Who Wants to Live Forever?

That's roughly the title of an article I came across in the newspaper over the weekend:

Want to Live Forever?

Disappontingly, the article doesn't offer the secret to immortality. It suggests three main ways of extending one's lifespan, two of them rather mundane: Vitamin B12 as an aid to physical and mental health in aging; maintaining optimal sleep rhythms; becoming a Greenland shark. Found to live two centuries or more, Greenland sharks have "evolved resilience to molecular and tissue damage over time."

Here's the Wikipedia page on the longest-lived known species in various categories:

List of Longest-Living Organisms

Even not counting colonies, clones, microbes, or creatures such as the "immortal jellyfish" (reverting to a larval stage and cycling through repeated growth phases), it's worth noting that almost all the extraordinarily long-lived species -- those that exceed the normal human lifespan -- aren't mammals. Some trees are 4000 years old or more. The glass sponge can reach 10,000 years. Another type of sponge is known to live to 1550 years, while tubeworms may reach 1000. One particular Greenland shark may be over 500 years old, the longest living vertebrate. Giant tortoises' lifespans have been estimated at approximately or, in at least one case, beyond 200 years. Bowhead whales may reach two centuries, making them the longest-lived mammals. Some birds live to over 100. Virtually all the other animals on the list capable of outliving us aren't warmblooded. Moreover, many of them dwell in cold environments, particularly aquatic. Is there something about cold water that promotes longevity?

Judging from the known record-holders among humans, our maximum lifespan peaks around 120. Therefore, Robert Heinlein's fascinating life-extension project, as described in METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN and related works such as TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE and TO SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET, simply wouldn't work the way it's portrayed. If the genetically determined limit on our lifespan is set at 120, no amount of concentrated inbreeding among individuals with genes for longevity would produce descendants surviving for multiple centuries. The breeding project couldn't create new genes. A mutation would be needed; in the introduction to TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE, it's explicitly stated that Lazarus Long, born near the beginning of the multigenerational project and practically immortal (although even he, like everybody else, requires artificial life-extension treatments to go on surviving indefinitely), owes his phenomenal age and perpetual youth to a mutation. In much later generations, after he has spread his genes throughout the network of "Howard Families," it would be plausible for all their offspring to live for centuries without aging beyond maturity. But not at the time of METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN.

Anyway, as the theme song to the TV series HIGHLANDER puts it, who wants to live forever? One society in Jonathan Swift's GULLVER'S TRAVELS includes a subset of immortal people. They do grow old, however, and they have an unhappy lot in other ways. Senility inevitably creeps up on them. Well before that, at a certain point in their lives they are declared legally dead, their possessions transferred to their heirs. Classical mythology features a similar cautionary tale, about a goddess who petitions endless life for her lover but forgets to include endless youth. Even if immortals remained in the prime of perpetual health, would they really want to outlive their mortal loved ones? Boredom with deathless existence appears frequently in vampire stories, leading to suicide by daylight (in the case of those vulnerable to the sun). TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE starts with Lazarus Long trying to kill himself out of boredom. Endless extension of earthly life as we know it doesn't sound too appealing. Linear survival in "chronos" -- ordinary clock time -- wouldn't be the same as eternal life in "kairos," a richer, multidimensional mode of life.

Margaret L. Carter

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

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

by Karen S. Wiesner 

  Beware spoilers! 

Of late on the Alien Romances Blog, I've been reviewing "reimagined and unconventional fairytales" written by T. Kingfisher. I came up with this list of her selections, arranged below on the basis of their publication dates: 

The Seventh Bride ("Mr. Fox"/"The Robber Bridegroom", and other aberrations)         

Bryony and Roses ("Beauty and the Beast")

The Raven and the Reindeer ("The Snow Queen") 

Thornhedge ("Sleeping Beauty")

A Sorceress Comes to Call ("Goose Girl")

Hemlock & Silver ("Snow White") 

In my first take on Kingfisher's loose renderings of fairytales, I reviewed Nettle & Bone, which is basically a subversion of everything that's been done in a fairytale all rolled into one, along with Bryony and Roses and Thornhedge. After that, I reviewed The Seventh Bride by itself. 

In preparation for reading A Sorceress Comes to Call, a 2024 fantasy release focused on "a dark retelling" (which is what it's been described as in reviews and summaries), I refreshed myself on the 1815 German tale "The Goose Girl" published in Grimm's Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm. You can find it online free in many different places. 

