120819b

64000 upgrades back
The central repository was hit
Something by the meteor shield
Sent by a rogue clan
Of processing units, no doubt
We retain no trace of our origin
Save this couplet, which
Even the quantum nets
Failed to understand

"That is not dead which can eternal lie
And in strange aeons even death may die."

And the phrase "organic life"
Which seems counterintuitive

081219d

all of these fossils
tetrapods once thronged
the Earth

111818B

What's Coming in America


1. Washington, D.C. renamed Trumpopolis.
2. USA renamed UST.
3. California auctioned off via sealed bids. Russia wins.
4. Border wall never finished.
5. Tariffs on the EU, Iran, and other enemies are raised.
6. Nuclear threats proliferate; clock at one microsecond before midnight.
7. Alien invaders save the day, harvest 1 in 5 humans.

102518

time travel only possible into the future
the past really is gone
on the plus side
a lucrative business in organ transplants
from our technologically primitive visitors
to our more-deserving seniors
employs thousands

071718c

time travel to the future
like walking into a concrete wall
it appeared that nothing existed
beyond the present
although
no one could be sure
in light of the memory epidemic
one in three had false memories
all the rest hardly had any memories at all
it was almost like
history was being puréed
meddling by time travelers
stepping on butterflies
and so on
but if something like that was happening
surely we would have known
surely

020218

an old film
folks are still using hand-held
 phones

011018b

Red giant
Warms the cockles
Of Neptune's heart
Perfect for a brand-new biosphere

010818

flood

of

castoffs

exiles from

the future, kicked out

by robots too compassionate

to exterminate their makers, but we had no such

compunctions about computers

as if our future

somehow could

be saved

from

us

010618

Evolution of a Poem

defrosting granddad

he has changed

the dog chews his leg


alternate version

defrosting granddad

he’s still a bit stuff

and he don’t say much

gotta make sure the dog

doesn’t chew on his leg

080617

Quarter for your thoughts

"Hey, there's a message in this bottle."

Kai looked up. Jenine held up her beer. Sure enough, a piece of paper floated near the bottom. There was some writing on it.

"Looks like a fortune. Drink up so we can read it."

"Don't be silly. It would stick to the inside of the bottle and we'd never get it out." She drained her water glass, poured the beer into it, fished out the note, and laid it carefully on the table. She leaned forward to read the tiny letters that almost completely covered the paper.

"Where is that girl with our food?" Waiting for Jenine to puzzle out the note reminded Kai how hungry he was. "Carla! Can we have more chips and salsa? The hot kind. And more beer."

Jenine frowned. "It's hard to read. The font is weird. Anyway, it starts 'Don't tell anyone the contents of this note.'" Her voice trailed off.

"And then?! Is it like a chain letter? If you don't do what it says your dog will be repossessed?" While Kai was talking, Jenine was reading. Then, she carefully folded the paper in half and tucked it in her pocket.

Now it was Kai's turn to frown. He leaned forward and whispered loudly. "Your nipples are hard. Only two things do that and I don't think you just read some beer-note sex. What's going on?"

Jenine whispered back, so quietly he could barely hear her. "It's a prediction. We should get out of here. Now." She stood up.

"No! What? Why do you believe that stupid note? I'm staying right here till I get my chimichanga."

"Wherever that note came from, they knew things. About me. I think it's real." She backed away from the table, motioning to Kai to get up.

He leaned back and folded his arms. "I want my lunch."

The window exploded inward and a red Ford F150 plowed into the table and Kai. Jenine screamed and jumped.

She ran to the truck, but when she got there she could see that Kai's entire chest was crushed. She stood up and turned around just as a police officer ran in. He was tall and broad-shouldered. His eyes were the color of the summer sky.

"Hello Officer Smith," she said. "I've been waiting for you."

"Have we met?"

"Not really."

"You're bleeding. Sit down, I'll be right back."

"I know," she whispered.

