Aleksandr Mikheev > Recent Status Updates

"Journalism, to me, is just another drug - a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight. But I'm neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill or the assignment and see what happens." from a letter to Ralph Ginzburg, November 18, 1968

"...we all get a little older and less honest every time the sun comes up..."

The Commuter (1953)
A man comes at the train station to buy a ticket to a town nobody have ever heard of, then suddenly disappears - he is just gone in a split second. A detective takes this accident seriously and starts looking for this non-existent town...

"I can't imagine explaining "sleep" to someone who had never heard of it. Hey, I'm going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this."

"They smiled and made happy Russian sounds."

"I clench my teeth. I clench my fists. I clench my butt. I clench every part of me that I know how to clench."

So far, so good. Pure action and slowly unraveling mystery. One peculiar thing I noticed: I am getting such strong Ryan Gosling vibes from the main character as if the book was written specifically with him in mind (yes, I know about the upcoming movie)

"Almost nobody gives a damn about your life but you, and according to Chase, there's a good chance you don't even give as much of a damn as you think. If you did, you'd already have done the hard work necessary to change yourself to match your idealized image."

Martians come in clouds (1953)

It uses sci-fi themes just as an allegory on what happens in real life, when people encounter anyone who is not like them.

A gangster named Rocky "...dies during a robbery and wakes up in an afterlife where his every wish is granted. Every woman wants him, everybody thinks he's wonderfrul, and every bet he makes is a winner. Eventually, Rocky grows so tired of what he assumes to be Heaven that he asks to go to "the other place", only to be told, "This is the other place".

"Some kind of life" - a 13-page and relatively light story, without much of a plot twist.

The next story in this collection is called Progeny.

It is an interesting take on a possible way of education in the future. In this short story, we are facing a future world where people are not allowed to see their kids from their birth day and until they are 18 years old.

I've read so far the first one, "The cosmic poachers". It's only 13 pages long, and it's nothing outstanding. It's not bad either, a nice real short story to read it to your kids as they fall asleep. There is an amusing plot twist, but nothing else that memorable.

"In 1919, a loaf of bread cost one mark; by 1923, the same loaf cost 100 billion marks".

"Please, gentlemen, a medal for a woman, that is really going too far." - the king, Wilhelm II, about Käthe Kollwitz winning a gold medal at Great Berlin Art Exhibition in 1898

"The sociologist George Steinmetz points out that national health insurance, industrial accident insurance and old-age pensions, all introduced by Bismark in the 1880s, were an effective way of lulling the working classes into complacency".

About 1870s: "The problem was the shortage of accommodation that was barely habitable for people on slender or middle incomes. Even public officials struggled. The city's mayor, Arthur Hobrecht, had to scour far and wide to find an apartment in his own city that he could afford on a bureaucrat's salary."

"There are no revolutions in Germany, because the police would not allow it"

"What's it all for, Prendick? Are we bubbles blown by a baby?"

"...what girl would refuse you? George had no specific girl in mind yet; he wanted none. Not now! Once he made Programmer; once he could add to his name, Registered Computer Programmer, he could take his pick, like a sultan in a harem."

"Every day is a gift. It's just... does it have to be a pair of socks?"

"Italy's youngsters complain, apparently, about having to live at home until they are 72 but that's because they spend all their money on suits and coffee and Alfa Romeos rather than mortgages."

"However, when you get to 33, everything changes. Time straps a jet pack to its back, lights the afterburners and sets off at Mach 3. The sun moves across the sky as though God's got his finger on the fast forward button. Blink and you can miss a whole month"

"...if you have all the facts to hand, you will see there are two sides to every argument and that both sides are right. So you can only have an opinion of you do not have all the facts to hand."