davidkm | Entries tagged with fiction

Pig Pong

Charley was on the verge of winning his 100th game of pig pong. It was a grueling sport, but he had made it his own, by dint of countless hours of practice on his grandmother's pig farm. How he had sacrificed--foregoing the ice cream socials, Friday night dances, trips to the movie theatre, birthday parties, everything, all had been subsumed by his one goal. And it had all been worth it. Now, with pig pong declared the newest Olympic Sport, he was perfectly positioned for a gold medal next year at the Pyongyang games. All the name calling, clod throwing, glance casting scum bunnies from East Central High School would finally get their paybacks. But now, it was time to focus. Randi had just backhanded a big hairy sow low across the center of the net. Squealing, the pig bounced in the near-right quadrant and spun towards the outside corner. *Wack* ("Eeeeeeeeeee") Charley returned the hog, dropping it just on Randi's side of the net in his patented pigspin return. No point. It was his serve. He dropped the porker smartly for a good bounce and slammed it towards the white line just below Randi's navel. Yes, it took a big woman to play pig pong successfully, but Randi was no pig. There wasn't an ounce of fat on her 6'1" frame. She returned the swine to Charley's left corner. Return. Right corner. Return. Left corner. Return. He began to sweat. This was a long volley for pig pong. Usually either the table or the suid gave out by now. Good thing they weren't playing a boar. Right. Return. Left. Return. Right. Return. Sweat poured down Charley's face. Randi was indeed a worthy opponent. He might just ask her out after the game. Left. Return. Right. Return. Left. Return. Right corner--and away. No point. Randi's serve. And so the game wore on, neither combatant yielding. Finally, the score was 20:18, Randi's serve, game point. She slammed the oinker down on the table and fired it straight for the right corner. Charley lunged and whacked the pig on the ham. He lurched back to position just in time to see the curly tail disappear over the other end of the table. He had lost. LOST! She must have cheated. He would NEVER ask her out now.

"Good game," she said, grinning, "want to go for a root beer?"

I did not remember, if I ever knew, that John W. Campbell, that bastion of hard science fiction, published a story* in 1952 by A. Bertram Chandler, that hero of Space Opera, in which human werewolves battle alien bunny-hopping weretigers for mastery of the stars. It's a great story. Well worth re-reading my old magazines for gems like these.

*"Frontier of the Dark," September issue.

When all the tomfoolery is done, and I want to read a paper book, I find it has fallen on the floor. Because I am a quadriplegic, I need someone else to pick it up for me. It's a good one too. A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller. This is my third time reading it, the first was in the 70s, and I recognize a lot of the people who voted for Trump in its early pages recording the fall of civilization. The book was written before I was born, in the mid 1950s, but it has aged very very well. I recommend it to anyone who likes to read apocalyptic science fiction. Five stars.

Vinge, Vernor, 1992, a fire upon the deep: Tom Doherty Associates, 613 pages.

I haven't read everything by Vinge, but I would be surprised if he's written another book better than this one. It is a thriller, in which an extremely powerful and implacable foe pursues relatively helpless and inoffensive people who, paradoxically, are the only ones who can protect the galaxy from it. But what does a plot summary tell you about a good book. This book is full of edge-of-the-seat drama, delightful aliens, futuristic technology, and the equivalent of e-mail messages from a galaxy spanning information network that add realism and allow the author to tell us things the characters can't know. It is sort of a perfect storm of the book, as far as I am concerned, and I can't believe no one's yet tried to make a movie or series of movies out of it.