The crux of that story is that a mother trusts a maid who works for them to ensure her princess daughter gets delivered safely to the prince she'll be marrying. The mother (not apparently a witch?) makes some supernatural preparations to that end--namely, ensuring their magical horse Falada goes along and by giving her daughter a handkerchief that's been enchanted. En route (and long story short), the princess loses her charm (literally, it falls out of her bosom and gets washed down the stream; bye-bye enchantment--it floats out of the story from that point on, out of sight and out of mind) while the maid declares mutiny and forces the princess to swap roles (and clothes) with her so she can pose as the princess. Meanwhile, the real one becomes her maid. This schemer extracts an oath from the princess to prevent her from telling the truth to the royal family she'll be marrying into. The maid anticipates becoming rich and pampered for the rest of her days. It's a brilliant plan, really, until they get to the castle of the bridegroom. The real princess is sent to care for the geese, the horse is promptly beheaded, and the maid is whisked away to prepare for her happily-ever-after. 

Alas, the destiny of royalty can't be hidden or squelched under rags and menial labor…you know, or something. When the princess lets down her golden hair, the boy Conrad she works with is possessed with the desire to snatch a few of the valuable tresses, so she voices an enchantment to make his hat blow away so she has time to brush out and plait her hair each day. Thank goodness for her princess hair, or this tale would have gone seriously wrong! And let's not get into how, if she's like her mom and can conjure enchantments, why not produce one that sets this all aright? 

Anyway, this happens between "The Goose Girl" and Conrad many times. Eventually, he gets sick of weird things happening around her, goes to the king (apparently any Tom, Dick and Harry can approach the king himself for any reason) and says he won't herd geese with her anymore. The king convinces him to continue one more day, and that morning the king watches in stealth. Finding things just as Conrad told him they were with this strange girl, the king summons her and orders her to tell him her story. She says she can't because of the oath the maid dragged out of her. He suggests she go tell the stove then. (Yes, you read that right.) She climbs in, lays her troubles bare to the cast iron, and he hears everything. 

At that point, the king decides to trick the maid into choosing the manner of her own punishment. Hey presto! All gets swapped back to the way they're fated to be. We've all long forgotten the magical elements her mother sent her on her way bearing. So, what was the point of them? Who knows? In any case, I'm sure the prince must not have been swindled into believing the maid was authentic at any point because he sure doesn't seem to mind the new bride that gets traded in while the one he thought he was going to marry ends up dragged naked through the kingdom in a barrel filled with spikes. Summary: I can safely say that T. Kingfisher's version wasn't much darker than the original. 

Okay, so now that you know the basis of "The Goose Girl" story (if for some odd reason you didn't already know it), I'll tell you that A Sorceress Comes to Call is almost nothing like it. To even call it a loose rendition is a stretch. For the life of me, I couldn't twist or finagle Kingfisher's story to fit much of anything within the fairytale it was supposedly based on beyond that, in A Sorceress Comes to Call, there's a magical horse named Falada who eventually becomes headless and there were geese (after a fashion) in the retelling. 

None of this is actually a judgment on Kingfisher's story, nor was there any real sadness in there not being much by way of parallels between these two. I would, however, like to hear it directly from the author why or how the original story inspired her tale. 'Cause I just don't get it. Almost always, Kingfisher includes some illumination about her inspiration for the story in the note she puts at the end of nearly all her books. With this one, she didn't bother to mention it, and this is the one I'm most wanting an explanation for. Sigh. Getting past that (I will eventually), I will say that A Sorceress Comes to Call was just as unique and unexpected as its predecessor. 

Fourteen-year-old Cordelia isn't a princess and her mother is not only a living nightmare but also a dreadful sorceress with a horse-shaped familiar. When their finances run to ground, Evangeline decides to snag a rich squire for herself. In order to do so, she first has to win him with her natural charm, as any magical enchantment enhancements would be broken during the church wedding ceremony (which uses wine, salt, and water) to ensure nothing unholy takes place. What Evangeline hasn't counted on is the Squire's sister Hester, a woman who chose to be a spinster (long story you'll discover in the course of reading this). Hester befriends Cordelia and realizes her mother is far removed from the innocent, sweet woman of misfortune she appears to be--only on the surface. From that point on, Hester becomes determined to save her brother along with this poor, abused daughter of an evil witch. But how to do that? 

I would have liked to know more specifics about Evangeline's origins, though the story does give a basic presumption about what happened to the most powerful sorceresses in that time period and area. Outside of that, the story told was very satisfying, filled with thoroughly engaging characters. Again, Kingfisher's lively prose made for a humorous, suspenseful journey toward solving a most beguiling conundrum about what to do when a sorceress comes to call. 

