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More stories I liked, that you might like too

Another in a semi-regular series of posts. Here are some stories I liked!  Please feel free to talk about them in the comments and/or leave links to additional stories you’ve liked. Stories are easier to transport for Mikulas morning and nobody will forget that it’s Mikulas and put their stinky feet on the nice stories you have left them. No one gets eaten by Krampus in these stories. That’s not really my style.

So Much Cooking, by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld).  Feeding a family in the face of a science fictional pandemic, food blogger style. This is so compassionate and humane. It is also so, so, so very Minneapolitan.

The Coup in Elfland, by Michael J. DeLuca (Mythic Delirium). I am a sucker for revolutions, especially for revolutions that do not have a simple happy ending. Blood is once again compulsory, you see.

Here Is My Thinking on a Situation That Affects Us All, by Rahul Kanakia (Lightspeed). Spaceship-perspective story on a gloopy people and their gloopy priorities vs. its own.

A Photograph of Bones, by Robin Husen (Daily SF). A completely different story but also about perspectives. Seeing the world differently is beautiful.

The Girl With Golden Hair, by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam (Beneath Ceaseless Skies). Great expectations, terrible queens, centaurs. And implication.

Spider’s Ink, by Jason S. Ridler (Beneath Ceaseless Skies). Rarely do I really like a story that I have to warn people might gross them out a little, but this is one: there’s some quite vivid visceral stuff here. That’s not the point, though, the point is much deeper, so if you can get through the initial bit, this is another story full of rebellion and politics, unreliability and non-simple endings.

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Where it starts, where it winds up.

I’m not going to say if it upsets you when there’s a mass shooting or police brutality, because you’re human. You don’t have to do a performative dance of grief for every person killed, every city that has to rise up and say no, enough, for me to know that you feel it. But if you’re American. If this is your country, in which all this is happening. That if, not the first one. If you’re American and of voting age.

Vote in your local elections.

Every news outlet in the country is trying to sell us the next presidential election as a two-year story–as the two-year story–and if that works, they’ll pitch it to us for three next time. Not even senators–say nothing of representatives. Just presidents, presidents, presidents. And not presidential policy. Future possible presidential policy. Hypothetical presidents. That is The News Cycle; that is what Serious People Who Care About The News care about.

Bullshit.

When it all goes down, when it’s your city or the city next door to it, the president can send in the National Guard if it comes to that, the president can make sad speeches on the TV and reach out to bereaved parents–and we are at a place, as a country, where we know that it’ll be time for another sad speech and some more bereaved parents next week. We know that their grief will be as real and as fresh and as meaningful as last week’s bereaved parents, and the president can reach out to them with five minutes between climate change talks and trying to get those Indonesian fires under control. Hey, remember those? Giant, rampaging fires ruining the air quality of much of the south end of Asia and destroying huge precious forests? No, never mind, in eleven months one of these yahoos might be on a major party ticket; we have to run footage of them at a pancake breakfast.

But when it all goes down–the part for which they’ll interrupt the pancake breakfast–the people who make the immediate decisions about what will happen in your city or the city next door–those people were either elected or their hiring or appointment was set up by elected people. For the most part, that is who runs your city and county government. By the time the presidential election rolls around, you have a pretty good guess which way your state will swing, although you should vote anyway. But who will your ward want for alderman? Who will be your rep on the city council? In many places you will be voting on sheriffs. Sheriffs, come on, we have all seen how important they are. You will be voting on judges–even if it’s just to retain or deny them their seat. Think about that. The judges, the people who issue warrants or quash them? YOU CAN VOTE FOR THEM. You.

The people who decide in budget meetings whether your police force should spend its money on community relationship training and a little trailer to haul around a speed detector sign, or whether that money should go to riot gear. You elect those people. Or you don’t. Or you say, oh well, there’s nothing important to vote on this time. Meaning: it’s not a presidential election. Meaning: I have not been force-fed years of coverage of these people eating pancakes. They are slightly lumpy and do not spam me with glossy ads of themselves and their glossy children. They have improbable names and there are lots of them. This part of participatory democracy is work.

