On The 2024 Election

We are days away from the 2024 election.  The good news is that we won't have to deal with all of the campaign advertising starting November 6th.

The harder to hear news is that what happens to America after that point is really up to us.  Who we elect is a secondary concern.

As an example, you may have heard of people on the left who are talking about leaving the US if Donald Trump wins.

And I get it.  His commitment to the Constitution is marginal at best.  He has a well-documented affinity for authoritarian leaders in other countries.  His behavior and incompetence in the wake of the 2020 election are a big part of why I cannot vote for him this year.

But if you are talking about leaving the US if Donald Trump wins, then please do the rest of us a favor.  Skip voting and move now.  He isn't the devil or a demon.  He isn't a fascist.

You clearly lack the Americanism needed to advocate for your preferred policies.  You lack the dedication to advocate for years and perhaps decades.  You lack a commitment to our Constitutional republic and obviously prefer some sort of left-wing dictatorship.  Please go there now so we can all be happier.

And you may have heard about people on the right who are talking about leaving if Kamala Harris is elected.

And I get it.  She cannot communicate even the simplest of ideas.  She spews out word salads that obfuscate and delay rather than directly responding to issues and questions.  Her demonstrated performance in public office makes her barely qualified to run for county commissioner.  Her failure in the 2020 election primaries and the fact that she did not face any credible form of primary in 2024 suggest that she isn't up to the task of being President of the US.  And quite frankly her cover-up of President Biden's obvious inability to be anything more than a warm body in the Oval Office suggests a lack of concern for America's national security and a lack of support for the Constitution.  She was ineligible for my vote in 2020 and absolutely nothing about her actions has caused that to change.

But if you are talking about leaving the US if Kamala Harris wins, then please do the rest of us a favor.  Skip voting and move now.  She isn't the end of America.

You clearly lack the Americanism needed to advocate for your preferred policies.  You lack the dedication to advocate for years and perhaps decades.  You lack a commitment to our Constitutional republic and obviously prefer some sort of right-wing dictatorship.  Please go there now so we can all be happier.

For everyone else, 2025 is a new year.  We will have a new President.  They will get the support and condemnation they deserve.  They will get support and condemnation that they don't deserve as well.  That's American politics.

Maybe we could try something new next year and reach for a little more civility.  Instead of calling one another morons...and much worse...maybe we could just simply say "I disagree".  

We don't need a unifying leader.  We need a unified populace; one that can disagree civilly as well as passionately.

Let's try being that instead.

A brief coda.

To my Republican-leaning friends, don't blame me if Donald Trump loses.  The GOP had plenty of better options on the table.  Both Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis come to mind.  There were others.  Worshipping a person rather than advancing ideas comes at a price.  A Trump loss is the price.

To my Democrat-leaning friends, don't blame me if Kamala Harris loses.  The Democrats had other options waiting to run.  I think Tulsi Gabbard would have been an interesting candidate, but y'all drove her out of the party.  Democrat politicians and functionaries have pushed so far to the left that they are pushing really bad ideas.  A Harris loss is the price of moving from being a liberal party to one that is progressive and/or socialist.

Review: Empire of the Vampire

Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a 4-star review. Some would rate it higher for good reasons.

If you are new to genre-fiction, then please go read this book. It is a good ride with great characters. Don't read my spoiler section...go read the book. The experience is worth the price of admission. The author has a lot of talent that is evident.

SPOILER
Now that it's just us, part of the reason for not giving this a full-throated (heh) 5-star review is that I've read a lot of genre fiction. I've seen a lot of movies.

This book uses many plot devices that have already been used.

The first one is the transmutation of Jesus Christ into a fictional redeemer broken on a wheel rather than on a cross. My first encounter with that technique was in Devil's Night Dawning by Damien Black. Another example is when a priest lacks the faith to face a vampire without being able to bear a religious symbol as a metaphysical shield. I first encountered that in Stephen King's ’Salem’s Lot. There are other examples, but you should get the point.

There are plot holes and omitted details. For example, the palebloods that fight to destroy the vampires are created by vampire fathers impregnating human mothers. Given that the palebloods are a significant threat to the vampires, one has to wonder why they continue getting human women pregnant. Also, what is the motivation for vampires to have sex with human women in the first place? It remains unexplored.

