My websites hosted at 1and1.com went down around noon today. I called and was told that there was a hardware error and that the hardware was being swapped out. The sites just came up so I am trying a post to the blog to see what happens.

Squirrel commented on my blog about how crime hasn’t changed much in Nyack.

Here are a few brief Nyack murder stories where family and friends were involved.

1) My friend Jim’s Uncle killed Jim’s other Uncle (mid 1930s). The younger brother shot his older brother who was physically and emotionally abusive. Jim’s mother hid the gun in the woods on the west side of Highland Avenue just north of Oak Hill. The police eventually broke down Jim’s mother and she took them to where the gun was hidden. Jim’s Uncle confessed. Because he was a minor and everyone in town knew how bad the brother was, he spent a short time in a youth facility (called a reform school, then). He moved away from Nyack and has not been heard from since. Jim still lives in the same house where the murder occurred.

2) My great Uncle killed a man around 1900 (The circumstances no longer known). My Great Grandfather had to pay the judge $500 (a huge amount then) to keep his son out of prison. He complained about it until the day he died claiming that his son was not worth it, and he should have let him go to jail.

3) One of my friends in Jr. High School (around 1964) was a foster child. His foster father was the pastor at a local church. The man had a fight with his wife and she locked herself in the bedroom. The pastor took a shotgun and tried to shoot out the lock to the door, accidentally killing his wife. He then took the shotgun, put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. My friend, a track star, ran all the way in the winter in his bare feet to Nyack Hospital to get an ambulance.

4) My second cousin is a notorious murderer and is in jail now.

5) My mother’s best friend and roommate at nursing school injected her husband and his mistress with an overdose of insulin while they slept. The mistress deserved it as she killed Mom’s friend’s cat. They caught her and she did 20 years in prison and my Mom went to see here twice a month. She now lives in Nyack.

6) A woman’s body was found in the woods near where I grew up in Central Nyack when I was about 10. She was killed by a shotgun blast. A little while later my brother found a shotgun in the trunk of an abandoned car in the same area. He kept the shotgun and never told anyone until years later.

I have hazy recollections of other similar stories. My Grandfather was Chief of Police in Nyack for a while in the nineteen-teens. He was given the position of chief because he was the only one on the police force who owned a car (an old ,even then, used Model A Ford). He used to tell great stories. I have some of his stories on tape and will put them on the blog as audio files if I ever find them again.

This is an interesting idea. It is designed to heat up water going to the hot water heater by extracting heat from waste water. Basically, when your dishwasher is flushing hot water down the drain, the heat exchanger is grabbing the heat and pre-heating the water going to your hot water heater. It is a simple and easy to recreate design. Ward is putting these together and selling them on the internet.

He says that he’s selling a version that he has modified to fit most waste pipes for $275 plus shipping. They go for around $500 on eBay. He says there is an amazingly good ROI. He’ll have a web page up soon.

You can contact Ward about it at

Oh boy, I think I might get plumbing stuff for Christmas.

Today marks 180 days that I have been waiting to hear from the Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Story Contest. Six months is a long time to wait on a story. Their website is never updated and there is no discussion board to check to find out what progress is being made. I think this is one of those where they don’t contact you if you lose. If you are not on the winner list, then too bad. My feeling is that they’ll announce the winners of the 2008 contest well into 2009.

I spent about 45 minutes on Thursday and and again on Friday writing a 3200 word cyberpunk story. I proofed it one more time today. I sent it to the first of two venues in DuoTrope that had the keyword cyberpunk. I expect to hear by Christmas, but my experience is that as soon as I send something out, the editors get behind in the slush.

The story is based an idea I got from reading that awful book, The King in Yellow by Chambers. The first story in the book, Repairer of Reputations, gave me the idea to write about a modern person who can erase bad reputations from the internet. My story is not as unpleasant as the Chambers story but I had to make the main character very nasty to make the story work, in other words a person who has a reputation he deserves, yet has the money to make it go away. I am afraid that I made the whole story a little too dark. It also uses some pejorative slang, which I normally avoid.

We’ll see.

My web host company offers this as a free option. It is supposed to allow a pop-up on the site so that users can chat with you while you are online and you can see what they see and help them through the site. It seemed like a good way to make a few more sales on FreeNameAStar.com so I installed it.

First, it never worked. Most browsers block the popup. Even with popup blocker turned off it I couldn’t get to work.

Second, it works by hijacking your site and wrapping a frame around it. This, it turns out, prevents paypal from working and I lost two days of sales before a frustrated customer emailed me.

The In2Site software was not well thought out. It is buggy and generally a really bad implementation. I would think that a nice ajax based javascript widget doing the same thing only better. I could write one in a few hours.

So, if you are considering In2Site, I’d say that you better avoid it.

Lately I’ve notice a gentle rise in traffic here. The traffic has doubled over the last four months. I figured it was due to the book reviews that I was doing, although I doubt that they really appeal to many people. A very recent increase in hits is because my cliche page has been getting pounded thanks to StumbleUpon.com. Some of these viewers are trickling up to my other pages. So maybe 20,000 people visit my site each month. Not many of them actually read the blog. The blog has a limited audience and appeal. It has a few dozen hardcore readers and a few hundred who wander in every day from google searches and never come back.

One interesting thing is that I get twenty or so hits every day through google image searches. People are dropping in to view pictures of my cats and yard. They especially like my fall and winter scenes. I can only assume the pictures are appearing in magazines or calendars somewhere.

Go to MyBlogLog.com and sign up for a free account and you also can get some nice stats. MyBlogLog is good at telling you where surfers go when they leave you page, as well as where they come from.

