turbyfil a long tale of how, in 1555, a boy was kidnapped by a troll. He has the photocopied accounts from a parish registry.

Five years later, Simon is found by some villagers, feral and without language. He tells his tale, with enough detail that, four hundred years later, after many expeditions to the Old Country, Sanzmann finds the cave he was held in. He presents Turbyfil with a box…

●●●●○ In Our Hands the Stars - Harry Harrison (nov) 1970
A Danish-Israeli professor at the University of Tel-Aviv makes an explosive discovery. Pausing in the wreckage, he thinks for a minute, then heads for his room, grabs money and travel papers, and heads for the airport, destination Denmark.

Arnie Klein had discovered the Daleth Effect (antigravity), and decided he'd give his discovery to the country that had saved him and many other Jews from the Nazis. Denmark would use the discovery for peace, while Israel, surrounded by enemies, would surely weaponize it.

Soon after the first test vessel – an adapted submarine – was built, Denmark ended up using it to rescue a Soviet lander that had become stranded on the Moon. The secret was out. American spies preyed on the American wife of the Danish spaceship pilot. Russian spies broke into the ministry, killing a guard. Nationalism caused no ends of troubles, and in the end it was all for nought.

●●●●○ The Earth Quarter - Damon Knight (nvt) 1955
Earth's civilization collapsed about twenty years after its starships found that humans shared their region of the galaxy with other spacefaring sophonts. No one was sure why.

Interstellar imports wrecking Earth's economy? Earth's farmlands devastated by rusts and blights, possibly of interstellar origin? Humankind's spirit broken by the disbanding of Earth's Space Navy after the Altair Incident, so “there would be no repetition of the Altair Incident – when a handful of maniacs in two ships murdered thousands of peaceful galactic citizens without the slightest provocation”?

Hundreds of millions of humans still lived on Earth, tilling their fields in the ancient fashion, and a hundred thousand humans lived in ghettos scattered across half a hundred worlds. Too many humans were vicious xenophobes, so the peace-loving races of the galaxy – none of whom made war on each other, or on themselves – wanted little to do with humans.

Now Rack, an ex-officer of Earth's Space Navy, came to the Earth Quarter in the capital city of the Niori homeworld, trying to recruit humans for his jihad against all non-humans. Things would not go well.

●●●◐○ Discipline - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1959
Why do archaeologists interpret so many things in religious terms? Walsh was an elderly archaeologist, and like his peers, interpreted the buildings the Bi-Yan had left scattered on a thousand worlds as shrines. Denton, his new young assistant, annoyingly did not see the extinct race's buildings in the same way.

This led to an argument, possibly fatal. After reading Denton's diary, Walsh wasn't sure. Steps would have to be taken.

●●●●○ Time Enough at Last - Lynn Venable (ss) 1953
Remember that episode of The Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith plays a “henpecked book lover [who] finds himself blissfully alone with his books after a nuclear war,” as IMDb puts it? This is the source story.

━━━━━━━━━━
[1] Why does a saint need a weapon of mass destruction? It wiped out a village.

[2] The artificial space station where some power-mad individuals raised modified humans as copies of figures from fiction, with VR simulations that permitted them abilities not found among mere mortals, in realms that didn't follow everyday limitations.

━━━━━━━━━━
Finished the final story from Best of IF Magazine v1, edited by Christopher Broschell. There's still a second volume. Had to do a rest of my ereader, so the first five days of the month had to be reconstructed in the calendar. I could restore the titles, but not the daily histograms.

Cumulative 2025 totals as of Week Nineteen:
124 ss | 18 nvt | 03 nva | 43 nov | #books
Tag to block if these reading posts annoy you: #BokBooks

bok May 5

●●●◐○ The Second Artifact - David Collins {Artifact 2} (nov) 2024
In the first book, the ancient alien spaceship that a human had linked up with voyaged outside the regular travel routes, encountered a damaged ship, and rescued a powerful figure. This book, they stumble upon an experimental ship from an unknown race with a hyperdrive vastly better than the galactic standard. This finding a new artifact each time is going to seem increasingly silly, but the series is light, fast-paced adventure, and I need that right now.

●●●○○ Beyond Death's Gateway - Paul Ernst {Doctor Satan 6} (nvt) 1936
The antepenultimate Doctor Satan tale sees him acquire a drug that kills the taker – but it wears off after twelve hours. After the de rigueur death of some magnates, Ashton Keane figures out the archvillain's plot, and manages to get his hands on some of the potion as well.

This lets Keane meet his dead father, and fight Doctor Satan in the afterlife. The series is going off the rails, but there's only one more story to read before the final story, which I by chance read first and liked, causing me to seek out the whole set.

●●●○○ The Lost Kafoozalum - Pauline Ashwell {Lizzie Lee 2} (nvt) 1960
The second-written (but fourth by internal chronology) story about the Cultural Engineering sees Lizzie and her classmates about to graduate. They're shanghaied into a final project, trying to stop a planet that was settled by two separate ships (each of which only learned of the other decades later) from starting a civil war.

