murumatsu | Reading

A shocking number of people will blithely tell us all about the book they read, in English, on an English-language subreddit, and never tell us that they didn't read it in English. I can only catch so many of them - if they don't say "English isn't my first language" or make any obvious foreign language errors then I'll never know. (Some of them say "I read this in my own language" and then don't tell us what that language was.)

Most of these people, if prompted, will tell you what language they read it in. Three times now, I've had to ask twice because they refused to answer the question in a useful way, and every time that person has been Greek.

I thought it was a little funny the second time, but three times is the start of a worrying pattern, especially as it's not at all the most popular not-English language posted there. Maybe there's something going badly wrong with their school system?

(And, sidenote, even if you're certain it was translated from English you still ought to tell us the language it was written in. At least in theory this can help us weed out false positives, although I may be expecting too much of fellow commenters to that subreddit.)

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sovay

For the seventy-first yahrzeit of Alan Turing, I have been listening to selections from the galaxy-brained fusion of Michael Vegas Mussmann and Payton Millet's Alan Turing and the Queen of the Night (2025) as well as the glitterqueer mad science of Kele Fleming's "Turing Test" (2024). Every year I discover new art in his memory, like Frank Duffy's A lion for Alan Turing (2023). Lately I treasure it like spite. The best would be countries doing better by their queer and trans living than their honored and unnecessary dead.

Current Music: Kele Fleming, "Turing Test"

sovay

As it turns out, what goes on with my hand is that it's going to have arthritis, but with any luck on the same glacial timeline as the kind that runs in my family, and in the meantime I have been referred back to OT. Maybe there will be more paraffin.

My parents as an unnecessary gift for taking care of the plants while they were out of town—mostly watering a lot of things in pots and digging the black swallow-wort out of the irises—gave me Eddie Muller's Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir (2001/2025), which not only fits the theme of this year's Noir City: Boston, but contains such useful gems as:

One of the most common, if wrong-headed, criticisms of film noir is that it relegates women to simplistic archetypes, making them Pollyannas or femmes fatales, drippy good girls or sinister sexpots. People who believe this nonsense have never seen a noir starring Ella Raines.

Ella Raines is indeed all that and a drum solo on top, but she is not a unique occurrence and I can only hope that people who have not been paying attention to Karen Burroughs Hannsberry or Imogen Sara Smith will listen to the Czar of Noir when he writes about its complicated women, because I am never going to have the platform to get this fact through people's heads and I am never going to let up on it, either.

Anyway, I learned a new vocabulary word.

Current Music: Lucy Dacus, "Most Wanted Man"

conuly

has got to be shrinkflation of dumb phone games.

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pegkerr

My cousin Jill's Year of Adventure suggestion for me was to take a couple of hours volunteering together to plant some trees with Great River Greening. So, we signed up for a shift, and last Saturday on a beautiful sunny day, the two of us, along with her partner Jack, met in a park in Brooklyn Center.

The volunteer coordinators had the process down to a well-rehearsed presentation, and we three ended up planting three trees in all in the two-hour time slot. The first two were straightforward enough, and third, a Catalpa, had evidently been in the pot too long. The tap root had pushed through the hole in the bottom and grown large enough to embed itself into the plastic. It took a twenty minutes struggle to get it out of the pot.

It was hot by the time we finished up, and I'd exerted myself enough during the struggle with the stubborn tree to be glad to drink down the water I'd brought and sit in the shade a bit. But we enjoyed ourselves, and there are now three new trees in a park in Brooklyn Center, thanks to our efforts. Afterward, we drove to Jack and Jill's house for lunch, where I admired their extensive gardens and patio under the beautiful spreading oak tree.

A day well spent in the outdoors.

Image description: Lower center: head and shoulders of two women and a man, wearing hats, smiling at the camera. Center: The same three people are planting a tree. Overlaid over the tree are the words "Great River Greening."