I’ve shipped out four boxes of books. I am making about 25¢ per book. The large boxes do worse than the small boxes for some reason. It seems that 7 might be the best amount to sell in a lot. I will try a couple of lots of 5 books to see how they do.

Paperback books average about 6 ounces each, including packing material. The exception was the Stephen Donaldson books, which came in around 10 ounces each. The formula width times height times depth divided by 39 to get pounds is not very good due to the amount of space inside a box and the density of the paper. Some books are denser than other books. The thieves world books came in the least dense and the Donaldson the most dense. It is coincidence that this also describes the narrative.

I was hoping to be able to list the books without weighing them. The bathroom scale seems to give me very inconsistent results. I need a postal scale, but I have no place to put one. As it is, I can say that thin, older books are about 5 oz, while fat new books are 10 oz and make a judgment. If I am wrong, media mail only costs 5¢ per ounce so if I am off a few ounces it doesn’t hurt much.

So far my garage sale books has profited almost $9. Another week and I’ll have the 300+ books paid for with about 200 left over. I have 3 auctions totaling 38 books in auctions now. At the current rate that should be $9 more. This weekend I will pick out another 40 books to sell and that will put me in the black.

My friend just told me this story.

I just had this borderline argument on the phone with someone I recently befriended — who is an older lady — who is a kind of New Agey therapist with numerous clients and who insists, among other things, that she cured herself of cancer without any of the traditional treatments (surgery, radiation, chemo), but simply by mind control.

I told her that I knew a friend of a friend who got breast cancer, tried to cure herself with alternative treatments but, when that didn’t work, decided to try traditional ones, by which time it was too late. I also told her that, because of her position of trust in relation to other people, that if one of her clients came to her saying he or she was afflicted of cancer, it was grossly irresponsible of her, who has no medical training whatsoever, to suggest that alternative cures were viable, and that if someone opted to forgo traditional treatments and opt for alternative ones based in whole or in part on discussions with her, and that if they died as a result, that she was partly responsible for killing them by virtue of her “authority,” I also told this person that she was either delusional or, worse, exploiting the gullibility of people, though that I was inclined to think the former.

She completely and utterly dismissed everything I said by basically saying, “Well, this reflects your reality, and therefore is perfectly legitimate for you. But my reality is completely different.”

How do you deal with someone like this? She, to my mind is dangerous, but it is difficult and dangerous to confront people’s belief systems.

Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson, stopping at Nyack, in 1609. Next year is the 400th anniversary celebration and one of the events will be the Ice Show at Rockland Lake.

The image at left is from one of last year’s ice sculptures.

Knickerbocker Ice Festival

One bad thing is that Rockland.org is spamming me. They used one of my odd spam emails so I know that it is nothing I voluntarily signed up for. This is too bad, because I am actually thinking about going to this.

Before John Jakes was a best selling author of historical fiction he was a trashy pulp magazine story teller. Jakes was into S&S and to my mind the best fantastic adventure writer – after Howard and Leiber. One of his short stories that I read in the 60s in the pages of Fantastic Magazine impressed me so much that I analyzed it sentence by sentence in order to figure out why it worked. I have tried to write my own version of it several times over the years and a decent unfinished story that uses the Jakes algorithm sits in my WIP pile waiting to be finished.

The Mask of Chaos (1970) is not S&S, but rather a very well done Space Opera. It is so much like a video game that I can’t believe that no one has licensed it. I find it hard to believe that Doom and Quake do not give Jakes credit for many of the elements ripped off from Mask of Chaos.

The story is about a man who has been turned into a cyborg and a woman of dubious virtue who are abandoned on a strange planet. They are forced to participate in a game that is televised to the whole planet and is the planetary national game. Think of a couple forced to work their way through the levels of Quake without the monsters. There are tricks and traps and red herrings. They accumulate money, find food and solve puzzles. They survive through the wits of the woman and the cyborg strengths of the man.

There is a part where a stairway changes to a 45 degree ramp and the woman slides towards a fan that is supposed to chop her into pieces. I swear that this is a trap that also exists in the Quake video game. There is no mention of Jakes in the Quake credits and I doubt that it is a case of parallel development.

I have about 20 pages to go, and I am sorry that I will have finished this by the time I get home. It is a page-turner and I am temped to wander off for a while and hope no one comes looking for me so that I can read some more of it. The story has just taken a very existentialist turn and I want to see how it comes out. The plot is good, the characters are well developed and I am emotionally invested in the outcome. This is what I consider a good book.

The copy I have is a decrepit Ace Double. I finished the other side yesterday. The picture above is much nicer than my copy. Ace books fall apart over the years. The one I have is held together by scotch tape and it sheds paper chips every time I open it. I like the Jack Gaughan cover with the vintage computer boards – no integrated circuits, just a few germanium type transistors!

Each year on the third Thursday of November the Nouveau Beaujolais wine goes on sale. The wine is a "new" wine in that it is not aged. It is the 2008 grapes that have fermented and bottled. The Nouveaus are light, fruity and taste pretty much like grape cool-aid with a touch of alcohol.

I like these wines, even though they don’t have much of the character that we expect of a finished wine. Because they are not aged or blended with with other vintages or wines, they reflect the character of the grapes of the season. Nouveaus vary considerably from year to year depending on the weather. Last year was good, the year before was bad.

I will stop by at the wine store on the way home and buy a few bottles to check out. By the way, Nouveau Beaujolais is the perfect wine to have with a thanksgiving turkey.

Skip sent me this:

Amazon is having a novel writing contest. The first prize is a $25,000 contract with Penguin.

If you want to enter this you have to have a 50k words novel finished by the first week in February. There is a one week window to submit the novel. This is related to Amazon’s CreateSpace.com POD service.

