Ghost Hunting

In case you want to write fiction about ghosts and hauntings or just read intriguing material about supposedly real cases of those phenomena, I ran across a website with lots of relevant resources:

The Shadowlands: Ghosts and Hauntings

There's a page with dozens of links to articles about ghosts, hauntings, and hunting for ghosts. Another page, on "Famous Hauntings," lists over sixty entries, some familiar, others more obscure. "True Stories," by contrast, comprises hundreds of personal accounts of encounters with the spirit world. Most interesting to me is the extensive list of "Haunted Places," with separate pages for each state and many foreign countries. Although the creator of the website believes in supernatural occurrences and claims to have experienced them, the "Haunted Places" section acknowledges that some of these stories of allegedly haunted locations may consist of local legends and urban folklore rather than reflections of actual events.

The articles on ghost hunting include tips on "How to conduct a safe ghost hunt" and warnings against trespassing on private property without permission. The site owner also deconstructs the concept of "debunking" from the angle that absence of evidence doesn't equal evidence of absence. To disprove a haunting, it's not enough to visit the place several times and conclude it harbors no ghosts because you didn't witness any. A valid "debunking" would involve discovering a plausible natural explanation for the witnessed and reported phenomena. That specific approach hadn't occurred to me before, and it does make a certain amount of sense.

On the other hand, the "debunking" side is robustly represented by SKEPTICAL INQUIRER magazine, which deconstructs not only ghosts and hauntings but other paranormal phenomena, as well as urban legends, cryptids, fraudulent cures, UFOs, and a wide variety of other dubious beliefs:

Skeptical Inquirer

Their website includes links to recent articles from the magazine that can be read for free. From this kind of material, a writer adapting a "real" ghost story for fictional purposes could find tips on how a skeptical investigator might try to disprove the haunting.

In fiction, we can make room for both Mulder and Scully.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review Legends and Legends II: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy Edited by Robert Silverberg, Part 1 by Karen S. Wiesner

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review

Legends and Legends II: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy

Edited by Robert Silverberg,

Part 1

by Karen S. Wiesner 

 

Be aware that there may be spoilers in these reviews. 

The two Legends short fantasy novel collections, edited by Robert Silverberg, first came to my attention when I was reading Terry Brooks' Shannara Chronicles to my elementary-school-aged son. I'd read that an epilogue to The Wishsong of Shannara (a particular favorite of ours) called "Indomitable" had been included in Legends II, and if there was a second installment, there also must be first, in this case, logically called Legends. Naturally, I bought the book and became interested in both volumes of these all-star collections. The concept is intriguing. In the introduction, Silverberg says that these masters of the genre became famous through the series their particular stories are set in. In my mind, that made for a great initiation into already popular series from the crème de la crème of fantasy writing. 

Unfortunately, I failed to take into account that most of these series are well established with multiple entries. Stepping into them, even with a prologue or offshoot--in other words, an installment that presumably comes before the beginning of the official series, or merely runs parallel with it but doesn't necessarily share the same storyline--proved to be intimidating, to say the least. 

I'll say upfront that all 11 stories in each collection, even the ones I couldn't really get into, were well written and engaging. I have no trouble believing that those who are fans of the individual series represented here will love these bonus offerings. However, having little or no previous reading experience with the majority of the writers and their series from both collections, I didn't have the same impression as readers familiar with their worlds. I can't say for sure whether the contributing authors were the types who deliberately refused to explain previous events (some writers are like that--I'll discuss that assessment more next week) or if they made every effort to adequately establish their worlds and characters and it simply didn't work in my case--in part because it's easy to become overwhelmed if there are already several works available in a particular sequence that haven't been read previously (or at least read recently). 

These two collections require a bit of explanation because they've been republished and repackaged (by more than one publisher) so many times. The list of stories and series contained within the first collection are as follows: 

Legends (hardcover published in 1998; trade paperback in 1999 with 715 pages)

1.     Stephen King: "The Little Sisters of Eluria" (The Dark Tower)

2.     Terry Pratchett: "The Sea and Little Fishes" (Discworld)

3.     Terry Goodkind: "Debt of Bones" (The Sword of Truth)

4.     Orson Scott Card: "Grinning Man" (The Tales of Alvin Maker)

5.     Robert Silverberg: "The Seventh Shrine" (Majipoor)

6.     Ursula K. Le Guin: "Dragonfly" (Earthsea)

7.     Tad Williams: "The Burning Man" (Memory, Sorrow and Thorn)

8.     George R. R. Martin: "The Hedge Knight" (A Song of Ice and Fire)

9.     Raymond E. Feist: "The Wood Boy" (The Riftwar Cycle)

10.  Anne McCaffrey: "Runner of Pern" (Dragonriders of Pern)

11.  Robert Jordan: "New Spring" (The Wheel of Time)

Note (because I'll bring this up again later): This is the order in which the stories are featured in the full collection. 

In 1999 and 2000, Legends was split between two volumes:

·       Volume One contained the stories by Pratchett, McCaffrey, Martin, Williams, and Jordan.