While I still enjoy Lizzie Lee's personality, this tale was nothing special, and ends on a sour note (which might have been less so in 1960), when the 37-year-old Doctor M’Clare, Lizzie's teacher, confesses his love for his 24-year-old student, and the she reciprocates, with the implication being they'll soon marry. That's just icky.

●●●○○ MacHinery - Eric Frank Russell (ss) 1950
A robot salesman is saddled with a new model to take on his sales calls. The FRM-1 looks like a portly uncle, and goes by the name Efrem MacHinery. Efrem gains an imagination, and produces a comedy of errors when his daydreams become visible to others.

●●●◐○ Ararat - Zenna Henderson (ss) 1952
Zenna Henderson's first story about the People, fugitives from another world who ended up on Earth. They look human, but have various psychic and telekinetic powers. Here there small valley needs a new teacher to come in and deal with a new crop of students.

This usually ends badly, when students can't refrain from accidentally levitating or using telekinesis, and the (usually elderly) teacher flees in terror. This time the valley is assigned a young teacher. Perhaps things will go better.

●●○○○ Heel - Philip José Farmer (ss) 1960
Zeus is an alien movie director, working in his looks-like-a-cloud studio parked above Troy, where his writers and techs are guiding the war with Achilles and Patroclus and the rest to a thrilling conclusion. But the studio has been there months longer than planned, so some crew, like writer Apollo, are scheming to cut the production short.

●●●●○ The Thing in the Attic - James Blish (ss) 1954
For doubting that Giants gave them civilization, Honath and four other unbelievers were exiled from the treetops and sent to Hell at the floor of the forest. Within a day, two of their party were dead, victims of huge beasts. Yet the surviving trio went on, enduring dangers like dinosaurs and giant sloths, and finding mysteries like blue lava (only an accident showed Honath it was a stream, since in the Attic, only rain and still pools in large plants exist).

The monkey-like folk made their way through unknown territory, eventually climbing to the top of a mesa, where they made a discovery proving they were both totally wrong and completely correct. It would change their people forever. #pantropy

●●●○○ Meeting of the Board - Alan E. Nourse (ss) 1955
In the old days, the Vice President of Production would have a nice office at the factory. But Robling Titanium, like other companies, had been taken over by the unions, and management was kept on a short leash. What mattered to union leaders was producing a solid – and growing – dividend for shareholding union members every quarter.

Research and Development and other departments had been cut to the bone. After years of this, the business was flagging, and management only had bad news for the controlling union, which it certainly didn't take well. Management was forced into taking drastic action: locking the controlling computers and going on strike. Heavy-handed.

●●●○○ The Third Artifact - David Collins {Artifact 3} (nov) 2024
Yet another found object, this one a half-million-year-old transport ship in which a human-like species (nearly as genetically close to Earth folk as chimps) had been marooned in without gravity. Our crew naturally rescues the Munchkins and made some crew.

They also rescue some stranded semi-merfolk aliens, and take them home. And rescue a Kipitz ship which blew its warpdrive, incorporating them into their crew. And, where last book our humans found a jumpdrive twenty times faster then the warpdrive other races use, this time they find a gravity generator. This seems to be the pattern. Find artifacts, rescue people, contact new species, more. An upbeat, kind-hearted adventure series.

●●●◐○ The Margenes - Miriam Allen deFord (ss) 1956
Marge and Gene were participating in a grunion run – scooping up small fish that had come ashore on a California beach – one April night in 1960, when they and others found another lifeform like a small donut also swarming the shore. The 1960s were a time of worrying about overpopulation and famine, so imagine how people felt when scientists discovered this lifeform had all the vitamins and proteins and so on a person needed, and they tasted great, too.

An industry was quickly set up to gather the margenes (named after the couple who brought them to scientific notice), process them into one-inch cubes, and sell them for very little. In their inexplicably vast numbers, they became a basic food for the world, and regular food became luxury additions. Now imagine what happened when, just as suddenly as things had started, the margene runs ceased in May 1969: Worldwide economic collapse, food riots, the Short War of 1970.

Science fiction writers had long wondered what would happen if aliens from other planets should come to Earth. “The margenes gave us the answer. […] We ate them.”

●●●◐○ The Fourth Artifact - David Collins {Artifact 4} (nov) 2024
A reflected radio signal detected by our young heroes' ship has the Stardust II¹ heading significantly beyond known space, where they contacted a race of dinosaur-like aliens without FTL, who had two colony worlds settled via generation ship. Ben, Chloe, and company also arrive in time to see the dino homeworld under attack by aliens with compound eyes who speak via light pulses from their antennas.

Since they're travelling with Meera (the human body a copy of the current War-Ender is in), several variant avatars, and her huge weapon ships, ending that war is no huge effort. So our do-gooders continue.

At this point Benjamin nominally owns all the Kipitz worlds (they felt they'd be safer that way, since it was their leaders who has almost started the most recent war) as well as many spaceships and space stations. He's the richest human to ever exist, by far. And he's a nice guy.