Like chicken soup, it might help and it can’t hurt. It’s free and it seems that most people I know have a 50K novel sitting in a directory deep down on a hard disk. All nanowrimo people have several of these and another coming along. (My longest is about 24K and I have no time to make it longer.)

I expect that the romance genre will dominate this, but maybe there’s a spec-fic novel fresh enough to bubble to the top.

The first prize is a $25,000 contract. I’d have to win 5 of these a year to quit my day job. Writing for a living pays less than a fry cook at Burger King.

Amazon.com: Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

This is one half of an Ace Double #78400.It is a later double from 1970 with a John Jakes story on the other side. First off, there is no Star Virus mentioned in the book, so I am going to assume that someone changed the title to make it more sciffy (perhaps Moorcock). Also this is Bayley’s first novel, and it shows it throughout. I assume that this was written years before 1970 and that Bayley improved after this because he was a regular at New Worlds and one of Michael Moorcock’s chosen ones. He was supposed to be influential in the science fiction New Wave movement of the late 60s, but I had never heard of him before reading this book. New Wave movement novels tend to be very good or very bad. This falls into the later type.

Interestingly enough, William S. Burroughs told Bayley at a party that he admired The Star Virus, but I am convinced that the old pervert was only making a pass at him.

One way to write a novel is to create a chase scenario. Give someone a McGuffin and send the bad guys after him. There is no need for any other conflict. Bayley does this by inventing some kind of space lens that he never explains very well, and he has an evil alien race rush around trying to get it back from the space pirate who stole it. Bayley throws the speculative fiction grand assortment of standard props at the protagonist who never seems to be emotionally involved in the whole plot thingy. The writing is nicely done more often than not, but it suffers from some sophomoric treatments of the action and characters. He seems to kill of the crew of his ship more or less randomly without any remorse. There is some mention of a back story to the protagonist, but just hints here and there that do nothing to round out the cardboard characters.

I sometimes hesitate to read Ace Doubles because one of the sides is always really bad. This means that the John Jakes story that I just started has to be very good indeed.

John Brunner, with his gritty dark worlds, was the precursor to modern Cyberpunk. His 1975 novel, Shockwave Rider, was required reading when I taught Artificial Intelligence and is considered the first Cyberpunk Novel by some. He was extremely prolific often writing three of four novels a year.

The Whole Man is the story of a severely handicapped man in a Dystopic world. Terrorist violence has nearly destroyed civilization. The hero is born with a twisted body and hemophilia and is the offspring of a mother who doesn’t love him and a terrorist who dies before he is born. Brunner goes over the top in giving the young protagonist a hard time. He is both physically and mentally crippled.

The story proceeds by making the crippled boy discover amazing ESP ability as he grows up and eventually being rescued from his homeless life in a ruined slum. He becomes an ESP doctor, using his telepathic abilities to treat mentally ill telepaths.

Although there are some Science Fiction plot lines involving the ability of a telepath to project a fantasy world and cause normal people to enter it while their bodies starve and eventually die, the story is mainly the life experiences of the hero as he arcs from a street urchin to a healer to an artist. It is the story of a soul that releases itself from the chains of a broken body and psyche, in spite of the grimy world and the inability of anyone to connect emotionally with him.

The story progressed from escapist Science Fiction to the transfiguration of the protagonist as an artist who has learned to express his inner art as thoughts that others can experience.

Brunner’s style is dark, full of information, and short on description. It is a difficult style and very much reminds you of the Cyberpunk novels that would appear 20 years later.

Published in 1964, The Whole Man marks a change in Brunner’s novels. Previously he wrote throw-away space operas largely for Ace Doubles. Ace paid writers a few hundred dollars for a novel that would appear in an Ace Double and maybe the author got half the royalties, but probably not. After The Whole Man, which was nominated for a Hugo, Brunner wrote many more important novels. He died of a stroke at a Worldcon convention in Glasgow – appropriate for a Science Fiction writer.

I’ve bought lots of stuff on eBay, but this is the first time that I’ve sold something.

I did everything wrong.

I did not describe the item very well. I figured that "4 Fantasy PB Books by Christopher Stasheff" would be sufficient. Erica told me to jazz up the title and description, but did I listen? No.

I charged for the exact shipping costs with no handling fee. Erica told me to over estimate and add a little extra to cover fees, but did I listen? No.

I started with a very low bid, 79�. Erica told me that I might not get more than one bid so start a little higher.

Erica told me that I should schedule the auctions to go off on Sunday evening, but I thought that it wouldn’t matter

I forgot to put in some extra for Delivery Confirmation.

I found three more books and threw them in the box, because there was room.

The only good thing was that I used the bathroom scale to estimate the weight and it came out more than a pound high so I accidentally had some extra room to cover the fees and extra weight.

I wound up losing just 10� on my first eBay sale. My goal was to get rid of books that I will never read, and in that sense the auction was a success. I have several watchers on the rest of my auctions, so I am not disheartened. I have about 50 more books lined up to go on auction, but I was too tired and lazy to put them out last night.

Another good thing is that the buyer is an avid reader, who like me, has to resort to eBay to feed his addiction. The books went to a good home.