Wail your anguish on social media, by all means, or don’t. I trust that you have a human heart, that you feel that anguish either way. But if you only have $20 to give, or you only have an hour to volunteer, is it going to matter more to the presidential candidate or the person who wants to make sure your city has a good council member? And if it all goes down in your city next time, God forbid, don’t you want to look at the people who are making the decisions and think, well, I did the best I could to get good ones? Because sometimes there’s not much a good mayor or a good alderman or a good sheriff can do. But then there are those other times, and we’ve seen too much of them lately. I’d like to hope we’ve seen too much of them to keep ignoring the most immediate scale of action we have.

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Books read, late November

Light fortnight for books–partly because of one monstrosity, partly because of a disproportionate amount of manuscript reading.

Pamela Dean, The Dubious Hills. Reread. I got lured. Again. This is one of my best examples of a book that teaches you how to read it as you go. I love all three of the main children so much, Arry and Beldi and Con. I miss the days when Moo was sometimes like Con. I don’t miss them always. Just a little. And I love the things it does with doubt and certainty and relying on other people.

Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, eds., Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales. Quite a few stories in this anthology worked particularly well for me. Holly Black’s “Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (the Successful Kind)” is the kind of lighthearted space SF that makes me think that the old guard complaining how there just isn’t old school SF like there used to be just aren’t paying attention to the right areas. M.T. Anderson’s “Quick Hill” was a sad creepy march toward the inevitable. Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Diabolist” worked quite well for me as the portrait of a girl and her own, her father’s, and a town’s demons. Patrick Ness’s “This Whole Demoning Thing” made me suspect (in combination with Carrie Vaughn’s “The Girl Who Loved Shonen Knife” from Haikasoru’s recent Hanzai Japan) that I might have a previously unsuspected fondness for apocalyptic high school rock band stories. Sarah Rees Brennan’s “Wings in the Morning” was the kind of teen relationship crack that she peddles so well–I could see the emotional buttons she was pushing, and that did not make them pushed any less effectively.  Also, harpies. Also, self-acceptance. Also, harpies. Finally, the volume closed with Alice Sola Kim’s “Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying,” which was a lovely examination of extra-dimensional alien who even knows what ghost things and adoption and three very different girls and their friendship. I loved it. I want more like it. I mean, also, look at the title. Just look at it. If you think “meh,” then maybe that is an accurate meh for you, but: that title, oh, oh.

Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination. Aaaaaand this was the monstrosity. So much Burne-Jones. So. Very. Much. How many times can one woman exclaim, “Shut up, John Ruskin”? Let’s find out! I said. I am not as much a fan of Burne-Jones as I am of William Morris, and let’s find out why! I said. MacCarthy is an affectionate but not blinkered biographer. She is reasonably sensitive to the women in Burne-Jones’ life but does not (sometimes alas!) let them take over his biography. This is a thorough ramble through Victorian England, where everyone appears to be related to everyone else, or if not (Paderewski came over from Poland and could not be expected to be everyone’s cousin) at least ran into them in the street. Quite a few moments of wanting to kick Rossetti.  It’s briskly written, fun to read, but you can look up and a hundred pages have passed and there’s still more of it. It’s a commitment, is what. But I would seek out more MacCarthy, and if you’re interested in the Pre-Raphaelites, I would recommend it for sure. Even if you’re only interested in the period.

Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems. Reread. This was the strangest experience. I remember loving Anne Sexton the first time around, and I honestly cannot point to more than one poem I loved or even liked all that much this time. I have a really strong sense of continuity of self. Usually even when I don’t still love things now, I can say why I did then. And I can’t even point to which ones I used to like. It’s baffling, disorienting. I know what year I read this originally–2002, it’s in my booklog–and other things from 2002 are explicable if not still loved. Honestly, no idea.

Amy Stewart, Girl Waits With Gun. A brisk, fun novelization of the story of one of America’s earliest women crime fighters. A run-in with a thug that ruins their buggy sets Constance on a path to law enforcement–since heaven knows it isn’t being enforced without her. Brave, stubborn heroine; quick read.

