Category: Book Reviews

Insightful book reviews by our staff

When I Was Your Age Television Was Called Books

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When I was a kid, I was a science fiction fanatic.  I went to the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and pored over the shelves.  I read everything they had and then I went to the next closest library and found what they had that was different.  And so on and so forth.  Until I reached the main branch; “Grand Army Plaza.”  And then there was no more.  So, all that was left until a new book made its way to the shelves was the monthly edition of Analog; the science fiction magazine where new stuff was to be found.  Sometimes there was a novel serialization by some well-known author like Heinlein or Frederik Pohl or Joe Haldeman or Gordon Dickson.  But more often there were short stories by anyone and everyone.  Not all of them were great or even good but they were still fun to read.  I had my own subscription for a number of years.  Then I found Camera Girl and I had too much to do with work and school to read anything but textbooks.  But I still saw the Analog covers at the local magazine rack down by the local El stop of the NYC subway.

But once I left New York, I confess I completely lost track of Analog.  I guess I just assumed that it (and its competitors; Asimov’s and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) were still out there chugging along even without me.

Turns out I was wrong.  Apparently, they’re all dead or dying.  The market for short science fiction has completely dried up.  Even the anthologies that used to collect these stories and sell them as books have stopped making money.

I guess none of this is surprising to folks who understand how the mass marketing of entertainment has changed.  I guess it only makes sense that the same generations that refuse to buy music and refuse to buy movies would also refuse to buy books and magazines.

Apparently, what they will buy are video games.  Now that reminds me of an old joke from an old movie.  There’s a scene at the beginning of the movie “The Princess Bride” where the grandfather played by Peter Falk is trying to read a story to his grandson who is playing a video game and objecting that instead of a book he wants to watch television so Falk says, “When I was your age television was called books!”

So, I’m at least two generations too late to imagine Americans reading short stories.  Now isn’t that amazing.  Or is it just paying for books that’s obsolete?  I think it must be the latter.  I understand there are free websites where authors provide their stories to consumers and they support these writers somewhat indirectly through Patreon or other means.  I guess this could be the new economy.  It seems as improbable as the world of the “Matrix” where human beings acting as bio-batteries power the cyber world they dream through.

Maybe I’d better find one of these sites and see if I can get these penniless zoomers to read my stuff.  I think I might see if I can play this three-penny opera thing that’s growing up in this brave new world.

Lost Histories

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Lots of fantasy and science fiction authors have used the rediscovered history theme.  I think maybe Robert Howard used it for Conan and maybe some of his other sword and sorcery stuff.  Tolkien sort of used it for the Lord of the Rings.  The Red Book of Westmarch is supposed to be the source from which he wrote his books.

So, the conceit is usually a scholar is searching through old manuscripts and suddenly finds stories that somehow no one has ever read before.  I guess maybe a case could be made that an existing manuscript might have a palimpsest layer that couldn’t previously be seen or read and now because of advances in sensing techniques it can.

But usually, this kind of text underneath text is limited to at most a few pages of written language.  But as anyone who has been a religious reader of this site knows, the Roman papyri from the ruins of Herculaneum are slowly and painfully being deciphered using a form of x-ray tomography.  These charred and unopenable papyrus scrolls are being read right through the other layers of charred plant material by an artificial intelligence that can scan the three-dimensional surface of the scroll in its rolled up and damaged condition.

Currently the progress is glacially slow.  And this is even though a million-dollar prize has been announced for the tech genius who can take the scans and turn it into text.  Currently the part of the library being examined contains the works of an obscure stoic philosopher which has extremely limited popular appeal.  But there have been claims made that the total library was an extensive collection of Graeco-Roman literature and history.

If this turns out to be true and the scanning technology becomes robust, there may be many lost masterpieces of ancient writing to be found.  Lost plays by Sophocles and histories of ancient peoples like the Etruscans.  Every classical scholar has a wish list of what would be wonderful to recover.

But what comes to my mind is what a perfect place to find some lost history with fantasy or science fiction elements.  Now exactly what they would be is something that will require careful thought.  As I said there have been a lot of stories somewhat in this vein.  The trick would be to allow this history to tie into the present day in some way.  There could be detailed information of something that’s been buried and could be retrieved.  Or maybe it’s something that’s hidden in plain sight and possibly still operating in the present day.