Other elements of the story remain unresolved at the end. How did Gabriel get his sword? How did he kill the Forever King? Unexplored. Unresolved.

And last, this book is not a complete story. It ends leaving plot threads unresolved and clearly intends more in the series. While I enjoy many genre series, I'm always disappointed when an author transparently announces the next book in the series.

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Review: Battle for the Wastelands

Battle for the Wastelands by Matthew W. Quinn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-star review which is a good estimate of my experience.

In a post-apocalyptic world, two opposing forces fight for dominance. One is an outright dictatorship that uses a variety of factions including one made up of cannibals and one that breeds genetic monsters.

The other is made up of people who seem to just want to be left alone. They are led by the remnants of a family, the Merrills. This side seems to be still a sort of monarchy rather than any sort of reconstituted democracy.

The common folks have to kneel to someone. Or so it seems.

The story is presented in a workmanlike fashion. Good spelling and grammar. Decent if somewhat pedestrian characters and plotting.

Several unexplained elements. It is inferred that the genetic monsters are related to some sort of nuclear radioactive location. There also seem to be several species of dinosaurs in the story - again, no explanation. And the cannibals are following some sort of "religion" for which there are no details.

I was reminded of the TV character Radar from MASH. In one episode, Radar begins correspondence courses to learn to write like Hemmingway and some other, allegedly, notable authors. In this case, it was Ethel Hemmingway.

The prose in this book similarly runs into the purple range.

Also, the guts of many characters clench on a regular basis. They must all have 6-pack abs.

Not a bad story, but I won't be continuing anything new in this series.

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Review: Dirty Water

Dirty Water by Tom Kratman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a two-star, Dorothy-Parker-DNF review.

I've enjoyed some of this author's other works a great deal.

This one was boring. I made it 10% through the book before moving on to anything better.

Most of the early parts of the book were a generic old guy taking his grandkids on a tour of Boston and lamenting how things have changed. It was heavy on the geography of Boston and light on making the old guy or his grandkids into interesting characters.

The brief interludes with the alien were good but infrequent and brief.

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Review: Murder at Spindle Manor

Murder at Spindle Manor by Morgan Stang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a 4-star review. Call it a weak 4.5-star review.

Murder at Spindle Manor is an entertaining melange of Agatha Christie, Lovecraft, and steam-punk seasoned with some bits of Monty Python-esque humor. Or "humour" as the whole thing has a decidedly late 19th-century British vibe.

This eclectic mixture of elements shouldn't work and yet it works almost perfectly. I don't read many murder mysteries as I find the big reveal less than satisfying. Perhaps that is something I bring to this experience.

Anyone who enjoys movies such as The Naked Gun or any Monty Python shows will find this delightful. The author has somehow managed to meld a pretentious, stuffed-shirt, murder mystery with the farcical version of the same tale.

This book won the Self Published Fantasy Blog Off in 2023. I have read most of the SPFBO winners and found them (with one exception) to be very rewarding experiences. Murder at Spindle Manor continues that trend.


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Review: Mirrored Heavens

Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse


This is a review without stars. I DNF'd this book.

I dislike extensive chapters based on some character's internal monologue. This book has an early chapter featuring an internal monologue from/with a character that I don't care about. It got in the way of the narrative of the main characters that actually matter to the plot.

Life is too short to have reading be a chore.

I didn't think it was fair to provide a star rating based on a few chapters.

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A Brief Tour of Mastadonia

I opened up an account on Mastodon a while back to see how that environment has developed in the wake of the exodus of the "oppressed" from X (formerly known as Twitter).  I followed a few hashtags for topics in which I am naturally interested.  My account is on mastodon.social rather than part of one of the many personal fiefdoms created as part of that distributed network.

Many writers flounced out of X due to the alleged overwhelming presence of fascism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, commonsense, blah-blah, etc.  Any idea that slightly diverged from leftist opinions of the moment was called intolerable.  Mastodon was one popular destination.

My exploration began with topics of personal interest that were mostly related to genre fiction.  I explored some political topics as well.

My first impression is that there wasn’t much activity related to Worldcon or the Hugo Awards.  There also wasn’t a lot of activity related to several genre-associated hashtags.  Given the number of genre authors doing their Dorian Grey impression, I would have expected more activity related to those topics.  There was precious little activity related to those hashtags.  [I eventually identified some other genre-related hashtags that are more active.]