Here is how it begins. 5 billion years before the story opens an evil computer program that was intelligent and self-aware tried to take over the galaxy. This conquest would have included its extinguishing all independent thought in the galaxy. But something, we never meet in, destroyed the evil thing and all recorded history in the galaxy's civilizations begins 5 billion years ago. That is so long that nobody really thinks about how odd it is to have a clean slate then that's as wide as the galaxy. A chunk of memory, as in RAM or the futuristic equivalent, exists just outside the main civilized part of the galaxy and it is in active. But a human civilization, not a very important one, finds it and tries to mine it for the valuable information it contains. We all know where this is going and soon enough the investigators are destroyed. But that's just the prologue. The entity immediately embarks again on its original plan, interrupted by a mere 5 billion years in suspended animation, and it creates what soon becomes known as "the blight." But I have to tell you another thing. The author hypothesizes that for some unknown reason the interiors of galaxies contain a field that suppresses intelligence of both natural organisms and artificial organisms like computers. So the interior of the galaxy is the unthinking depths, old earth is in what's called the slowness, were faster than light travel is impossible, above the slowness is the beyond, divided into three syllable airs and above the beyond is the transcend, which is really outside the galaxy entirely. If you move up into the transcend and are not soon destroyed, you become a power and may ultimately evolve into something like a god, although those are not usually interested in mundane things like galaxies. Some of these powers or even greater entities are perverted and instead of doing what ever they are supposed to do they decide to control and destroy a helpless little creatures inside galaxies. Like us. It's one of these that is creating the blight. So while the blight is systematically subverting and destroying the vastly powerful civilizations of the high beyond, subsisting on computers more intelligent than Einstein, faster than light travel, and technology based mainly on force fields and things even weirder, when human spaceship escaped the initial attack and headed for the bottom of the beyond where something mysterious might be able to defeat the blight. I'm not going to spoil the story by telling you what happens with that plot line. But the world where much of the rest of the story plays out is inhabited by arrays of intelligent doglike creatures. Each individual member of that race consists of three to six doglike beings, which are individually about as intelligent as dogs. But a pack communicates within itself telepathically. Keith Laumer explored something a little bit like this in one of his amusing Retief stories. Retief was stationed on a planet where the natives consisted of isolated organs, like spleens, eyes, feet, and so on. A bunch of organs got together to make a more powerful being. Just like with Vinge's story, in Laumer's older story the intelligence rose with the complexity of the organism. That book was written with firmly in cheek, but "a fire upon the deep" makes a serious attempt to portray the colonial doglike organisms realistically I think the attempt is pretty successful. This is just one example of the care that Vinge used in putting this story together. You need to read it.

Reynolds, Eric T., ed., 2007, Ruins: Extraterrestrial, Hadley Rille books, Box 25466, Overland Park KS 66225, www.hadleyrillebooks.com. Perfect bound trade paperback, 345 pages, $15.95.

"Nice cover," I thought, though that seems to be typical of this publisher. I enjoyed every story too. There are 23 them, and the theme is obvious from the title of the book.

I have always been fascinated by ruins. Studying them, we catch glimpses of other people, doing other things. Ruins give one a feeling of mortality and also immortality. Here we are, receiving something from those who lived long ago. Some of what we get is passed on unintentionally, and this can be at least as revealing as estimates that are meant for posterity. Considering the past reminds us that we could pass something on too. The fact that we may only have a few crumbs from the biscuit just makes vanished worlds more intriguing. We can take as a premise that ancient people were not so different, really, from us, because varied circumstances have the same basic human material to work with in creating cultures and societies. Could the same be true of ruins left by aliens? Maybe, maybe not. In _Ruins: Extraterrestrial_, a couple of dozen authors consider this question and others

A few excavations.

I'm not familiar with very many of these authors, which may be a function of my ignorance more than anything else. I was quite impressed the quality of writing.

In "stonework" by Wendy Waring, an archaeologist of sorts encounters a relic of a civilization that isn't quite as dead as it seems. This story doesn't answer any questions, but it raises a few.

Justin Stanchfield takes us "Beyond the wall." The concept of a mysterious wall whose far side is unknown is almost a cliché in science fiction. Stanchfield does manage to bring a new twist to the idea. I like the way he like the way he shows, rather than tell, what is going on. And what is that exactly? Is the wall a device that manipulates time? Does it merely manipulate minds? Maybe the difference really makes no difference.

Christopher McKitterick introduces a new riff on the end of humanity theme, so wonderfully played by John W. Campbell and others over the past few decades. "The empty utopia" isn't completely empty, but the last cup is about to be drained when the Martians show up in the nick of time. It is a sweet story.

I don't really mean to say something about every single story in this book, because that would make this review longer than it ought to be. The truth is I like just about every story in this book well enough to tell you something about it. I am afraid that talking about these stories is a bit like eating leaves potato chips. "Borrowed time" by Gustavo Bondoni left me wondering what the ending meant. That doesn't happen too often and I quite enjoyed it.

Harvey Welles and Philip Raines use "The dam" to look back from the far side of a profound cultural transition. Something like the singularity of Vernor Vinge. It's almost impossible for us to understand what the far side of such an event would be like, but this story provides a few clues.