So, this is the vaguest of outlines and needs lots of thought but while I was out watering the vegetable patch and photographing half-grown preying mantids it occurred to me.  And since I never have an undocumented thought, lo and behold; here it is.  It occurs to me I’ve never written a horror story.  Mostly I just make fun of H.P. Lovecraft but a two-thousand-year-old Etruscan demon might be something I could get interested in.  And since we know next to nothing about the Etruscans, I could make up anything I wanted and no one could definitively call me out on any of it.  What could be lazier?

I Feel Like a Phoenix Rising Over Arizona

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The suffering is over.  The waiting is over.  The only thing I have left to do this week is get the oil changed on my car.  I can read, write, watch movies, sit in a hammock in the shade (well, if I had a hammock), write poetry (not good poetry), plot the overthrow of the Dunwich town government, laugh in the face of death, learn to play the piano; you name it!

Great Caesar’s ghost!  I’m exhausted just reading that list.

So, emerging from my forced isolation I see that nothing of note has happened in the last five days.  The endless jousting between the press and the Trump administration continues and Trump slowly accumulates small victories from the courts and larger ones from the Supreme Court.  Good!  I’ve declared victory (for the most part) and allow the world to slowly become Trumpified while I get on with my agenda.

I finished my re-read of the last third of my book and came to a few conclusions:

  • I like the writing. I like the way it reads.
  • I like the story line. It moves forward.
  • There is something missing to allow the story to end satisfyingly for all the threads of the book.
  • So, the good news of the first two points makes it worthwhile for me to tackle the bad news of the last point.

As I earlier stated it was weird to read the book after a good long time and read it as if I wasn’t the writer.  Of course, I knew the plot but the writing seemed fresh to me, like I was reading it for the first time.  Now, I did make some edits and even made some small changes to the wording during this read.  But I’m good with what’s already done.  So, I’ll kick around a few ideas to see which one makes the ending most satisfying.  Good.

The summer has gotten amazingly hot and humid.  And this has drawn the grandchildren to want to swim in the pool.  And this year the water is perfect.  Perfectly clear.  No algae.  Good pH.  No leaks.  There are a few small cracks in the liner above the water line.  So, I bought a patching kit and I will attempt to fix them myself.  If I botch it, I’ll call in the professionals and they’ll overcharge me but make the problem go away.  But it’s good to see this expensive hole in the ground get used by someone who can enjoy jumping in and swimming around.  I think in the fourteen years I’ve live here I’ve gone in once.  Oh well.

So, let’s see where Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is in a few days and where the various wars are in a few weeks.  But I’m ready to enjoy the seasonal weather and do some cooking out with friends and relatives and enjoy the only true summer month in the otherwise blighted New England calendar.  Because remember, July is the only month in which measurable snow has not fallen in southern New England.  That makes it sacred.  Enjoy.

Reverse Engineering an Ending

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I’ve been trying to figure out how to end my book. Today I’ve been reading the last third of the book to see if I can force an exit strategy into the story. The good news is I’m enjoying the narrative. It’s almost as if someone else wrote it. So that’s good. The bad news it’s taking a while to figure out a satisfying ending that leaves all the major characters with a satisfying “landing.”
But I’m glad I’ve re-engaged with the writing on a more robust schedule. I think the story is well written so it gives me motivation to get the darned thing out there. Onward and upward.

So, has Trump really ended the Iran/Israeli War? Well, here’s hoping.

21JUN2025 – An Interesting Day

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A recent post called “Where Will We Be in 2,500 AD”  reminded Ed of an old song from 1969 called “In the Year 2525.”

“Remember this one?

In the year 2525, if man is still alive

If woman can survive, they may find

In the year 3535

 

…    (very long series of verses)   …

 

Now it’s been ten thousand years

Man has cried a billion tears

For what, he never knew, now man’s reign is through

But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight

So very far away, maybe it’s only yesterday

In the year 2525, if man is still alive

If woman can survive, they may find”

 

And that produced this comment by me:

“I remember it well. I was in the family station wagon heading for Long Beach Island on the Jersey shore for the summer vacation when it came on the radio for the first time. I was reading a science fiction anthology edited by Robert Heinlein called “Tomorrow, the Stars.” Life was simpler then.”

