Mastodawn

●●●○○ Seeds of Futurity - Kris Neville (ss) 1951
“Edward Barnett could discern one unalterable fact: that civilization and humanity were dying. The reasons were as simple as reasons can be in affairs human: too many metal servants, too little work, and absolutely no ambition.” Most people weren't having children, but a few did, though they tired of them soon, and they were turned over to robots to raise.

Edward acquired over a hundred children under a year old, and turned them over to a mute robot caretaker on an isolated island. In eight years, forty were left. Harsh, but only the strong and healthy would suit his needs.

The survivors created their own social structure, self-sufficient, unburdened by the knowledge of the dying world. When they were twenty, Edward gassed them unconscious, loaded them into the suspension room on the ship he'd had robots make them, and set out to find a suitable world. There he unloaded them, leaving before they awakened. Let them build a new world, innocent as babes. Maybe they'd do better.

●●●◐○ The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1951
The gnoles, who lived on the other side of the forest, had a bad reputation. No human went there. But Mortensen wasn't merely human, he was a salesman. A young, go-getting salesman, who thought it likely that even gnoles had need of the ropes and twines and threads his firm sold. So he decided to peddle his wares on the other side of the forest.

But, though the showing of samples went well initially, gnoles are not humans, and cultures vary, and Mortensen made a major misstep. Ah, well, such is life. Also death.

●●●◐○ Operation Time Search - Andre Norton (nov) 1969
Scientists at a college in Ohio had developed a time viewer. They were pointing it at a nearby structure of the Mound Builders, hoping to see some natives of the ancient culture. The scientists had fenced the mound off to keep modern folk away. That made an activist think the college was planning to expand its facilities and destroy the mound, so he sent in a friend, an ex-soldier photographer, to get evidence; Ray was caught in the beam when the scientists increased the its intensity, and it opened a door to the past, before overloading and shutting down.

Ray ended up at the edge of a vast forest, where he was picked up by an Atlantean hunting party, perhaps a hundred thousand years in his past. Mu, a continent six times larger than Australia, filled much of the Pacific; it was the mother culture, and had sent out colonies to Uighur (Asia), Mayax (South America), and most importantly, Atlantis (4×AU).

Atlantis had turned against Mu, rejecting the Living Flame it worshiped in favor of Ba-Al, a bull-headed dark god. Taken to an Atlantean ship, Ray escaped with the help of Murian Cho's mind powers, and the pair was rescued by Murians. They were taken home (undergoing a battle on the way — war between Mu and Atlantis had yet to break out, but there were increasing clashes between isolated ships), and Ray was introduced to Lady Aiee, Cho's mother, and through her, the Re Mu, ruler of the land.

The Re Mu and the priests of the Living Flame realized that they could use Ray in their struggle, and (not totally of his own will) he was sent to Atlantis. All this time, scientists back in Ray's future had been trying to reopen the time portal, and had used mechanized telepathy to try to call Ray back to the transition site.

There follows adventures in the enemy's capital city, struggle and triumph, a new friend, a failure, and a twist ending.⁰

●●●◐○ The Feminine Metamorphosis - David H. Keller (nvt) 1929
Martha Belzer, number two in the research department at Aviation Consolidated, had for a year stood in for the sick Chief of Research, who's just died. She did not get his job. The company president is blunt: “You were not promoted because you were a woman.” Belzer quietly sends out letters to nine of her friends, women of science and business from all over the United States.

Patricia Powers, only child of the richest man in the country, auctions off all of her late father's stocks to other financiers, raising three billion dollars. Belzer, Powers, and a dozen other notable women take vacations abroad; all suffer fatal accidents, with the bodies not being found.

A hospital is opened in China. The staff is uniformly female, and the hospital pays Chinese men $100 in gold each if they allow one testicle to be removed. (This is described obliquely enough that, if you were a kid reading this, you might not know what was happening.) These are processed and the extract is sent to Paris, where a women's college has been founded; it has extensive medical facilities attached.

Three years later, a new crop of men begin to appear on Wall Street and in other centers of power. They are clannish, well-dressed, brilliant, and have no interest in playing golf or joining the usual men's clubs, though they do supposedly play cards at their new, well-guarded Bridge Club building. They are quickly becoming wealthy and powerful.