Later on, we had the misfortune of the attempted #assassination attempt on #donaldtrump.  For clarity, it was fortunate and good that he survived.  Political violence is always a bad idea.

A check of the hashtags #trump and #assassination in the days following the attempt suggests to me that the Mastodon admins are purposefully censoring or otherwise throttling which topics are allowed to trend on that platform.  The hashtag stats suggested that few were talking about the event.  A review of the search results of posts on Mastodon indicated that many people WERE talking about that event.  The hashtags were included in the text of various posts, but a hashtag search didn’t correlate well with a post-based search. 

Conversely, both tags were quite active on X.  I cannot say that the tag search and the post search accurately reflected each other on X.  Only that both were active.

There is also evidence of censorship/down-platforming/throttling of certain Mastodon accounts.  Doing topical searches, I found several accounts that Mastodon admins had purposefully muted.  You could still click through to read what they have posted, but you do get a notification that the account has been muted.

None of the accounts I found (roughly 5, so not a big sample) had posted anything overtly offensive unless one holds that moderate disagreement with leftist positions is ipso facto proof of offense.  Comrade Stalin would be proud.

It would be unsurprising if I learned that my account had already been deprecated or otherwise throttled.

Individually, Mastodon users generally (exceptions to everything) appear to lack any interest in critically engaging with diverse viewpoints.  One recent example was a discussion in the wake of the tableau from the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics that was designed to invoke da Vinci’s Last Supper.

My interlocutor responded at some point with “artistic license”.  I pointed out that the artists were appropriating another culture and that I am reliably informed that cultural appropriation is an unacceptable behavior.  Having nothing to offer in response, they blocked me.

Casual accusations of racism, sexism, blah-blah, etc. are routine.  I’ve already been called racist despite not once offering any opinion that relates to race in any reasonable manner.  Again, Comrade Stalin would be proud.

Before Elon Musk purchased Twitter/X the platform was infamous for quietly throttling accounts expressing opinions that were modestly right-of-center.  There was a two-tiered system of moderation in which the slightest of infractions by someone right-of-center would engender suspensions, throttling, and bans while identical (if politically inverted) behavior from left-of-center accounts would be overlooked.  [I came across a recent thread on Mastadon about abuse on that platform.  So leaving Twitter didn't really solve any problems, eh?]

After purchasing the site, Elon revealed exactly how biased the prior administrative efforts had been.  Many normal reasonably centrist and modestly right-of-center accounts were restored.

It appears that the Mastodon user base prefers to live in a mutually affirming silo.  The platform is distributed so that people may create private chatrooms where they can police ideas into conformance.  And that choice is their absolute right!

Yet they still are tolerating extreme forms of authoritarianism in their midst.  I found many profiles using Che Guevarra and communist Hammer-and-Sickle images as profile icons.  Other accounts will readily endorse socialism and/or communism as viable alternatives to liberal democratic capitalism.

Most informed people will recognize that socialism/communism continues to have a higher body count than fascism.  Socialism/communism also continues to foster higher rates of poverty and murder by state actors.  Ask the citizens of Venezuela about it.

While Mastadonians have cleared Hitler, the Nazi cross, and real fascism from their social media environment, they have left far more offensive, destructive, and murderous opinions untouched.

None of this is particularly surprising.  Nor is it unique to left-leaning folks.  People on the right (with some obvious exceptions) have seemingly lost the ability to participate in good-faith engagement with people who hold different opinions.  The number of right-leaning accounts that are comfortable with using helicopter memes to address communists is quite…well…deplorable.

People in all corners of the political pool only seem to want to assuage their emotions by participating in the vibe.  Labels matter more than substance.

Me, too…from time to time.  But I try to be aware of the problem.

Mastodonia isn’t a solution.  It is a reflection of the problem of reacting to conflict by shutting out contrary perspectives.  Siloed communities are not a solution.  Good faith engagement is the only solution.  I don’t see it coming back in fashion anytime soon.

Hugo Nomination Pool for 2025

Novel

Novella

Ghost of a Neon God by T.R. Napper - Napper is the underappreciated modern master of cyberpunk.  This novella examines our relationship with technology and considers the morality of dealing with a truly sentient AI.