Well, of course that got me thinking.  As I remembered that was a pretty good anthology.  But unfortunately, it was a trade paperback from 1969 so it fell apart about fifty years ago or so.  Curses!

But Amazon.com has some redeeming value.  I found a hard back copy (seventeen years older than the paperback I owned but in much, much better shape) and purchased it for a very reasonable sum.

And, as remembered, there are several very good stories inside; C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Silly Season,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “The Report on the Barnhouse Effect” (I forgot he was the author), Isaac Asimov’s “Misbegotten Missionary,” William Morrison’s “The Sack,” Fritz Leiber’s “Poor Superman” and several others that I still like.

So now that will allow me to enjoy some excellent short science fiction from the golden age (or was it the silver age?).

And I’ll need it.  I was reading Heinlein’s posthumously published alternate novel to his “Number of the Beast” alternate universe story; “The Pursuit of the Pankera.“  But I just couldn’t read it straight through.  Just like in the “Number of the Beast” the four main characters just talk way, way too much.  It was like an endless struggle session to see who could out-Heinlein who.  I also developed a strong antipathy for his character Hildy.  I wanted a monster to squash her when she started hectoring them.

I will admit it was better than “Number of the Beast” but I couldn’t finish that one either.  Maybe it’s me but after his illness in the ‘70’s I don’t think his writing ever recovered the vitality it had before “I Will Fear No Evil.”  Or maybe something changed in me.

But anyway, Heinlein’s picks in the anthology I’ll be rereading show good taste at least in conventional science fiction from the 1950s.  Thank goodness he didn’t have access to his continua craft in his old age and could go back and change his story selections for that anthology.  I’m not sure I’d enjoy them.

Today I also received my handy-dandy manual chain saw doo-hickey (in the same box as the book).

It’s the chain for a chain saw with carabiners on the ends to allow it to be used using human power.  I went back to my downed tree and took a three-foot length from the trunk and it only took about twenty minutes of sawing.  Of course, I took another twenty minutes of breaks to restore strength to my tired old arms but still this is a factor of ten faster than it took me to cut the last chunk using the bow saw.  My next gambit is to see if I can attach the ends of a chain to the frame of my bow saw.  That would make it more convenient to use.  Alternatively, I could imagine attaching the chain to the rear wheel of a stationary bicycle and really improving my efficiency.  I guess I’m anticipating a future without gasoline or batteries.  But I do think strangely.

Well, it was an interesting day.

The Wise of Heart: A Modern-Day Re-Imagining of the Scopes Monkey Trial by Hans G. Schantz – A Book Review

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“Inherit the Wind” was a famous fictionalized account of the Scope’s Monkey Trial of the early twentieth century.  It centered on a young school teacher who was arrested and put on trial for teaching the theory of evolution in the Bible Belt where laws had been passed to forbid it.

Dr. Schantz has managed to swap out transgender orthodoxy for fundamentalist creationism in his story and crafted a courtroom drama that captures all of the nuances of our present-day retreat from reality that calls sexually mutilating adolescents, “gender-affirming therapy” and allows grade school teachers to conspire with social workers to perform these procedures on minors despite parents’ horrified resistance.  A high school biology teacher is accused of teaching the biological facts of human sexuality and this throws him in conflict with a state law that forbids a teacher from challenging a student’s “selected gender identity.”

For those familiar with the movie version of “Inherit the Wind,” some of the plot twists will reappear in a new analog.  But this isn’t a rehash of the old story.  This is a very in-depth look at the illogic and fallacies of the transgender narrative and the way different parts of the government, the medical profession, media and academia pander to the delusions of confused children and frighten their parents into allowing terrible things to be done to their children.