Tree Planting

22 Tree Planting

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: pleased

sovay

As my day centrally involved a very long-awaited referral finally coming through and foundering immediately on the shoals of the American healthcare system, it wasn't a very good one. The CDC called for my opinions on vaccination which it turned out I was not permitted to state for the record without a minor child in the house. Because the call was recorded for quality assurance, I said just in case that I had children in my life if not my legal residence and I supported their vaccination so as to protect them from otherwise life-threatening communicable diseases and did not express my opinion of the incumbent secretary of health and human services and his purity of essence. I got hung up on before I could tell my family stories from before the polio vaccine and the MMR.

Of course the man in the White House used the Boulder attack to justify his latest travel ban. Burned Jews are good for his business. I appreciate this op-ed from Eric K. Ward. I hope it reaches anyone it's meant to. I thought I was jaundiced about people and now I think I'm just in liver failure.

It would never have occurred to me that a video for Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" (1977) should have anything to do with psychological realism, but Saoirse Ronan seems to have had a great time with it.

Current Music: Sam Fender, "Tyrants"

sovay

Thanks to the Canadian wildfires, our sunset light is Pompeiian red, by which I mean mostly the cinnabar and heat-treated smolder of the pigment, but also the implication of volcano.

Because my day was scrambled by a canceled appointment, after I had made a lot of phone calls

spatch took me for soft-serve ice cream in the late afternoon, and once home I walked out to photograph some poppies I had seen from the car.

( Did you love mimesis? )

I can't help feeling that last night's primary dream emerged from a fender-bender in the art-horror 1970's because once the photographer who had done his aggressive and insistently off-base best to involve me in a blackmail scandal had killed himself, all of a sudden the hotel where I had been attending a convention with my husbands had a supernatural problem. Waking in the twenty-first century, I appreciate it could be solved eventually with post-mortem mediation rather than exorcistic violence, but it feels like yet another subgenre intruding that the psychopomp for the job was a WWI German POW.

Current Music: Frog Eyes, "A Library Used to Be (Black Hole and Its Concentrated Edges)"

conuly

Isn't the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn't the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn't banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
"Why are you sad so often?"

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.

*****

_Link

conuly

But so it doesn't get lost in the crowd, don't forget about the protest on the 14th!

( Links )

conuly

Ideally something I can get through the NYPL or the Queens Public Library (I haven't yet re-upped my Brooklyn Public Library card. I ought to go do that this weekend or the week after.)

I suppose I should set a good example and rec something to all of you first. Lemme see....

I did recently enjoy both Long Live Evil and How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying!

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sovay

I just had my hand dipped in paraffin for a therapeutic procedure and it was so cool. After four immersions in the bracingly hot, clear, slightly soft liquid which reminded me of candle-making in elementary school, it formed a dully livid, slowly malleable coating in which I could see instantly the possibilities of practical effects, although what I actually said as I carefully brought my mannequin hand over to the table where it would be wrapped in plastic and insulated with a towel was, "It's fascinating. I must be quite flammable." The heat lingered much longer in the paraffin than I had expected from the quick-hardening dots and puddles of candlewax and cooled to room temperature without brittling. It had to be rubbed through to be removed. Tragically it did not peel off like a glove into an inverted ghost hand, but it could actually be worked off my wrist and fingers in a coherent thick wrinkle and took none of the small hairs off the back of my hand with it, like its own Vaseline layer. "Your skin is going to be so moisturized," the therapist promised me. I am still getting a referral to a hand specialist, but it was such a neat experience and like nothing I have experienced at a doctor's. It did not trip my sensory wires and made me think of Colin Clive in Mad Love (1935).

Current Music: Jade Bird, "Dreams"

sovay

It improves my mood considerably that I can listen to the Drive's "Jerkin'" (1977) because not only is the song itself a brilliant example of stupid rock, the band existed for a grand total of seven months during which it managed to release one un-radio-playable single, manufacture a scandal, blow an important gig, and implode in a puff of 20/20 hindsight, which sounds like a none more punk biography to me. Any myriad of such one-not-exactly-hit wonders would have bubbled through any scene with a critical exposure to Patti Smith or the Sex Pistols—in this case it was Dundee's—but this one left enough traces that I can, thanks to one of the better functions of the internet, experience all six and a half minutes of their total musical record and read for myself their history according to their lead singer, who really should feel proud that so much pleasure can be transferred through a song about masturbation. It has a two-guitar solo! DIY that slide! The persistence of thrown-at-the-wall weirdness makes me feel better about the world. On that note, because I had recent occasion to, as it were, drag it out, Lou Rand Hogan's The Gay Cookbook (1965).