It's clear what's going on. The author repeatedly says that women are as smart as men, as hard-working, and if anything better at keeping track of many things at once. The detective on the case (Taine of the Secret Service, whom Keller featured in a series) is hired by worried men on Wall Street who want to know who these new rivals are. Taine is casually but not nastily racist (he uses the "weak gap in armor" term for Chinese people), but seems to acknowledge female equality for most of the story.

This novelette is like a lesbian pulp romance where all goes well for most of the story, only for the sapphic lovers to suffer at the end for Hayes–Code-like reasons. Here, too, the women who thought they'd gamed the system suffer a fall at the end, which doesn't seem to flow from what's gone before.

Everett F. Bleiler in Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years calls this “A bad story,” saying it's “One of Keller's idiosyncratic stories in which he apparently recognizes a social problem, but then distorts reactions to it in a very offensive way.”

Yes, there's blather at the end where Taine says “You went on with your plans, but you forgot God,” and we see that the new-men had extensive, mad-scientist plans. Taine subsequently reveals that the ex-women overlooked something that is already starting to kill them. But for the bulk of the story, I felt that the tone of the work was okay, especially for its time, and the tale doesn't seem anti-feminist to me. Though I may well be blind.

This story is from Gynomorphs, edited by Jean Marie Stine. The 2005 anthology collects three vintage tales from 1929, 1935, and 1938 about female-to-male transitions in pulp scifi. #trans

●●●○○ 1632 and Beyond, Issue #1 - Bjorn Hasseler, ed. (mag) 2023
This first issue of the followup magazine to The Grantville Gazette contains five short stories (four Ring of Fire, one Assiti Shard, specifically Ship People) and a nonfiction piece, plus some other bits. Counts as five shorts; I'll ignore the fact article.

"An Exchange of Favours" by Jody Lynn Nye
Barely a tale, this novel excerpt sees the daughter of an Earl rich in sheep, but poor in cash, come to the big city to plead (unsuccessfully) for a break on her father's taxes. She gets involved with the Grantville delegation currently locked in the Tower of London. (It's a genteel imprisonment, and visitors are allowed.)

"On the Jerichow Road" by S.M. Stirling, Virginia DeMarce
A middle-aged herbalist salesman and a young man on his way to enroll at the University in Jena discuss county politics, and may get the town of Jericho to change things with how it's (not) represented in the new parliament.

"Ill-Met in the Marshes" by Garrett W. Vance
A Japanese couple from a previous story, currently in Thailand, makes preparations to move to Grantville, but not before a local gang of thieves tries to make them pay.

"Indian Tea" by Chuck Thompson
An old Grantville man breaks his sick friend out of a care home to help him give his old manual farm equipment to a down-timer young man so he can get his village's crops harvested even though most of the healthy young men were lost in the war. He also introduces his uptime friend to a yaupon holly bush on his property, whose leaves can be made into a sort of tea.

"Into The Dark" by Iver P. Cooper is set in a Shard where a 2030s luxury cruise liner ends up back in time just after Alexander the Great died, and gets involved in Mediterranean politics. Uptimers also founded a country, New America, on Trinidad, the go-to place in Shard/RoF tales to build your first oil wells. Here, a young ship's carpenter into caving is recruited to find some caves with bat guano deposits, needed to produce saltpeter for black powder. Also fertilizer, as well as other things.

"Farm Equipment That Came Through the Ring of Fire" - George Grant
A fact article that discusses what it says on the tin. "Fact" because Grantville is based on Mannington, a real town in West Virginia, and the author drove around seeing what horse-powered equipment was available.

●●●●○ Zabrina Meets the Retro Club - Maddi Gonzalez (comic) 2025
I did not expect this when I got around to the next epub-split piece from Starstuff. This is not a text story, it's a ten-page comic about a girl (maybe ten?) meeting some online friends for the first time in real-life at the new MALL (Multimedia Augmented Liminal Locations).

One of her friends shows up as a small robot, which Zabrina doesn't realize until the end is an animatronic tele-puppet that allows Dina to interact in the real world, even though she's too ill to do so in her real body.