The story is inhabited by a cast of characters that interlock at multiple points.  Small town politics and society mesh with national political figures who have their own agendas but seize upon the trial as the perfect battlefield to win a victory for their side.  Both sides are portrayed believably.  The woke activists aren’t just straw men but sound quite close to what their real counterparts sound like in news clips.  The details of the trial sound extremely close to what the transcript of a trial would consist of.

So, what did I think of the story?  I think the story takes a while to get going.  There is a set-up needed to get all the pieces in position for the trial.  During this period the reader will have to be patient.  Once the trial gets going the story finds its stride and becomes a courtroom drama.  And I found the ending satisfying without being overdone.  As with its predecessor it doesn’t attempt to write a conclusion to the clash going on in the story but rather capture the flavor of the two opposing sides and show how each side attempts to paint itself and its opponents using the weapons that each prefers.  The Left fixates on emotions and idealism while the Right points to logic and reality.

Who is this book for?  Well, first off, people of the woke persuasion will not be amused.  Despite being reasonably accurate in his portrayal of the woke side they don’t come off as sympathetic characters.  So, this leaves moderates and people on the Right.  Also, this book is a courtroom drama and folks who read these are its intended audience.  Personally, I liked the book.  I liked the defense attorney and I despised the prosecutor.  This made the courtroom battle satisfying for me.  But you’ll have to make up your mind based on what I’ve described whether this is your kind of story.

Yellowstone Summer – Part 2

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Patricia (Pat) Tollens’ first week in Boghadair had begun less than smoothly.  Her first encounter with her new supervisor could best be described as a train wreck.  Tanner Carrero had encountered her when she attempted to hike in the mountains.  But instead, he had to rescue her from a marauding grizzly bear that she had incited by leaving her bear transponder in her car.  Things had started poorly.  And then they got worse.

From her point of view Tanner was a hopeless throwback to the stone-age patriarchy that no longer existed in her world.  Back at UC Berkeley if he had yelled at her the way he did on that trail, she would have had him brought up on charges; verbal assault, hate speech, and any number of micro-aggressions.  In fact, he pretended that she was the one at fault.

And now she had to work for this caveman.  She called up her advisor at Berkeley and requested that a grievance be opened up against Carrero by the school.  But she was advised that Typhon Industries didn’t work that way.  In fact, they didn’t even have an HR department.  They had something called “Personnel” and basically, they handled payroll and insurance paperwork and handed complaints over to local management.  If she wanted to lodge a protest, she’d have to talk to Carrero’s manager.  When she attempted this, she found an even older, more sexist man than Carrero who told her to stop making trouble or she’d be sent back to California by the next plane.  And just to make things completely transparent she was cc’d on an e-mail from his boss to Carrero telling him what she had done and recommending he straighten her out right away or send her packing.  Pretty bad.

So, on her first day of work she showed up at the small frame building that housed the survey team.  There was an office list and she found Tanner’s name and walked down the corridor to that room and saw him setting at one of the desks and approached with the bleakest expression that her face could produce short of actually being caught by a grizzly bear.

Tanner was sitting working on a spreadsheet but caught sight of Pat as she approached his cubicle.  His expression turned to a mixture of anxiety and embarrassment.  He had never liked “supervising” people.  He was an “individual contributor” down to his boots.  There was nothing he hated more than “onboarding” employees.  And now he had a problem that threatened to drag him into a world of paperwork.  Terminating an intern sounded like a nightmare of paperwork and he would avoid it by almost any means possible.

Tanner had booked a conference room for her first day to allow her to come up quickly to speed on the project by working one-on-one with him.  He asked her to follow him to the conference room and they sat down opposite each other at a small conference table.

Tanner coughed nervously and started, “Ms. Tollens, we’ve started off badly but we can move past the problems we’ve had if we concentrate on the work at hand.  My boss is sort of upset.  He’s probably more upset with me than with you but we have to show him that we can work together efficiently and hit our deliverables on the schedule.  If you think we can work together then I’m going to meet you in the middle.  But if you feel that I’m as bad a person as you indicated in your grievance then we should end this today and not waste any more of your time or this company’s.”