Current Music: The Drive, "Jerkin'"

sovay

All praise to the makers of Bar Keepers Friend, which enabled me and

rushthatspeaks to de-blue the shower tonight after he had re-dyed his hair. It took us four tries to find a restaurant that wasn't dark Mondays, but eventually El Vaquero came through with, in my case, a spectacularly stuffed burrito de lengua which did its best to be bigger than my head. I am not at the top of my health and feeling more than a little disintegrated about current events. Have a picture from a window of MIT.

Current Music: Wolf Alice, "Bloom Baby Bloom"

mrissa

Fear, Loathing, and Transcendence in the Great American Road Trip. Friday, June 13, 4:00. Beth Cato, Marissa Lingen, Alec Marsh, Arkady Martine, Reuben Poling. Whether we like it or not, we are currently in the United States of America. The particular fantastic resonance of this country, and the continent it occupies, is often evoked by that great American literary tradition – the road novel. There’s an undeniable magic to traversing this huge landmass, with all its relatively open spaces. The brutal process of colonization that produced this country, and the unusually truncated history delineated by that process, add texture and horror to the magic of the open road.

Books like Max Gladstone’s Last Exit or Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning take the American road novel a step or ten further into the fantastic, including unflinching consideration of the bones beneath the highway. What other possibilities can fantasists encounter out on the interstate, and what can they throw in the trunk to bring along into other worlds than these?

I'm Only Happy When It Rains. Saturday, June 14, 2:00. Elizabeth Bear, Anthony W. Eichenlaub, Marissa Lingen, Arkady Martine, Caroline Stevermer. The weather’s weirder lately. Or at least out here in the regular world it is – but the weather’s been weird in fantasy for a long time now. Sometimes it tries to kill you (like in McCaffery’s Pern novels or Elizabeth Bear’s The Steles of the Sky), sometimes it makes you really miserable and then it tries to kill you (CJ Cherryh’s 40,000 in Gehenna, Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather), and sometimes you try to kill it and that doesn’t go so well (every story about terraforming or cloud seeding or propitiating the weather gods for mercy). Is the weather really just an excuse for an author’s indulgence in pathetic fallacy? Or can the environment become a live actor in fantasy storytelling?

mrissa

Yukito Ayatsuji, The Labyrinth House Murders. The first of two books I read this fortnight whose ending made me actively quite angry. The ending did not work for me at all, leaning hard on two twists one of which frankly did not work for me logistically. Yuck.

Peter Beinert, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. This is a great example of a time when it's good to be aware that I am not the target audience for everything, because I think Beinert's main target audience is the overlap of his fellow Jewish people (I am not) and people who need convincing that being concerned for Jewish safety in the Middle East (and elsewhere) and being concerned for Palestinian safety in the Middle East (and elsewhere) do not have to be opposing concerns (I already believe that). It was still interesting to see how he approached this topic writing to people who are not me, and it's a very short book, but it's not any more cheerful than you might think, especially as he is willing to discuss recent deaths in this region from both/several groups in some detail.

Elizabeth Bowen, The Complete Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. It is what it says on the tin: all her stories, arranged chronologically. They are the sort of slice of life vignettes (and somewhat longer sometimes) that I don't often like, and I liked these enough to read hundreds and hundreds of pages of them. Why? I'm not sure. I think because the slicing of life was done with a firm, wry hand? I think most people would enjoy this more in small bites, and maybe I would too, but I was traveling and had limited book supply, so this is where we landed.

Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School, Chapters 25-26. Kindle. This is the end of this book, and it has an ending entirely in keeping with its genre, so it likely won't surprise you if you parcel out the reading like this, but it will satisfy inasmuch as the boarding school story can satisfy you. If you're not a boarding school story fan, this is definitely not the story for you.