Fancast

The Cinema Stories Podcast - Thus far this year, author/podcaster Paul Hale has surveyed Disney's Frozen and the Hanna-Barbera version of Charlotte's Web.  Paul routinely provides an entertaining and educated comparison between written stories and the movies they have inspired.

Series

Arcana Imperii series by Miles Cameron.  MilSF inspired by the the trading ships of old Europe as well as the great naval battles of WWII.

Review: Translation State

Translation State by Ann Leckie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a 2-star DNF review.

My patience for authors that focus on the "guess a gender" game is gone. The last Ann Leckie book I read I did finish...but wish I'd given up sooner as it had plenty of other problems.

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Hugo 2024 - Best Novel

As is my habit, I am buying and reading all the novel finalists for this year's Hugo Awards.  This is how my ballot will line up.  

1. Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh [currently reading] - This book reflects the best of genre fiction.  It asks the reader to consider a great many presumed perspectives.  There is an underlying theme of asking people to listen to one another that I find powerful.  There are other themes in the book that I will challenge in a longer review of the book.  The fact that there are challenging themes is part of what makes this a great work.  The author has crafted compelling characters and circumstances that motivate the reader to continue reading despite some of the kookier ideas presented.  There are some serious identitarian themes presented in the book.  I think it is useful to point out that while another serious identitarian finalist was a hard DNF, this one is a hard "have to finish".
2. No Award
3. Starter Villain by John Scalzi - This one will get a 4-star review on Goodreads.  John Scalzi does what he does best.  He creates relatable characters in reasonably relatable circumstances that draw the reader into the story in a way that motivates you to finish the book.  The first quarter of the book is pretty much a normal person going through normal bad times slowly sliding into a "excuse me what do you mean by that!!??!" sort of world.  You are buckled in for the entire ride.  The book exhibits a lot of John's wit and humor and is quite fun to read.  I won't spoil a good reading experience, so go read it.  So why is this below "No Award"?  Because this is a lightweight story.  The ending is telegraphed early on.  There are multiple instances where any normal person would have acted differently and concluded the story faster.  Starter Villain is almost on par with books like Piers Anthony's "On A Pale Horse" and other entries in the Incarnations of Immortality series.  I recommend those books as well.  They are entertaining with several deep messages woven into the series.  Starter Villain lacks any serious depth beyond some mildly "woke" (for lack of a better term) elements.  It simply is not in the same category as the works that have been awarded the Hugo.  Worth buying and reading.  Not one of the 6 best books of 2023.
4. Witch King by Martha Wells - I have thoroughly enjoyed (most of) Wells' Murderbot series of books.  She writes with great empathy and detail.  She invites the reader to experience different perspectives.  In Witch King, our supposed protagonist is a demon who has inhabited the body of another person.  The first act of possession was supposedly of a willing person.  The rest were not.  The single greatest flaw in Witch King is the presumption that the demons are benevolent and that the antagonists are evil.  We are shown that demons have great power that can be used to destructive ends.  We never learn what motivates them to interact with humanity much less how they might be morally constrained from wreaking havoc on the world.  A decent book.  But not one of the six best books of the year.
5. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty - Conceptually, this was a really intriguing book.  The book presumes to tell a fantastic tale akin to some of the great fantasy tales in the Western tradition but from an Arab perspective.  As someone who grew up with many Sinbad stories, I was ready to warmly welcome a more native telling of a fantasy set in that region.  If one sets aside the hypocrisy involved in painting early Islam as tolerant of independent women, Amina al-Sirafi is a fine read.  Also, the book hides a lot of information from the reader.  The person relating the story tells the reader directly that they are lying, but they will get to the truth eventually.  This technique is an unclever method for stretching a good novelette into novel length.  And it frustrates the reader.
6. The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera - plain DNF.  No connection with the characters.  No real progress in the story.  I made it over halfway through the book before I just couldn't take it anymore.  I've got a half dozen books waiting in my Kindle that I already know will be better than this.  Definitely not one of the six best books of the last year.  People really need to start ignoring Locus for this sort of thing.
7. End of Ballot
8. Translation State by Ann Leckie - Hard DNF.  I've really got no patience for the "guess a gender" authors anymore.  My last experience with the Radsch Empire ended poorly.  I gave this one a chance but "noped" out early on.