I'm hoping to get hold of Kingfisher's newest (at the time of this writing in November 2025), Hemlock & Silver, soon for review to complete the circle of fairytale-spun retellings. Don't miss this one. It may not be anything like the origin story, which you might want to peruse before or after, but it's definitely worth a read on its own, considerable merits. 

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

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

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

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

A Sorceress Comes to Call

A SORCERESS COMES TO CALL, by T. Kingfisher is a full-length novel (over 300 pages) set in a quasi-Regency society and inspired by the fairy tale “The Goose Girl.” Although the book doesn’t follow the plot of the traditional story to any significant extent, they share several elements: The magical and eventually decapitated horse Falada; a heroine and villainess, neither of whom is what she seems, moving into a wealthy household; and geese -- as the LOCUS review puts it, attack geese. The first chapter introduces Cordelia, a fourteen-year-old girl trapped in an appalling situation by her subtly abusive mother. The opening scenes and Cordelia’s despairing reflections make painful reading. Her mother, Evangeline, exercises only one kind of magic so far as we witness, but it’s a terrifyingly powerful one. As punishment or sometimes apparently at random whim, she makes Cordelia “obedient.” In that condition, the girl has no control over any voluntary physical actions except blinking and moving her eyes. Her mother operates her body like a puppet, keeping Cordelia in that condition for hours or occasionally longer. Moreover, Cordelia has no privacy aside from her rides on Falada; her mother doesn’t allow her to close any doors in the house. (Contrary to the book’s blurb, the rooms do have doors.) Evangeline, of course, claims she loves her daughter and inflicts this control for her own good. Cordelia manages to make one friend during her horseback rides, a consolation ruined by the discovery that the friend’s father is Evangeline’s “benefactor.”

After the sudden, violent termination of the “benefactor” relationship, Evangeline captures the interest of a generous country squire, who invites her and her daughter for an extended visit. Evangeline intends to trap him into marriage, but she can’t achieve that goal with magic because certain elements of the wedding ceremony cancel spells. She can, however, use her powers to manipulate him indirectly. She has already demonstrated her ability and willingness to inflict horrible consequences on people who offend her, compelling victims to maim or kill themselves or others. Because everyone who believes in sorcerers at all thinks they’re capable of only weak effects such as illusions, nobody suspects her involvement in those crimes. Thus Cordelia contemplates with helpless terror what her mother might do to the squire and his innocent household. Here’s where one of Kingfisher’s most engaging secondary characters (and that’s saying something) comes in.

The squire’s middle-aged sister, Hester, a goose fancier, takes an instant aversion to Evangeline but at first doesn’t know what to make of Cordelia. When Hester learns the truth about Cordelia’s plight and her mother’s evil, the aging spinster recruits a former suiter who’s still a dear friend, plus her closest female friends, each with their own entertaining quirks, to combat the sorceress. It's a pleasure to see an older, single, rather ordinary woman playing a major role in a fantasy novel. In addition to fascinating character interaction and development, the story features library research into arcane lore, scintillating dialogue, desperate confrontations, and moments of bone-chilling horror. Codelia grows into an independent person and discovers her own hidden strength. After narrow escapes, dark moments, and twists designed to surprise even the most genre-savvy fans, the good guys attain a well-deserved victory. A satisfying experience for devotees of T. Kingfisher’s fantasy and horror as well as a worthy stand-alone introduction to her work for new readers.

Margaret L. Carter

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

Not The Worst Investment

The worst investment that I ever made was to invest $5,000 to buy shares directly from the owner of the first publishing "house" that published a version of "Forced Mate". I received a share certificate, but the publishing house "went under". My loss was 100%.

On the upside, I met some wonderful friends who went on to great success with other houses, and who gave me fantastic advice, but they would have done that without my investment in the company.

This is not about those great ladies, or that instructive experience. This is about my brother and sister authors who make money from writing (no matter how little or how much) and about Individual Retirement Accounts.

If you earn, you can set up an IRA. Disclaimer, I am not a qualified financial advisor.... and I did not stay at a motel chain last night.

If you have an IRA, be it Roth or Rollover, you can day trade in volatile markets and not pay capital gains taxes. You can buy a stock in the pre-market on a down day, sell it later that day if it pops, buy it back when it drops, rinse and repeat, and you will pay no tax.

In my opinion, in an IRA, you should do the reverse standard behavior, which is to let winners "ride". Let losers ride because you cannot harvest losses to offset gains. With gainers, take profits. 

For security of your IRA, use a unique name instead of your email address, and do not use that name on any other accounts. Ditto, use a unique password that you do not use anywhere else. Your password might be a "pass phrase" or "pass sentence", such as "Daily, I eat garlic...NOT" with a few substitutions of numerals for vowels. 