One more. "The fateful voyage of _Dame la Liberté_" by Lavie Tidhar reminded me strongly of RA Lafferty. There's nothing like surreality to enhance a story about archaeology.

The bottom line is that Eric has done something really remarkable in this volume. If you are anything like me, you will like every story. Don't wait until it goes out of print!

In the interest of full disclosure: Eric and my wife are old friends.

A poetry reading has been approved for Mid-City Microcon (Baton Rouge, Saturday, Feb. 8). How many of you can say that you are likely to participate? I don't need a firm commitment at this time. I'm also going to allow fiction if you only read a few minutes worth. I need to let the library know about how much time the reading will encompass, so I need to get an idea about how many people are likely to be participating.

David

We lost Bruce a few days ago. Folks who knew him better than I have written about him elsewhere. I wrote this review of his second novel quite a few years ago.

Boston, Bruce, 2007, The Guardener's Tale, Sam's Dot publishing, cover by Jan Lillehei, trade paperback, ISBN 1-933556-78-1 and 978-1-933556-78-9, 273 p., $19.95, signed and numbered edition of 200 copies.

Bruce Boston's second novel is a dystopia á la 1984. That's the comparison the advertising copy makes at the Genre Mall. Of course 1984, like many dystopian novels, was told from the viewpoint of one of the victims, whereas Boston has tackled the same problem from the point of view of an enforcer. The book has the form of a detailed report of how one citizen, Richard Thorne, strayed from the path of righteousness. He lives a good life but is dissatisfied, and begins to do the sorts of things that just are not done. He visits squatters in unreconstructed slums, has sex with illegal prostitutes, and reads banned books. Soon he is infected with the ideas of rebellion.

He is observed by Sol Thatcher, Guardener. The Guardeners protect society by gardening the populace and their interactions. The story, in part, is the tale of Thorne's descent into what remains of the underworld in a tightly controlled high-tech society, but one that has not yet exerted its hegemony over the entire populated world. Behind and interwoven with Thorne's story is that of the Guardener who observes and ultimately has the job of apprehending him and his shady associates. The form of the book resembles that of the society it describes. Just as the society consists of two linked elements, the tightly controlled dominant society and the undocumented world on its fringes, the book consists of two interwoven parts: the story of Richard Thorne's disintegration wrapped in the story of the watcher who became involved.

We are meant to be sympathetic with the outlaws. They live in what's left of our society, a society in which one can consort with anyone, read any book, and think any thought. At the same time, their existence is squalid and they aren't going anywhere. They are still thinking about fighting a war that they have already lost. The Guardener has the job of protecting society by making sure its members conform to established norms. Although personal freedoms are limited, Thatcher's world is safe and the citizens are healthy and well taken care of. But this is not just the story of the destruction of the old world by the new. It is the story of their mutual interaction, and when all is said and done we may become sympathetic with the Guardener too.

The book can be seen as social commentary, but this is not its strength. The comparison between freedom and autocracy is far from new. The gardened world, especially the sanitized picture presented in the novel, is more literary construct than representation of anything that could actually be created by humans anyway. The Guardener's Tale is a story of people, people who live beside each other but not with each other, despite the complexity and intensity of their interactions. In this way The Guardener's Tale is much stronger than Boston's earlier novel, "Stained Glass Rain." Boston has been working on his craft during the many years since publication of that book, and Sam's Dot got lucky when he submitted The Guardener's Tale to them.

The Guardener's Tale is a Prometheus Award nominee and is on the Stoker preliminary ballot.

This is the first I have seen of Sam's Dot's ventures into trade paperback publishing, although it's not the only trade paperback they have produced. It looks nice, and I hope they do more substantial books like this one in the future.

Flashing Swords 9 , Winter 2008, serves up a generous helping of sword and sorcery fiction and verse (http://flashingswords.sfreader.com/titlepage.asp). This issue, 136 pages long, contains illustrations by a variety of artists and 19 written pieces. Alas, the table of contents does not distinguish between stories, essays, and poems, although interviews are always titled using this form "interview with...". In this review I cover all of the fiction, none of the nonfiction, and some of the poetry. I also give my opinion on the artwork although I freely admit to vast quantities of ignorance in this area.

Editor Crystalwizard and her team have done a good job of editing, proofreading and so on, although I think editorial choice of fiction was more sophisticated than that of either poetry or art.