He stopped talking and waited for her reply.  Pat had listened with interest to his words.  Apparently, he wasn’t the monster she had assumed.  He sounded almost reasonable; confused but almost reasonable.  She thought, “Maybe this won’t be horrible.”  She wanted badly to get Typhon Industries on her resume.  Everyone in the mining industry knew they were light-years ahead of the competition.  She had heard they weren’t a progressive company but this Carrero guy might be honestly trying to work with her.  She decided to give it a try.  She said, “I think we can work together.”

Tanner let out a sigh and managed a half smile, “Good.  I’d like to have you go over our field work manual today and we can break that up by having you begin to attend the project meetings so you can meet the team and become familiar with the way we work.  In the afternoon I’ll meet back here with you to go over a field study I have planned for tomorrow.    I’ll provide you with the itinerary and also the gear you’ll need.  We’ll take three other interns along to get them trained too.  They’ll be at the meeting today so you can get to know them too.  The four of you may find some benefit to spending some time together to help acclimate yourselves to a new locale together.”  Pat nodded her head and said, “That sounds good.  Is there a laptop I’ll be using?  I’d like to take notes on the manual and figure out your e-mail system and other onboarding tasks.”  He said, “Sure, it’s the one on that side of the table.  There’s a folder with the onboarding information, including initial passwords and other IS gobbledygook.”  She looked a little anxious when he used the term gobbledygook but she didn’t say anything.

And so, they began.  Maybe not a ball of fire, not “Astaire and Rogers” but no one had been brought up on charges and neither of them had raised their voices a decibel over cubicle normal.  A new beginning!

Yellowstone Summer – Part 1

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Tanner took a break from his mineral survey to drink some water and get out of the sun.  He was in the Beartooth Mountains and recent discoveries of rare earth metals had provided him with some summer employment to help him pay for his coursework in mining engineering and mineralogy at Yellowstone University.  He was a 23-year-old graduate student and between his gigs as a teaching assistant and driving a snow plow in the winters he kept himself almost fiscally solvent.  But this survey work was more what he wanted to be doing with his time.  Typhon Industries employed most of the population around the town of Boghadair and technically Tanner was already an employee with an equity account but he’d have to wait until his schooling was completed to get his hands on any of the credits accruing in that account.  So, this survey work meant the difference between hamburgers and pizza a couple of times a week or just cheap noodles night and day.

He was standing on a rocky slope that descended onto a flat highland covered with wildflowers.  There was a small lake and woman was at the water’s edge washing her face.  But what caught his attention was past the woman in the distance was a large grizzly bear and it was running directly toward the woman.  He approximated her distance from the bear as half a mile and his distance from her as a little more than a mile.  He screamed a profanity, dropped his water bottle and started running toward the woman as fast as his legs would carry him, screaming to her as his breathing would allow while running.  The bear was moving at about twenty-five miles an hour and Tanner might be doing ten but his repeated screams of, “Bear!” finally caught her attention and she looked around to see the bear and began to run directly away from it.  Unfortunately, this was not toward Tanner but at almost a right angle from him.

Tanner gave a cry of frustration at this unfortunate circumstance and tried to figure out how he could run to end up between the woman and the bear.  In his confusion he just ran after the woman.  When the bear was only a hundred yards from the woman it suddenly spasmed in mid-stride and tumbled to the ground.  Tanner was only slightly closer to the woman than the bear but luckily the bear’s receiver had finally registered the signal from his bear protection transponder.  The bear saw him running off at an angle and according to the algorithm in his controller ran off as fast as he could.  He wasn’t running directly away from the woman but pretty soon the diverging tracks would put Tanner between the bear and his former prey.

Pretty soon Tanner caught up to the still running woman and told her she was now safe.  It took her a few minutes to catch her breath and get over the terror she had experienced but when she seemed calmer, he starting yelling at her, “Lady what the hell are you doing in grizzly country without bear protection?  If I hadn’t seen that bear charging it would’ve gotten you!”

The young woman was shocked to hear him so angry, “I have bear protection.  It’s in my car.”  He was confused, Where’s your car?  She pointed east and said, “At the road.  I wanted to climb up the slope to see the lake.”  He was stunned, “That’s two miles away.  The transponder only has a range of a mile.  You would have been killed.”