Here are some more of my auctions:

7 Thieves World Books � Robert Lynn Asprin $1.49 (one bid, 2 watchers)

18 Marion Zimmer Bradley Books $1.99 (3 watchers, but no bids)

7 Books by Stephen R. Donaldson $1.99 (two bids so it is up to $2.24 with 2 watchers)

3 Stock Photo Books with CDs Comstock PhotoDisc Age $4.99 (2 watchers)

Coming up are a dozen books by Larry Niven. I have enjoyed some Niven stories, but I recently listened to the audio version of Disk World and I thought that it was an interesting idea, but told in such a flat stretched out narrative that I didn’t enjoy it. I prefer the Niven/Pournelle collaborations. I really enjoyed A Mote in God’s Eye and may read the sequel (which I now have). I will sell a Dozen Asimov books, but I want to go through and make sure that I’ve read them all. I may reread some of the better ones before I put them out. I also have a ton of Heinlein, Dick and Bradbury duplicates that I might put out.

I am currently reading a Brunner book. It is very dense, very dark and very good. More on that when I finish it.

This article explains why movies are so bad. There have been a dozen or so money making movies based on comic books. It is obvious, however, how much of a lemming mentality exists in the film industry. Not all of these comics will make good movies. Not all of these movies can be successful if they are made. By the time most of these movies are made the public taste will have moved on to something else.

At least Neal Gaimon and John Shirley will be making money from their graphic novels.

I’ve tried to convince some of my art students at RCC that it would be a cool thing to make one of my stories into a graphic novel.

So far they have not even considered it. They smile as though I am telling a joke. I guess they figure the old computer geek guy could never be cool enough to write a good story.

I think that when I get a chance I will try to storyboard a story and see if someone gets inspire.

75 comics being made into films – Den of Geek

My old buddy Zack passed away today. I went over to Mom’s house and helped Larry dig the hole and we said goodbye to him. Zack had cancer, responded well to chemo for a few years and then had a bad relapse in the last few weeks.

Larry found Zack when he was a stray. He came to the my parent’s house house begging for food and never left. Zack was the smartest and most affectionate cat that I’ve ever met. I will always remember him because he was the only cat that ever made friends with my father. My Dad did not want to make friends with cats because he did not want to outlive any more pets. Zack took every opportunity to sit on my Dad’s lap, something no one could understand. When my Dad was dying of cancer and in pain all the time, Zack never left him and was a great comfort to him. Zack was the only cat that my Dad ever liked. Zack wound up outliving Dad and missed him for a long time.

There is a race of great cats in my old neighborhood of Central Nyack. The females are all Calico cats and the males are usually red orange like Zack. If you ever need a great pet, come to 19 Vine street in Central Nyack and see if you can find a stray – everyone in the neighborhood feeds them, so just ask Larry and he’ll tell you who is homeless and who belongs.

The Martingale strategy was a method of placing bets that was popular in 18th century France. The principle is simple. In a game of flipping coins, the odds are 50-50 of wining. If you win, you take your money and bet again. If you lose, you double your bet so that on the next flip you will get all your money back, plus a profit. The odds are 100% that you will never lose and you might win, but only if you have enough money to weather a very long streak of bad luck. If you bet a dollar and lose you have to bet $2. If you lose that you have to bet $4, then $8, and you can see that if you hit a bad streak, you will have to cash out before the Martingale can work for you.

There is also something called an ant-martingale that suggest that luck comes in streaks, so when you win, you double your bet because you may be in a lucky streak. This, of course, is dependant on the game.

Hedge funds use Martingale and ant-martingale strategies to make bets on the movement of stocks and commodities and they hedge their bets with different bets in other sectors make limiting bets on the same object. These strategies work for the simple reason that in the long run the probabilities will usually pay off. By making martingale bets to cover failed bets, the hedge funds were certain to survive temporary dips or movements of stock outside of their predicted probable ranges.

Then there comes a time when the limiting factors of the Martingale take over. All it takes is a prolonged run of bad luck or the value of stocks fluctuate outside of their predicted model for a long period. The bet maker, in this case the hedge fund manager, reaches a position where he cannot make a big enough bet to cover all of his losses so he has to make the best bet he can and liquidates some of his assets to do it. The liquidation of assets to cover large bets drives the market down further and other hedge funds must liquidate to cover their bad bets. All the Martingale strategists fail together, because they were all betting the same game.

Crash-Boom.

I remember when my Math professor showed me the very simple solution to the Martingale strategy and why it will always fail. The math was easy and obvious. I enjoy a game of chance, but I won’t bet more than 25¢ on anything and I don’t ever expect to make money gambling. The proof my professor showed me makes it obvious that any repeated bet will eventually crap out. There is no such thing as a sure thing. All bets, no matter if they are a sure thing are not, eventually fail. This includes life bets, like love, and career bets. As John Maynard Keynes said, “In the long run, we are all dead”.

Another Side of the Galaxy (1966), edited by Groff Conklin is the second Conklin anthology that I’ve read in this series. The previous Conklin Anthology dealt primarily with golden age writers. I need to refine that a little in that following the incredible decade of the 1940s where John W. Campbell, Jr.’ s Astounding Science Fiction magazine created modern SF (the golden age), there followed the 1950s where Campbell, although still a powerful force, slowly lost his leading position. Readers began to tire of Campbell’s gadget based technology stories and new pulps like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy and Worlds of If sprang up and presented alternative forms of SF. Campbell’s abrasive style and absolute certainty of his opinions  caused him to lose, one by one, most of his stable of writers. These were the same writers that he had discovered and guided into modern Science Fiction. By 1960, Astounding was still telling technological engineering based gadget stories while the other magazines were exploring characters, social issues and literary forms.

Groff Conklin’s Possible Worlds of Science Fiction presented stories from the 1940s and were mostly Campbell type stories. Another Side of the Galaxy contrasts these with the new writers of the 1950s who wrote about non-technical people with deep emotions, living in interesting societies and coping with problems that could not be solved with a slide rule.