The first story, "The shores of limbo" by S. C. Bryce, is Part 4 of "Rise of a Necromancer." Because this is not the conclusion of the serial I will not review it here, except to say that an accompanying illustration by Michael "Miko" Mikolajczyk seems to have a slight problem with human anatomical proportions.

The second piece is a poem; "The reluctant viking" by Wesley Lambert. It is accompanied by a very charming drawing by Miguel Santos. I particularly like the detailed ink representation of carving on the Viking warship. The poem is straightforward, and I am afraid I learned little about vikings, or anything else. The poem is rhymed and metered, with four-line stanzas, but has some problems with scansion. The second of six stanzas represents it well enough.

"Foul tales reached us, from northern climes,
of pillage out of season;
of selling longboat building-plans–
for this we charge treason!"

Other poems are printed here and there among the stories, but they too are not to my taste. I find it very difficult to translate sword and sorcery successfully into the poetic medium, and I think the poets whose work appears in Flashing Swords 9 had the same trouble.

"Mightier than the sword" by Bill Ward begins with a pocket picking. The target is anything but oblivious, and the story quickly moves on to burglary, flight from authorities, and magic. The story is straightforward, but I like its ambiguity. Are we meant to identify with the protagonist (he isn't an especially nice fellow)? Is the magic real? How does it work? Without these unanswered questions, "Mightier than the sword" would be run-of-the-mill sword and sorcery. Instead, I found the read enjoyable, and I cared enough about the main character to want to know how he fared. The illustration by Mikolajczyk isn't as awkward as the first, but the characters portrayed are contortionists! The tale moves quickly and reads easily. It does not stretch the limits of the field. Here is a small sample:

"As I said, the kid was good, but so was I in my days as a street sharp. I snatched his wrist and spun, saw the fear and surprise and anger and all of that writhing for dominance in his face. I just frowned, smacked him lightly on the back of his head, and released my grip on his arm. I flashed the Guild
handsign ‘brother’ and he gave a quick, embarrassed nod and vanished into the crowd. "

"The plague ship" by Liane Whittier is a good story, but the illustration by M. D. Jackson has some startling perspective issues. It sure looks like one pirate's head is bigger than another's thigh! And his nickname doesn't have anything to do with the size of his head. This is a classic story of supernatural evil (think Cthulhu mythos, and you have the idea), in which something horrid and inexplicable wrecks havoc on the minds and bodies of hapless humans. This sort of narrative contrasts with, and in my mind is infinitely superior to, the tired horror-movie plot of the unkillable human imbued with strength from the devil. Why do I prefer that unstoppable horror have an alien source rather originate from Christian mythology? Perhaps because it seems a little unfair for our own supreme being to give his entirely dependent adversary the capability to unleash unlimited and unending devastation on His own progeny. Whereas, if alien gods from beyond time and space are responsible, well, what do we expect? "The plague ship" breaks no new ground, not even with Whittier's choice of a woman as the pirate captain. Still, the story is well written and I enjoyed it.

"And the wind sang" by Bradley H. Sinor is not illustrated. It's a shame, because the choices are so varied. Arthurian high fantasy, Norse mythology, vampires, mind control, wanton murder, mistaken and assumed identities, and so on. Evil has returned to Arthurian Britain, in the form of alien technology that had been locked away so it could not continue to be misused. Well guess what, someone is misusing it again and it takes a knight of the round table to straighten things out. Heck, it takes two of them. This tour de force somehow hangs together for me because it moves quickly, and even though the disparate elements come from vastly different sources, they are fit together so smoothly one almost forgets they don't belong under the same roof. I suppose one must place this story within the subgenre of Arthurian fantasy, although extraneous elements are so plentiful and so central to the story that it can't possibly fit with canon. Sinor makes no real attempt to explain why all these things go together. I can only hope that this story is one of a series and that the back story has been adequately covered. If there is a genre called "everything but the kitchen sink," then the story definitely belongs, and for all I know it contributes new insights in the field.

"Zeerembuk" by Steve Goble is an amusing tale of demon summoning gone awry, told from the demon's point of view. I should say, that although I found the story quite funny, I think it was meant to be taken seriously. The demon for whom the story is named is summoned to earth, as he has been many times before, but this time he appears in a forest. There has been some mistake, and until he can find the sorcerer who called him, and perform the required task, he can't get back home. However, both people and his own hotheaded nature conspire against him. Will anyone get what he or she wants out of this mess? This plot premise is a bit of a stretch. If the spell was wrong, so wrong that he didn't even end up in sight of the spellcaster, then why was he even successfully summoned, and definitely why is he compelled? It seems far more likely to me that if the spell was spoken incorrectly he would arrive under no compulsion to fulfill the wizard's desires. But suppose we let that slide.

