Private Mars Rocket II

Lesbians In Space: Where No Man Has Gone Before by J.S. Fields

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Some anthologies can be tough reads because the theme is too narrow. This is not one of them - in fact, it's the best anthology I've read in a while. Thanks to a wide group of authors and good editing, there's not a bad story in the bunch. Having said that, a couple of highlights:

"Vendo Does Not Give Change" - an interesting take on AI and evolution.
"The Mycologist's Guide to Identifying and Antagonizing Extraterrestrial Fungi" - one of two stories with intelligent fungi in them.
"Decompression" - a two-character love story.
"While it Lasted" - an entertaining heist story.
"The Ritter Maneuver" - a great short Star Trek parody.

I highly recommend this book, and there's a Volume 2 coming out soon!



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As reported earlier, I am downstate at my parent's house. Although I tend not to have as much free time when I'm down here as I do at my house, I brought two Genuine Paper Books down to read. One was recommended in the Chicago Tribune and the other I found via John Scalzi's "The Big Idea."

The first was Vanishing Daughters: A Thriller by Cynthia Pelayo. I found it to be the opposite of thrilling. The story is very much set in and of Chicago and written by a long-time resident. However, it's Just. Damn. Slow. I have abandoned it at about the 50% mark.

The second story was Stolen Sisters (Mangas County Mysteries) by Lif Strand. It's Book 2 of a series and I'm 50% through the novel. I'm enjoying it enough that I've ordered Book 1.

Back in the day, I used to subscribe to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There was a reviewer - Charles DeLint (sp) for the magazine, and I eventually determined that if he liked a book I would not like it. I'm beginning to detect a similar pattern with the Tribune. If they like the book, I probably won't like it, while with the Whatever I have a better chance.

I just finished reading the book Careless People and I wanted to jot down a few thoughts. First, I felt that the title, from a phrase in F. Scott Fitzgerald's book "The Great Gatsby" was entirely appropriate. As painted by the author, Mark Zuckerberg and his management team just don't give a damn (to steal from another American great) about what's right and wrong. Second, I think it highlights a key point which is relevant to the current American political system which is this: evil can come not just from evil people but from those that can't be bothered to object to evil.

In honor of the passing of Gene Hackman, I decided to screen one of his movies last night. (And whatever you can say about Hackman's passing, at age 95 untimely is not one of them.) I decided to watch a movie I've heard a lot about over the years but never saw, the 1974 movie The Conversation.

In this movie, Hackman plays Harry Caul, a secretive and very button-downed surveillance operative. The movie is very 70s-ish: gritty, downbeat and not especially fast-paced. It's also, to modern eyes, anachronistic - rotary phones and phone booths abound. Having said all of that, Hackman does a very good job portraying a not-very-sympathetic character.

Last night was movie night at Casa Gerrib, a double feature consisting of Personal Shopper and Out Come the Wolves. Herewith, thoughts.

Personal Shopper - I *thought* this movie was going to be some social commentary on rich people as seen through the eyes of Kristen Stewart, playing the titular character. Nope - it's a mixture of ghost story and suspense thriller. Now, to be fair, there is some commentary on rich people, but that's really secondary to the main plot.

Out Come the Wolves - this is a Canadian B movie which I viewed on a whim. It's also pretty good. Missy Peregrym plays a woman who grew up in rural Canada. She goes back for a weekend visit with her boyfriend and another man, a childhood friend. On several occasions, the movie takes a left when a more stereotypical movie would have gone right.

Relics From A Traveling Show by K. M. Herkes

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Full disclosure - I know the author personally. I had not, however, read any of their short fiction. When I was at an event with them recently, they mentioned this book and I decided to buy it. It's a very entertaining read and I glad I made the purchase.



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I'm not obsessed with Mars - I can stop thinking about the Red Planet anytime I want to. In the meantime, I got a new iPhone and found the wallpaper ugly so I changed it to a picture of Mars. In other news:

As part of getting a new iPhone, I got a 3-months-free deal on Apple TV. So far I've seen:

1) Greyhound, a gritty WWII movie about a convoy attacked by U-boats. Tom Hanks is the lead and it's a tense ride.

2) Blitz, another WWII movie. In this one, a woman sends her son away to the country in 1940 London, but he runs away and comes back. Also very good and unstinting - the son falls in with a group of crooks who are robbing bombed-out buildings, including one with the dead still inside. Also I learned that the London Tube did not want to let people use their stations as bomb shelters but was forced into it by popular demand.

3) The first two episodes of Black Doves, a British spy thriller. Of interest is that the spies have normal lives outside of spying and balancing that with being a spy is part of the show.

The latest book, Strawberry Gold goes live tomorrow!

A Pair of Wings by Carole Hopson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book was featured in the book section of the Chicago Tribune, so it's hardly obscure. It is, however, very interesting. It's a novelization of the life of Bessie Coleman, the first American to get an international pilot's license.

Bessie was a Black woman, the daughter of a freed slave turned poor sharecropper in Texas, was an unlikely pilot, especially in 1920. But she made her dream come true - a dream which alas killed her in a plane crash in 1926. As a student of Chicago history, I found it especially interesting in that Jesse Binga, Chicago's first Black banker, and Robert Abbott, founder of the Black newspaper the Chicago Defender, both play prominently in this story.

This is a really good book and I highly recommend it.



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The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I read this book for a book group I'm in. As one of the members of my group said at our recent meeting, "this is a book you read because you have to, not because you want to." The book takes place over a few weeks in the summer of 1950 in the Florida panhandle. Robert Stephens Jr., a black 12-year-old, kicks a white boy in self-defense and gets sent to the reformatory for 6 months.

This is the start of a harrowing experience of casual brutality, sadism and racism. While he's in, his sister Gloria, sixteen, attempts to get him out, dealing with her own threats of rape and beatings. The story is an unflinching look at how everybody, including whites, were oppressed by a pseudo-feudalistic Southern society. Their are ghosts or "haints" but those are not the source of horror - the horror comes from humans.

This is not a pleasant book to read, but an important one.



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This novel had an intriguing premise - two lovers riding overland in winter in the wilds of the American West. Unfortunately, it didn't really deliver on that premise for me. First, the most developed character was Tom Rourke, the male of the riding pair. He's not very sympathetic, being a drunk drug addict who steals money and a horse as part of the plan.

His girlfriend, Polly Gillespie, probably has a troubled past as well. We're told that she's an orphan and that at 29 she's hard up enough to agree to be a mail-order bride. However, we don't see much else about her, and she's a very passive person in this tale. I did find myself caring about her fate enough to finish the book, but barely. Her husband, Captain Anthony Harrington, is a caricature of religious zealotry and most of the other characters are straight out of Central Casting.

The book itself is very literary, by which I mean it starts slowly and has a sinuous plot, making it feel longer than the 242 pages in my edition. Overall, I found it merely okay.