All of the books that I nominated were better than the books that ended up below No Award.

• The Ferryman by Justin Cronin 
• Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson
• House of Gold by C.T. Rwizi
• Stand Alone by John Van Stry  (the weakest of my nominees, still better than this stuff)

Review: The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a 4-star review. My experience was closer to 3 stars, but I think the subject is important and the experience of reading about it is useful for those who haven't spent the last few decades reading about the details elsewhere.

The author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, lived through the communist revolution that turned Russia into the USSR. He was imprisoned.

I'd like to say that he was imprisoned because he had thoughts and beliefs that didn't align with the dominant Soviet communist ideology, but the reality is that the Soviet communists used prison as a terrorist tactic. Anyone could be tossed in prison for the flimsiest of reasons (or no reason at all).

The ultimate objective of the Soviet communists was to create a populace that would never question communist rules.

My problem with the book is that the first portion of the book is filled with broad-brush descriptions of how people ended up in prison and the other tactics used by Soviet communists. There are few details. No statistics. Few names with details of their cases.

I have spent the better part of 40 years reading about how all communist states treat their people. In those 40 years, I have read more detailed descriptions of the very same circumstances.

Few people had the advantage of knowing what the Soviet communists were doing back when this book was first published. What made this book great at that time was that it revealed so much new information. These were the first experiential building blocks in an argument against communism.

Today we have the benefit of more detailed accounts and analyses. Mortar to fill the gaps between those blocks.

This is a great starting point for someone who has no exposure to the deprivations of communism.



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Review: Way Station

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a 3-star review. That is a charitable estimate of my experience with this book. I was expecting the classic of the SF genre and Hugo Award-winning "Best Novel" to be much better.

The basic outline of the book is that our protagonist, Enoch Wallace, lucked into being contacted by an alien from outer space. The alien, named Ulysses by Enoch, asks Enoch to manage an intergalactic waystation.

Essentially, beings are tossed across the galaxy. Dust and other galactic ephemera limit the distance that can be traveled in a single jump. Waystations are required to permit travelers to reach farther destinations.

There are two major and a few minor elements of this book that undermine the reading experience.

The first major element is the consistent use of internal monologues. Enoch carefully weighs each decision in his mind. He also reflects on the many new cultures and friends he has experienced courtesy of his position as a stationmaster.

We rarely see Enoch interacting with other characters. We do not learn about new cultures and new alien species as part of regular interactions. Enoch just reflects and emotes. This one factor alone almost caused me to not finish the book.

There are extended segments of the book where Enoch is faced with the choice between joining the galactic co-fraternity and leaving Earth or remaining on Earth with the hope that his new knowledge and experiences will help humanity survive. The essence of these sections is that this decision is hard. Not a surprise, but not terribly interesting after the first few pages of dithering.

This book is a classic example of why "showing" is better than "telling".

The second major element is the use of so many different aspects of alien cultures and technologies. One section will focus on a new system of mathematics. Another section will focus on alien "thaumaturgy" as a method for focusing spiritual essence to create a new being.

Some of these sections pay off at the end of the book. There are extended discussions with Ulysses about intergalactic politics influencing where new waystations are located.

Other sections just pad the number of pages. Enoch creates some spiritual friends using alien thaumaturgical techniques. They end up drifting away after Enoch fails to ignore the fact that they do not have and will never have a physical aspect. The presence of thaumaturgical "science" has no influence on the outcome of the book.

It is as if the author could not decide which genre tropes he wanted to use. In his moment of indecision, he found himself using all of them. The result is a reading experience that wastes time on marginally explored and incomplete plot lines.

There were a few minor nits to pick.

The waystation system appears to exist solely for the transport of individual entities. It is never obviously used for the transport of freight. Here in reality-land, most transportation involves moving stuff rather than people. As the galactic system appears to be focused on colonizing new worlds, the absence of any freight traffic is a bit odd.