This is not the first story I've read that was told from the point of view of the demon. I am thinking of a novel whose title and author I forget that began in a similar way. Except in that book the demon was cultured, even refined, and earthly existence was a trial to him. "Zeerembuk" is heroic fantasy. Er, antiheroic fantasy. The demon struggles with his own nature as well as his surroundings, and what he ultimately decides to do is less interesting (and less believable) than the struggle itself.

A drawing by Santos adds a creepy representation of Zeerembuk's face to what the reader can glean from the written description. Curiously, Santos draws the female sacrifice as nude, where as Goble had her wearing a "frock." I don't think the term frock fits the medieval setting (think cocktail parties). Just as importantly, why waste valuable fabric on somebody you're going to exenterate? I like the interpretation in the drawing better even though it's rather tasteful.

"The Porvov switch" by Seth Skorkowski, illustrated by Mikolajczyk, is obviously one of a series of stories about a cat burglar named Ahren. In this story, he has moved to a new city to escape justice and has joined a new gang, where he has yet to prove himself. Ahren's gang has lost a valuable artifact to another gang that is attempting to muscle in on their territory. The other gang is reputedly led by a demon. In the attempt to retrieve the artifact and sabotage the other gang's position in the city, Ahren has ample opportunity to prove his worth. All he has to do is survive.

This story is classic sword and sorcery. The "new guy on the block" hook for the protagonist also is a standard way to bring the reader into the created world, because the reader is always the new guy on the block. Nothing wrong with that. As entertainment, I can't fault "the Porvov switch." Skorkowski hasn't broken any new ground here, but he's gone over the familiar territory competently.

"Death's Head" by Joseph A. McCullough V uses a premise I have not seen often. The protagonist, Bowis, previously was a participant in a battle in which God's hand was unequivocally revealed. The reader knows none of the details, but none of the characters doubt this fact. In this story, Bowis encounters a very odd person who is probably either an angel or a demon, but which? He's obligated to protect the former from those who might mistake it for the latter. McCullough manages to cover this situation without church politics, which is refreshing. I've seen plenty of medieval church hierarchies in fantasy settings. Nothing wrong with that, but it's nice to see good and evil handled "in the field" so to speak.

"Tyler's bed & breakfast" by Lyn Perry, illustrated by Richard H. Fay, is a ghost story, set in the present-day northeastern US. Setting and subject matter are completely different from everything else in this issue. I feel a ghost story is out of place here, but some might enjoy the variety. The story itself is worth reading but not gripping.

The next story is "Cold fire" by Brian Dolton, illustrated by T. A. Markitan, who has a welcome skill with the human form. This is a story of feudal Norsemen, location imaginary as far as I know. In brief, a few years past, a group of vampiric (but human) and cannibalistic highwaymen were defeated and exterminated by some of their neighbors. But it turns out that at least one member of each group has survived. This leads to a confrontation one cold winter night, with onlookers unsure about who they should root for. The story is not bad. I like the potential role switching and uncertainty, but the evidence on which the protagonist decides who is telling the truth is weak. No court in the world would have touched it with a 10 foot pole.

"Like ink in rain" by Elizabeth Barrette is a flash story about an encounter between a mixed party of humans and a golem (and perhaps other races not mentioned) and a troop of orcs led by an ogre. I think it's kind of funny to use the term orcs in a story that involves the ethical treatment of ogres, because the ogres in Tolkien's writing were so unredeemably bad that the question of whether to kill one or enslave it just would not come up. However, using the more standard fantasy conception of ogre it's a valid question. I can say no more without giving away the game, except that I like what Barrette did with it.
"The night of the meld" by Bruce Durham features that monster fabled in story and song that consists of numerous bodies of human beings that have somehow thaumaturgically been squished together into one hideous giant. How the thing can even function is beyond imagining, but this is sword and sorcery, not science fiction, so believability is much less of an issue than it might be. It's eerie; within the last year I read another story by a different author using just about the same monster, and it ends in more or less the same way. But that's okay, Durham has done an entertaining job of tale telling, and the accompanying illustration by Mikolajczyk is very good.