·       Volume Two contained the stories by King, Goodkind, Card, Silverberg, Le Guin, and Feist.

 

 

Additionally, a three volume set was published, the first two released in 1999 and the final in 2000, separating the stories this way:

·       Volume 1 with King, Silverberg, Card, and Feist.

·       Volume 2 with Goodkind, Martin, and McCaffrey.

·       Volume 3 with Jordan, Le Guin, Williams, and Pratchett.

If you can believe it, there was another four volume set published after that, as reported by isfdb.org, but the page for it on that website is confusing, at best, about which stories were included in which volumes. 

Tracking down any of these, whether sold in one volume or over several, was a bit of a nightmare for me. Eventually, I frustratingly ended up with both Legends and Legends II as single volumes as well as all the individual ones--in some cases, more than one (because listings were confusing when I was purchasing them). Regardless, the stories I enjoyed in them did at least make the effort worthwhile and, hey, the gently used duplicates will make good gifts. 

All right, let's get to the reviews. As I said before in my Rogues Anthology review,  rather than insult some perfectly good writers and stories I just didn't happen to connect with--though I'm certain others will, I'll mainly go in-depth with reviews of the particular stories I actually liked in the first collection. 

From Legends: 

1)    1) The third story featured in this collection, "Debt of Bones" by Terry Goodkind, tells the origin of the Border between the realms in his fantasy world from The Sword of Truth. At the time of this publication, there were four novels available in this series. According to the introduction to the series included before the story, this tale takes place years before the first book, Wizard's First Rule. In "Debt of Bones", a woman comes to see the wizard Zorander (or Zedd) in "Debt of Bones" to beg him to save her young daughter from invaders to the land she hails from who have kidnapped her child. Her only means of persuasion is a debt owed (or so Abby believes) to her mother by the sorcerer. She goes into this endeavor certain it's the only way to save her daughter. But is it? I've never read anything else by this author, nor do I fully understand how this particular story fits in with the series it's associated with (I think Zedd may be the First Wizard, a mentor and friend to the two protagonists in the novels but, without reading them, I can't be sure). I can't say exactly why "Debt of Bones" gripped me the way it did when the previous two stories in the collection failed to impact me. For a good two dozen pages or so, I believed the main character Abby was a little girl. Then I found out she was actually the mother of the little kidnapped girl. I guess I had compassion for her desperate plight regardless of her age. The wizard Zedd and his ability to hold countless conversations simultaneously intrigued me, as did the impossible decisions he was forced to make--invariably either saving the many or the few, never all. I loved the final words in the story: "Enemies," the wizard said, "are the price of honor." In the future, I may see what The Sword of Truth series has to offer, on the basis of this compelling story.

2    2) The seventh story in this collection, "The Burning Man", by Tad Williams includes a haunted castle and events in the age before his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Series. Oddly enough, I found that I own all four books in this series and I'd read them maybe a decade or more ago. The only real memory I have of this is that I wanted to and felt that I should have liked this series more than I ultimately did. But, because this author's name was familiar, I gave "The Burning Man" more of a chance to make an impression on me than I usually would an unknown (to me) writer. It took a while for the story to grow on me, and there was some confusion in the first several pages before the plot began to coalesce and work itself into something intriguing. I believe the hindrance before that point was due to the style the story was written in, namely the one Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft seemed to prefer. Both were enamored of telling stories by starting at the end of the story, when the main character is past the actual events. The protagonist in "The Burning Man" has come through the ordeal and decided to divulge all, and proceeds to retell that story from the start. In my mind, this removes any chance at all of the story being suspenseful since the reader is told upfront the main character has survived and, one way or another, things have worked out after a fashion. In general, I despise this manner of writing, but I will point out that it rarely stops me from reading a story I think I'll like. I'm particularly glad I gave this one a chance since I enjoyed it very much. In particular, the aspect that the heroine's stepfather is searching for something--the answer to what's beyond death, if anything, in order to give his life meaning. The path to finding what he seeks to the exclusion of all saps his happiness while his stepdaughter physically follows behind him in a blind sort of manner, always keeping to the dark so she isn't caught. What happens as a result teaches her that "love does not do sums, but instead makes choices, and then gives its all". Despite what I considered a limited way of presenting the story, the characters were well drawn, their quests intriguing and convincing. "The Burning Man" has made me consider re-reading the original series again, to evaluate whether I'll have a better reaction to it now. 