Within the book, there is an object referred to as the Talisman. It ends up being a sort of McGuffin. The Talisman is a device that is used by a spiritually sensitive person to connect various populations with a spiritual essence. The sensitive person travels with the Talisman to each world. They turn it on and the Talisman's connection with spiritual essence fosters peace for that world/population. As a secondary effect, a world where the Talisman has not yet traveled still experiences a sense of hopefulness, peace, and unity with the rest of the galaxy based on the possibility that the Talisman might eventually visit their world.

The entire concept appears to be an attempt to obtain the positive benefits of religion without the perceived obligations and objections that come with belief in a specific religion. It creates an appeal to authority without the need for anyone to submit to that authority.

Which leads to a final criticism. Enoch is of the belief that the various peoples of the rest of the galaxy are in some morally superior to humanity. He presumes that by dint of their acknowledged technical superiority, those peoples are peaceful, cooperative, and otherwise better. Humanity on the brink of nuclear war is considered to be below the standard for acceptance into the galactic co-fraternity. Various non-humans seem to confirm Enoch's self-denigratory perspective.

Yet at the end, a non-human shows up having stolen the Talisman. They are quite willing to commit acts of violence in the furtherance of their unexplored scheme. We also learn of factionalism within the galactic government based on competition for scarce resources as well as for the opportunity of pursuing policies that validate the pride and narrow interests of certain members of the galactic government.

Sounds an awful lot like Earth and the conflicts that occur between our nations and even between various cultural groups within a single nation.

"Waystation" is worth reading once for those interested in the overall history of the speculative fiction genre. Outside of that motivation, I see little to recommend in this book.


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Review: Tower of Silence

Tower of Silence by Larry Correia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a 5-star review, but it's closer to 4.5 stars.

Why the 1/2 star deduction? There were a few instances where the characters dropped into using early 21st-century idioms. And this is part of a series, so the tale is incomplete.

This is a solid entry in the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series. Our hero Ashok finds himself on Fortress, a nearby island. He should be dead, but he isn't. And he has to find his way back to the mainland so he can return to guarding Thera.

In the meantime, the prophet Thera and the priest Keta must continue to lead their people despite Ashok's absence.

More people encounter some aspect of the Forgotten Warrior. They begin to suspect that their culture is not all they were told.

I don't want to go into too many details as they would spoil this book and it is a tremendous read. I will say that for a book with so many serious characters, it also has well-crafted moments of bust-a-gut humor.

There is never a page where you aren't interested to see what comes next.

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Carolyn Callendar - In Memorium

The year was 1981.  I was taking Advanced Composition in my junior year of high school.  Carolyn Callendar had the misfortune to be teaching the class that year.

Mrs. Callendar taught the class every year, so she bears some responsibility for what followed.  

It was a great class.  She gave us daily and weekly assignments.  Mostly they were writing prompts that we could take in any direction.  Such an open-ended invitation proved advantageous to our group of young writers.

Mrs. Callendar had her preferences.  One of us had a knack for ethereal treatments that I will stereotypically describe as "butterflies, flowers, and rainbows".  That student always got an A on their work.  The rest of us had to work for it.  Or so it seemed to us at the time.  Young student writers have a tendency to be precious about their early work.

My personal favorite piece was an extended bit of poetry that I produced in collaboration with my best friend.  It was a dark and moody piece that was inspired by the works of Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe, and who knows what else.  We had the "dark" knob turned up to eleven.  Naturally, we both lost our copies so it exists now as a vague reminiscence of our clear literary genius.

As one might expect, the class went through phases.  The band RUSH released their quintessential album, "Moving Pictures", that year.  The second track was the science fiction inspired song "Red Barchetta".  The titular automobile had been saved in an old white-haired uncle's barn.  A relic from before the Motor Law being chased down by gleaming alloy air cars.  The driver was subsequently saved by a one-lane bridge that the air cars could not cross.

We were largely unaware that RUSH's primary lyricist, Neil Peart, had found inspiration in a piece of fiction that was first published in the November 1973 issue of "Road and Track".  That story, A Nice Morning Drive written by Richard S. Foster, told the story of an old MGB roadster.  Rendered obsolete by wave after wave of modern automobile safety standards had made surviving car crashes not only likely but predictable.  The drivers of the newly designed cars expected to walk away from accidents unscathed.  As a result, drivers of these Modern Safety Vehicles began targeting older vehicles leaving them in mangled heaps.  Those driving older cars were likely to be left in a similarly mangled condition.  The price for driving a classic.  And so the driver of the old MGB engages in a race for his life pursued by a pair of MSVs.