Yeah, we're not going for deep or realistic fiction here, but I like the series, and unlike the other fast series I read, there's no misogyny or racism. Two more books, and then I've read all released to date.

●●●◐○ Ballroom of the Skies - John D. MacDonald (nov) 1952
Reporter Dake Lorin was working with a distinguished American to try to come up with a political solution that would prevent the Great Powers – Irania, Pak-India, and Greater Brazil – from starting World War Four.² At the last minute, his boss did something completely out of character, and tanked the agreement.

Looking into this puzzle, Dake discovered that there were aliens using psychic powers to keep Earth in a state of constant chaos and destruction. His investigation resulted in various people dying, and put his girlfriend in a mental asylum. But at the end Dake found his answer, and it wasn't at all what he expected.

━━━━━━━━━━

[1] Benjamin and crew upgraded their original ship last book, moving crew and AI Jessie to a bigger ship. They arrange for a further upgrade this time.

[2] World War Three saw Europe heavily bombed, and the Soviet Union and United States lightly nuked. They survived, but economic and societal collapse left them politically powerless.

Cumulative 2025 totals as of Week Eighteen:
118 ss | 16 nvt | 02 nva | 41 nov | #AmReading #books
Tag to block if these reading posts annoy you: #BokBooks

bok May 2

#Books and #stories for #AprilReads.

~330 words | Tag to mute: #BokBooks

Eleven novels:
●●●◐○ Grand Central Arena - Ryk E Spoor {Arena 1}
●●●○○ A Choice of Gods - Clifford D. Simak
●●●○○ The Gourmets of Grantville - Bethanne Kim
●●●●○ Too Like the Lightning - Ada Palmer {Terra Ignota 1}
●●●◐○ Spheres of Influence - Ryk E. Spoor {Arena 2}
●●○○○ The Silent City - H.G. Suren {Alignment 1}
●●●○○ Murder in Snydersville - Valleri Saint Matthew
●●●○○ Seven Surrenders - Ada Palmer {Terra Ignota 2 }
●●●○○ The Artifact - David Collins {Artifact 1}
●●●○○ The Crucible - M L Maki {Fighting Tomcats 11}
●●●◐○ The Second Artifact - David Collins {Artifact 2} (nov)

Zero novellas.

Six novelettes:
●●●◐○ Rats in the Moon - Pauline Ashwell {Lizzie Lee 3}
●●●○○ Consuming Flame - Paul Ernst {Doctor Satan 4}
●●●○○ Horror Insured - Paul Ernst {Doctor Satan 5}
●●●○○ Fatal Statistics - Pauline Ashwell {Lizzie Lee 4}
○○○○○ Beyond Death's Gateway - Paul Ernst {Doctor Satan 6}
○○○○○ The Lost Kafoozalum - Pauline Ashwell {Lizzie Lee 2}

Twenty-nine stories:
●●●○○ Snowball - Poul Anderson
●●○○○ Trials - Nicolas Wilson
●●○○○ One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts - Shirley Jackson
●●●◐○ Virgin Ground - Rosel George Brown
●●●○○ Mousetrap - Andre Norton
●●◐○○ McIlvaine’s Star - August Derleth
●●○○○ That Only a Mother - Judith Merril
●●●◐○ Discontinuity - Raymond F. Jones
●●●○○ Homo Inferior - Mari Wolf
●●●○○ Space Episode - Leslie Perri
●●●◐○ The Worlds of Joe Shannon - Frank M. Robinson
●●○○○ Nightmare Call - Carol Emshwiller
●●◐○○ No Shield from the Dead - Gordon R. Dickson
●●○○○ The Thought-Monster - Amelia Reynolds Long
●●○○○ Everything's Different Up There - Genevieve Haugen
●●●○○ Horrer Howse - Margaret St. Clair
●●◐○○ The Beautiful People - Charles Beaumont
●●●○○ Luvver - Mack Reynolds
●●◐○○ Prominent Author - Philip K. Dick
●○○○○ For Sale, Reasonable - Elisabeth Mann Borgese
●●●○○ Radio Ghost - Otis Adelbert Kline
●●○○○ Mile-Long Spaceship - Kate Wilhelm
●◐○○○ Welcome, Martians - S.A. Lombino
●●◐○○ Little Boy - Jerome Bixby
●○○○○ Life - Daniel Arenson
●●○○○ Brainchild - Henry Slesar
●●●○○ MacHinery - Eric Frank Russell
●●●◐○ Ararat - Zenna Henderson
●●○○○ Heel - Philip José Farmer

━━━━━━━━━━━━
2025-04: 29 ss | 06 nvt | 00 nva | 11 nov
2025-03: 30 ss | 05 nvt | 01 nva | 12 nov
2025-02: 34 ss | 00 nvt | 01 nva | 09 nov
2025-01: 26 ss | 05 nvt | 00 nva | 09 nov