3    3) The eighth story in the Legends collection, "The Hedge Knight" is associated with George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, though it isn't actually part of that particular series per se, nor would I call it a prequel. Spinoff series is the best description for this. The three currently available stories in the A Knight of the Seven Kingdom series (which is what it was called in the trilogy compilation of it as well as will be called for the forthcoming HBO series) are set ninety years before A Song of Ice and Fire events, while the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne, and it does include characters from that series--Aegon Targaryen (known here as Egg, the future King Aegon V) and Ser Duncan the Tall (Dunk, the future Lord Commander of the Kingsguard). Hoping to gain employment as a knight for hire by participating in a tourney, Dunk instead finds himself fighting for his life when he crosses the wrong Targaryen in order to save a young, pretty puppeteer artist. I first read this story after getting the Legends II: Dragon, Sword, and King volume in order to read Terry Brooks' "Indomitable". At that time, I'd just started getting into the "Game of Thrones" world. I had no idea how these characters fit in. The Dunk and Egg (as in, "dunk an egg") aspect seemed silly to me. So I can't say I appreciated the story the first time I read it. However, when I reread it recently in association with Legends, it was with a much clearer comprehension of the primary series. I really liked and rooted for Dunk and Egg. As soon as I finished this story, I ordered the trilogy of novellas, published together in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, complete with illustrations by the fabulous Gary Gianni. I intend to review that series in a separate article soon. 

Incidentally, if anyone's interested, in my article "Of Proper Short Story Collection Assemblage" (you can find it here: https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2024/06/of-proper-short-story-collection.html), I talked about how stories should be arranged in an anthology, with the strongest as the first, last and middle, with other good ones sprinkled throughout the middle portions of the collection evenly, so as to maximize reader enjoyment and prevent walking away before finishing the entire volume. Based on my reasoning in that article, I ended up liking the third, seventh, and eighth stories most in Legends. I believe it would have been much more effective to have Martin's story first, "Debt of Bones" last, and "The Burning Man" smack-dab in the middle as the sixth story in the collection. 

Next week I'll review Legends II. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor 

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

The Past Is a Foreign Country

According to a quote in THE GO-BETWEEN, a 1953 novel by British author L. P. Hartley (whom I confess I hadn't heard of otherwise), “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

I was recently struck by the realization that this memorable aphorism can apply even to the past in one's own lifetime, when I read THE GIRLS WHO WENT AWAY (2006), by Ann Fessler. I bought this history of homes for unwed mothers that flourished from the 1940s to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision because it's one of the principal sources used by Grady Hendrix in his WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS. This novel, set in such an institution in 1970, is one of the best -- and most emotionally harrowing -- horror stories I've read in a long time.

Hard as it is for me to imagine, for our younger grandchildren 1970 lies further in the past than World War II did for me at their age. My teen years -- the 1960s -- are ancient history to their generation! One thing that hit me while reading the reminiscences of unwed mothers who gave up their babies for adoption in the pre-Roe era was how strange the customs and taboos of that period seem to me now, even though I remember living through it.

Delving into Fessler’s meticulously researched work immediately after Hendrix’s novel reveals how much factual material he drew upon. Each chapter of THE GIRLS WHO WENT AWAY alternates historical and sociological background information by the author with retrospective first-person narratives by women who “went away” to homes for unwed mothers –- run by the National Florence Crittenton Mission and the Roman Catholic Church, among other institutions –- and surrendered their babies for adoption. In the framing introduction and conclusion, Fessler lends a further personal touch to the topic with her perspective on her own experience as an adoptee from that period. I was surprised to learn that originally most institutions for single, pregnant girls and women focused on giving them resources and skills to rear their children themselves. A radical shift occurred during the 1940s, after which residents of homes for unwed mothers were automatically expected to give up their newborns for adoption. Interestingly, Black families and communities, rather than routinely sending pregnant girls to “homes,” more often provided support to help young mothers keep their infants. In the post-World-War II institutions, the inmates were shamed, assumed to be neurotic and/or sexually promiscuous. Little or nothing, of course, was said to condemn the boys and men co-responsible for the pregnancies.

The girls typically lived under strict regimens and received little or no instruction on what to expect from the process of childbirth. They were routinely lied to, told they wouldn't suffer or remember much of anything because they would be unconscious the whole time. After delivery, they were rushed into relinquishing custody of their infants, signing documents they didn't understand and sometimes weren't allowed to read. Some of the young women eventually went on to marry the fathers of their children. Most, at least in Fessler’s sample population, did not. A few, interviewed decades later, reported their stays in the “homes” as positive experiences and were in fact glad to surrender their babies to married couples, who could give children stable families, and move on with their lives. Most, however, did not feel that way. The loss of their babies, often perceived as forced upon them, resulted in lifelong trauma, even if hidden. Often their “shameful” past was concealed from the children they later bore within marriage and sometimes even from their husbands.

Although I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, I still find it hard to wrap my head around the lengths to which families went to conceal their daughters’ “disgrace.” From a contemporary perspective, I can’t help looking back and thinking, “Good grief, why on Earth did they care?” Granted, for an unmarried teenager, dealing with pregnancy and motherhood would have been (as it still is) a terribly difficult plight. But to act as if having it revealed would practically be a fate worse than death? "Foreign," indeed!

margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager

by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Riley Sager's The Last Time I Lied is a thriller published in 2018 and it reminded me of some teenage drama B-movies that came out in the 80s and 90s where particularly stupid young adults make bad decisions and spend the rest of their lives paying the price. In this story, a rich girls' summer camp reopens 15 years after it was closed due to the unsolved disappearances of three prominent teenage girls. Heroine Emma stayed in the same cabin as the older, lost girls. Now a painter, Emma suffers survivor's guilt, painting the three missing girls over and over in her acclaimed art. When the owner of the camp decides to reopen despite the notoriety of Camp Nightingale, she invites Emma to teach painting during the summer session. Emma knows she needs to deal with the past and this seems like the way to do it. Besides, she's determined to find out the truth of what happened a decade and a half ago--even if it means potentially stirring up a hornet's nest and setting in motion a repeat of the past. 