Flashing Swords 9 isn't perfect, but it contains some very good sword and sorcery and I enjoyed reading it.

Smith, Clark Ashton, 2014, The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, S. T. Joshi, ed., Penguin books, ISBN 978-0-14-310738-5, paperback, perfect bound, 370 pages.

I have a particular fondness for Smith. Who else can use words no one else knows, without awkwardness? Gene Wolfe comes to mind, but that's it. Most of Smith's stories are set in the far distant future, which seems a lot like the distant past in many ways, because the technology is much less sophisticated than our own. And magic works. This setting gives Smith tremendous scope.

Dark Eidolon begins with probably the best-known Smith story: "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros." This is a good story, and I did not mind reading it again, but it has been repeatedly reprinted. This book contains a mixture of very familiar and good stories and unfamiliar and forgettable stories. So I found nothing new and meaty in here. That's because I have read almost everything by Smith that has been collected or anthologized in the past 50 years. Now, Dark Eidolon is probably the only Smith collection in print right now. For anyone who has discovered Smith within the past 30 years, finding the other collections might be rather difficult. For anyone new to Smith and his fantastic stories of far-future adventure, dripping with magic and monsters, and assembled from the broadest word palette imaginable, you need this book. But if, like me, you are familiar with Smith's fiction, this book will not satisfy your desire for more. Dark Eidolon also includes quite a few poems, about 40 of them. The editor, in the introduction, reports that Smith had a very low opinion of his own poetry. The author might be wrong about his work, but in this case I don't think he was. I am not the most eager fan of fantasy poetry, but I have read some that really blew me away. I am afraid that Smith's poems don't do that.

From "The Last Night":

I watched, until the pale and flickering sun,
In agony and fierce despair, flamed high,
And shadow-slain, went out upon the gloom.
Then Night, that war of gulf-born Titans won,
Impended for a breath on wings of doom.
And through the air fell like a falling sky.

To quote Beyond the Fringe, it's not enough to keep the mind alive. So don't buy this book for the poetry unless your taste diverges quite sharply from mine. By contrast, the 35 short stories that comprise the main part of the book are easily worth the price of admission. If you thrill to tales of demons, magic-users, and warriors of all stripes, if John Carter got your heart pumping, read this book.

Marge Simon and Malcolm Deeley, 2009, The City of a Thousand Gods, Sam's Dot publishing, www.samsdotpublishing.com, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-935590-28-6, perfect bound paperback.

This book is like a deck of cards, if each card has an original painting on one side and a flash story on the other. This book was written around the idea of a city in which almost every faith is given a place. The idea is reminiscent of Fritz Leiber's street of the gods in Lankhmar, although Simon and Deeley 's City is nowhere near as gritty. Also, the street of the gods was created to illustrate the foibles of religion. "The city of a thousand gods" celebrates diversity. Colored watercolor and colored-pencil cover illustration and interior illustrations. These are evocative and appealing.

"The City of a Thousand Gods" focuses on the many different gods and religions the authors have imagined for it. It is not an encyclopedia, because each entry is a story, now that I think about it, that would be a wonderful kind of encyclopedia. I will admit right up front, the book does not cover all 1000 gods that are worshiped in the city. It does cover a good 29 of them. Perhaps there will be a sequel.

One remarkable thing about the book is the cover. Sam's Dot is notorious for less-than-thrilling covers. This book is an exception. Not only do I like the cover, which stands out as one of the best I've seen from Marge Simon, but I enjoyed nearly all the stories. Quite often in a book of this sort, where a certain minimum number of stories is needed, some stories are right on the mark, but others are as flat as pancakes. Not here. The authors stopped at 29 stories because they felt they were done.

Simon and Deeley have come up with some very engaging concepts. Priests of "The Sixfold Visage" spend their time learning about other faiths, which is how they practice their own. Reminds me of Unitarians. "The Dysur" believe that they can develop their mental powers to travel to other worlds. The Body of Family believe that the path to heaven requires one's body be made into a sacred brick, whereas followers of the Path of Light believe one's body must be scattered to the wind I thought Romeo and Juliet had it bad! Many of the faiths will remind the reader of some that we know exist or have existed in our world. The sacred prostitutes, the man-only and woman-only cults, and so on. But isn't this inevitable? Over the past half-dozen millennia for which we have at least a minimal records humanity has experimented with almost any kind of religion that could possibly be imagined. One might think of "The city of a thousand gods" as a compassionate review of these possibilities.

