The TransLatin@ Coalition breaks ground on new home for TGI community work
"To our gender transitions in our 60s, a lavender cottage by the sea and a wedding beyond our dreams"
https://medium.com/prismnpen/roads-we-never-thought-wed-take-1dfbf2bbf3c9
●●●◐○ Kreativity for Kats - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1961
Gummitch was one of three cats owned by Kitty-Come-Here and Old Horsemeat. He was a puzzle to them, since he kept knocking over his bowl of water, yet didn't look dehydrated. His mistress eventually solved that puzzle, getting a glimpse of the workings of his mind. His contemplations — on the transmigration of souls, and whether it was worth turning the lady into a witch so he could be a familiar — escape her.
●●●◐○ The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For - Cameron Reed (ss) 2025
Once a woman grew up poor and became very rich. The CEO of the Griffin Corporation, a mid-level player in the techno-feudal world of the future, thought she could do it again, and she did. Now her clone, current head of Griffin, is trying to repeat the performance.
Ilona¹ was the young #trans woman adopted to bear the latest Griffin clone, but she miscarried thrice, and was to be set aside. Mira is her replacement, and is six months pregnant. Mira was slated to marry Colleen, hired to be her wife. (They're supposed to raise their daughter in poverty that looks real, but that a lot of money is secretly keeping clean and safe. Then they're to fake their death in an accident when the daughter is about to graduate college, like the Founder's mothers did, with the daughter to be groomed by her "grandmother" [DNA source] to be the next CEO.)
But Mira had fallen for Ilona, so the CEO sends Colleen off with a bonus and lets the couple marry. The staged life doesn't come to pass. Corporate warfare is more than economic in this world, and Vega Corp carries out a raid on Griffin. Ilona must make a sacrifice to allow Mira and herself to escape.
●●●○○ Return Engagement - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1952
An older spacer tells a newbie about a recent voyage, when their ship was transporting a famous chef — brother-in-law to a Dynast; you know how things are — and the problems that caused. On most planets the problems were annoying, but on the Jovian moon Iapetus they were even more so, as the arrogant and bumbling chef got himself in about-to-be-cooked trouble, along with the story-teller who was sent to find him.
●○○○○ The Remaking of Sigmund Freud - Barry N. Malzberg (nov) 1985
We begin with Sigmund Freud dressing in a spacesuit to step out onto Venus to deal with a spaceman who's having a mental crisis that could fatally damage the habitation dome, given that the people in charge are idiots who don't even keep an inventory of the explosives they have.
Then we immediately cut to a flashback of the last day of Freud's life, where an American newspaper publisher shoots him dead for refusing to accept a contract to write an advice column for his newspaper. (This didn't happen in our reality.) We continue with more flashbacks in no temporal order.
Then we get sections about Emily Dickinson that leap forward and backward through time, as she writes various poems, has a vision of President Lincoln's assassination weeks before that happened, tours the country giving speeches, and sleeps with many important men, like Mark Twain. This is mostly alt-hist stuff.
The above was written when I'm 12% into the novel, and I'm confused. It probably doesn't help that the table of contents lists the chapters in the order 3,5,7,9,6,4,8,1,2.
[Later] Okay, turns out that in the future, humans have the power to "remake" people, using a protoplasm bank and templates² to call forth a copy of some historical figure to solve a problem. We find that, for no sane reason, Sigmund Freud, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain are on file to be called forth for duty. Oh, and then some aliens, the Vegans, get involved in using remakes to do stuff for them. I surrender.³
●●●○○ She Knew He Was Coming - Kris Neville (ss) 1953
Mars is poor, so it's not unusual for parents to sell their green-skinned daughters into indentured servitude at the brothel by the spaceport to service the hairy, pale-skinned Earthmen. It beats starving.
Anne — hostesses get new names that are easier for humans to say — claims that a spacer has fallen in love with her, and is going to pay off her contract and take her away to live on a frontier planet. So when his ship comes in, Anne stands up to Miss Bestris, not going to her room with one of the clients, but staying in the salon, waiting. Come closing time, he still hasn't come. Then next morning…
●◐○○○ Between the Hard Earth and Dry Heaven - Melusi Nkomo (ss) 2021
In this tale, years of drought have made life difficult in Eswatini⁴. There's very little grass, and an old man's small herd of cattle is nearly starving. One cow gave birth this year (there were no births in the last two years), but the calf is sickly, with sores beset by maggots, and the little-better mother can't produce milk.
The old man's neighbor and friend died recently from cancer, and his widow barley escaped execution as a witch by fleeing the village. The man's daughter fled to the city years ago, and his twin teen sons look likely to do the same. When the man's wife notes that there's almost no food in their shack, he agrees to sell the calf to the butcher. And since his entire life is clearly a failure, the old man walks off into the river to drown.
Yet another depressing story from the anthology Disruption (“New Short Fiction from Africa”). If an aim of this volume was to encourage me to read more fiction from African writers, it's done the opposite. Many stories from this anthology are both confusing and depressing. This tale gets points a bonus half-point for only being the latter.