Adrienne Maree Brown, Ancestors. I can verify that it's okay to read this without the two that precede it in its series because that's just what I did. You'll get all the incluing you need about what has happened (a plague, Detroit being enclosed behind a wall) and who these people are (a diverse bunch of people with intermittent super-ish powers), and their personal problems entwine satisfyingly with their science fiction problems. Also there is a bunch of sex and gender, in case you want some. Also, and importantly, there is a quite good dog.

Willa Hammitt Brown, Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack. This is lavishly illustrated though a bit repetitive--it's definitely for the general/casual audience. (We live in a time when a book interrogating the masculinity of lumberjacks can be for the general/casual audience. What a world.) I learned some things that apply to my own ancestors as well as more general things about the lumber camps and their later mythologization, so that was interesting.

Stephanie Burgis, How to Write Romantasy. Kindle. This only gets categorized as "books" because it was an individual ebook. What it is actually is an essay, and I picked it up because I am not fond of romantasy as a category but am fond of Steph's work and the work of a few others I know she also enjoys, and I thought I would learn more from someone doing it in a way I like and respect than from people whose work doesn't connect with me. This did turn out to be the case--there were thoughts about subgenre and relationship arc that are useful to me even as I write things that are definitely not romantasy.

A.S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman. Reread. This is the wrong end of the series, this is starting at the ending, but I still find these characters fascinating, and this is the one I could--with some joy--find used, that I was missing. (I still need a copy of the first one but I can reread the middle two any time I like.) Midcentury women struggling to lead meaningful lives, love to see it.

Antonio Carbone, Epidemic Cities. Kindle. A quite short monograph on the various handling of different plagues by different cities, probably will not be much new if you think about this topic a lot but a good intro.

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Kindle. I said sarcastically to my niblings, "You'll never guess how it ends." But there's a lot that comes for the archbishop before death, wandering around the American Southwest in an era that...look, Cather doesn't have what we'd call modern consciousness of colonialism, but she has better awareness of Native people as people than I would have feared for this era.

Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, eds., The Way Spring Arrives: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Visionary Team of Female and Nonbinary Creators. Kindle, reread. Reread this for my book club, glad to discuss the stories in more detail with other interested people.

C.S.E. Cooney, Saint Death's Herald. Second in its series, and just as lovely in its writing and characterization and combination of whimsy and seriousness, no one else is quite like Cooney in that combination. Very happy to have this, you might be too.

Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages. This contains comparisons of art/archaeology to literary portrayal in this era, which is interesting, but also you will know just from the title whether you are the audience for this book or not. It is an absolutely lovely thing that it is, but it's not some other secret thing that will surprise you. I got it off a shelf labeled "history of WHAT???," and you will know whether that shelf is your heart's home or not.

Francis Dupuis-Derland and Benjamin Pillet, eds., Anarcho-Indigenism: Conversations on Land and Freedom. A series of interviews with people who have very different relationships with this term--gave me a lot more questions than answers, which is I think a good sign in this kind of book, especially when the people being interviewed have more writings available elsewhere.

Elizabeth Fair, A Winter Away. Reread. Unfortunately I was not immediately aware that this was a reread and more or less didn't notice, because it was not particularly notable either time. Had I read this already, or was the plot and characterization that predictable? We now know the answer, but at the time either seemed plausible. (Again, traveling. Limited book supply.) It's not offensive, it's fine, it's just...gosh I hope to remember not to read it a third time.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth. Kindle. This is my least favorite Gaskell novel so far. This is the sort of book that you read and think, ah yes, we had to go through this to get to where we are, but...unless you're a Gaskell superfan (which, fair, hi, hello), I feel like a book whose thesis is "maybe we should treat women who have sex like they are fellow humans rather than demons from the lowest pit of hell, at least if they're otherwise completely angelic" is--hmm, I wanted to say that it's not something most of us need any more, but I think what I would rather say is that it's unlikely to reach those who need it in quite this form these days.

