Category: Guest Contributors

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 24SEP2024 – Death of SF Magazines

photog Book Reviews, Chemist, Guest Contributors, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , ,

I have always enjoyed the shot story format. For a while, in the 60s & 70s, some of the big name authors were competing with each other to write a complete story on the back of a picture postcard. Some of these were amazingly good!
As for Analog, I gave up on it a long time ago (30 years?). Their Science Fact articles were all doom and gloom:
“We are all going to die and thee is nothing you can do about it!”
Or:
“Here is why FTL travel, Nuclear fusion, laser defenses, etc. won’t work and cannot work.”

And, to me, the Fiction was woke before woke was a thing. So I stopped buying after I realized I had a years worth of issues that I had not read and could not motivate myself to read.
I suspect that Analog (and maybe the others) got infected by the same liberal women who took over the NY publishing houses.

Another datapoint: I recall talking to a successful SciFi author in the 80s who switched from writing short stories to novels. When asked why, he said: “Its just as hard to sell a short story as a novel, but novels pay a hell of a lot better.”

BTW, Photog, another non-woke publishing house is Chris Kennedy Publishing.
You might consider sending him a copy of your novel.
https://chriskennedypublishing.com/

Tom’s World – 09SEP2025 – Drugs

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TomD

Truthfully, I went through a phase when I did drugs but that ended well over 40 years ago. I was lucky, not smart, no incredible willpower, just lucky. I apparently didn’t possess whatever gene creates the predilection to addiction and dependency. I could try something and say, “That was kinda cool” and walk away. A lot of people do have that gene and they are the unfortunates that battle dependency their entire lives. Some people, bless them, do possess that gene but also have a strength of character to refuse to succumb to alcohol, or drugs of lord knows what type.

A big problem being there have been some frightening drugs created over the last decades, drugs so horrendously addicting and/or destructive. I’m not certain that that it is possible to 100% solve the problem but, with these, an effort has to be made.

Having know a few of the addictive unfortunates, I have some sympathy and wouldn’t accept any solution that required that addicted users end in a jail cell.

I never dabbled with the supply side but obviously knew people who did and also know there is, and will always be, a percentage of the population that can no more resist the prospect of easy and big money than the users can resist the product.

I have no ideal what the solution could be other than to contain it to whatever extent possible. A lot of lives ruined and this includes especially alcohol. I do know that simply criminalizing every aspect, even strongly, reduces the problem but does not eliminate. Ever heard of Prohibition? That worked well, humm?

You’d think that the flood of fentanyl would act to suppress drug use because if you have to worry that the next dose of your whatever contains a fatal dose of something unexpected.

As far as blowing people away who are part of this plague of Musk level rich narco-terrorism? I’m perfectly okay with that.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 03SEP2025 – Now and Forever

photog Current Events, Guest Contributors, Tregonsee

For some reason I always come back to Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings (https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm). It is 10 stanzas so a little long to stick in a post (if it is new to you it is well worth going and reading it), but here are the last two talking stanzas about how things end

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

It is an appalling good prediction, Kipling could see things screwing up well over 100 years ago (the poem was first published in 1919) and got them darn near spot on.