If the book strikes any false notes, it is that some of the stories seem to be a little too detached. Relatively passionless summaries are starkly contrasted with emotion-charged personal tales. The latter, which I prefer, outnumber and outweigh the former.

I am a sucker for books that explore alternatives. "The city of a thousand gods" does so very well.

Schoen, Lawrence M., 2009, Buffalito destiny, cover by Rachael Mayo, Hadley Rille Books, www.hadleyrillebooks.com, hc & perfect-bound pb, 264 p, ISBN 978-0-9819243-3-5 $15.95, 978-0-9819243-4-2 $26.95.

A young terran named Conroy is stranded, penniless, far from home. In desperation he revives an abandoned interest in hypnotism. Turns out that most aliens can be hypnotized as easily as humans, and a successful stage act is born. From there it's a short step to stealing alien technology, becoming wealthy, and having the waste products hit the air circulation device.

Schoen is very inventive, and that is one of the best things about this book. Alien species, alien customs, future technology, this reminds me of Analog magazine of the late 1960s. I mean that in a very positive way. There is a bit more of an egalitarian perspective, a welcome product of these times, and the technology is of course different than we imagined 40 years ago.

This book is fun, quick read. Recommended for fans of science fiction of that era. And for anybody who likes imaginative fast-paced science-fiction adventure.

Reid, Luc, 2010, Bam! 172 hellaciously quick stories. Self-published as an e-book in every format imaginable. $2.99 [See end of review for download URLs].

Bam! is intended to be read during those odd moments when you want to read, but don't have very much time. Personally, I don't often have two minutes for reading. Two minutes is about how long it takes to read the average story in this book. If I have just two minutes, my first thought isn't "Oh! I need to read something." It takes me at least that long to absorb whatever is worth looking at in my surroundings. Fortunately, it's perfectly okay to read more than one story, one right after the other. That, I have time to do. I found myself reading this book over a period of a week, but mostly in a couple of days. These stories are the literary equivalent of potato chips, but without the fat. Actually, that comparison is unfair. I enjoyed every single story. Many made me stop and think for longer than it took to read the actual story. Reid is very good at creating a compelling situation in a few words and bringing it to a satisfying end just as quickly. A few are merely jokes, but they're good jokes. Most are surprisingly nutritious considering how few words it took to make them.

These are what most people call flash stories (fewer than a thousand words per story; in most cases fewer than 400). With this number of words to play with, you can write one scene, maybe two. It's not easy to inject an entire world into one scene, but Reid does that time and time again. The characters, whether they live in one sentence or 20, are real people. Don't take my word for it. Go to www.dailycabal.com and read some of his stories. Some of those stories are in this book, but Bam! contains stories that were published elsewhere, as well as new material.

In case you don't want to take my advice and check out some of Reid's stories online, I will say a few words about them here. Bam! is full of death, transformation, alternate realities, alien worlds, time travel, and dystopias. Not many utopias, because really, what is there to say about perfection? The stories range from upbeat to downbeat; some are simply there. Some connected stories form trilogies, tetralogies, and so on, but most stand alone. Most, but not all, are science fiction. What? You want some examples? Here are just three.

From "The war with the clowns":

"Sometime in the dark hours of the morning on April 1st, Clowndependence Day as they later called it, I woke up choking and blinded, half-suffocating on a face full of coconut cream pie."

Or, "Up late with all the power in the universe":

“Claude, why did you make us alive?” said a monkey with a drum. “Now that we’re alive, we have a lot of feelings, and we don’t know what to do about them.”

Or, "Good news from the European National Lottery Foundation":

"I already knew what the new universe would be like: all the others. Very little changes from one version of reality to the next. That’s why I was working the same scam over and over, in universe after universe. Pretty soon I would have enough to set me up for life."

Get the book. Enjoy. Tell him I sent you. (Just kidding about that last part.)

Find Bam! Here:

on Amazon for Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004GUS8Q8?ie=UTF8&tag=thewillengi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004GUS8Q8

(or at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004GUS8Q8 if you prefer it without the affiliacy info) and

on Smashwords for all eReaders at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/35395 .

Soon at http://www.lucreid.com/bam