One of the things I'm always lured into Sager's stories with is the promise of potential supernatural explanations for unsolved mysteries. In this story, the ghost of one of the missing girls seems to be haunting Emma's consciousness--or is she physically haunting her? Not knowing kept me reading. I loved the allegory of Emma painting the three girls into all of her art and then covering them up under forest scenes of paint. Emma can't get past this in her painting let alone her life until the mystery is finally solved. 

Sager is a solid writer and always includes well developed characters that you root for even as you doubt them and their true motives. This plot was filled with a large amount of red herrings and suspects along with multilayered subplots and suspense galore. While a lot of the reviews I read about the thriller talked about a shocking twist at the end, I for one anticipated something just like this (which could just mean I'm a writer as well as a reader). For that reason, to me it simply felt well done and perfectly executed, not particularly surprising. The story would have felt incomplete without that precise denouement. 

My only real complaint is a pretty mild one that I've spoken of in at least one of my previous reviews for this author's books. The tale just dragged on and on. In part, I admit I don't feel any great love for summer camps, having never gone to one nor ever really wanted to. I felt there were too many characters, too many mysteries to solve, too many twists and turns. As I've alluded to before with Sager, I felt the book was unnecessarily complicated, something others might consider a plus, but which made the off-shot tangents in the plot a burden for me to get through. I'm not sure it needed such a large cast of characters either. I had a little bit of trouble keeping track of who was who and how they all fit in the story--past and present. 

Overall, though, The Last Time I Lied is another solid brainteaser, and Sager has convinced me to put him on my "read everything by this author" list. Stay tuned. I expect I'll be reviewing more of his books in the future. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

Searching for Extraterrestrial Life

I'm reading a book about the possibility of life as we know it (or maybe as we don't know it) on other planets in our solar system and on extrasolar worlds, THE SECRET LIFE OF THE UNIVERSE, by astrobiologist Nathalie A. Cabrol. The author, director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute, has worked on multiple unmanned space exploration programs. Reflections on her own experiences in that field lend a lively, personal touch to her in-depth analysis of the subject. Published in 2023, the book contains information about discoveries nearly as up to date as a reader could hope for. This book could serve as a valuable resource for science-fiction writers.

After two introductory chapters about Earth and the origins of living organisms here, she lays out the basic conditions for life as we know it -- mainly a temperature range where liquid water exists, the presence of certain vital elements, and particular levels of gravity and atmospheric pressure. Ideal geological and meteorological conditions also contribute to the probability that life could develop and survive.

Detailed analyses of Venus and Mars explore whether living creatures, if only on the microbial level, could exist there. Other possilities are some of Jupiter's moons and Titan, a moon of Saturn, since organic molecules and liquid water have been discovered on them. More surprisingly, Cabrol proposes possible environments for organic evolution on dwarf planets and even Mercury and our moon. Later chapters plunge into more speculative discussions of life that might exist on planets of other stars. She delves into the Drake equation (how statistically likely are extrasolar biospheres, intelligence, and civilizations?) and the Fermi Paradox (if other advanced civilizations exist in the universe, where is everybody?). Of course, the problem with determining the likelihood of some of the factors involved is that we have a sample of only one, our own world. There's a chapter on the active search for life throughout the galaxy, especially the SETI project. The author also considers the broad question of the definition of life and whether artificial intelligence could qualify.

The book's endnotes direct the reader to the resources the author drew upon. Her treatment of the various topics is so extensive and deep, however, even sometimes getting rather technical with discussions of organic and inorganic chemistry, that anyone wanting to use this work as background for creating alien lifeforms would hardly need to look elsewhere.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Bite Dust

The copyright blogs these last few days have been full of a singular judgement in Thomson Reuters vs Ross Intelligence where a copyright infringement lawsuit was successful against a defendant who used copyrighted material to train an A.I. model.

One of the most interesting perspectives on the case is penned by Joe Meckes and Joseph Grasser of Squire Patton Boggs,

https://www.iptechblog.com/2025/02/court-training-ai-model-based-on-copyrighted-data-is-not-fair-use-as-a-matter-of-law/#page=1

Discussion of when and whether facts or citations can be copyrightable, and re-using them is or isn't "fair use" came down to a couple of issues. The defendant, Ross Intelligence, was found to have copied Thomson Reuters' "headnotes" in order to develop a competing product for commercial exploitation.

The court's definition of minimal creativity  -as reported by the legal IP Tech bloggers- was striking:

"The court rejected Ross Intelligence merger and scènes à faire arguments. Though the headnotes were drawn directly from uncopyrightable judicial opinions, the court analogized them to the choices made by a sculptor in selecting what to remove from a slab of marble."