Bill Hayton, A Brief History of Vietnam: Colonialism, War, and Renewal: The Story of a Nation Transformed. On the up side, this introductory history of Vietnam contains a great deal of pre-20th century stuff that sometimes gets skipped over in Anglophone histories, and it's a quick read. On the other hand, it's an entire country, you may well find yourself dissatisfied by a treatment this short, and it surely was not consistent about things like providing pronunciation or defining terms, sometimes doing so repetitively and sometimes not at all. I hope there's a better starting place for this.

Mohamed Kheir, Sleep Phase. A short dreamy novel (yes) about emerging from being a political prisoner in Egypt in this century, readjusting to life outside and its changes. Glad I read it but will not want to reread it.

David Kirby, The Baltic World, 1773-1993: Europe's Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. So on the up side, Kirby is very solid about paradigm shifts like Sweden sometimes being central Scandinavia, in political terms, and sometimes being the northwest corner of the Baltic. Unfortunately his focus of scholarship (I've read his history of Finland) and the timing of this book (basically right at the end date in the title) tipped the balance towards him being one of the people of that generation who felt the need to come up with explanations for why it was inevitable or just or...something, why it made sense for the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to be conquered when Finland was not...without reference to bloody geography for heaven's sake get it together my dude if your explanation does not lean heavily on "Finland is a frozen swamp and the others less so," what are you even doing. Ahem. Okay. Anyway, it's in some ways a useful historical reference and in other ways a cautionary tale for not trying to make history more just and sensible than the world actually is. (Please note that I say "frozen swamp" with the deepest of affection.) (It's just, look, I know you all wanted to have impeccable reasons why it couldn't happen to you, but it could bloody happen to you, of course it could, that's why we had to let the entire Baltic into NATO ffs, it could happen to you any day of the week, victim blaming for your own comfort is not a reasonable worldview thank you and good day to you.) (The thing is that not a lot of people read Baltic history with no strong feelings about the Baltic, I think, and I am no counterexample.) (If more of this book had been about the Winter War, would he have...no, he's an historian of FInland, he ought to already have.) (Harumph.)

Ann LeBlanc, The Transitive Properties of Cheese. Kindle. A delightful novella about the lengths a genetically modified cheesemaking clone will go to in order to protect outer space's most perfect cheese cave. I had a good time with this.

Rose Macaulay, Told By an Idiot. Kindle. This is a family novel that follows its characters from the late Victorian period through the postwar period although since it was published in 1923, it's not very far into the postwar period. It's got her characteristic humor and observations of humanity and its foibles, and she's very explicitly talking about how The Young Generation is perpetually being credited with all sorts of new traits that have in fact been in humans the whole time. I love her, and this was a fun one for me, albeit with somewhat less plot direction than some of her others.

Charlotte McConaughy, Wild Dark Shore. This was the other book I read this fortnight with a catastrophically disappointing ending. It was going so well with climate change and botany and repairing families, but the ending upset and frankly really offended me--this is not an "I don't like sad endings" problem, this is an "I don't like what the shape of sad ending once again implies about the worth of women" problem. Not recommended despite copious botany and several seals.

Tashan Mehta, Mad Sisters of Esi. Discussed elsewhere.

Candace Robb, A Gift of Sanctuary. I managed to finish this medieval mystery novel without attaching to any of the characters even a little bit. There was a lot of "which one is he? oh right that one" going on in my head. I finished it, I left it in a rental apartment, I can't say I recommend it but it probably won't do you any harm.

Rosália Rodrigo, Beasts of Carnaval. Discussed elsewhere.

Silky Shah, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Kindle. Explorations of how the carceral criminal justice system feeds the carceral immigration system, sure-handed and angry where it needs to be.

Vivian Shaw, Strange New World. The fourth full-length book, fifth story, in the Dr. Greta Van Helsing series, and this one goes to the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell for its monster medical drama, and also to [gasp] New York. I would not start here, because there are character implications and because the previous ones are still in print, but I actually think you could. But also the previous ones are still in print.

Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire. This was brilliantly done, pointing out that even the histories of the Age of Revolution that make an effort to include people of color are mostly still extremely focused on the Atlantic world, and things of interest were absolutely going on in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as well. Interesting, well-written, hurrah.

A.G. Slatter, The Path of Thorns. A very classically formed governess novel but with a ton of magic stuff in it. Yay, enjoyed this.

Sarah Suk, Meet Me at Blue Hour. A sweet novel about two Korean-American teens in Korea coping with the results of a memory removal clinic while one of them has a grandfather in the early stages of dementia.

Sunaura Taylor, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert. I've read several of this genre of book, which is case study of an ecological region and the humans who live in it being ravaged by particular companies who know exactly what they're doing and attempt to lie about it. This is probably the best one I've read so far, as it has very solid grounding in both disability theory and ecology, as well as the politico-historical chops for the research, and also the personal disabled/community connection to the subject, so if you only read one in this genre, read this one. (And hey, read one in this genre sometime, maybe, huh? You might think you already know how bad it is, and I promise it's worse.)

Sienna Tristen, Hortus Animarum. Kindle. A glorious collection of botanical poems paying tribute to loves that are not necessarily sexual or romantic but are definitely queer. One of the best indices I've seen in years, for friends who are index hounds.

Mai Der Vang, Primordial. The saola, a rare bovid native to Vietnam, is Vang's central metaphor here about the Hmong refugee experience. Some of the poems about it are stunning, brave, and vivid, but the whole is rather more monofocus on the one image (the saola) than I prefer in a collection of this length.

Elizabeth von Arnim, The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight. Kindle. This is a very silly book about a German princess who runs away to live in England in a little cottage and learns to appreciate being a princess. At no point does anyone consider that she is not inherently superior to all who surround her. It's briskly written and got me through waiting for an airplane, but I can't say it was wonderful enough that I recommend it more generally.

Neon Yang, Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame. Okay, so there are books where the twist is the point, and there are books where you see the twist coming from a mile away and the journey is the point. This is definitely more in the latter camp, but unfortunately it meant that I started to find the protagonist frustrating for not also seeing the twist coming. Possibly this is because it's much harder to be in a fantasy novel than to read one. If you want a well-written sapphic knights-and-dragons story and don't much care about the plot, here you go.

conuly

And I may have noticed that I need something new to listen to.

Now, I've said this before and I'll definitely say it again, but audiodramas are, hands-down, the gayest media I have ever consumed. So, in honor of the occasion, three lists:

The End's collection of LGBTQ+ audiodrama with at least one completed season

A search of Audiofiction.co.uk's entire catalogue for audiodrama with LGBTQ+ creators

A search of Audiofiction.co.uk's entire catalogue for audiodrama with LGBTQ+ characters

pegkerr

As I posted last Saturday, I have been working to assemble an anthology to submit to a contest with the Minnesota Authors Project (among others). I hadn't assembled as many authors as I had hoped, but we put together a nice little ebook, and I was proud of it and excited to enter the contest. We finished pulling it all together by 6 pm the day before the final deadline, and I went to the contest portal to submit it.

And at the last minute, after I had spent a good 40 minutes working my way through the portal and was just about to push the 'Submit' button, a Terms and Agreement page popped up that turned all my hopes to ashes.

The book had to be already published.

Now, I had inquired about that. The person I'd gotten the flyer from wasn't sure, and the website didn't mention anything about that requirement.

I had arranged with a letter of agreement with my authors specifically stating my understanding that this WASN'T a promise of publication, but that if we won the contest, we could make decisions about publishing at that time.

So, extremely mortified, I had to go back to the authors and explain. I'd done my due diligence, I had wondered about that very question, checked the website and the flyer, and I'd still gotten it wrong.

Some of the contributors wondered whether we could quickly self-publish, throwing it up on Amazon, of course the very reasonable expectation requested was that I would then promote and distribute it. I had very little time to make the decision, and I never heard back from one of my contributors, and I was badly rattled by making such a mistake. Maybe it was a lack of courage, but I just couldn't make the promise. I don't have my own website or any kind of mailing list. I didn't think I could (after letting my contributors down so badly) volunteer to do something that would let them down even further.