She began to cry and Tanner started to notice that she was probably about his age and he felt guilty for yelling at her.  And he also noticed that she was very pretty and this seemed to make him feel even worse about yelling at her.  He said, “Look I’m sorry I yelled I guess I was just scared for you and I got too excited.  I’m sorry, okay?”

She pulled out a handkerchief and dried her eyes and nodded her head, “Okay, it’s alright.  I guess you did save my life.  Thank you very much.”  There was an awkward silence while both of them tried to figure how this meeting would end.  Finally, Tanner said, “Look I need to walk you to your car so you’ll be safe.  And from now on please carry the transponder wherever you go outside of town.  Are you staying in Boghadair?”

She nodded again, “Yes, I’m working on a mineral survey project and have to start work tomorrow.  I was just enjoying a little sightseeing before starting work.  Tanner’s brain clicked through all of this and he said, “Are you Pat Tollens?”  She said, “Yes, how did you know?”  He replied, “I’m Tanner Carrero.  You’re my summer intern.”

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 01JUN2025 – Future of Entertainment

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There was a concept a while back of Narrowcasting (as opposed to broadcasting) where you would aim for certain smaller markets via directed media like the internet. To some degree we see this happening with youtube and tiktok. The monetization would be direct from the consumers and perhaps via pre subscription schemes.

It seems that Hollywood got the narrow part but not the monetezation part. In an analogy to the misquote of Pauline Kael they don’t know anyone that voted for Donald Trump. Their audience is boomers who grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s and are nostalgic for their college days and the protests against the Establishment. The boomers have not processed that they are now the Man. Meanwhile, Hollywood keeps churning out $200-400 million blockbusters aimed at that tiny (perhaps 5-20%) market demographic. Hollywood depends on the old 80s-2000s mix of movie theater, marketing of merchandise and resales for income. The thing is their little stunt of 2020 killed the theater, the Merch was for kids (or perhaps grand kids) which the boomers do not have, and residuals on the various streaming platforms residuals are bupkus compared to VHS/DVD sales. The big Studios are like the last of the dinosaurs standing around in a swamp in Louisiana on the day of the KT boundary impact saying “Hey Ralph whats that pretty light in the south it isn’t sunrise yet…” They’re dead they just haven’t figured it out yet, and the mammals are crouching in a variety of holes trying not to be eaten.

 

Comment by photog:  I guess I’m waiting for the mammals. It’s a lonely vigil but, “Ya gotta keep da faith.”

 

reply by Tregonsee:

Indeed Photog I’m rooting for the mammals too. Like the Mammals of the Tertiary (now called Paleogene) it may take a while for the producers to get organized. In publishing the transition seems well under way. Most Authors of more plot based SciFi either are at Baen or publish independently. Even giant authors like Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn, Way of Kings, etc.) are tending to eschew the big 5 publishing houses.

Music has been going to self publishing too. What it takes to have a GOOD studio is probably 2 orders of magnitude

Part of it is that for visual SciFi even though special effects are easier than 20-40 years ago (e.g. I’ve heard tell of a copy of the Death Star run in star Wars done totally with effect in CGI in a couple days that is VERY close to the original that took weeks in physical models) it still takes time and money. You still need actors and good ones are expensive unless you’re doing something they want to take a chance on. And even doing minimal sets things get expensive fast, and acting to things and characters that aren’t there on green screen is really hard to pull off believably even for first rate actors. The other part is that the current media seems to fight these efforts tooth and nail.

All that said there are signs things are improving. A movie called Flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) about a black cat and an odd bunch of animals in a post apocalyptic world got the 2024 Golden Globe and Oscar for long form animation. This was published by a 6 person group out of Latvia. I love animation and even though the premise is straight up green nude eel catastrophe the story and animation rival the best of Classic Disney or Studio Ghibli

 

