Mars Calling!

It was thrilling to watch the launch of the MAVEN mission to Mars from Cape
Canaveral yesterday. We wish the spacecraft godspeed during its 10-month-long
journey to the Red Planet. Third Flatiron is excited that its next anthology will be
Mars-themed.  "Redshifted: Martian Stories," is due out December 1, and we'll be
dedicating it to the MAVEN scientific team, many of whom are based right here in Boulder, Colorado. Here's the great cover design by Keely Rew and the lineup of authors:



Table of Contents
Eurydice in Capricorn by Neil James Hudson
Make Carrots, Not War by Maureen Bowden
Colorblind on the Red Planet by Vince Liberato
The Journal of Miss Emily Carlton by Lela E. Buis
The Canary and the Roach by Ian Rose
For Sale: One Red Planet by Jeff Hewitt
Cadaver by Robina Williams
No Ravens on Mars by Martin Clark
The FALCON by Jaimie M. Engle
First Step by Jason Lairamore
MarsMail by Michael McGlade
And a Pebble in Her Shoe by Kara Race-Moore
The Read Planet by Chuck Rothman


The recognition this week of the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's
assassination also brought back some sad memories. The image of little
Caroline Kennedy taking her mother's hand to comfort her brought tears
to my eyes.

Wikipedia.org notes: On November 29, 1963, following the death of
President Kennedy, his successor Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive
Order 11129 renaming both NASA's Merrit Island facility and "the
facilities of Station No. 1 of the Atlantic Missile Range" (a
reference to Canaveral AFB) the "John F. Kennedy Space Center". He had
also convinced the governor of Florida to change the name of Cape
Canaveral to Cape Kennedy.

Confusion ensued, and ten years later, Cape Canaveral became Cape
Canaveral again. Well, at least for this week, it'll be Cape Kennedy
in my heart.

Review of Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross

It's always frustrating to contemplate the vastness of the cosmos,
especially in view of the fact that we can't travel faster than
light. That means covering the distance to even the nearest star would
take years at best. Add to that the fact that it's improbable we could
even travel at even a small fraction of that speed. Add to that fact
the fact that we are fragile beings and that seemingly empty outer
space is really filled with deadly radiation.

Oh, well, we must give up on space operas, right? Not if you're
Charles Stross. His latest effort, "Neptune's Brood," takes place in a
time when humans have staked a claim on a 50-light-year span of space
and can carry out business in pretty much real time. The fun part is
finding out how have they have done it. I was reminded of Vernor
Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep." In his universe, the speed of light
slowed down the further toward the center of the galaxy you got.

Part of Stross's solution is to make humans a lot less fragile. Almost
everyone has replaced their biological cells with cybernetic
"mechanocytes" that can mold to different shapes and hold the memories
and personality of humans. But it still takes years to physically
travel to the next star system. A network of laser beacons has been
arduously established over a 2,000 year period so that if a person
wants to travel abroad, they merely ship their "soul" aboard a laser
beam to the next beacon and assemble a body at the other end. It's
very costly, of course, so an intricate system of "slow" money has
been set up to finance colonization, while "fast money" is used within
local systems. FTL remains only a dream, and everybody knows it.

The action of Neptune's Brood takes place when forensic banker Krina
Alizond-114 stumbles upon the biggest swindle the galaxy has ever
seen. Recently arrived in the Dojima System in search of her sister,
she dodges assassins and sails aboard a Church of the Fragile ship
(crewed by a literal skeletal crew and headed by Lady Cybelle, its
Borg-like priestess) to the water planet of Shin-Tethys. Forced to
assume the shape of a mermaid and diving to the impossible depths of
Shin-Tethys, Krina meets her sister and learns that their mother, the
original Sondra Alizond-1, was involved in the destruction of a
legendary colony thousands of years ago. And now she is coming to
collect the spoils of the long con, even if she has to destroy her
daughters to do it.

Krina finds an ally in the form of a privateer who survived the colony
destruction and holds an ace up his hairy, ratlike sleeve that can
defeat the evil Sondra. We suspect that it must be FTL, but it
isn't. Quite nicely done, Charles.

Boulder Rides Out the Flood

I was a Rainbow Girl in my tweens. Wasn't there some sort of promise by God that He
wasn't going to be doing this stuff all the time any more?

Close friends and neighbors wait on Wagonwheel Gap before FEMA escorts them out.