The case will most probably be appealed, and the judge's ruling may be overturned, but it is worth watching.

For now, it does not appear to have ramifications for writers, unless AI is trained on one prolific author's works, and is used to write to order a novel like this author's novels, and this AI-generated novel is monetized in competition with the original author.

Unless... it might affect creators of recipe books. If a recipe is a list of ingredients, a list of equipment, and a list of activities in the preferred order, there's not a lot of creativity in the bare facts. The creativity and copyrightability comes from the "expression" of those facts.

Coming back to my musings on where AI might cross the line, I wonder what would happen if someone commanded AI to write a version of the Bible with a happy ending, or if someone were to order AI to generate a gospel according to Judas Iscariot.

Has it been done already?

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™  

https://www.spacesnark.com/  

https://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday   

 

 

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Hunter's Run by Gardner Dozois, George R. R. Martin, and Daniel Abraham by Karen S. Wiesner

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Hunter's Run

by Gardner Dozois, George R. R. Martin, and Daniel Abraham

by Karen S. Wiesner

 

 

Be aware that there are spoilers in this review. 

Hunter's Run is a science fiction novel published in 2007 and written over the span of 30 years by "three young authors over time": Gardner Dozois (who's credited with the original concept), George R. R. Martin, and Daniel Abraham. I reviewed one of Martin and Dozois' co-edited anthology collections (Rogues) back on June 28, 2024. Martin is, of course, the famed author of A Song of Ice and Fire (HBO's Game of Thrones). Dozois was a science fiction author before he passed in 2018 as well as the founding editor of The Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies (from 1984 through 2018) and Asimov's Science Fiction magazine (1986–2004). Abraham is a novelist best known for his The Long Price Quartet and The Dagger and the Coin fantasy series, and (with Ty Franck) as the co-author of The Expanse science fiction series under the joint pseudonym James S. A. Corey.  

In 1976 Dozois conceived of the story of a man floating in darkness. A year later, he was invited to teach at a summer science fiction writing workshop by Martin, who found Dozois's story interesting. Dozois felt stalled in continuing it so, after three years in a drawer, he asked Martin to collaborate. Martin wanted to explore the alien world of São Paulo. In 1982, Martin couldn't get any further in completing the story either, so he passed it back to Dozois. Neither was able to find a way to progress, and the book went back into a drawer until 2002. Martin brought it to the attention of a young "Turk", author Abraham, who completed it as a novella. Martin called it "Shadow Twin". It was published in 2004. Later, Dozois reworked it into a 300-page-plus novel and renamed it Hunter's Run. Despite how disjointed the writing of this story undeniably was (the full account of the process is included in the back matter of the published novel), it surprisingly does come together in a seamless and cohesive way. At no point in time did I feel like someone (or some two or three) else had written certain aspects of the story. If for no other reason, that does make this "experiment" quite an achievement.

Before I proceed any further, I'll again warn that there's no way to review this book the way I want to without giving away key aspects of the plot. If you want to read the story without being told those pivotal points, go read the book and come back to this review later. 

In this futuristic science fiction, humans have reached the stars but unfortunately alien species including the Silver Enye, Turu, Cian, and others have already claimed the choice worlds. However, these races allow human colonists (mostly the downtrodden, poor, and/or potential lawbreakers) to join in the world-building by crash-testing them on empty planets too dangerous to be colonized by the "worthy". 

The main character Ramón is a thoroughly despicable creep who came to the planet to escape the poverty and hopelessness he faced on Earth. Unfortunately, the capital city on São Paulo is no better. The only law in this place is survival. A prospector, Ramón drinks away whatever money he makes or spends it on the woman he's with, though certainly doesn't love or particularly even like. He's an abusive jerk (though Elena can be described exactly the same way) who ends up killing someone important. On the run in the wilderness "wastelands", he tells himself if he can find a rich mineral strike somewhere, he can start his life all over. He stumbles upon an alien installation. Before he can do anything about it, he's kidnapped by the aliens. 

When he comes to, he's told by the aliens that another man has discovered their location and they have to capture him before he reveals their existence to the human colonists back in São Paulo. Ramón is compelling to join that hunt. In the process, Ramón begins to bond with his captor Maneck. Eventually Ramón learns that the other human intruder was actually the original Ramón that the aliens have cloned to create him--he's the clone of the original Ramón. Despite this, Ramón begins to understand that these advanced aliens also landed on this hostile planet where they're just trying to survive. Cloning humans and trying to learn their behavior is simply a way for them to blend in and co-exist. 

The clone-Ramón manages to escape this captor and meets up with the older, jaded and, frankly, out of shape version of himself, who doesn't recognize him. It doesn't take long for clone-Ramón to realize he really, really does not like the original Ramón. He begins to question his own existence, intentions, and purpose as a result. When the original Ramón discovers who he is, survival is again the only option. The clone kills the original (whoa!) and tries to take up his old life in the capital--which means consequences of the original's crimes and imprisonment. Soon the clone decides he has more in common with the aliens and more chance at a life of peace and purpose with them. 