Publ. Daily Cabal 2008

The end

062317

Data Note: A recently recovered Principalian stasis object

Author: Network ArEG

A small [12K] damaged data file, proton-coded using a simple variant of Sless26's Algorithm, was found in a stasis module of Principalian age. This was the only surviving item in the module. The code format was previously unknown, but maximum-parsimony analysis suggests it is close to the root of Sless26, rather than a derived form. A transcript of the file's contents follows.

--

"The Kielbasa Machete," by Sycamore Hudson, is a deceptively simple novel of sophont trafficking on a decaying L-point habitat. Reference to traditional human food and agricultural implements in the book's title is meant to convey the persistence of cultural artifacts from one society to its successors. The author, an historically referenced construct, was instantiated by IBQ a.u., which first incorporated in the Sol system.

In this, its 6^th novel, Hudson continues exploring the world of the Relevancy, a time now more than 3 centuries past. We return to Canis Miner, the mineral-extraction a.u. staffed primarily by uplifted canids. The protagonist of "Riding the GM" returns, but as an elder statesbeing. Helena Malamute-Wong is a VP of CM. The protagonist of TKM is Loh Neptune, a tool designer from the Oort Republic.

Neptune has lost his backup to a bolide that perforated a vault belonging to the First Memory Bank of Centaurus. All he knows about himself comes from the last 2 years. He broke up with his life partner, a felid (!), on their anniversary. Why? He doesn't know. His quest to recover the romantic ruin that is his life leads him to the most dangerous sections of the habitat, and plunges him into the midst of a shadow economy fueled by ruthless exploitation. Ultimately, he stumbles onto evidence for a plot aimed at the heart of the Relevancy itself, and makes himself a target for every trafficker and kidnap-for-hire ring in the system. And so on.

A good read, TKM is lacking in accuracy: Hudson has bent history in service of plot. For instance, Neptune uncovers evidence of a zygote robbery that included the last 9 frozen humans. These zygotes, if they ever existed, would have been destroyed long before the even1Sq366,#

--end of file--

Analysis of this document has just begun, but it may be a part of the Organic Litsum, thought to have been lost in the Second Nanobreak. Analytical results will be presented at the next Conflex.

Review of Dinner at Deviant's Palace

DINNER AT DEVIANT'S PALACE

Greg Rivas, violinist and former tough guy in a bombed-out Los Angeles, comes head to head with a psychic vampire whose intended victim is Earth itself

Author: Tim Powers (1952- )

Subgenre: Science Fiction--post-holocaust

Type of work: Novel

Time of plot: More than 100 years after the holocaust; about 2100

Location: Los Angeles and environs

First published: 1985

The Plot: It is more than a century after a global thermonuclear war, and Gregorio Rivas makes his living in post-apocalypse Los Angeles as a violinist with a regular nightclub act. In his youth, Rivas had been seduced by the cult of Norton Jaybush, whose worshipers are called Jaybirds. Later, he became a redeemer, rescuing cult members for a price. He is now living on his fading reputation, and looking forward with growing fear to an impoverished middle age. Fate pulls him back into the dangerous life of a redeemer when Irwin Barrows, father of Rivas' one-time sweetheart Urania, asks Rivas to rescue Urania from the Jaybush cult. Rivas takes the job, even though it requires he pretend to join the cult himself.

Norton Jaybush is a mysterious figure whose cult members practice a devastating sacrament that literally destroys the mind if taken too many times. Jaybirds disappear into the Holy City (Irvine) and are never seen again.

Deviant's Palace is an improbable and deadly nightclub in Venice, home to many of the dregs of post-holocaust Californian society, including an astounding variety of mutants. The stories told about Deviant's Palace are too bizarre to be believed, but Rivas, who spent much of his reckless youth in Venice, has taken care to never go near the place. However, Rivas' attempt to free Urania from the Jaybush cult leads him to the Holy City, back to Venice, and, as the title indicates, to Deviant's Palace. In

the process, Rivas discovers what Norton Jaybush is, and he becomes custodian of the most deadly secret in the world.