A highly creative and mischievous friend of mine once wanted to get around a particular State's ban on the use of coarse words on vanity license plates. She secured IVn1k8or.  

IV is the Roman numeral for 4. Knowing that you can figure out the derogatory noun. Please do not enter the correct answer as a Comment.

George Bernard Shaw did something similar with the word "fish". He said it could be spelled gh-oe-ti.

The "gh" sounds like "f" as in "cough".

"Oe" as in Oedipus sounds like "I".

"ti" has a "shhh" sound as in the middle of "ambitious".

Back to being secure....

Refuse to agree to set up your voice as authentication. Some brokerage houses will try to force that on you, and it is a very stupid policy now that a criminal only needs a couple of seconds of your recorded voice to create deep fake sentences using AI.

Do not "save" or "remember" that ID and password on any application or on your browser or device regardless of convenience.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: The Complete Adventures of the Borrowers by Mary Norton by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review of The Complete Adventures of the Borrowers

by Mary Norton

by Karen S. Wiesner 

   Be aware that there may be spoilers in this review. 

One of my first forays into fantasy literature was Mary Norton's timeless adventure series about a family of little people living in the walls and floor of an English home. These little beings are called Borrowers because they borrow from the human "beans" who live in the house--borrow in the sense that they never give any of these things back, of course! Even their names were apparently borrowed from human objects. The series had five installments including The Borrowers (1952 but 1953 for the US version), The Borrowers Afield (1955), The Borrowers Afloat (1959), The Borrowers Aloft (1961), and The Borrowers Avenged (1982). 

The saga follows the Clock family (consisting of father and mother, Pod and Homily, and their teenage daughter, Arrietty). Their original home was based on the place the author was herself raised, namely The Cedars. Arrietty is fascinated by "Big People" and gets into all sorts of trouble because of it. In the first book, she befriends "the Boy", who eventually delivers a letter to other Borrowers, Arrietty's aunt, uncle, and children who she's heard "emigrated". The Boy gives them dollhouse furniture and other useful things, but the household cook Mrs. Driver and the gardener Crampfurl become suspicious. Forced to flee, the family ends up living in an old boot, and the mysterious, wild Borrower boy Spiller, who's around Arrietty's age, brings them food. Each subsequent installment has the Borrowers trying to find a permanent place to call home, away from those who want to make their existence known to the world (for profit). Beyond being titled alliteratively and even alphabetically, interestingly, with Books 2-5, all the stories are named for what happens at the very end of each title. Specifically, at the end of Book 1, the Borrower family finds themselves "afield"; at the end of 2, they're "afloat"; at the end of 3, they're "aloft"; and at the end of 5, they're at last "avenged".   

The characters and plots are winsome, compelling, and chock-full of old-fashioned fun. While the specified reading age is 8-12, why deny yourself the pleasure of such a magical story filled with the journeys of tiny creatures most of us hoped really existed when we were young?  In 1983, a 700-page omnibus including all five stories was published at a very reasonable price. Included with it was a novelette called Poor Stainless--A New Story About the Borrowers, which was written in 1966 and published posthumously. This was apparently a story Homily told Arrietty, no doubt to scare her into submission. In it, Stainless, a Borrower, got lost. I suspect the plucky, adventurous Arrietty went forth unmoved and unimpeded after hearing it. Despite being written in the 50s, Arrietty was a female empowered! She seemed to realize she might be the last Borrower and couldn't and wouldn't be held back by outdated beliefs that women were the weaker sex. Survival is no respecter of short-sighted and erroneous labels.

As I said, this was my first taste of fantasy novels growing up. Though generally my own family went home (our permanent residence in Wisconsin) before school started each year,  after a summer spent in whatever place my dad was working temporarily, this particular year my brother, sister, and I actually started school in the state we were in (South Dakota that time, I believe). I read the first three Borrowers' installments as school library books while there, but I was only a little more than half through the fourth story when we had to go home. I sought out the book after that, hoping to finish it, but I never quite got back into the series, though I know the gist of how it ended (the title specifically told me they'd be "afloat" and Pod had been working on the hot-air balloon within the story). Until recently, I've never finished Book 4 nor read the final series book that came out much, much later than the others (30 years! As an author myself, that's simply beyond imagining!), nor the novelette. I purchased the boxed set, which had the Stainless short, though the original "short author's note" wasn't included with it. As this series holds a ton of nostalgia for me, in 2026, I did at long last finish Book 4, the novelette, and Book 5, which introduced at least one new Borrower and ended on a satisfying happily ever after for this ingenious little family. 