●●●●○ The Unsworth Manor Nudes - P.Z. Walker (nov) 2017
Cedric Unsworth, the Earl of Unsworth (a Very Proper English gentleman) and his German wife Margarete (twenty-eighth in line to the throne of Germany) decide to take their two kids and visit Margarete's cousin Augusta (and her husband, Kaiser Wilhelm II). While there, they find that Wilhelm, his wife, and their six kids are practitioners of Frei Körper Kultur, free body culture: naturism.
This leads to Cedric and Gretchen⁵, and their kids Max and Rose⁶, all being taken to a lake where Wilhelm and Augusta and their kids — as well as scores of other people — enjoyed lying on the beach unclothed, playing in the water naked, and picnicking nude. Max and Rose adapt quickly, but it was a trial of fear and embarrassment for their parents.
But eventually they (as well as the governess the Unsworths brought on their journey) joined in nude activities. After an hour, everything seemed normal and everyone was having fun, such that Max and Rose asked the Empress if they could go again another day, and everyone did.
When the Unsworths went home, they found that they now all strongly disliked wearing heavy Victorian clothing in warm weather, so they decided to adopt a quiet nude lifestyle. Two of their four servants ended up quickly joining in; their cook found she couldn't strip, but wasn't bothered when others did; pledging not to gossip, the manservant asked to be let go. So now when it was warm, the Unsworths only dressed when they had company, and Miss Nancy conducted lessons on the back lawn, nude like her two charges.
The Unsworths managed to find other people who enjoyed nudity, and invited them to come to the mansion. This is the first book in a trilogy showing how Unsworth Manor came to host a nudist family, then later became a nudist resort, then how it revived after a post-WW2 slump and changed to survive the latter part of the century.
●●●●○ Dogs of War {Dogs of War 1} - Adrian Tchaikovsky (nov) 2017
Rex is the leader of a Bioform combat team. He's a two-meter-tall, uplifted, gene-mod, cyber-enhanced dog outfitted with heavy shoulder-mount weapons. His teammates include Honey, an even taller biomod bear who's smarter than Rex and carries a huge gun; Dragon, who has komodo dragon roots, with chameleon camouflage and a back-mounted sniper rifle; and Bees, who's a swarm of bees with a distributed sapience (totally unexpected, and her handlers don't know about it); she acts as scout and has the ability to produce several types of venom, from knockout to neurotoxin.
Revolution has beset Mexico, and international corporations have hired private mercenary armies to fight for them and their property rights. RedMark is one such, and it runs Bioform teams. When an undercover UN spy (posing as a corporate auditor) comes to investigate human rights violations, she's exposed, and a firefight ensues.
Rex and team end up on the run in a country awash with private armies, local militias, upstart warlords, and remnant government forces. They hook up with an isolated village, protecting it from various dangerous groups while Honey uses local internet links to try to figure out if there's a future for their kind. Can Rex, hardwired for loyalty, find a path to freedom? Can Bees, the only member who needs corporate resources to live — her worker-unit bodies only last 100 days, and her breeding rack was left behind — even survive?
The second half of the book shows how Bioforms gain rights and become part of society, with flashforward chapters showing ever deeper integration.
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Week Fifteen's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
120+05 ss | 08+0 nvt | 07+0 nva | 29+2 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction
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[1] Another first-person tale with no narrator name given, so as usual I picked a random name starting with I.
[2] As in the Able Spacer system in the Final Fall of Mankind series by Andrew Hindle, where in the event of a catastrophic loss of crew, a ship can just cook up standardized, fully-trained, replacement crew members. Or the Born Whole Clone system in the Behold: Humanity! books by Ralts Bloodthorne, where one can have a creation booth spit out a gardener or soldier who already knows how to do their job. You can see this isn't a moral system. And this book handles things even worse.
[3] Okay, this book is boring and confusing. Did Not Finish. It's 3.44 out of 5 on Goodreads, though if you only look at the people who wrote something, not just awarded stars, it's a point lower. I already got to day two on the calendar, so I'm not removing it, or it would leave a hole, which would annoy me. But I didn't count the novel for this week, and won't for the month or year.
[4] Or South Africa. I'm going on one line of untranslated dialog that a web search says is in Swazi, and that's where this group of Bantu people live.
[5] I read all those Ring of Fire stories featuring Gretchen Richter, and never knew that "Gretchen" is a diminutive for Margarete/Margareta. Not that that Gretchen is diminutive.
[6] Mentioned at one point as being 15 and 13, but I wonder if that was a line from a first draft that missed revision, since the kids are written as at least five years younger than those ages.
[edit] Added missing close-italics.
Roanoke transgender community and allies celebrate support amid challenges
150 Homes in 10 Years: How the Foster Care System Fails Trans Kids
https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/150-homes-in-10-years-how-the-foster
Transgender World
Transgender World
bok
CBC Montreal