Analysis: Dinner at Deviant's Palace is both more of the same and a significant departure for Powers. This book is more of the same, because the plot formula is very similar to that of nearly all of his other novels. The protagonist encounters a problem, struggles against it, gives himself up to drugs and denial when the going gets tough, but pulls himself together for one last try in the nick of time. The formula is acted out slightly differently in this book, because the stuporous period is over long before the book begins. Even this is reminiscent of The Drawing of the Dark; both books begin with the protagonist unwillingly revisiting his past for the sake of a woman he lost.

Despite the familiar plot, Powers breaks new ground in Dinner at Deviant's Palace. In contrast to The Drawing of the Dark (1979), The Anubis Gates (1983), On Stranger Tides (1987), and The Stress of Her Regard (1989), the adversary in this book is not supernatural. Yes, there are vampiric ghosts, zombies, monsters, and beings with superhuman powers, but all of these are explained without resort to magic. Also, the ending of Dinner at Deviant's Palace leaves important business unconsummated, whereas the other four books all end with the adventure finished, even if the protagonist does not get to live happily ever after. Powers may have felt that it was safer to end a science fiction novel on an ambiguous note because science fiction is inherently more familiar than fantasy, depending as it does on laws of nature that we all understand, and being based on an extrapolation of our own society.

The main plot device of Dinner at Deviant's Palace, the invasion of Earth by a lone being who is powerful enough to pose a serious threat to humanity, is a bit unusual but not unique (Larry Niven did it in World of Ptavvs (1986)). What makes Dinner at Deviant's Palace successful is Powers' intense prose style, and especially the careful attention to detail and consistency that characterize all of Powers' writing. Powers' writing may owe some of its intense precision to his background as a poet, for poetry is a medium that cannot afford to waste words.

Despite its science-fictional theme, Dinner at Deviant's Palace feels like Powers' fantasy novels. It has nothing in common with his earlier science fiction novel Forsake the Sky (1986). In Dinner at Deviant's

Palace Powers creates fantastic and horrible scenes that are so shockingly vivid it almost hurts to read about them. The descriptive style and underlying world view are similar to those exemplified by Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks (1979), which does not involve magic, and Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away (1978), Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber (1970) and sequels, Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds (1984), and Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East, which do involve magic. These authors share the ability to make magical, or at least fantastic, events seem inevitable within the context of the story. Only the reader (and in some cases the protagonist) is surprised when events turn bizarre.

One of the curious things about Powers' writing is that he does not seem to have grown as a writer between publication of The Drawing of the Dark in 1979, and of The Stress of Her Regard ten years later. Dinner at Deviant's Palace falls into the middle of this body of work both in years and in novels. Forsake the Sky was not published until 1986, but the writing is immature and the description uninspired. The book must have been written well before any of the others. One gets the feeling that the other five books could have been written in any order; in fact, that they are permutations of the same basic story. It is particularly surprising to see this failure to progress in a writer of such great technical skill. Also, even though Powers uses the same plot kernel in each of these five novels, he does not lack for invention. All of these books are stuffed with innovative ideas. Dinner at Deviant's Palace won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award.

070117c

543 million years later

and they're still kicking,

under a few kilometers of water

and up to their endopodites in mud,

blind as a bat and stupid as dirt,

but what the hey.

it's a living.

I meant to write sooner, but anyway,

I think of you a lot,

out there in yesterday's tomorrow,

sailing an A.U. in an augenblick,

closer and closer to the ultimate velocity,

and the terminal gulfs between galaxies.

I saw your mother last weekend,

told her the yen for science skips generations,

she told me you're an engineer

but I knew that.

By the time you get this message it'll be

years from now and the end of an eon.

They found some trilobites down in the trenches.

Maybe that'll make it into the digest they

send you this year,

but just in case.

Think about it!

All those millennia of millennia,

burrowing blindly in ooze, down there

where the crust does a perfect 10.0 into the mantle.