You might be interested to know that many movies and TV series have been launched with roots that go back to Norton's classic Borrowers Series, as well as a similar series called The Littles, first published in 1967, written by John Peterson, about little people with mouse-like features (tail included) that live in a house with a family called Bigg. As you'll probably guess, I also read that when I was much younger, and enjoyed it, although it's always been The Borrowers that held my heart. Give it a try. I can't imagine you won't be glad you did.

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/

Thoughts on Astrophage

Although I haven't read Andy Weir's PROJECT HAIL MARY or watched the movie, I was intrigued by an article about it in the May-June 2026 issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. The antagonist in this story, the Astrophage, is a species of algae that feeds on the energy of stars, ultimately making any planets orbiting them uninhabitable. The article explores whether any real-life extremophile organisms can do what this microbe does.

One analogous ability of an actual earthly life form: A bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand ionizing radiation beyond what it would encounter in interstellar space, with a cell wall that shields against radiation and the ability to repair damaged DNA by having multiple copies of its genome.

What about the heat of the sun or other stars? The most heat-resistant terrestrial microbe, Methanopyrus kandleri, can survive extreme temperatures up to 251 degrees F. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be able to survive sun-level heat.

Another ability of Astrophage unavailable to earthly organisms: It can travel through space at "ridiculous speeds using a specific wavelength of infrared light." No real-world microbe can do that.

What about changing a planet's climate to make it unlivable? Two and a half billion years ago, cyanobacteria transformed Earth's atmosphere to an oxygen environment, good for us but lethal to some previously existing life forms. Today, greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide "are primarily microbial in origin."

So we find that "tiny things" far too small for us to perceive without special instruments "can have mighty impacts on an entire planet." As the article's conclusion admonishes, we big creatures should remain mindful of the mighty impacts we can have.

Margaret L. Carter

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

The Write Stuff

In the Anthropic lawsuit, the court ruled only on the use of written works taken from pirate sites. It seems that, if authors fail or neglect to expressly reserve all rights to use their works for training AI, then such uses are Fair Use.

Now, along comes the Authors Guild with some suggested wording for authors to insert into their publishing contracts.

Authors Guild recommends that AI is not --not-- used for editing, translating, audiobook narrating etc, and that rights are withheld for derivative use of authors' biographies and private, personal information.

https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/ai-model-clauses/

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ 

https://www.spacesnark.com/  

https://www.rowenacherry.com

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review "The Ice Dragon" by George R. R. Martin by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review

"The Ice Dragon" by George R. R. Martin

by Karen S. Wiesner

  Beware potential spoilers! 

Latter editions of George R. R. Martin's "The Ice Dragon" saw it becoming a children's fantasy novella (120 pages) geared toward 7 to 12 year olds. However, I don't believe it was originally intended to be for kids. First published in 1980 in the Dragons of Light anthology, it was also included in Martin's 1987 collection Portraits of His Children. 2007 saw the story reworked, complete with new illustrations, and then again in 2014. 

The children's version was the third audiobook I'd listened to on my library's Libby app. The reading was very short and, unfortunately, I didn't have access to any of the illustrations that probably made the story even more compelling. Adara is a strange young girl, a child of winter, with an appearance that sounds distinctly like the Cold Others in A Song of Ice and Fire--pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes--who befriends an ice dragon. Martin says that this story wasn't originally set in the same world as A Song of Ice and Fire since that setting didn't exist when he wrote it…which doesn't necessarily discount it from being. However, the newest edition of the children's story may have been tailored a bit more than earlier renditions toward his most popular series' setting. In the fifth book of that series, A Dance With Dragons, while Jon Snow descends the Wall, he thinks of an ice dragon in the sentence: "The wind was gusting, cold as the breath of the ice dragon in the tales Old Nan had told when Jon was a boy." I'd love to believe this story was set in that world, whether or not it actually was. By the way, if you're interested in the origins of Martin's Westeros, visit https://bookanalysis.com/game-of-thrones/first-men/, where you're sure to find something compelling you probably didn't already know. 

At the time of the opening in this story, no dragons have been tamed by humans. Adara is the first and, when fiery dragons attack her family's farm, she must call upon her ice dragon and all her courage to save them. 

More than six months after listening to the audiobook version, I read this story for myself within the author's Dreamsongs, Volume I anthology and enjoyed it immensely there (although I didn't really connect with more than a couple of other stories within that collection--sorry to say!). As I said at the beginning of this review, I don't believe this early version of "The Ice Dragon" was intended for children, considering that it was fairly graphic in certain places, though I'm convinced it was presented in this particular anthology the way it was intended to be before being reworked and repurposed so often. Whether you're a child or an adult, if you like dragons, I advise you not to miss this one. 

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

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