Another Side of the Galaxy starts with a The Red Hills of Summer by one of my favorite writers, Edgar Pangborn. Pangborn produced two of my top 10 SF books, The Judgment of Eve and Davy, but was not as prolific as other writers. It is interesting that the protagonist in The Red Hills of Summer is named Davy. The story, set in a post apocalyptic future, involves humans fleeing a dying Earth, searching for planet where humanity can settle and grow and perhaps, correct the mistakes made on Earth. Four explorers are chosen to land on the planet to see if they can survive with the knowledge that they will never be allowed to return to space. The settlers cannot risk the future of the human race on a hidden disease that might enter the main ship and destroy them all.

The Red Hills of Summer is a love story between a couple who must face the unknown together, but are not quite committed to their love. Although there is little else to the plot other than coping with each of the problems as they arise, we become involved with the lives of the lovers and the story is how they finally come to grips with their own relationship. It is well done and first appeared in F&SF magazine, being the kind of transcendent writing and concepts that they looked for in a story. It was wonderful to find a new (to me at least) Pangborn story.

Paul Ash is in reality Pauline Ashwell, a Hugo nominated Science Fiction writer. Her story Big Sword was published in Astounding. I would guess that Campbell talked her into changing the gender of her pen name to appeal to his overwhelmingly male readership. The story is an odd choice for Campbell because it involves a child with emotional problems and the science is an ecological puzzle on a distant planet. Campbell was nuts about ESP, which figures in this story, and this might explain why he bought it. The conflict involves a child with ESP whose parents are divorced. He is taken by his unemotional and distant father, a spaceship captain, to a strange planet. In an alternate story line, the protagonist is an alien named Big Sword, who needs to communicate with the humans to solve his own serious ecological problem. The resolution is ingenious and satisfying.

The First Lady by J.T. McIntosh was published in Galaxy. It would not have fit in Astounding because the central conflict involves sociology rather than technology. The premise is that a pair of special government agents has to escort a young woman to a planet where she would be the first female on the planet. This would have been a reasonable plot line 1953, although ludicrous by today’s standards. McIntosh envisions a system where planets are settled by men only and then later a woman shows up to be the "First lady". She carries the first child and if it is healthy, the colony is allowed to continue. What makes this a good story, in spite of the silly premise, is the relationships between the male and female agent and the future first lady as they travel in the cramped rooms of the spaceship on the way to the new colony. It becomes a love triangle, which is intensified by the fact that it cannot continue once the planet is reached. The tension involves whether or not the future child will live and the colony survive, as well as the fact that one of the agents knows what the outcome will probably be.

J.F. Bone, Insidekick, is the story of a man who suddenly finds that he can do almost anything because a strange creature has entered his mind in a symbiotic relationship. The title is a pun on sidekick (in-sidekick, get it?). Jesse F. Bone was a prominent veterinarian and was nominated for a Hugo award. He must have been a friend of Robert A. Heinlein because he is mentioned in the Cat Who Walks Through Walls as the veterinarian fetched from another universe to help save the cat Pixel’s life after the raid to save Mike. He is known for his book of sexual mores and animal rights, The Lani People (Available at Project Gutenberg).

The Live Coward  by Poul Anderson is a Planetary League Story, one of a series involving diplomacy in a universe where there are literally millions of worlds settle by Humanity and their alien allies. It is an interesting story where Anderson get’s his character Wing Alak, into difficult situation and then bails him out with ingenuity. I first read this in the pages of a an old Astounding from my uncle’s collection that he kept in his attic. I was convinced that these old magazines were a thing of the distant past and did not exist any more, until I found Analog Magazine at a small soda shop down in the village of Nyack.

Eric Frank Russell’s Still Life is the weakest story in the bunch. It deals with the red tape of a huge and top heavy galactic empire and how a junior clerk goes about finding alternate paths through the miles of regulations in order to get a life saving piece of equipment to a distant colony. I work for the County Government and I am not interested in red tape, regulations or bureaucratic nonsense – I see enough at work.

These stories average around 13,000 words each and are Novelettes rather than short stories. The Edgar Pangborn story would be classified strictly as a Novella. I like these longer form short stories. Magazine editors seem to have liked them in the past, but modern editors, especially in the on-line magazines prefer shorter stories less than 5,000 words. The main pro magazines still regularly publish longer stories in the 7,000 to 15,000 word range. It is a conundrum that modern readers seem to prefer short-short stories over the longer ones, yet most modern novels are padded out from 120,000 to as high as 200,000 words. I have read that some romance publishers have gone back to the shorter snack-size 40k book. I wonder if anyone has test marketed shorter SF novels lately. 40k to 60K is a good length for a novel.

I thoroughly enjoyed All the Colors of Darkness. It was published in 1963 and is the second in Biggle’s series of books featuring a detective named Jan Darzek. Biggle was probably more famous for writing detective fiction than he was SF, so this novel is a good blend of Science Fiction themes with detective fiction characters. The emphasis is on characterizations and Biggle even does a good job creating believable alien characters with alien personalities.

The science fiction is limited to one SF element. The story starts out with the creation of a Teleportation Portal. This is stock SF and many stories have used it. It is the primary SF element in the book. The aliens, it turns out, are trying to prevent us from developing the portal. The rest of the world is just early 1960s America with women in cocktail dresses and men in ties all smoking cigarettes.

This limited SF-ness makes the story very enjoyable because the book concentrates on character and plot much more than in the average SF novel of the time. Because of the nerdy engineering tech slant to all the golden age stories, there was never much emphasis on character. Most stories spent all their time on describing technology. Being able to introduce SF elements without being bogged down in long explanations is called Heinleining, because Heinlein was so good at it. The prime example being Heinlein’s phrase: “The door dilated.” This expresses the science fictional element, a very high tech door, without wasting time describing the technology.

