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‘ve gone into comics in the past here. So now I’m putting you onto something really good, something that will make you happy and sad and yank those old heart strings around, a webcomic titled Space Boy, online and free for viewing. So, Space Boy isn’t really centered around a boy so much as it is a young girl named Amy in the 3300’s-and-something. She lived in a deep space mining colony, her dad was scapegoated for an industrial accident, and her family has been “fired” (i.e. removed from service and sent back to Earth). Now, Amy has lived on […]

rom out of the yellowing book box, another draw (this one happily not flaking into scraps). As usual for me (hey, I have my interests) another science fiction tale from Clifford D. Simak from 1970, a strange little story titled Out of their Minds. So this one is strange – hero-guy Horton Smith is troubled. He’s (I assume) burned out from his life as a globe-trotting journalist. Now he’s in his car heading back to Pilot Knob, the tiny town way up in the hills (somewhere somewhat close to DC, but then again, in the 70’s, the wilderness was a […]

o let’s not start by talking about this book as a story or a metaphor or anything. Let’s talk about it as a book. Been carrying this little paperback with me for 40 years or so. It was on my shelf in Drapers Meadows West in Blacksburg, it lingered in my huge shelves in my vault I lived in at York. And in the time between all these places, it sat in a book box waiting to be reread. I can’t even say why I’d have bought it. I did read some Vonnegut at University for classes and found him […]

ooks are time machines and we read them in our context at our peril (or rather, our down-our-nose smarminess). The Wanderer copped a Hugo Award back in 1964, which was seven years after On The Beach (a story about a gentle yet depressing apocalypse) came out. Yet gone are the gentle civilians living out their last days in quiet contemplation of the doom that was settling over them. In The Wanderer, we’re back to people meeting their end with violence antagonism. Mobs. Guns. Killing. Drunkenness. All the things we Americans do well*. So the story opens with a half-dozen openers […]