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Cabbage, Radishes, Pearl

Dear Great-Grandma,

I was in the store just after 6 this morning, beating the crowds to get my Thanksgiving supplies. The clerk said to me, “I can see you’re in charge of the vegetables this year. You have all the fancy things.” She was holding a cabbage and a bunch of radishes.

And I thought of you, Great-Grandma. I thought of you and your cousins, up early to get to the market to get the good cheap cabbages and radishes and the other winter vegetables of the north, get them before they were picked over. Get the family fed. All the fancy things.

Great-Grandma, you’ve arrived.

You’re looking over my shoulder as I marinate the thin-sliced beef for tonight’s noodle soup, nodding, oh yah, you can stretch a lot of soup out of that much meat, don’t need much to make it soup, to make it taste fine. Especially with a dab of pepper there, yep, hardly anyone will taste you didn’t put much meat in there, mostly carrots and radishes cut real thin. And noodles, lots of noodles, that’ll make it last. You can feed those big men for days on that soup, they’ll never guess how little you spent on the meat. Good girl.

I wouldn’t even tell you that’s not what I’m doing. I’d just say, you wouldn’t believe how cheap I got this big thing of dates–up on University there’s a Persian grocery that sells them, a quarter the price of a regular grocery store. They have a streetcar you could take there again, just like in the old days. Sit down and have some dates. Have some pecans with them. Take a load off your feet, Great-Grandma. Didn’t you hear the lady at the store? You’re one of the fancy things now. All those days of making it last, making do: you’ve made it.

Love,
Marissa

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Only maybe one point for it not being Free Bird

Friends, today I am here to talk about a serious issue affecting all of us. Or at least all of us who go to concerts, or possibly listen to concert videos on YouTube.

Will you stop shouting song titles at singers while they are performing.

Stop.

Just stop.

They know what songs they’ve done, or if they’ve forgotten, you shouting one isn’t going to make them suddenly spontaneously remember enough to perform the song credibly. If they only have one or two big hits, they especially know those. They know they are the big hits. They are aware. They may make a joke about it. This is almost certainly not because they think they only wrote one worthwhile song. No. It is because they know that yahoos like you only know the one.

On the other hand, if you are a hardcore superfan, shouting the titles of really obscure songs will impress no one. (Said the person with an obsessive memory who also knows those songs, who likes many of them, and who is still not impressed.) Sometimes an artist will solicit requests. That is when you get to shout titles. Otherwise there are many urges you must stifle when you venture into public with the rest of us, and this is one.

And in particular stop shouting song titles two or three songs into the set.

Seriously. Stop. Give them a chance to get their feet under them. Give them a chance to get to it, for the love of Pete. Possibly the song you want to hear fits in perfectly four songs into the set they had in their head. Five songs in. Possibly the song you want to hear is a great set closer–that happens a lot with crowd favorites. If all you want to hear is “Major Hit: the Only Chart Topper,” they run the very real risk that if they walk out and play it first, you will be restless or possibly just leave.

But if you sit/stand there and shout it every time they stop singing? This is at least as disruptive. Cease.  Desist.

We have this lovely technology that allows you to make a playlist. It’s called–follow me here–a playlist. What it is not called is a live concert. Those work differently. You do not get to fast forward through the bits you do not like; you do not get to pause when you have to pee, and above all you do not get to demand all your favorites in order of what you remembered liking just now.

I love the Cedar, I truly do. You can get varied hippie snacks (often falafel) and chai and locally brewed beer, and no one grabs your butt at a concert unless you brought them along and asked them to. All hail the Cedar. But sometimes the intimacy of the Cedar venue makes Cedar audiences into–and I say this with all love–entitled buttheads. Do not be an entitled butthead at the Cedar. Do not be an entitled butthead at any venue. If you are excited to see an artist, you may shout, “Woo!” “Yeah!” is also acceptable. I suppose if it is a rock-ish sort of show, “We love you, [artist’s given name]!” might be within bounds, but this is likely to disconcert folk artists, especially if they have moved to this area and gotten used to it here, so possibly stick to, “Woo!” You can’t go wrong with, “Woo!” Practice with me: “Wooo!” This is how you channel your excitement about possibly maybe hearing That One Song or maybe not.