While all the authors who had hands in this project played with radically different ideas (told in the interviews in the back of the book) for Hunter's Run, at its heart, the theme is in the exploration of what it means to be human. Everything you've read thus far in this review are all the reasons I wanted to love this book. It sounds amazing, doesn't it? The subject matter, the setting, and the concept is utterly compelling to me as a person and a writer. I truly enjoyed the Enemy Mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_Mine_(film) overtones that pervaded the interactions of clone-Ramón and the alien. 

To me, the fatal flaw in Hunter's Run (and probably it's earlier version "Shadow Twin" as well) was that the authors jointly made the protagonist--and, by default, his clone--so unlikable and thoroughly despicable that I never got to the point of feeling like his/their story was captivating, nor were they worth rooting for. In his interview in the back of Hunter's Run, Dozois said, "There was an essay by Damon Knight complaining that almost all heroes in science fiction are middle-class white Americans whereas almost no one on Earth is… 'Where is the space hero who is Mexican?'…I made Ramón in the 1970s very stereotypical… We needed to move away from that." Given that glimpse of story creation, I found it highly ironic that the three authors, even working together, ultimately chose to make Ramón stereotypically violent and reprehensible, so much so that it was hard to feel sympathy for him on the basis of the fact that, wherever this man went, he constantly felt he had to fight from every side just to survive. Ramón as a person was portrayed as ruthless, selfish, and vicious. He made bad choices he couldn't blame anyone else for. Regardless of his merciless setting or the environment he was in, he was a man who would always be who and what he was…a creep. There's no sugar-coating that fact with philosophical, psychological, or cultural discourses. 

As the majority of this story was told from the point of view of his clone, who does--to his credit--seem to be at least aware his original self was a jackass, I experienced disappointment that the clone didn't seem significantly changed even after he realized who he was in relation to the original Ramón and admitted to himself he didn't care for his "predecessor". As Jerry Seinfeld said, "adjacent to refuse is refuse". I guess ultimately I strongly need to feel a protagonist is a hero, or more accurately, has the potential to become one through the course of a story, not simply a degree above a villain, as this clone character was. I could in no way conceive that clone-Ramón might break free of any association with his original counterpart. His motives only felt slightly less egotistical and "survival of the fittest" than the original Ramón's. I kind of wish the authors had chosen to tell the story from Maneck's perspective, or at least partially so. 

The end also bothered me because, again, it displayed so pointedly that clone-Ramón wasn't much better than the original. There was no clear resolution. Clone-Ramón escapes prison and heads back to the alien hideout, hoping to find a way to live with the aliens in peace--and the reason he does this is to escape the imprisonment he's facing and to better himself. We never learn whether the aliens are amicable to this. I hate endings that don't provide adequate resolutions. To me, this still feels like a story untold, as it certainly must have at the many stages the authors shelved the unfinished versions. 

While there was a lot to be impressed by here in terms of the thematic explorations which make this tale well worth reading and the masterly world building of these three amazing writers, sadly I didn't actually enjoy it at any point. Still, it's certainly something any lover of science fiction action/adventure tales and fans of these three authors should consider picking up. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

 

AI-Generated Persons

I've read more than one near-future story about people dealing with bereavement through interaction with computer simulations of the deceased. I had no idea they already existed. This company creates simulacra of clients by means of information, photos, and videos provided by the individual in life for that purpose:

You, Only Virtual

If you upload this kind of data to generate a Versona -- a virtual person -- your surviving loved ones can carry on conversations with "you." The Versona claims to personalize and "replicate" the unique conversational style the survivor had with a particular deceased loved one. It promises "an authentic connection that brings true comfort and familiarity" even after death. Supposedly, these AI "persons" will "continue to grow alongside you. . . . learn, evolve, and remember." Still more audaciously, the Versona purports to embody "the essence of your relationship, brought to life."

Are "griefbots" or "deadbots" a productive way of dealing with grief, though? This article explores potential problems:

Will We Live on in the Form of Virtual Avatars?

The more realistic the program becomes, the more likely that users will tend to forget they're talking to a machine, not the actual person. Even if the user doesn't get snared by this illusion, interacting with the software might delay or derail the normal progression of grief. One critic quoted in the article warns, “This could lengthen the mourning process and perpetuate the lack and suffering, because the object is there. It blurs the relationship with the machine. And you can’t turn them off, because they represent someone you love." Another potential hazard arises from the AI tendency to "hallucinate." Until that can be reliably prevented, a Versona might say things jarringly unlike the real person, causing the live user painful cognitive and emotional dissonance.

An article on the ethical and legal problems associated with digital avatars, such as issues around actors continuing to "appear" in films after their deaths:

Digital Avatars and Our Refusal to Die

Suppose it eventually becomes possible to upload a person's literal mind and self into a computer before death, as imagined in many SF works? Would that process avoid the problems and hazards inherent in an AI-created reincarnation? Or would the flesh-and-blood user still run the risk of being tempted to live in a fantasy world of virtual rather than real "relationship"? Would the uploaded personality be the "real" person in a meaningful sense?

