●●●◐○ The Fish Tank Crab - Genna Gardini (ss) 2021
Two arguing women pass a writer in a park, and he hears one tell the other with some emotion, “Listen, you just pick up the phone and tell him, ‘Lewis. Your fish tank crab has escaped!’” The writer imagines a whole darkly comic scenario from this:
Jess, the Kinsey-4 who's feeling suffocated in her new relationship. Keisha, the judgmental lesbian who feels Jess isn't trying hard enough. Lewis, who has a crush on Jess and doesn't realize she's in a relationship, who asks her to watch his fish tanks for him while he's away for a week, secretly hoping she'll be impressed.
Ramon, the small, red crab who grabs the net Jess is cleaning his tank with, before leaping at her face, then falling to the floor scuttling for the apartment door. Maureen, the octopus whose tank gets knocked over when Keisha is startled by Jess's scream, and who realized that tasty Ramon was no longer locked away in another tank…
So, this last story from the Disruptions collection of short African fiction — Hurrah! — isn't depressing. It's maybe not even a real story, since a character just idly imagined it all. And it might not be African. I mean, the characters discuss an event in East Croyden, and I don't think London has moved. We do learn Keisha is originally from Johannesburg, but is that enough?
I also wonder about a couple lines like this, where Keisha is remembering her and Jess's second date: “Jess was shy, Keisha had thought, and it was aDɔrəble.” There's another line with a word in IPA. Don't know why.
●●●●○ More Unsworth Manor Nudes {Unsworth Manor 2} - P.Z. Walker (nov) 2018
We begin this second Unsworth novel with a former fighter pilot looking to buy the manor, which is deserted and run down. While Avery is looking around, the realtor tells him that the former residents all died when the Lusitania was sunk. The family we followed in the first novel — Cedric and Gretchen, their kids Max and Rose, Nancy the young governess — all wiped out offscreen. Well, that sucks.
Anyway, Avery the American, Great War pilot, scion of an industrialist — not just anyone can afford a ten-bedroom Manor — finds Gretchen's diary, and becomes interested in the nudist lifestyle her family and staff lived. He tries being nude a few evenings after the workmen who are repairing and modernizing the manor have left for the day. He even goes nude in the back garden, and swims nude in the pool when it's completed. He enjoys it.
Then it's back to the US to deal with some business. He invites the woman he's previously dated to visit. She does so a month after he returns, when the house is ready, but their relationship founders. Avery likes nudism; Lisa thinks no civilized person would go unclothed. Despite his nudist ways, Avery is a proper gentleman. He finds that Lisa has changed while he was away, and she now drinks too much and parties too hard, the bad sort of Prohibition-era flapper.
Avery continues in his nudist ways, and like the Unsworths before him, he finds his staff is willing to go along with the lifestyle. Avery also befriends some titled refugees from the Continent, and finds out they're involved in something illegal. And he acquires a girlfriend who eventually becomes his wife. I thought this trilogy was about a naturist resort, but apparently that's only the case for the third volume. If that.
●●○○○ The Last Ride of German Freddie - Walter Jon Williams (nvt) 2002
In this #AltHist tale, Friedrich Nietzsche has gone to the Old West. He caught diphtheria and cholera in the Franco-Prussian war, and his health is fragile. Add in that his father died mad at age 35, and Freddie thinks the same will happen to him, and he's prepared to take wild risks. Freddie has become a Cowboy, capital C¹ — a rustler. His group is currently in Tombstone, Arizona, trying to get their man elected sheriff (rather than Wyatt Earp), since it's convenient for a criminal gang to have a sheriff in its pocket.
Freddie gets involved with the current sheriff's girlfriend, and also is more than a bystander to the famous street fight in Tombstone. Despite betrayals and scheming, this talky story seems overlong.
●●○○○ Hunt the Hunter - Kris Neville (ss) 1951
Ri and Mia are a pair of rich big-game hunters, who discovered a world with farn beasts, which makes for a good hunting challenge. They tried to keep this a secret when they went back to civilization, but their pilot talked, and a richer and nastier big-game hunter — Extrone, the dictator of human space — has kidnapped the pair and made them his guides. There's little doubt he'll kill them if he doesn't have a successful hunt; he may do so even if he does.