John Gorka may be from New Jersey and not expect too much, but I’m from Minnesota and we have standards.

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Access, ability, health: this week’s round

After the debacle that has been several years of World Fantasy Con, Mary Robinette Kowal has posted a convention accessibility pledge. It’s worth a look; it’s worth thinking and talking about. I specifically want to highlight something that I know Mary and the other people who have been talking about this pledge agree with: that the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) is a starting point for convention accessibility, not the be-all and end-all. Not everyone will want to sign this pledge for a number of reasons, but taking part in the conversation and advocating for accessibility is important for all of us regardless of what form it takes.

Accessibility is an ongoing conversation in part because it never takes part on just one axis. Something that makes a convention more accessible for people with one kind of limited mobility won’t help people with another kind; mobility accessibility won’t help people with hearing limitations; and so on. We understand more about neurodiversity than we did twenty years ago, or even ten, but our understanding is still imperfect.

It’s been disheartening to watch people get defensive on these issues, to see comments that amount to “I’ve tried hard and been a good person and that should be enough”–especially since “trying hard” often applies to completely different fields of endeavor: you can try very hard to have an allergen-friendly green room, and that’s wonderful, and it doesn’t do anything for wheelchair access to panels.

The post I intended to write, before this came up, was about unhelpful reactions to other people’s medical situations–thankfully not mine, no one’s in my house. I have watched people play “guess the random diagnosis” for a friend who was having enough trouble without having their random friends with no medical expertise whatsoever pelt them with guesses for diagnosis and treatment. I have listened to stories of misrecorded personal details that could have serious impact on future care. I have heard reports of care costs that were supposed to be covered by insurance and were not, to the tune of four figures–or that were covered by insurance, and were still four figures. So the main thing I wanted to say was, “Never start talking about someone else’s medical care with, ‘you should just…’ because it’s almost never ‘just.'”

And this ties back in with convention accessibility, because if you’re dealing with health problems and/or disability. Even if they’re short-term–even if you’re “just” broken your leg and “only” have to get around on crutches for weeks. You are already wrestling with a labyrinthine system that is draining your time and energy in addition to the health problem that is draining your time and energy. And then you turn to your leisure activities to relax, and you’re the one who has to put in more and more time and energy to make them baseline functional. If the conrunners don’t do it in advance, it’s the people who are already having problems in the first place (this is a known pattern across other concerns) who have to put in more time and energy that they already have depleted.

I had a miniature hissy fit while doing some revisions on Itasca Peterson, Wendigo Hunter. I was adding supporting characters, and I noticed that everyone in the book was apparently able-bodied. And I had a miniature meltdown in the privacy of my office, going, “I have to deal with disability crap both first-hand and second-hand every day. Literally every. Day. Why can’t some able-bodied person who lives only with able-bodied people be the one to notice and deal with it in their children’s book?” I am not proud of this hissy fit, and when I had finished with my meltdown, I pulled up my socks and gave one of the kickass college students Itasca looks up to a kickass walker that is painted with cool designs. Which is not the ne plus ultra of disability in children’s books, so hey, any able-bodied person who lives only with able-bodied people who wants to notice and deal, feel free. But it circles back again: the people who have to deal with this stuff, statistically, will be the ones who deal with this stuff.

So if that’s not you, one way or another…think about changing the trend somehow? Thanks.

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Books read, early November

Peter Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt. Lots of things about going smash against the Spanish in the 16th century, mostly, although extending around it. Fun bits of culture clash where the Spanish are baffled by the Low Countries and vice versa. Their women! Their literacy!  Yyyyes, excellent. A bit of a specialist volume, but interesting for that.

Holly Black, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories. I have enjoyed some of Black’s novels, and others have just not really hit me well. Apparently I appreciate her much more at shorter lengths. I’m motivated to get the novel version of “The Coldest Girl in Coldtown” just to compare, because I thought that the short version did an excellent job with the gaps between our perceptions of other people and their reality. And so did a later story in the volume, “Paper Cuts Scissors,” which had lovely library imagery as well, even though I am a tough sell on library stories–in fact the stories I liked most were the ones I would have expected to be a tough sell on–so in general I will keep looking for Black’s short fiction from here on out.

Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People. I suspect that Bolz-Weber’s book will resonate most with those who are most aligned with an organized church. They will probably feel rueful about themselves in spots, supported in spots, nudged in spots. A lot of the places where Bolz-Weber says “we,” though about what we expect, what we want, what we do…become less applicable the less aligned you are with a formal and hierarchical church. If you are not aligned with organized Christianity at all, this is not the book for you, I don’t think.

Vera Brosgol, Anya’s Ghost. This is one of the places where my status as a non-visual person really limits my interactions with the comics medium, because for me this was just a random ghost story, pretty well-done but not amazing, and the art also being pretty well-done was not that big a draw. For others it will probably be more so. (I was reading comics recommended to me as possible Christmas presents for a few people on my shopping list. Not, alas, successfully, but also not painfully.)

Kurt Busiek & Benjamin Dewey with Jordie Bellaire and Comicraft, The Autumnlands Vol. 1: Tooth and Claw. This comic mostly has anthropomorphic animals as characters, but the champion who is summoned is a human. And I’m done; I hate that. Humans are the special ones! What about badgers? I ask you. Some beautiful landscape pictures here, but: there are venomous shrews in the world. Echidnas. And yet the human has to be the chosen one? Get away from me, book with pretty landscapes.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle. A memoir of his family and their setting. I found it to be a fast and compelling read that gave a very different personal context than I’d had access to before. Worth the time for sure.

Pamela Dean, Tam Lin. Reread. Yes, I know, but I gave it to a friend to read and we were talking about it and I got lured. This time one of the tiny points that hit me that was different, being at a small private Minnesota liberal arts college in the early ’70s vs. the late ’90s: being “on financial aid” and having an on-campus job was a specific thing, not just, like…life for every single person you knew except literally one. I have no idea how many times I’ve read this book, and I love some of the same things every time, and yet there’s always something different.

Barry Deutsch, Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword. Quite a focus on the Orthodox Jewish culture of the setting, so if you know someone who wants to see themselves in such a heroine and/or would like to learn about that culture, here is a way. I didn’t find the action plot to be very well-paced, and it felt a bit preachy about skills/values in the resolution, but not offensively so.

Peter Haining, ed., Time Travelers: Fiction in the Fourth Dimension. This book…someone picked it up randomly ages ago, and I can’t put “reread” because it’s not in my booklog. In fact I’m not sure any of us ever read it. I think it might just have accompanied us around from apartment to apartment to house, looking like the sort of thing we might like. Which it is not. It is from 1997. I remember 1997. Women had been invented then; I remember specifically having been invented then. You would not know it from this hostile, smug book, where women are not only not authors but also substantially not protagonists, not anything really in most of the stories but dizzy objects, prizes. And the time through which these men’s thoughts traveled–all of time, all of space in most cases–was so damnably small. These were the sorts of stories that would have made me write The Stuff We Don’t Do in a fury if I hadn’t already written it, so it was a relief that I already had, because I was busy that week. And no. Just no. At least we can stop hauling this book around with us. Uff da.

Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm, Good As Lily. It felt like the title wasn’t adjusted after the comic evolved. Still: teenager has to deal with different ages of herself, hijinks ensue. Good enough that I reached for the next DKK thing on my library pile.

Derek Kirk Kim, Same Difference. Friends figuring out an interpersonal minor mystery of sorts. Mostly friend interaction of a young adult sort. Entertaining and light.

Hope Larson, Gray Horses. Slightly surreal bilingual foreign exchange student comic. Pretty but not as insightful as I had hoped.

Wallace J. Nichols, Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do. Ask me if I was actually surprised. Oh, just ask me. There is some actual science here confirming that my habit of finding water and walking near it is very sensible and healthy. There is also a near-epic amount of woo, some of it in evo-devo directions, so…handle with care.