Living with Them – Part 2

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There was a little additional discussion of the hunt but Bob’s prognosis on the end date seemed to have depressed his comrades and so they departed one at a time after a few minutes.  Dave headed home and reached his front door just as the dusk warning siren sounded.  He felt a little shudder of fear pass through his body at the sound.  Maybe tonight’s talk had depressed him more than he thought.  He opened the outer door and closed it behind him and then the scanner activated and after twenty seconds the inner door opened, he stepped inside, the inner door closed behind him and the safety bolts shot home with a loud and comforting bang.  And based on that sequence he knew that everyone was home for the night.  They were locked up tight and could live and sleep secure for the night.  Walking through the entry hall he reached the dining room where the cheerful yellow light revealed his younger brothers and sisters sitting around the table working on their school assignments.  They looked up as he entered but it was his father who smiled with a relieved expression that the last of the family was home, “Busy day Dave?”  He shook his head, “No Dad, I just spent some time with the boys to blow off some steam.  Nothing too busy,” he lied, not wishing to upset his family about the hive found so close by.  His father nodded his head and went back to working on some chore at his work station.  He walked through to the kitchen and found his mother cleaning up from dinner.  She smiled at him and handed him a warm plate of meat, mashed potatoes and some kind of vegetable hash of some sort.  He smiled at this mystery course but thanked her and sat down at the kitchen table to eat.  “Gina stopped by today and asked if you were going to the social this weekend,” she mentioned in what she hoped sounded like an off-hand way.

“Oh really.  And I suppose you told her I could” he shot back.  She looked offended and said, “I did nothing of the sort.  I told her I’d tell you to call her.  And you should.  She’s the nicest girl you’ve ever brought around here and she’s very pretty too and if you’re not careful someone else will speak up and win her away from you.  Girls like that don’t wait around forever you know.”  Dave laughed to hear her vehemence but he promised to call her that night.  Finishing his plate, which was quite good even to the unrecognizable goulash, he put his plate in the dishwasher and patted his mother’s shoulder and thanked her as he headed for the living room.  His father had migrated there too and was watching a video about a new surveillance system that incorporated lasers and advanced machine intelligence.  Seeing this brought back Dave’s gloom as he reflected on how life always came back to the hunt and the lock down.

His father must have sensed his black mood and turned off the video and said, “Sorry Dave I needed that video for a work meeting I have tomorrow.  I should have had it on the small screen where you couldn’t see it.”  Dave smiled halfheartedly and said, “Nah, it’s nothing Dad.  Just one of those days, you know?”  Then he said less cheerily, “We found a nest pretty close by today and I guess I let it get me down.  Then Mom starts telling me that I better scoop up Gina before she marries someone else.  It just feels like we’re living in a nightmare and I can’t see how it goes on.”  His father looked down and sighed then looked up, “Yes, I know exactly what you mean.  When I was about your age, I met your mother and she wanted to get married right away but I couldn’t imagine bringing children into the world with danger and horror all around us.  Back then it was considerably worse than it is now.  We had lost two of my brothers to the beasts when I was a teenager.  They were older than I and had been part of the hunt.  A communication snafu had them unprotected practically on top of a hive in their sector.  I was devastated.  I couldn’t see the sense in living that way, always one mistake away from losing friends or family to these awful creatures.  I despaired.

But my father told me something that has stayed with me ever since.  He said, ‘Hal, remember that you come from the smartest, toughest animal to ever appear on this green Earth.  Your ancestors had to fight off saber-tooth tigers and cave bears with flint spear-heads and bone clubs.  And their only protection were caves and maybe a campfire.  But over the course of a million years, they killed off all those predators and made the Earth a garden.  And by God, you and your descendants are going to rid this Earth of these giant vermin, take my word for it.’  So, I thought about what he had said and I understood.  There is within us all of the cunning, courage and tenacity of our ape-men ancestors and we should look at this crisis as a challenge that we must accept and overcome.  We’re men and our enemy is just a stupid bug that needs exterminating.  It’s just a part of life.  A problem no different than cancer or earthquake.  Something we use our brains to figure out and eventually eradicate.  Just like the saber-tooth.”  His father looked off into the air for a second and then said, “You know your mother is right about Gina.  A girl that pretty is going to be snatched up pretty quickly if you don’t wake up.  Why don’t you give her a call.”  Then he walked away toward the kitchen.

Dave sat there for a few minutes thinking about everything his father had said.  Then he called up Gina and asked her out to the social.