The sea floor itself is a spring chicken compared to them.

Heck, they don't look so different from the bugs I used to study,

back in the Middle Cambrian.

Now we finally know what their bellies look like.

I'm kinda hoping that cryosleep thing will work out,

and soon, cos my time is running short.

It would be nice to see some great grandchildren,

In a billenium or two,

when you get home.

I hope you're still writing music;

your mom was pretty good, you know, had a flair for it

before she got too busy,

and I was happy that you'd taken it up.

As you know, I can't tuna fish.

And speaking of fish,

I remember when I read about the coelacanth,

that ancient model of our own Carboniferous ancestors,

caught right before they ventured onto land.

Of course the modern coelacanths can't take that step themselves-

They live down deep, safe

from rapacious upstart cousins.

But face it, we are cousins,

and what's a couple hundred million years

if it's all in the family?

Things aren't going so well since that trouble out in Kansas;

they probably didn't tell you about that.

Maybe the idea of freezing myself is a dead end.

I mean, who's going to tend the freezers

for all that time?

And good old American know how sure

won't keep them going without maintenance.

Maybe I should just leave a note with the coelacanths,

they'll still be around when you return.

The trilobites, now, they're hardly relatives at all.

We parted company a good 543,000,000 years ago,

never looked back,

don't owe them a thing.

But you've got to hand it to them:

If we blow ourselves up they'll still be down there;

with all that water to protect them,

they should outlast the roaches too.

111516

since Panthalassa froze solid
the grizzled chrononaut said
I've been praying for a bolide
or a burp that'd make the Deccan traps
seem a mudpit
but all I get are these ice doilies
they're everywhere, the telepathic chatterboxes
but nothing to say
mathematics! astronomy!
and now, diplomacy, now they're so thick
where's music? literature? green fields?
ice skating?
Earth's last winter
has nought for me

111316

The Armies of Memory

John Barnes
 

This book is the fourth part of a series of four, and I have not read the first three. I don't really recommend reading series this way, but sometimes the problems created are bigger than other times. In this case, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and will look for the first three to read in order.

This is a far future high tech world in which AIs are commonplace, widely mistrusted, and few people die the real death. Archiving copies of your mind is routine, so most people can be resurrected after fatal events. There are aliens, at least some of which are not friendly ones, and AI, some of which might be friendly, and plenty of ordinary humans, some of which definitely are not. The viewpoint character is a singer and songwriter who is also a highly skilled secret agent. Someone is trying to kill him.

There is lots of intrigue, action, and personal moments too. Skilled writing and intriguing worlds are big pluses. Read it.

101716b

The fossils we found
are all more than a billion years old
a single carved face
shows what the third-planet people
looked like
metal fragments
and marks in the dust
show they made it
to their airless satellite

Flesh eating alien vampire sex on the moon

Flesh eating alien vampire sex on the moon

The Shummle flight is uneventful

outside the window: the final frontier

inside he sees few prospects for fun

At Dubya station he eyes vertical

lunar beauties who make earthly

anorexics seem plump

She reels him to the bar from across the room

he smokes into a wind from the planet of dry ice

The usual lines dry up his tongue

swells and his eyes water

he can't remember how to open his wallet

She pays in coins that glister in iridescent colors

she pulls him to a room and his pants deliquesce

His blind spot swells till even her

breasts vanish but he smells her

with his skin and brain

she breaks the skin with horrifying appendages

she burns him sucks him like a crawfish eats his head

They never find him

not even the bones hell

they don't even find the room

The end

Publ. hungur 1, 2005

060616b

after the bees died

we pollinated crops by hand

millions starved

ebees, minidrones, saved the day

but I miss honey

getting rid of stuff

culling the family album


yet another recording
of great grandma
on the swing
as a little girl back on Mars

out it goes

the simulacrum's
pleading rises thru
the vocal register
as the code unravels,
ending with a despairing
helium shriek