Because Biggle wastes no time describing the science behind his portals, his character can use them as a Hitchcockian McGuffin to create exciting and interesting plot points.

The writing is crisp and concise, without a wasted word and pulls you along through the plot to the point where I felt compelled to read it last night while Erica watched TV – something I hardly ever do.

I am going to keep my eye out for more Biggle books. (Notice that I am on the top shelves of my new collection. I will be reading A’s, B’s and C’s. There are a dozen Asimov’s, but I have read them all – so off to eBay with Isaac.)

This novel comes from a time when books were about 60,000 words long. Longer books were edited down and shorter books were padded up or had font adjustment so that they were 160 to 200 pages. I much prefer this short format. It is a good quick read. I am selecting the books that I read by number of pages. I have decided not to read books longer than 200 pages.

Yesterday I created 3 more auctions for books on eBay. I am selling off the High Fantasy, which I don’t have much taste for anymore, and I am selling off the fat books. All the Niven & Pournelle books are going into the sell pile. All the David Gerrold books are going on eBay. Stephen Donaldson books are on their way out. I like these authors, but I have read enough of their works that I don’t want to read more. For each one of their books that I sell, I get to keep two or three thin books, which I like much better.

Larry tells me that the police are looking for one of the kids that hangs around his house in Central Nyack. Larry fixes junk bikes up for neighborhood kids and one of the kids is one of the robbers. I know him. He is there a lot. Larry gives him jobs to do, like mow the lawn. He’s really really dumb, and would have guessed that he might wind up in a life of crime.

According to Larry the video at the store clearly shows him, in spite of the mask. Larry talked to the convenience store owner and he knows the kid, although he didn’t know his name. The kid would buy stuff there with the other robber – an older kid. His mother has some relationship with the police force, so they didn’t release the name on the web site.

CENTRAL NYACK – Clarkstown police today were looking for two men who robbed a Waldron Avenue convenience store at gunpoint last night.
The men entered Nyack Food Mart at 11 p.m. and demanded money from the clerk, police said.
One of the men held a handgun, police said.
The clerk gave the men money from the cash register. The men left the store.
One man wore a red and black ski mask, while the other wore a white Halloween-type mask, police said.

I bought Larry a Halloween mask last month. He likes to wear them and scare the local kids. I wonder what happened to it?

Police seek robbers of Central Nyack convenience store | lohud.com | The Journal News

I was reviewing my “Idea List”. I have too many ideas to actually write them. It is more fun to think about them than to do the hard work of writing down the words.

Here are some interesting entries on my list. If you feel the need to “borrow” any of these, let me know first. I may get around to writing these some day and you don’t want work on a story when I have already sold it (very unlikely).

The Drought – A lake begins to recede revealing skeletons of people who have disappeared years ago. The further the waters recede, the weirder the skeletons. The last of the water in the lake disappears revealing the skeletons of monsters. It ends in a torrential rain.

“It’s a slide rule.” he explained, “An ancient calculating device, like an abacus only capable of much more.” He showed it to the ship’s engineer and explained how it worked. The engineer used it to compute the natural log of the arc-cosine of the product of three numbers and was duly impressed. This was the last anyone thought of it until the computer melted down about half way between Jupiter and Neptune (Uranus was on the other side of the solar system at that time).

The Ruby of Death – steampunk – Victorian inventor explores a Brazilian cave left by an ancient civilization. He makes a laser out of shaving mirrors, a large ruby, and the flash powder from his photography equipment and fights off the angry inhabitants.

GPS story. A couple on vacation plug in “somewhere different” into the GPS and have a weird adventure. Obvious ending is to press in “Go Home” and get a gun (book, large battery, long rope, change of underwear?) before returning.

Time travel story where a scientist couple are abandoned in time far in the past, only to be rescued years later. They are brought back, and are greeted on return by their children, grandchildren and their descendants, who have been working for a 100 years to rescue them, although in their time sense it has only been a few days.

From Louis L’Amour. Ghost Rocker, (Louis did Ghost Boxer) like a ghost writer, but someone who replaces a sick rock and roll star. (think RAH Double Star). Get’s good at it and plays as good or better than the original star. There is conflict and resentment within the band’s other musicians. Finally real rocker is dying, but shows up at a concert, but is actually a ghost, and has one last jam. I think Farewell Tour is a good title or Cover Star, but perhaps Ghost Rocker is better, even though it gives away too much.

From JWC, Jr. Letter: Cosmic rays are evidence of spacecraft engines

From JWC, Jr.. Letter: A World where only women duel.

From JWC, Jr. Letter: A soldier behind enemy lines like the Japanese soldier on the island. He must survive aliens until men come back, but it is 20 years and men have changed.

From JWC, Jr. Letter: Think of a quantum computer that can answer ANY question. What do you do when the device cannot lie and tells the absolute truth, without being asked?

Story of a man who is doing mysterious things – starts out “I’m sorry, but I don’t know why I did that.” He takes wrong turns and winds up in the wrong place. Buys newspapers and scans them quickly and throws them out. Stops mesmerized like a tourist by commonplace things. It turns out that he is being “run” by a time traveler/alien/computer/spirit tourist who views things through his eyes without him knowing it.

Story line about kids who go to the edge of their wireless interconnects to get high on the lack of signal from the central networks. (I wrote a version of this, but there are many other possible variations.)

Weird tale base on the song by Hal Ketchum:
Bobby told Lucy the world ain’t round
Drops off sharp at the edge of town
Lucy you know the world must be flat
Cause when people leave town they never come back

Eating your own babies: It’s a marketing concept. When you release a new product that is better or cheaper than your existing one, you basically destroy the market for the older product. You are hurting any future sales of it. Announcing a new product will freeze sales of the current product. What happens to Artificial Intelligence when the new version of AI is about to appear? What happens to obsolete robots when the next level robot is released?