The situation is made worse by the fact that farn beasts are known to be spread across alien worlds, and the fact that they're found on this planet means the never-named aliens put them there. The aliens are known to react violently to intrusions upon their space.
●●◐○○ Civilizations - Laurent Binet (nov) 2019
A series of murders and flights from vengeance sent various groups of Vikings from Norway to Iceland to Greenland to Vinland. Eventually a woman named Freydis came to lead a large group with several ships, along with their horses and cattle. They worked their way down the eastern coast of North America, stopping from time to time to spend a year, making friends with some Skraelings and enemies of others.
The Vikings learned local crops and customs, and taught the natives how to make bog iron. But after some time, the Skraelings inevitably became sick with smallpox and other European diseases, and the Vikings moved on, usually leaving some horses and cattle behind. Some of Freydis's group settled in Cuba, while she and the other half continued on to Mayan territory, and eventually down to Peru.
Desired result one: the natives of North and South America are exposed to European diseases early, and have a chance to recover before Columbus shows up some 500 years later. They also know how to work iron, and have horses and cattle. Columbus shows up on schedule. The natives get more horses and cattle, more tools and knowledge, plus guns (though they don't learn how to make gunpowder). Things end badly for the Genoan. Desired result two: one young woman learns Castillian. This sets up the Chronicles of Atahualpa.
When the Sapa Inca died, his sons Huacar and Atalhuapa fought for the throne of the Incan Empire. The latter ends up being forced ever northward with his retreating army. Eventually the young prince ends up on Cuba, where he meets the middle-aged Higuénamota, the princess who knows Castillian. He's also shown the hulks of two of Columbus's boats. Atahualpa has his people fix those ships, and build a larger third ship, and sets forth across the sea.
Higuénamota comes along, and the three ships of non-sailors who grew up in the Andean mountains successfully arrive in Lisbon, sailing in on a tsunami, after a great earthquake has leveled the town. (In our timeline, this happened in 1755, but Binet moves it to the early 1500s, because if it helps your plot, why not?) Events happen, and Atahualpa and his people end up walking to Spain.
More buckets of authorial fiat then water the plot, as Atahualpa ends up taking over Spain, setting up an alternative to taxation, providing for the poor, abolishing the Inquisition, instituting freedom of religion, and becoming a power in Europe, culminating in being crowned the Holy Roman Emperor. A restrained #AlternateHistory tale of "one small change" this is not.
He also starts trans-Atlantic trade with his brother (who sends a fleet that magically arrives, in the nick of time, at the city where Atahualpa and his forces were being besieged, which wasn't the city he was in when Higuénamota was sent to Huacar), and more. And Pedro Pizarro, Lorenzo de Medici, Michelangelo, Martin Luther, and loads of other famous people make appearances.
As usual, non-SF writers don't write SF according to the conventions, which can annoy people who like those conventions, but if one makes allowance after allowance, and doesn't choke on the "you're kidding me" moments, the book isn't terrible.⁰ At least the first three-quarters or so. I admit my patience plummeted when the Aztecs showed up in Europe.
●●●○○ Consumership - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1956
Group Mother was distressed by Marian, the latest child to progress to her Group. Unlike Tommy, who knew all the latest slogans, and always preferred new things, Marian wanted to eat her usual food, not something different every day, depending on what companies were pushing that week. Marian even wanted to keep her doll, not exchange it for something new each week. It was a trial.
●●●●○ The Hemingway Hoax - Joe Haldeman (nov)² 1996
Our story begins with a conman, Sylvester Castlemaine (Call me Castle) and a literature professor, John Baird, who specialized in Ernest Hemingway. A casual conversation reveals that early in Hemingway's career he'd lost a suitcase of manuscripts, encompassing half of a novel he'd written, and ten or twenty short stories.
Castle more-than-halfway interested Baird in attempting to forge that half-novel, which he could do, since he had an eidetic memory and likely knew more than anyone in the world about Hemingway and his works. Baird had also published some short stories earlier in his career, so he could write, as well. And since payments from John's trust fund would soon stop, leaving him in a financial hole, why not try?
For reasons beyond the comprehension of mere humans, this drew the notice of forces who monitored the timelines of the multiverse. Rather than an Element who looked like a blond Russian spy being assigned to the case, à la Sapphire and Steel, the agent assigned to Baird looked like Hemingway. It switched between avatars of the writer at various ages. After a conversation on a train, that agent killed Baird for threatening to upset events in the near future.
