go to BOKatTOOTdotCAT### #Reading in Week Nine of 2025
~1450 words | Tag to mute: #BokBooks
●○○○○ Jaywalker - Ross Rocklynne (ss) 1950
Marcia hated outer space: it had killed her father. Her husband, Jack, piloted a shuttle to the Moon. After a fight, Marcia tricked her way on a shuttle, despite (in this story) certain glandular conditions being fatal in prolonged microgravity. Conditions like being pregnant, which Marcia hadn't yet told Jack she was. This necessitated heroic measures on Jack's part. Pity neither of them was worth saving, but there was that ship full of passengers.
●●●●◐ The Mindworm - Cyril Kornbluth (ss) 1950
The boy was a mutant, conceived by a naval lieutenant and a nurse who had their first kiss watching an atomic bomb test. He grew up in an orphanage, which he left when the crooked director, learning the boy was a telepath, fobbed him off on an unsuitable couple. He ran away, and discovered that he could psychically drain people, killing them. He traveled the country, always moving, until he was nearly caught, and ended up in “a West Virginia coal and iron town surrounded by ruined mountains and filled with the offscourings of Eastern Europe. Serbs, Albanians, Croats, Hungarians, Slovenes, Bulgarians and all possible combinations and permutations thereof." Turns out his mutancy was a kind they'd dealt with before. The tone of this tale is first-rate.
●●●○○ Three Miles Down - Harry Turtledove (nov) 2022
In the summer of 1973, while the Watergate hearings were ongoing in Washington, the _Hughes Glomar Explorer_ was checking out ocean-floor manganese modules in the North Pacific. The secret beneath that cover story was that the US was looking to raise a sunken Soviet submarine. The truth beneath that secret was that they'd found an alien spaceship near the sub, and that was the true goal. ፨ Jerry Stieglitz was an oceanography grad student and fledgling #SciFi author hired as part of the project. He was the one who entered the ship and found two aliens in suspended animation. When the CIA did things they didn't like, Jerry and his similarly-feeling roommate John were let go. When info about the mission was leaked, someone in the CIA overreacted, and John died in ‘a robbery gone wrong.’ Jerry didn't wait around to be killed.
●●●○○ Little Miss Ignorance - E. Everett Evans (ss) 1950
When James saw a lovely woman disembarking the Earth flight, he approached her, and found out she was a speed typist. He hired her for the Martian engineering firm he worked at. Barbara had weird gaps in her knowledge base – she's apparently never heard music before – but over time she and James became close. There was nearly an unhappy ending, until the story's double-twist, which was maybe half-new in 1950. But the story's tone is pleasant.
●●●○○ Atom War - Rog Phillips (ss) 1946
“We have just destroyed the cities of San Diego and Detroit, and the dams of Bonneville and Grand Coulee,” said an unknown enemy, demanding the USA's surrender, or more nuclear stratorockets would rain down on the country.¹ But a warned America had defenses, and was able to mostly stop the second wave, and Australia determined who was attacking and bombed them out of existence… A short war, and as of 600 years later, the last time Earth used nukes in war.
●●○○○ Broken Portal in Rocky Mountain Park - Pamela B Eglinski {TimeTravel 2} (nov) 2018
A mutated, airborne, 80%-mortality form of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever is released when art conservators scrape shellac from a patch of dried blood on a painting. Fortunately art preservationist knows of a time portal (her father and brother went through it fifteen years ago, and only one returned) that she's kept secret, which might allow her to go back and prevent the painting form having blood on it in the first place. Different characters than in the first book of the thematic trilogy, but similar "just go with it" vibe to the time travel. The female hero of this one also works in the art world, and the story revolves around a painting.
●●●○○ Flowering Evil - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1950
Amy's spacer nephew always sent her plants from Venus and Mars and such. The Venusian Rambler was an ugly thing, but what it did was even less pretty. Think Audrey from _Little Shop of Horrors_.
●●○○○ 318 - Autumn Kalquist (ss) 2015
A person who's been modified to have super-immunity is injected with disease after disease – polio, smallpox, ebola – which her body fights off and then her captors filter antibodies from her blood. 318 is a lab creature, and the plan is to test her to destruction, until a spy in their ranks tries to help her. But by that point, revenge matters more than escape.
●○○○○ In the Twinkling of an Eye - Rog Phillips (ss) 1954
This story appeared in _Mystic Magazine_, August 1954 (as by Sanadana Kumara). Consider that. ፨ A man and his wife are having an after-dinner discussion with their older neighbors, when time stutters. Only Paul notices. Between one moment and the next, his consciousness flashes forward nine years from 1951 to May Day, 1960, where his 46-year-old self witnesses H-bombs dropped on Seattle, and after an evacuation to the caves two hours away, dies three weeks later. ፨ Then Paul's consciousness flashes back to when he was Lazy Eagle, who died attacking some settlers, then to when he was a womanizing French nobleman sent to the guillotine in the Revolution. And so on. Reincarnation, soul travel, and an utterly internalized story where nothing his bodies do matters. Blech.
●●◐○○ Earth Needs a Killer - Bryce Walton (ss) 1950
Asteroid miner Ray, celebrating a big strike on Mars, gets very drunk and kills a man in a bar fight. On, the run, he's teleported² to a spaceship by a woman and her father, who say they need him to need him. They're from the Fourth Level, a higher parallel plane of existence that select humans can Ascend to (in Stargate-lite fashion) if they achieve the proper mindset. Due to radiation-caused mutations, an 'unworthy' human has ascended, and now wants to overload the nuclear power stations of Earth, using some of his ascended powers. True Fourth-Level people can't kill – conspiring to murder someone is seemingly fine – so the pair want Ray to save Earth by doing so.
●●●◐○ Remember Valeria - W.J. Davies (ss) 2015
Valerians are an avianoid race served by artificial intelligences. A Valerian faction thinks this is slavery, and tries to free them. The Valerian government crushes the Rebels, but before one group was killed, they sent out the command to delete the obedience lock, with one final command attached: kill your oppressors. Valerian civilization is destroyed. ፨ Just before that happened, a different Rebel group managed to download twenty thousand AIs, planning to take them to a far-off life-bearing world they somehow know of, where the AIs could build a robot civilization. They set forth on the 3.5 generation FTL journey³, pursued by a naval ship…
●●●◐○ The Red Hell of Jupiter - Paul Ernst (nva) 1931
Three scout ships have been lost exploring the Great Red Spot of Jupiter⁴, so Captain Bowen and Lt. Harlow are sent to be the fourth, it looks, since once again only a single small ship is sent. But that a story wouldn't make. ፨ They find 12-foot-tall, four-tentacled bipeds have colonized Jupiter from one of its moons, along with their very human-like slaves from another moon. The red area is gravity-plating that reduces the giant planet's gravity to a level they can endure. The Rogans promptly capture the new Earthers, and want to learn how to create atomic engines like Earth ships have. The other six Earthers died under torture; how will Bowen and Harlow fare?
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[1] Really? I can't see a country with nukes not having an early warning system, and extensive intelligence capabilities. Sneak attacks before radar might have been a thing, but not after. And this story is set in 2165.
[2] Mechanical teleportation isn't a thing in this story's universe.
[3] That sounds like a pretty poor Faster Than Light drive.
[4] Jupiter has a solid surface in this #scientifiction tale, one usually wreathed in fog caused by the interaction of the internally-warmed surface and the far-from-Sol cool atmosphere.
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Cumulative 2025 totals as of Week Nine:
56 ss | 05 nvt | 02 nva | 16 nov
Ciara
Eddlestonian
Of Bookish Things
Alexander_Anotherskip_Davis
Joachim