●●●●○ A Deskful of Girls - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1958
Carr was a detective, hired by the ex-husband of Evelyn Cordew, the era's major screen star. He was meant to retrieve blackmail materials from Dr. Emil Slyker, a consulting psychologist (if you believe his sketchy diploma). Carr had schmoozed Slyker for hours at his club, and had won an invitation to his private office.

Slyker, more than a bit drunk, went on and on about the psychological troubles of his patients, including at last Evelyn. Then Slyker hit a button, trapping Carr in the special chair he was sitting in. Slyker revealed that he didn't possess blackmail materials, so much as ghosts.

These stabilized ectoplasmic envelopes, expressed by patients under emotional circumstances, Slyker detached with special silver shears. These gossamer shed-skins of people could be saved, and reanimated. In the required darkness, Slyker was preparing to do this, when Carr heard someone sneak into the office. He heard Slyker struggling. Then things got weird…

●●○○○ The Gardener's Pitch - Michael Shotter (ss) 2020
Having read four of the eight tales in the Shards collection, I think can say this of Shotter's characters: you don't want to be one, or meet one. Nasty things happen. In this case a young gardener (with aspirations toward landscape architecture) with a hard-luck past is looking for work, and encounters a house whose grounds need it. He sketches some possibilities, then the owner arrives home and asks who he is.

After turning down Ortin's pitch, the just-arrived-home homeowner pulls into his garage, and Ortin glimpses what he thinks is a noose. He feels obliged to see if the homeowner is suicidal, so he sneaks up to the garage window. Turns out it's not a noose. But Ortin's curiosity ends up revealing auto-erotic asphyxiation, murder, snuff films, more. Not a fun story.

●●●◐○ Frolic - Cammie Conte (nvt) 2018
Iris¹ and Sandy, just graduated from high school, spend a week with "Aunt Judith" (an older friend of Iris's mother) in the country. After dinner one warm evening, the three were sitting on the deck, when Judith suggested the pair take a dip in the pool. The girls said they'd get their swimsuits, and Judith said the closest neighbor was a mile away, and they needn't bother. But that first night they did. The next night, however, with more encouragement from Judith…

After the second swim, before Sandy and Iris could get dressed again, Judith asked them to help her make a pie, so for ten minutes they worked naked in the kitchen. Aunt Judith seemed to enjoy the view. The next day a neighbor couple visited, and the discussion that ensued echoed Aunt Judith's pro-nudity, pro-sensuality views, leading to them encouraging Sandy and Iris to kiss each other, which the friends did. Later, after the girls had gone to their room, leaving the Stevens couple and Judith alone, the girls dared each other to cross to the bathroom topless so that the older trio would see them.

Judith continued encouraging nudity and sexuality, and the next day the girls ended up masturbating next to each other in the guest room's queen bed, then taking a nude hike and doing it again in a clearing. When they returned hours later, Judith was hosting a party on the deck with three neighboring couples, and Sandy was daring enough to just walk onto the deck nude, with Iris slowly following. The girls had nude barbecue with the clothed guests, and later played lawn darts naked.

As a naturist tale, this is more soft erotica. Judith is encouraging Iris and Sandy to be nude, and to sexually play with each other. Other guests do the same in a more low-key fashion, but nobody besides the girls get nude. The first time the girls got naked, Aunt Judith even felt their breasts: “Look at how firm they are.” The girls have sex a couple of times (that we see) in a clearing when they went hiking, but the description is kept on a softcore level.

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Week Fifty-Two's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
308+10 ss | 30+2 nvt | 12+0 nva | 123+1 nov | #books
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[0] Interestingly, Ray tells the Murians that there are legends of Atlantis in his time (a land “said to have vanished beneath the seas in tidal waves and earthquakes because of the wickedness of its people”), but no one believed the legend. Ray says he's never heard of Mu. But he learns that Murians also have legends of an ancient land lost to death and disaster because of human greed and lust: Hyperborea.

[1] Not actually the character's name. Henceforth, if I have to read a first-person viewpoint that never tells me the narrator's name, I'll make up one that starts with "I" for the "I did this" and "I said that" story.

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Light-reading week. Norton's is the only real novel. The other two calendar-top-line (usually where longer works go) works are a magazine I'd already read off-calendar, and an additional short story. At least two of the stories this week are novelettes.