In the 11th century, it was common for some disputes to be adjudicated by physical trials. Two conflicting Liturgies were decided by jousting knights. Two bishops had a dispute and they were ordered to use judicium crucis, which is when two men spread their arms out in the position of a cross and the first to drop his hands loses. There might be a good S&S story here. How could you modernize it?

“Christ is realized in evolution.” – Teilhard de Chardin

First line: “Eat your supper. There are children in space going hungry.” or “There are children on Earth going hungry.”

“Medium of Exchange” or “Unit of Work” Consider a planet where the unit of currency is not an arbitrary symbolic unit like the dollar, but a small elf like creature capable of doing work. Rich people expend these like burning money. Poor people try to breed them. What does an Earth man do when he buys something and his change is nine small green gremlins?

The Nigerian scam, only this time it’s an Alien or Demon or Time Traveler. Flash?

I think Artie went too far when he hooked the Voder up to Big Jim’s brain. Big Jim is the ugliest and meanest old bull west of the Pacos, and I do not care to hear his opinions about anything.

There are two August Derleth anthologies with the name Beyond Space and Time. The one that I read is the later and much shorter one published in 1958. There was a longer one, full of poems and excepts and even some Jules Vern and Wells that was published in 1950.

August Derleth is a good writer and is known as the publisher of H.P. Lovecraft. His milieu was the world of 1930s Weird Tales and he published many of the Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction writers from this era. This anthology largely reflects the 1930s, but has a few later stories thrown in, possibly to attract more readers.

The first two stories are from the late 1940s and do not much fit with the rest of the book. Heinlein’s The Long Watch and Theodore Sturgeon’s Minority Report (no relation to the Philip K. Dick story) start the collection. We all should have memorized the Heinlein story – I practically have, but the Sturgeon story might be new to you. It is the most interesting story in the anthology, and might be a considered a bridge between the formal style of the other stories and more immediate style of later SF. Sturgeon presents a fascinating story, partly told by a historical narrator, and partly through the newly discovered words of a mute servant named “Grudge”. An obsessed inventor builds a space ship only to discover a terrible secret that will isolate Earth from the rest of the galaxy forever. This information is filtered through the disturbing mind of the deformed servant that he wrote and hid so well that it was not discovered for centuries. It is an interesting approach with surprising characters and plot.

The rest of the stories are mostly from the 1930s and all are Derleth’s cronies. They are told either in a high fantasy style similar to Lord Dunsany or in a mythic narrative as though it were a retelling of an ancient tale. These formal styles were all the rage in the pages of Weird Tales, but to the modern reader are terribly dated.

Stories:

Colossus [Doane Sharon] – Donald Wandrei – Astounding Jan ‘34
Very early SF which describes the incredible shrinking man, only in reverse. It is interesting in that it describes an earth just as it destroys itself in a war. The story wanders off describing wonders of a huge universe where our universe is just an atom. It meanders, and nothing much else really happens.

A Voyage to Sfanomoë – Clark Ashton Smith – Weird Tales Aug ‘31
An allegorical trip to Venus without much characterization or plot. Its style is a mythical narrative.

Seesaw [Isher] – A. E. van Vogt -Astounding Jul ‘41
The short story which later became The Weapon Shops of Isher. Not as interesting as the novel.

The Flying Men [from Last and First Men] – Olaf Stapledon – London: Methuen, 1930
No story at all, just a description of a race of Flying men told in a mythical narrative.

Fessenden’s Worlds – Edmond Hamilton – Weird Tales Apr ‘37
A man creates a universe and then plays god with it. One of the better stories, although in a dated style.

Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall – Frank Belknap Long – Startling Stories Nov ‘48
Not good SF, but more like a good horror tale told with SF elements.

I chose this anthology because I had it in my head to read lots of short stories and learn from them. This collection was interesting and fun, but it was no help in writing. The best story, Minority Report is so unique that it would be very hard to imitate. Sturgeon is known for looking at a story from an odd angle and approaching ideas from left field. That is not something that I set out to do as a plan of action. The Heinlein story is so imbued with his personality that it would impossible to use as a guide without sounding like bad Heinlein. The other stories are an interesting read, but are obviously from another context.

We went garage sailing today. One of the sales was up on Tweed Boulevard, which runs along the high ridge across from Clausland Mountain and eventually becomes the Palisades. It once was a nice spot for young couples to go and park and watch the “Submarine Races” on the Hudson River. Now, multi-million Dollar homes run all along the road.

I took some pictures of the view. That’s the Tappan Zee Bridge, the Piermont Pier and you can just make out the village of Nyack down below, dominated by the ugly condominiums at the foot of Byrd Street, and Hook Mountain in the distance. (See the picasa album here)

I went over to my Mother’s and Larry came in with a giant TV in the back of Harold White’s pickup truck. Harold is one of the few people left in Central Nyack from my childhood.

I got pictures of Zack and Toby. Zack is sick. The cancer is back and his days are numbered.

Some of these pictures were taken with Larry’s new Nikon 5400 (a garage sale find). A very nice camera, indeed. Larry has to go over to Walmart and get a memory card. I took these pictures with my memory card.

I bought 337 SF books for $20 including the bookshelf.

I just lugged them out onto the enclosed porch. I’ve read about 1/4 of them and at least half I don’t think I will read, but at 6¢ a book, I have no choice.

These are mostly 1980’s and 90s, but there are many old books from the 1960s and a few from the 1950s.

