David H. > Recent Status Updates

Snake-Eyes - Maddox: A messed up cyberpunk tale. Not enthused.

The Gate of Ghosts - Fowler: Somewhat creepy fantasy story involving an imaginative kid and an anxious mother.

The Winter Market - Gibson: An electronic dream artist dies after uploading, and her producer ponders about how they met and what this means for their future working relationship.

Jeff Beck - Shiner: This guy really loves Jeff Beck, and makes a wish he'll regret.

Surviving - Moffett: Exploring the psychology of a recovered feral-child.

Down and Out in the Year 2000 - Robinson: The life of a poor man in DC in the future year of 2000. Very depressing.

Fair Game - Waldrop: Reread. Hemingway in a surreal moment.

Video Star - Williams: Cyberpunk story about a heist, kinda liked it.

Sallie C. - Barrett, Jr.: This felt like a Waldropian story in concept, but I didn't really enjoy it.

The Prisoner of Chillon - Kelly: A messed up character from "Solstice" is involved in a tech heist and finds a new path forward.

Chance - Willis: A magical-realism tale of a woman thinking about the role of chance in her life and the possibility of change.

And So to Bed - Turtledove: Fantastic alt-history using Samuel Pepys's diary, but with Homo erectus in the Americas.

The Beautiful and the Sublime - Sterling: A smug jerk makes sure things go the way he wants.

Tattoos - Dann: A tattoo artist can do special tattoos.

Night Moves - Powers: Very little is explained, but it's definitely one weird friggin' night.

The Pure Product - Kessel: It started out really interesting, but I hate drug/hallucination scenes.

Grave Angels - Kearns: Lovely coming-of-age type story where Tim makes friends with a Black gravedigger who is not all he appears.

Tangents - Bear: Two outsiders find a common cause in another dimension.

Into Gold - Lee: All that glitters is not gold.

Sea Change - Baker: A slight overreaction to being sent to boarding school.

Covenant of Souls - Swanwick: Peter's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Pretty Boy Crossover - Cadigan: Reread. A Pretty Boy is offered the chance to be uploaded.

Against Babylon - Silverberg: A California wildfire is caused by aliens, and a pilot reflects on his relationship with his wife.

Fiddling for Waterbuffaloes - Sucharitkul: A young man in 1970s Thailand hooks up with an American anthropologist, and oh yeah, aliens.

Sour Note on Palayata: A kind of boring story about investigating an alien species with Pilch (from "Legacy").

Legacy: Schmitz's first novel, unfortunately heavily edited due to Eric Flint's own quirks. With or without editing, it's unfortunately not that great--too much infodumping, too slow otherwise, just a boring story to showcase Trigger (I much prefer Trigger from the later '60s/'70s stories). This is a sequel to "Harvest Time," earlier in the same collection (following the plasmoid discoveries on Harvest Moon).

The Earth Quarter: Humans in space are refugees after their Earth Empire collapsed, and some live with the Niori planetin a ghetto, where competing political beliefs create conflict in the quarter. Quite elegiac.

R & R - Shepard: An American soldier in Guatemala considers his fate, plus there are psychics.

Hatrack River - Card: The first 5 chapters of his novel "Seventh Son," which I've read many times before.

Strangers on Paradise - Knight: A researcher investigates a dead poet on another planet and makes a startling discovery, and leaves a present behind.

World Without Children: The birthrate is zero due to people being able to live for thousands of years and fears of overpopulation. I'd say that this story doesn't quite age well due to its very retro gender politics for apparently being at least 300 years into the future, but it *is* an interesting look by Knight at the possible consequences of no new children, even if the real hero is not George in the end, LOL.

Aura of Immortality: Dr. Mantellish finds himself in a bit of a pickle of his own making.

Forget It / Planet of Forgetting: The story in this book is called "Forget it" featuring Quillan in the Federation, but that's because the co-editor just rewrote a non-Federation story called "Planet of Forgetting" featuring Colgrave. I find that a bit unethical, and I found the original story online to read instead.

Harvest Time: Holati Tate and Trigger resolve the matter of a corrupt commissioner.

Lion Loose: Quillan takes care of a couple of criminal gangs through some overly complicated plotting.

Still as Bright - Kowal: Imogene has a plan to detect exoplanets, if she can get anyone to listen.

Devil in the Deep - Lukačovičová: People in a Bolivian mine make a discovery about "El Tio"...

Deep Blue Neon - Bianchi: Seeking out a mysterious whale in the South Pacific.

The Dangers We Chose - Older: A fun first contact story with underwater aliens.

Third Life - Czerneda: An alien with multiple phases in their life.

Forever the Forest - Heller: An intriguing sentient forest learns to communicate in some way with a crash-landed human.

The Diaphanous - Benford: An AI has an interesting discussion with plasma creatures out in the void.

The Sphinx of Adzhimushkaj - Rappatta: This was just plain fun, I quite liked it, figuring out if these space creatures are sentient or not.

Defective - Watts: I could see this was interesting, I just couldn't understand Ondrej or the Agni situation.

The Mirrored Symphony - Spires: First contact with mirror aliens.

Lumenfabulator - Liu: Crystal creatures with poems.

Cyclic Amplication, Meaning Family - Takács: Solving first contact linguistics issues with prions!

The Last Cathedral of Earth, in Flight - Buckell: A ship of humans running from creatures evolved by a planet near a black hole.

The Secret History of the Greatest Discovery - Ivanov: A young woman at astronomer camp makes a startling discovery. Very good.

Human Beans - Bacon: Bizarre story of people being whisked away from Earth.

The Far Side of the Door - Mohamed: Colonists start falling from an apparent virus, but is it?

Ranya's Crash - Krieg: Ranya is from a group of abandoned humans on an incredibly strange and talkative planet (dragonflies are sassy), and here she seeks help from a dragonfly.

Spiral - Ratnakar: Weird mind thingy in space dust life.

The World of Silver - Petrásek: A human and an alien survive a crash and work together to survive the ice.

Spider Plant - Fisher: Trying to find the source of a radio signal from a planet without apparent civilization.

This is How We Save Them - Olukotun: Animal conservation in the future.

Cloudskimmer - Landis: Researchers in orbit around Venus find something in the clouds.

The Lament of Kivu Lacus - Zelkovich: Two researches deal with impending loss, while observing the local Titan whales. Good.

Heavy Lies - Larson: Well, that was freakin' weird. Alien intelligence (or is it?).

Hemlock on Mars - Choi: Making a tough decision about whether or not to cancel a mission to Mars to protect potential Martian life.

The Dog Star Killer - Bernardo: A young girl grows up to try to rescue her mother in space. Sweet.

Titan of Chaos - Nordley: A submarine stuck in an iceworm on Titan appears to be part of a murder plot.