So we missed the contest deadline.

I am going to try to find more contributors and figure out a way to publish it. And hope that we can enter it in the contest next year.

I feel so very mortified and foolish. At least two of the contributors wrote new material for this project, and I feel keenly that I let them down. Professional embarrassment is the WORST.

But! This is the year of adventure, and that means trying new things. And sometimes, when you try new things, you fail. And that (I am telling myself firmly) is okay.

Here is the beautiful cover that Bruce Bethke designed for the book we had planned, and I hope eventually it will come to fruition.

Shelves of Wonder cover

Current Mood: embarrassed

conuly

This is the same little squirrel that's been trying to break into my bedroom for the better part of the past ten days. Once it actually got into the house it was immediately chased by a cat and had cause to regret all its life choices.

We removed the cat and opened the front door very wide and absented ourselves from the area, so we think it's gone now.

( Image of the squirrel at my window )

I think it's a baby. Not just because it's so small, but because the other window squirrels will shamelessly stand up or bang on the glass if they think they can catch my eye, but when this one realized I was there it hunkered down very small and actually turned its face away a little.

I hope it's all right now that it's outside where it belongs.

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( Links )

sovay

City of Fear (1959) has no frills and no funds and it doesn't need either when it has the cold sweat of its premise whose science fiction had not yet become lead-lined science fact. It's late noir of an orphan source incident. Its ending is not a place of honor.

Unique among atomic noirs of my experience, City of Fear couldn't care less about the international anxieties of nuclear espionage or even apocalypse, at least not in the conventionally pictured sense of flash-boiling annihilation. More akin to a plague noir, it concerns itself with the intimately transmissible deteriorations of acute radiation syndrome as it tracks its inadvertent vector through the bus stops and back alleys and motor courts of the city he can irradiate with nothing more than a nauseated cough, the drag of a dizzied foot, the clutch of a sweat-soaked palm. As Vince Ryker lately of San Quentin, Vince Edwards has all the hardbodied machismo of a muscle magazine and the cocky calculation of an ambitious hood, but he's a dead man since he shoved that stainless steel canister inside his shirt, mistaking its contents for a cool million's worth of uncut heroin. It's a hot sixteen ounces of granulated cobalt-60 and it has considerably more of a half-life than he does. Well ahead of the real-life incidents of Mexico City, Goiânia, Samut Prakan, Lia, this 75-minute B-picture knows the real scare of our fallout age is not the misuse of nuclear capabilities by bad actors, but simply whether our species which had the intelligence to split the atom has the sense to survive the consequences. "I doubt if anyone can explain that calmly to three million people without touching off the worst panic in history."