Karen Russell, Swamplandia! Unlike Russell’s short story collection, this is more grounded-weird than way-out-weird. Grounded weird is enough: it is set in Florida. It’s the story of a family of teenagers who have lost their mother and are figuring out which parts of their world were real without her and which were a collective delusion. The alligator wrestling is entirely real. Much of the stuff around it…well, that’s the book. Beautifully written, much to enjoy without the way-out-ness. Very well-characterized. I am a Karen Russell convert.

Brian K. Vaughan, Adrian Alphona, and Takeshi Miyazawa, Runaways: The Complete Collection Volume Two. More of the same, more or less, without quite so many of the original characters, with more crossovery characters. This is not improving, but I still like some of the original “your parents are supervillains and you run off to do better” premise enough that I’m still with it, but I probably won’t stick with it to the bitter end.

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All the stars

Gather round, kids of all ages and genders. I’m going to tell you a secret.

The world does not come with a five-star rating system.

Several times lately I have seen people impose the five stars into systems that did not helpfully provide one. As if this is universal. As if this is the natural and right way to interact with the universe. No. No.

Yesterday it rained while I was out running errands, sheets of rain rolling into the river valley off the prairies. It was warm rain for Minnesota in November, though not in absolute terms, when what we deserve was snow, but we’ll take it. We’ll take it. My jeans were plastered to my thighs in less than a minute, my hair soaked through. I almost had to pull over, driving home, because there was so much rain that I couldn’t see two cars in front of me. I crept along through the wet white world.

It was not a five-star rain. It was a glorious rain, a drenching rain, a pounding rain.

Last weekend we heard the Minnesota Orchestra play short Sibelius pieces. The humoresques danced and romped. The Oceanides drew us in with woodwinds. For awhile I did not think of my loved ones who had been hospitalized that day. I thought of the music, of the woods of Finland and the sea and the music. At the end we clapped, and we went home, and there was no button to click for stars.  How many stars?  Five?  Why not more?  Seven, nine?  Ten stars?  Seventeen?

I know, I know–the things that do have the five-star rating system attached are trying to get feedback. Many times they’re trying to get past automated gatekeepers, and that can be a worthy goal. But the things that don’t have that don’t need you to impose it.

Sometimes things are so amazing as to leave you wordless. I know. I spend a lot of time there despite all my chattering. But “five stars” does not convey that. Any time you create a shorthand to try to convey that, it stops working the minute it’s established. For most of the things that matter, you have to get out there and say: this moved me. Or, I have mixed feelings about this.  Or, I was not so sure and then the tarragon flavor really hit me and I was a convert. Or you have to be willing to let people see the stars in your eyes.

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Robot Universe, by Ana Matronic

Review copy provided by Sterling.

The subtitle on this glossy coffee-table book is “Legendary Automatons and Androids from the Ancient World to the Distant Future.”  It spends a lot of time on the fictional robots, spending a full page spread on most of the author’s favorites from both written media and the movies.  But there are also real life examples of automata and robots, including gems like Su Son’gs Cosmic Engine.

The author’s stage name makes her passion for the topic clear, but even if she was writing as Betsy Peterson, it would be apparent from the way that she squees about robot after robot how much she loves the subject matter.  This is not a book for serious academic research.  This is a book for poring over the pictures, for going, “Gort!  I love Gort!”  (What? I do love Gort) and, “Daneel is the best thing he ever wrote,” and other bouncy happy fan reactions.  And its timing, coming out at the end of the year, is very convenient: if you’re trying to come up with the right present for someone with a lot of nerd identity but no particular inclination toward cerebral research, that person might well enjoy a hundred favorite very shiny robots, with pictures of Elektro and Sparko from the 1930s and allusions to Marge Piercy and Kraftwerk.

Please consider using our link to buy Robot Universe from Amazon.

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Points of Origin

Today’s new story is on Tor.com: Points of Origin.  For those of you who managed to find the copy of Analog that had “Blue Ribbon” in it, it’s the same universe, but none of the same characters, so there’s no requirement of reading one for the other or vice versa.  And it’s got grandparents and ice skating and rocks.  Oh, and Mars.  And the Oort Cloud.  And stuff.

Go, read, enjoy!