There's also a commercially available program to let you talk with your future self:

Meet Future You

The website describes it as "an interactive experience for cultivating self-reflection and long-term thinking." They claim to use AI to create a "realistic conversation partner based on information you provide," which "lets you chat with a personalized version of your future self." This program seems less problematic than conversing with the posthumous avatar of a dead parent, spouse, etc. Users wouldn't be likely to get sucked into unrealistic expectations of Future You as long as they remember the software can't make actual predictions. It's "designed to aid exploration of aspirations" by producing "a vivid and realistic picture of what your future life could be like." It sounds like a fun way to explore options if the user doesn't mistake it for an infallible oracle. And it might be entertaining just to see and hear what the AI imagines you'll look and sound like years or decades down the road.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Rolling In The Weeds

Austrian archduchess and French queen consort Marie Antoinette was said by the French revolutionary "Sans-Culottes" to have suggested that the French peasants who could not afford their daily bread ought to eat cake.

Were the sans-culottes without their lower body garments on the "liar liar pants on fire" principle? That is not what history says, of course, nor what Wikipedia says, but to my knowledge, Wikipedia may be convenient but it is by no means accurate.

Would it be appalling for a modern day Marie Antoinette to advocate for the eating of kale instead of cake?

Caldwell B.Esselstyn advocated strongly for eating kale as part of a heart-health-restoration regimen, but even he and his wife tended not to eat the stalks, and you can eat them, you just need to cut them finely, cook them well, and disguise them in some other well-cooked dish, such as curry.

Here's a conspiracy theory for you: the Puritans killed the so-called witches of Salem because the ladies knew too much about free, wild herbs.

By the way, "Conspiracy Theory", IMHO, is a much over-used term. Sometimes, what they call a "theory" is indeed a conspiracy and not theoretical at all.

And so, to the "weeds".  My paternal grandmother used to say, "Waste not, want not".  She meant, if you don't waste food and other resources, you will not go hungry. My maternal grandfather used to save the electricity needed to boil an electric kettle by only adding to the kettle exactly the amount of water needed for his one mug of tea (or coffee).

Sorry about the tautology, but some folks think of a saucepan when I say "kettle".

One can economise on electricity, if one so wishes, by making sure to cook several dishes at the same time in the oven, when it is on. The same principle applies to what one puts in a saucepan of boiling water. For instance, you can layer veggies in a single saucepan, with the carrots and brussels sprouts and mukimame beans at the bottom; then mangetout beans, sugar snap peas and cauliflower chunks; and broccoli florets and asparagus on the top above water level in the steam. 

As I write, I am boiling a sweet potato in with my beetroots. The sweet potato brings up the water level, so I use les water, it takes on pretty stains from the beets, so has a tequila sunrise appearance when cut in half for rewarming in the oven, and it adds extra nutrients to the beet-water stock which I will set aside, cool, and later use to boil red beans or pinto beans. (Often, I will add barley or rice in with the beans.)

For further economy on electricity, cook beets and beans and rice etc early in the morning, on cheap rate electricity. If you have a solid hot plate, it holds the heat at no additional cost, so you can bring your pot to the boil and turn it off, go away for half and hour or an hour, and bring it back to the boil again. You'd be amazed what free residual heat will do.

What do you throw away? Are you composting food that you could be eating?

Do you know that you can eat the green parts of leeks and of green onions (no different from chives, but a little coarser), beetroot leaves, carrot leaves, broccoli stalks, cauliflower stalks, dandelions (from root to flower)?

When I buy carrots, and they come with leaves, I wash them, cut off the tops, store the carrots  upright in a mug in the fridge, maybe with a little water. Then, I take my favorite kitchen scissors (I have a fav pair, and two not-so-beloved pairs that I keep because they are multi-functional with parts for opening lids and snapping off bottle tops), and I snip the carrot leaflets off the stalks. I do discard the stalks...there's just too much roughage there.

I store the leaves in a sealed pot. If I have too many, I freeze some of them.

Here's a recipe for oyster stuffing made from stale bread and carrot leaves, aka weeds. 

INGREDIENTS

Tinned oysters in liquor (3 or 3 cans).  If oysters are a problem, baby clams work just as well. Or suriname. Or finely diced, cooked chicken.

 

Carrot leaves or torn kale or wilted lettuce, or arugula, or green tops of green onions.

Wheat bran (or the finely sliced stalks from kale).

 

One serving stale bread or stale bap, crumbled between fingers or palms.

 

Shake of garlic/herb powder. 

 

Extra-virgin olive oil.  

 

Portabella mushroom (or whatever mushrooms are available and starting to go mottled in your fridge),  

 

Shake of black pepper (piperine is good for you).

 

Unless allergic, you always want to mix mushrooms with oysters because one has heart-healthy potasium and the other has zinc (for reproductive-system health), and those minerals work best together.