Courtesy of Neil Peart's retelling of A Nice Morning Drive in Red Barchetta, a series of automobiles entered our classroom zeitgeist.  We subjected Mrs. Callendar to seemingly endless stories that involved red sports cars.  The model of the car would shift to suit the moods and tastes of various authors.  Sometimes it was only glimpsed under a protective tarp.  Other times the car would tear along country roads kicking up a stream of fall leaves.

We began to perceive that Mrs. Callendar was dissatisfied with our seeming enchantment with red sports cars that appeared in our work.  So we shifted to blue sports cars.  She was not amused.  I think she secretly was amused.

Our appreciations of the roadster (red, blue, or otherwise) lasted a few weeks before Mrs. Callendar put a kind but firm end to our vehicular ruminations.  Automotively-inspired expositions were no longer acceptable subject matter for the course.  A few essays later in the year reprised our earlier fascination with motorized conveyances.  She accepted these brief automotive interludes with humor and grace while simultaneously assuring the class that she would throttle any attempt to return to those halcyon days of transportational bliss.  The fuel gauge was on "E" where cars were involved.

Mrs. Callendar retired a few years later.  She and her husband moved to Georgia where they enjoyed the company of their grandchildren.  She also enjoyed playing bridge and reading books, naturally.

Carolyn Callendar passed away in 2022.  While I don't know what comes next, I'd like to imagine that somewhere she is at the wheel of a red roadster from a better vanished time.  Naturally, she would be gaily driving along with the top down, the wind whipping her hair, and stirring up a steady stream of autumnal yellow, red, gold, and brown.

Sexualizing Children??

This entry is part of an ongoing conversation taking place from time to time at File770, among other locations.  As is frequently the case in passionate discussions, the topic tends to shift depending on the speaker.

For the most part, my interlocutors are aghast at the many legislative efforts to limit the books that are available in public libraries and public schools.  And honestly?  I share their concerns.  Many of the books that end up being impacted by these initiatives are things that I read decades ago.  Many of the newer titles are equally unworthy of attention either legislative or administrative.  

Reasonable people can disagree about the relative merit of a children's book that features a farting main character.  No reasonable person would suggest locking up a teacher or a librarian for including it in a school library.

The problem is that books featuring farting characters, or books by George Orwell (irony!) are not the subject matter that is driving the issue.  Focusing on farting characters or on "To Kill a Mockingbird" or any other largely inoffensive work is a purposeful attempt to deflect the discussion away from the core issue.

Sexualizing children.

What follows is very much my part of an adult discussion that involves adult materials.  If raw images of sexual body parts offend you, then please move on to something else.  I have some very nice book reviews to read.

For everyone else...

Review: Aliens: Bishop

Aliens: Bishop by T.R. Napper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

T.R. Napper gets invited to play in the world of Aliens. Here we learn that Colonial Marines Master Sergeant Apone has a brother. His brother is a Captain in the Colonial Marines who is charged with tracking down Michael Bishop. Bishop is the progenitor of the Bishop series of androids. He also has a desire to investigate and exploit the xenomorphs.

The mission to track down Michael Bishop reveals an opportunity to recover the physical remnants of the Bishop android from the Aliens movie. (That is the one with Newt.) Eventually, it becomes clear that Michael Bishop has grown more xenomorphs. Captain Apone wants some payback for the death of his brother.

The events of the book take place after the Aliens: 3 movie as one of the survivors of the prison planet eventually becomes part of the story.

Napper does an outstanding job of filling out each character with unique motivations and history. There are many events where characters are faced with choices that pit a desire to settle past grievances with the desire to survive in the face of low chances of survival. Collectively and individually, they demonstrate the grit needed to rise to the most lethal of challenges.

The book provides us with a raft of new characters and events without breaking the lore of the Aliens fictional world.

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Review: System Collapse

System Collapse by Martha Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While I have thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the books in The Murderbot Diaries, I found this installment to be a bit pointless. We don't learn anything new or interesting about Murderbot.

Read the rest of the series. It's very well written. If there ends up being an eighth installment, then be sure to read this book. But if this is the end of the line, then you can stop at the sixth installment and not have missed much.

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