The plot in this sense is mostly a skin for the philosophy, a procedural on the eighty-four-hour clock of its antihero's endurance as the authorities scramble to trace their rogue source before it can ionize too much of an unprepared Los Angeles. In slat-blinded boxes of offices as blank as concrete coffers, Lyle Talbot and John Archer's Chief Jensen and Lieutenant Richards of the LAPD gravely absorb the crash course in containment delivered by co-writer Steven Ritch as Dr. Wallace, the radiological coordinator of the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District who bears the stamp of nuclear authority in his thin intense face and his wire-brush hair, a lecturer's gestures in his black-framed glasses and his quick-tilt brows. Pressed by the cops for a surefire safeguard against loose ⁶⁰Co, he responds with dry truthfulness, "Line up every man, woman and child and issue them a lead suit and a Geiger counter." The stark-bulbed shelves of a shoe store's stockroom provide a parallel shadow site for the convergence of local connections such as Joseph Mell's Eddie Crown and Sherwood Price's Pete Hallon, whose double act of disingenuous propriety and insinuating jitters finds a rather less receptive audience in an aching-boned, irritable Vince, groaning over his mysterious cold even as he clings territorially to the unjimmied, unshielded canister: "Look, this stays, I stay, and you get rid of it when I say so." Already a telltale crackle has started to build on the film's soundtrack as a fleet of Geiger-equipped prowl cars laces the boulevards of West Hollywood and the drives of Laurel Canyon, snagging their staticky snarl on the hot tip of a stiff just as the jingle of an ice cream truck and the clamor of eager kids double-underline the stakes of endangered innocence. While Washington has been notified, the public is still out of the loop for fear of mass unrest, the possibility of evacuating the children at least. A night panorama of the dot-to-dot canyon of lights that comprises downtown L.A. recurs like a reminder of the density of individuals to be snuffed and blighted if Vince should successfully crack the canister into an accidental dispersal of domestic terrorism: "He's one man, holding the lives of three million people in his hands." At the same time, he skulks through a world that for all its docu-vérité starkness of Texaco stations and all-night Thrifty Drug Stores seems eerily depopulated, a function perhaps of the starvation-rations production, but it suggests nonetheless the post-apocalyptic ghost this neon concentrate of a metropolis could turn into. It might be worse than a bomb, this carcinogenic, hemorrhagic film that Dr. Wallace forecasts settling over the city if the high gamma emitter of the cobalt gets into the smog, the food chain, the wildlife, the populace, Chornobyl on the San Andreas Fault. "Hoarse coughing, heavy sweat, horrible retching. Then the blood begins to break down. Then the cells." With half a dozen deaths on his conscience as the picture crunches remorselessly toward the bottom line of its hot equations, we can't be expected to root for Vince per se, but he isn't so sadistic or so stupid that he deserves this sick and disoriented, agonized unraveling. His relations with Patricia Blair's June Marlowe are believably tender as well as studly, sympathetically admitting in her arms that he just wanted something better for the two of them than an ex-con's "dead meat dishwashing for the rest of your life." A cool redhead, she's a worthy moll, unintimidated by police interrogation or the onset of hacking fever. A sly, dark anti-carceral intimation gets under the atomic cocktail of tech almost in passing—the fatal canister came originally from the infirmary at San Quentin, where it was used in what Lieutenant Richards describes as "controlled volunteer experiments" and Vince more colloquially identifies as "secret junkie tests." Perhaps we are meant to presume that the prison grapevine jumbled the science, allowing him to confuse the expanding field of cobalt therapy for drug trials and thus a lethal radionuclide for a lucrative opioid. The fact of human experimentation regarded fearfully by maximum-security inmates remains. Their radiation safety was evidently nothing to write home about either way.

( It's worth a million. )

Co-written by Ritch and Robert Dillon, this terse little one-way ticket was directed for Columbia by Irving Lerner, a past master of documentaries and microbudgets and an alleged Soviet asset while employed by the Bureau of Motion Pictures, or at least he was accused of unauthorized photography of the cyclotron at UC Berkeley in 1944. Wherever he got his feel for nuclear paranoia, it is intensely on display in City of Fear, its montages a push-pinned, slate-chalked, civil-defense-survey-metered feast of retro-future shock. Lucien Ballard once again shoots a grippingly unglamorous noir of anonymously sun-washed sidewalks and night-fogged intersections. The low-strings score by Jerry Goldsmith pulses and rattles with jazz combo edginess, all off-beat percussion and unease in the woodwinds and jabbing brass, closing out the film on a bleak sting of the uncertainly protected city. I discovered it on Tubi, but it can be watched just as chillingly on YouTube where its existentialism, like a committed dose, spreads from the individual to the national to the planetary. No one in it wears proper PPE, but it names its deadly element outright. For a study in whiplash, double-feature it with A Bomb Was Stolen (S-a furat o bombă, 1962). This contamination brought to you by my controlled backers at Patreon.

Current Music: Oppenheimer Analysis, "Security Risk"

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A nice thing to link to: Jeannelle M. Ferreira's "The House of Women" (2025), named after the site on Akrotiri because it is a story from when the mountain was Minoan and the walls of the city where libations were offered 𐀤𐀨𐀯𐀊 𐂕𐄽𐄇 were painted with dolphins and saffron gatherers. I have a great affection for this story with its ground pigments and grilled eel and lovers describable as sapphic a thousand years before the tenth Muse. Even in cataclysms, it is worth holding on.