 

Carrot leaves contain folate, Vitamin K, and more, and they  help metablism and immunity and they meet the need to eat some leaves every day.

 

WHAT TO DO WITH THEM 

 

Drain the oyster liquor into a deep, narrow saucepan, and bring to boil.

 

Put a little hot water into the bottom of each emptied oyster tin, swish around, pour it into the next tin, etc to be sure you waste no undiluted drop of oyster residue and flakes left in the tin. Add that to the boil.

 

If you have finely diced cauliflower stalk or broccoli stalk, and grated cauliflower, you can add that.If you have brussels sprout leaves that have dropped off brussels sprouts in previous cooking, or fragments of carrot, that can go in (also unsalted vegetable cooking water from a previous day).

 

By the way, you should never need to buy vegetable broth. If you reuse the water that you cook your veggies in, you have your own veggie stock or broth for free.

 

While the broth comes to the boil, examine every oyster to be sure there are no shell fragments. Every tin that I've ever opened has at least one shell fragment.

 

Crumble the stale bread into the boiling liquor, stir, and turn off the heat.

Add oysters, roughly diced mushroom, herbs, carrot leaves, shake of pepper, garlic if you like it (but never garlic salt).

 

Stir.

 

Put a little olive oil in the bottom of a glass casserole.  Pile in the stuffing mixture. Put in 350 - 400 degree oven for half an hour.

 

Enjoy.

 

SUGGESTIONS FOR ON-THE-SIDE: 

 

Chopped beetroots recooked in olive oil and Jalapeno or Red Pepper jam by Braswells; 

 

Beans -- red or pinto beans cooked from scratch in beetroot cooking water (possibly supplemented with taco powder to thicken, left over tomatoes and/or left over fragments of vegetable peppers.) 

 

Baby spinach boiled with arugula, torn kale, green tops of leek or of green onions, chopped garlic.... strained (reserve the cooking water), put into a casserole or ovenproof dish, and topped with a little real butter, and all put in the oven with the oyster stuffing.

 

Guac. 

 

Sweet corn.If you like eye- and brain- healthy sweet corn, buy it on the cob, and leave a shucked cob out overnight to shrink just a little, then prise niblets off, row by row so that the individual niblets or kernels retain the kernels' tip caps (the brown inner tip) which are the most bowel-beneficial part of the corn (provided you don't have celiac disease). The cob you discard should look like a toothless jawbone. Processed corn is just the fleshy bits sliced off, with the recessed good bits left behind and discarded.

 

All the best, 

Rowena Cherry 

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Lock Every Door by Riley Sager by Karen S. Wiesner

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: Lock Every Door by Riley Sager

by Karen S. Wiesner

 

 

Lock Every Door was published in 2019, written by Riley Sager (pen name of author Todd Ritter). This is the second Sager novel I've read (I reviewed Home Before Dark on July 26, 2024). This Gothic suspense horror drew many comparisons to Rosemary's Baby, maybe because Sager dedicated the book to Ira Levin. I can see the reason for the comparison in the story parallels. 

In this novel, Jules Larsen is without family or job, and her boyfriend kicks her when she's down by cheating. Needing money and a place to stay fast, she interviews for a luxurious apartment sitter position at an exclusive New York City building called the Bartholomew, which has both rich and famous tenants and a checkered history filled with intriguing deaths and disappearances. 

In exchange for apartment sitting for three months, Jules will be given $1200 (which I found to be a pretty pathetic sum, considering the limitations placed on her during this time, but I suppose the point is that most of these sitters have no other place to live and need money badly). The only catch is three weird rules that she has to follow while living there: No visitors, no nights spent away from the apartment, and no disturbing the other residents. From the first, Jules can't seem to help herself from playing amateur sleuth. The disappearances of previous sitters is uncanny, considering all were broke, homeless, and without family. 

I enjoyed the Rosemary's Baby overtones that opened this story, along with the creepiness of the building with gargoyle statues guarding it, and the believability of this desperate character taking a job that doesn't seem quite smart. However, I strongly felt that the mystery investigation aspect smothered the very long, middle portion of the story. I found myself bored as more and more suspicious disappearances were discovered, and Jules tracked down every lead. I think at least a hundred pages could have easily been cropped out of the middle without significantly changing much of anything in the overall story. I guess ultimately I wanted much more horror, much less Scooby Doo. I did appreciate the social commentary aspect of how easy it is for penniless, orphaned young adults to fall through the cracks with hardly anyone--least of all law enforcement--even noticing. 

This well-written story did provide a rich tapestry when it came to setting and character development. I will say that I guessed the culprit or culprits almost right away, and I actually had a strong inkling why it was done as well--the second, short "flash forward" scene that the author included told me basically everything I needed to know. Admittedly, I'm a mystery writer myself so maybe it's harder to fool me than the other reviewers who all claimed this story had a lot of twists, turns, and surprises that I didn't find evident myself. However, oddly enough, I did think the red herrings were particularly well done and compelling. There's talk of this novel in development as a TV series by Paramount. All in all, this one is worth a read, and I do plan to pick up more of Sager's books in the future. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/