Category: SF&F Book Reviews

Science fiction and Fantasy book reviews by a classic sf&f fan

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.

Living with Them – Part 1

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Dave watched the flying drone’s video output on a twenty-four-inch screen that he perched on a shoulder height outcropping of rock in front of him.  It was flying at about three hundred feet of elevation over the landscape in front of him.  It was typical Northeastern US second growth forest; a mixture of conifers and deciduous trees breaking out into overgrown fields, swamps and rocky hills.  But in one of those fields, he could see the tell-tale earthen cone.  It was a hundred feet in diameter. Twenty feet high with a ten-foot round hole in the center.  And sure enough, there were five specimens of Camponotus vicinus gigas.  They ranged from nine to fifteen feet in length and were carrying the remains of some dairy cattle that they must have torn apart.  Sending the drone in for a closer look he saw that one of the ants was transporting what looked like human remains.

Dave geolocated the nest and then released two projectiles that plummeted from the drone directly into the entrance.  They were black and spherical, about six inches in diameter and they popped upon impact and released a cloud of red colored dust that thoroughly coated the entire entrance area.  Dave typed in a report on his actions and attached the geolocated video.  He also recommended that all human habitations within fifty miles be contacted and warned of the nest.  He specifically mentioned the dairy cattle and human predation.  Then he said a short prayer for the poor victim.

The rest of the day was uneventful.  The drone had covered the rest of the area in his portion of the grid and nothing else was found.  When the drone returned, he packed it up and waited for the transport to pick him up.  The transport landed in the clearing where he was set up.  Dave looked admiringly at the huge machine.  It was a two-hundred-foot square hovercraft with armor extending completely around a central deck.  There were guns located on all four sides and powered hoists on booms located in the center of the craft.  One of these booms was lowered toward his drone package and snagged it and hoisted it into the craft.  When it was clear Dave walked over to the closest door on the perimeter and waved his ID in front of the scanner and walked through the opening door.

Once inside he walked across the open deck to the control room and checked in with the supervisor.  The pilot was already starting the engines in order to head to home base.  The supervisor was already reading Dave’s report and said, “That hive is a disappointment.  We thought we cleared this whole sector three years ago.  Maybe the current virus isn’t 100% effective anymore.”  Dave nodded his head wearily, “Yeah, same old story.  Nothing works forever.  Eventually munitions and poison gas are what make the job thorough.  Anything less is just too dangerous.  We can’t have people getting torn to pieces by these monsters.  It’s not right.”

The supervisor gave him an angry look, “Look, we’re making progress.  The safe zone in this area of the grid used to be fifty miles square.  Now it’s five hundred.  We’re winning.  There are bound to be failures.  Stop getting so emotional.  Just do your job and be part of the solution.”  Dave grimaced but inside he knew the man was right.  Mankind had been dealing with the ants for over seventy years and for the last twenty years the tide had turned against the creatures.  Starting at the poles and working toward the equator the ants were being driven toward the tropics.  No one believed they could ever be extirpated from the amazon or equatorial Africa or Southern Asia but it was hoped that the temperate zones could be completely cleared and an effective barrier strategy established.

When Dave exited the transport in Fort Peterson in the White Mountains he headed for the local watering hole and joined up with his friends.  Half of them were miners in the local quarries and half were like him bug hunters for the government.  All being in the twenty- to thirty-year-old age group most of the talk was about where the best-looking women could be found.  But after they were finished lying about their weekends some of the miners were curious to know how the bug hunt was going.

The senior hunter at the table was Craig and at twenty-eight his vast knowledge of the project didn’t impress anyone too much but he attempted to give an authoritative lecture on the theory and practice of bug hunting, “What we’re seeing is a steady and comprehensive rolling back of the infested area throughout North America.  All of what was the Canadian territory except for British Columbia is already cleared.  In the former United States, New England, the Great Lakes region and the Mountain West is clear all the way to Eastern Washington and Oregon, down as far south as Colorado.  Projections indicate ten years will bring us down to the old Mexican border.”

Dave looked bleakly toward Craig and said, “We found a nest two hundred miles south of here that had just finished off the human and bovine residents of a dairy farm right before we got there.  I’m guessing ten years might be a little optimistic.  What have the university researchers published this year, Bob?”  Bob was a former academic who had joined the hunt after he lost his family to an infestation a few years earlier.  Biological modelling had been his field of research and he still had contacts within the bug modelling project.  The small bespectacled young man looked up at Dave and quietly began to talk, “Well Craig is right that we have turned a corner.  In the first twenty years of the war humanity lost essentially the entire human population of the tropical zone that was forty percent of the 2.69 billion people living, about a billion people.  We lost another billion people everywhere else.  After that we only lost another two hundred million over the course of fifty more years.  And this year was the first net population gain.

As far as the bugs.  Initially their population increase was asymptotic.  In the last twenty years it’s levelled off.  We don’t have any hard numbers but we have reduced their territory substantially in the last ten years.  The modelling I saw showed a hundred-year estimate to clear the temperate zones but that’s a low confidence study.  The problems with resistance to the viral agents we’ve been using makes it almost impossible to extrapolate the curves for anything more than a year with high confidence.”

Dave nodded his head, “That’s what I heard from someone in the headquarters this week.  Not particularly cheering.”

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 14MAY2025 – Review – Watchmen (2009)

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So the original story is by Alan Moore. He was fairly famous in the comic book industry in the 1980’s when this was originally published. Take a moment and find a picture of Alan Moore on the internet, I’ll wait… Are you back? Given that image you will likely be unsurprised to find out he is a notorious and unrepentant anarchist and rather unhinged (even for an anarchist). Other efforts by him include V is for Vendetta and Batman: The Killing Joke. The Watchmen Series was a 12 issue mini-series from DC published in 1986-1987 set in an alternate history where the US has Dr. Manhattan (who is more overpowered than even say super man, his abilities verge on the godlike).
It was rather cutting edge for its period with its serious antihero vibe.

The movie came much later in 2009 after many years of wandering into development hell. In many ways its cinematography and dialogue come straight from the comic series art by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s dialogue. It does skip/compress several subplots, and change the method of the ending though not its source (Ozymandias/Veidt) nor its intent (forestall or avoid WWIII). It was one of the first R rated comic book movies (previous having limited themselves to PG-13/PG) and also one of the first to release in the late February slot to take advantage of College spring break.

As a fan of the original comics I thought it rose to slightly above meh say 6/10. It loses much of the complexity of the original, which given the size of the 12 issue series was somewhat unavoidable even with its bloated 3 hr+ run time. As Chemist notes if you don’t already know some of the plot points it is going to be a whirlwind. Heck as the original comic book doled out over a year it was confusing until the last few comics at the end where all the threads got tied together and many of the hints in the original lurk in the subplots that were excised.

There is an animated retelling done by DC Animation scripted by J. Michael Straczynski and Dave Gibbons from the original It is split into 2 90 minute subsections. It does a better job at keeping more of the necessary beats to help you see the solution and keeps to the original ending. It is maybe a 7.5/10.

Honestly, if you like comics, find a perfect bound version of the original comic books is available this is available for ~$20 the price of 4-5 fancy coffees. It is less than the $24 I paid in 1986-87 for the original comics. Do not try to go buy these at a comic book store (except for the perfect bound single volume version). They’re moderate collector items at $20-30 a each for even poorish quality copies and the first the last and (potential Spoiler) the one where they break Rorschach out of prison run for probably twice that each. As much as a crazy tinfoil hat wearing jerk as Alan Moore can be this is easily in the top 5 of comic series I have read in 50 years of reading comics and is probably better than 90% of most comic/SciFi writing.