I will make boxes of 10 or so books each that I want to sell, during the next few weeks. For instance, I like Robert Asprin, but I am not interested in reading the Thieve’s World Books. There are a dozen or more of these, so I will be selling them as a lot.

I now own about 600 books, not counting my original stash. I will read about 300 of them, maybe more.

I have been too busy at work to finish my book selling web site. It is about halfway through. I will sell the books there for a dollar or less, and figure the cheapest way to ship. I want to make it so you get a discount for buying more books, as well as saving on shipping. One good thing is that most books weigh about the same so shipping is easy to calculate.

It is interesting that the person that read these (sadly, it was an estate sale) had very similar tastes to my own. I am not as much into Niven and Pournelle as he was, and he had literally everything by M.Z. Bradley. He did, however have lots of great Ace Doubles (always a good trashy read), and stuff by George O. Smith, H. Beam Piper and Murray Leinster (my sf spirit guide). He had a least 30 Andre Norton’s including a few that I’ve never read. He had all of Bradbury and all of Heinlein and most of these were early first edition paperbacks. I’ve already thrown out the L. Ron Hubbard’s and I hope to make more room I as I read and sell them.

There have been several reports that Forry (age 91) died yesterday, and then some saying not.

Forrest J. Ackerman, although not a great writer, editor or critic, was very much a part of the Golden Era of science fiction. I know of him through his Famous Monsters magazine, which I used to buy when I was 9 or 10.

Forry was always the perfect Spec Fic fan. He went to the conventions, wrote letters to the editors of all the magazines, met and made friends with every science fiction writer that he could. There was no one who didn’t know Forrest J. Ackerman (4SJ in his letters) and there was no one that Forry didn’t know.

I bought a few items when he put his Garage Mahal on sale – the garage where he stored his memorabilia. I got a nice note from him signed with his 4SJ tag line.

Forry is, by most accounts, on his death bed. Everybody, please have good thoughts about a nice guy who is very much a part of the basic fabric of Speculative Fiction.

I have spend about $80 on bird seed so far this year and all it seems to do is make for fat squirrels and to attract mice.

This one is thinking about taking over the house and is measuring the drapes. There are several excited cats who are not in the picture trying to climb those drapes.

Groff Conklin was one of the most important Science Fiction Anthologists of the 1950s and 60s. He produced dozens of Anthologies in the 1950s, which were widely distributed and found their way into most libraries. Many people discovered Science Fiction through Goff Conklin’s collections.

Possible worlds is divided into two parts. There are four stories in a section called The Solar System and four stories in a section called The Galaxy. The stories are not great with a few exceptions. The bad stories are The Enchanted Village by A.E. Van Vogt, Not Final! by Isaac Asimov, Limiting Factor by Clifford Simak, and The Pillows by Margaret St. Cloud.

Asleep in Armageddon by Ray Bradbury, In Value Received by H.B. Fyfe were mildly entertaining, but not outstanding.

Asimov’s story is a typical Campbell gadget story from Astounding, but it was written by a very young Isaac, and it flounders, going nowhere (I’ll bet that John W. Campbell wrote the last page or two of the story, because it changes style). The Van Vogt and St. Cloud stories are weak stories without much in the way of character and plot. The Margaret St. Cloud story was a disappointment because I have always felt that she was one of the best short story writers of the Golden Age. Ray Bradbury’s Asleep in Armageddon was poorer than average Bradbury, mainly because the resolution, although chilling, was not that satisfying. I liked In Value Received by Fyfe, but it was such a typical Astounding engineering story, that I barely remembered it a day later. The Simak story is just a bunch of interesting engineering ideas and then the story is over.

On the other hand, the Murray Leinster story, Propagandist, was wonderful, although very much in the same vein as First Contact, my favorite Leinster story. The Malcolm Jameson story, Lilies of life, I had read before in the pages of a 1945 Astounding in my collection, and it is an unexpected concept story concerning environmental science and religion, although ultimately just another technology story.

The Space Rating by John Berryman was an engineering story, but it dealt with a management issue that involved some interesting characters so I would say it was a good, if not great.

Lastly, the Poul Anderson story, The Helping Hand, in my opinion should be required reading in high school civics and history classes. It fails a little in that its plot is mostly just a narrative of events and hardly involves more than a personal conflict, which is not resolved by direct action at the climax. Its subject is very significant, though. I read this in a 1950 Astounding a few years ago and I may have even blogged about it because I was so impressed. I may take the time to analyze it in a future post, but suffice to say, the story treats a conflict of cultures in a way that we all could learn from, especially now when the world is so small.

The stories are all long, as were most stories in the golden age, and average around 9 to 10 thousand words each. The general plot, in almost all cases, is to posit a technical question and let humans solve it through careful analysis, even if they fail eventually. These types of stories filled the pages of Astounding, Planet Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories. Groff Conklin must have searched these old pulps for stories and it seems that his criteria was to find inexpensive stories with a few good ones by greater names. The anthology was published in 1955, but most of the stories were originally from 1940 to 1950. Not Final! would never have been anthologized if it were not written by a young Isaac Asimov and the Van Vogt story was much like any other Van Vogt story, only less so. I don’t know where Bradbury anthologized Asleep in Armageddon, but it was not in any of the books that I read in October.

Conklin adds a short preface to each story, which is mostly useless as an introduction and could have been left out. I might have liked a short essay on why he thought these stories important enough to be anthologized, but I would guess that Conklin was just looking for enough inexpensive stories to fill the book and wasn’t interested in the quality.

I own both the 1955 and 1960 editions of this book. The image above is the 1960 edition, which I carried around with me on the bus because it was less fragile than the older book.