For reasons beyond the comprehension of extra-dimensional beings, Baird's death did not take. He woke up in his own body — with different wounds from Vietnam, and with a second set of memories that matched his new timeline³ — and life carried on. And when Baird continued on his forgery quest, not-Ernest showed up and killed him again, in a different way, to see if it stuck. It did not, and things began to get rather more odd.
●●○○○ Cormorant Cove - Mel Cowan (ss) 2025
The second day of Elara's vacation was a masterpiece of organized leisure. A map, a GPS watch, and a hiking app would assure that she, with her carefully stocked backpack and professional hiking outfit assured she'd reach Beacon's Point by her planned lunch break.
Except three hours in, she got a curt call from her boss demanding to know where a file was. That meant Elara⁴ had to email her assistant to handle it, which led to her missing a turn off on the path, so she ended up at Cormorant Cove, a secluded nudist beach.
The usual follows. She's initially shocked, she watches a while from behind the boulder the wrong path dumped her out at, she comes to see the naked humans as just people doing people things, and she ends up trying nudity for herself and enjoying it.
●●●◐○ The Goggles of Dr. Dragonet - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1961
In a story that seems more Radium Age than Golden Age, a professor makes some goggles that block electro-magnetic radiation, but allow one to see gravito-electric and magneto-gravitic spectra. The former makes anything living (or derived from living sources, like leather or wood) invisible, but still shows nonliving things. The latter allows one to see minds. Not thoughts, just personality traits and emotions.
For instance, the minds of newspaperman Marty and sculptor Alice were both green with flashes of blue — they're extroverts with dashes of introversion — while writer Arthur was the reverse. Dr. Dragonet then passed out white canes, and his chauffeur Karl drove the foursome from the house in the Hollywood Hills into the city, where they observed people for hours.
At the end of the afternoon, the quartet arrived back at the doctor's estate. After hours wearing the goggles, they'd become sensitive, and Dragonet instructed them to look up, where they saw the Milky Way span the sky, shining in mindlight: the galaxy was populated. He also pointed them at a bright violet light in the sky, which Marty identified by its position as Mars. That proved to have some repercussions.
●●●○○ The Gardener - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1949
There are fifty Butandra trees in the sacred grove a few dozen kilometers from the planetary capital of Cassid. There had always been fifty trees in the small, no more, no less, for all of recorded Cassidan history. You'd think that Hobbs, acting chief of the Bureau of Extra-Systemic Plant Conservation would respect that, but no. On the last day of his posting to Cassid, he'd gone to the grove and cut down a sapling, planning to make a walking stick of the fine-grained white wood.
The Gardener — a figure of myth on Cassid — traced the missing sapling to a hotel, where the meter-tall, stocky figure with skin like rough, brown bark was seen by a green-skinned maid. But Hobbs had already boarded a spaceship and left the planet. The Gardener looked upward, and began to rise ever faster into the sky. The next day, Hobbs was just starting to whittle the Butandra sapling into a walking stick, when he looked out the porthole in his cabin, and saw a face looking back at him. The story proceeds from there.
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Week Seventeen's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
132+06 ss | 08+1 nvt | 07+0 nva | 34+3 nov |
#books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction
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[0] Though its cover is the most childish of anything I've read in years.
[1] “[Brocius] and his crowd defiantly called themselves Cowboys. It was a name synonymous with ‘rustler,’ and hardly respectable — legitimate ranchers called themselves stockmen.”
[2] This is barely a novel, by the screen counts I'm using — short→150, novelette→300, novella→450 — but 465 screens is over 450.
[3] Not-Ernest is killing John twice — a body left behind in one timeline, a mind overwritten in another — and he's still not happy. Some entities just can't be satisfied.
[4] Kate's spellcheck objects to ‘Elara’ but has no problem with ‘Elara's’? ‹sigh› Oh, and another word I wish I could remove. I occasionally mention ‘chauffeur’, a driver. I never mean to mention ‘chauffer’, a small stove (think ‘chafing dish’). Kate is the most adequate text editor I've tried in Linux, but it lacks so many abilities I was used to under Windows.
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