Schenck – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

March 28, 2021

Steam Bird (Review)

ell, this one jolted me in surprise – written in the mid-eighties by Hilbert Schenck, who worked on feasibility studies for the USAF for a nuclear-powered bomber (impractical, given that conventional bombers could do the job easier, cleaner, and didn’t radiate like the bombs they’d just dropped when they returned home). Anyway, what caught me is that the story opens in a model train operations session (where, before Digital Command Control, they are using “microcomputers” (whatever that means in 1985) to simulate how steam engines work in their session). Overall, I really enjoyed the tension and repartee most sessions have. […]

April 25, 2021

Hurricane Claude (Review)

ack before writers wrote to fulfill publishing needs, when they just wrote stories and submitted them to publishers and magazines in manila envelopes, writers ended up with all sorts of story-chunks, from a million words to a couple of hundred. And publishers, trying to fill a potential book, had to dip into a writer’s backups to get enough to flush out a paperback. That seems to be the case with the short story Hurricane Claude, which showed up as a 45 rpm flip side in Steam Bird (which I reviewed HERE). This story was actually quite good. Oh, there were […]