After surviving heavy hail in late June, my neighborhood in Boulder is still trying to get its head around the latest flood, in which a stationary
rain system dumped around 18 inches of water on a town that usually gets that much precip in a year. There've been all sorts of arguments about whether this is a "hundred year" or "thousand year" flood. My husband calls it "the Milluge." There's a great explanation of how it all came down last week by Bob Henson of NCAR.

 Grave of the fireflies: Before and after photos of the wetlands near our home.

I finally found an open library where I could return my overdue books. The main and branch libraries all suffered water damage. Luckily, all fines are forgiven.



Only in Boulder: to have a special raincoat and umbrella for your pooch, even though it only rains every 100 years.

As the sun begins to shine on the saturated soil, I'm seeing our friends the "dog people" and their companions emerge after a week of cabin fever to see how everyone is and to talk about what happened to them during the flood. And hey, Boulder's Fringe Festival begins this weekend. There's no telling what will happen there, but it'll be hard to out-quirk the weather.




Reach Out

We were saddened to hear of the death of Joseph Howlett, retired owner of the Jamestown Mercantile, whose house collapsed on Thursday, when flooding first began. Joey always put a 10-gallon jug of water out for thirsty bikers like us who struggled our way up Lefthand Canyon on weekends. Rescue efforts for Jamestown, the Boulder Foothills, Lyons, and Estes Park continued all week, as FEMA volunteers and Chinook helicopters ferried people to safety. Planet Bluegrass in Lyons was completely leveled when the St. Vrain River exploded over its banks. The owners vow to restore the festival grounds in time for next July's RockyGrass Festival.

But the Greatest of These Is Charity

We've all heard stories about how long it takes to get funds to people affected by disasters and tragedies such as 9/11 and Aurora.  Boulder musician and teacher Julie Gussaroff and fellow musicians are starting to give benefit performances, with all the proceeds going *directly* to rescue efforts and county residents affected by the flood. The first official "Wake of the Flood" benefit concert is scheduled for September 28 at the Fox Theater on the Hill.

Meanwhile, Congress threatens to cut food stamps and shut down the government on October 1st. Not really a good time, folks. . .

Review of The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan

When we first meet Anais, she is a mess. She is being shipped off to the Panopticon, a home in Scotland for children who are in the care of the government, while authorities determine whether she attacked a female police officer and put her in a coma. The story uses a setting based on a design for institutional buildings invented by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham.

Fifteen-year-old Anais has been transferred from place to place and family to foster family all her life. She has a history of violence, drugs, and crime, and she has no self control. She might be schizophrenic. They say her mother committed suicide. She thinks she may just be an experiment and that she is being watched by the Panopticon. She wants her mother!

We can't help but care for Anais, as she goes from one grim situation to another, because she is brilliant and lovable despite her tough exterior. As a parent, I wish I had known the phrase her social workers use constantly, "It's not optional."

Author Jenni Fagan makes liberal use of Scottish slang and obscenities to punctuate the thoughts and fantasies of Anais and the friends she makes in the kiddie slammer. You'll probably need to have the Urban Dictionary close by to get past page one.

For all those who think nothing can be done about child abuse, rape, prostitution, and poverty: they're wrong. We've got to believe that--that Anais gets out, even as she finally realizes she has to deal with life alone.

Review of Existence, by David Brin

Some of the best futuristic SF ever comes from the pen of David
Brin, Startide Rising, Earth, and Kiln People, to name a few. I
don't know why--perhaps it was reading this as an ebook--but I found
Brin's latest effort, "Existence," to be a cluttered melange of
trendy SF tropes. It's set in the near future, when any number of
things might be possible, and the author seems to want to make sure that he
has turned over every rock.

Each section is book-ended by essays about the myriad ways the world
could end, or humans could end it, or aliens could end it, or disease
could end it, or disaster could end it, or. . .

Brin uses a common "parallel thread" structure designed to keep the
reader dangling on the hook. You read a bit about character A
(astronaut/space garbage collector Gerald Livingston), then on to
character B (Tor Povlov, "ai"ce reporter), C (Hacker Sander, a rich
kid who dabbles in high tech), D (Lacey, Hacker's rich mother, a
member of the secret ruling clade), E (Xiang Bin, a poor shoresteader
off Hong Kong), and F (Hamish Brookeman, famous disillusioned
novelist--Michael Crichton, maybe?), then loop. But we're never sure
these characters will have anything in common when the plot finally
thickens.

Humanity has suffered numerous setbacks and disasters, but none
sufficient to bring the world to an end. Gradually we've learned that
aliens are making first contact via a couple of recently discovered
stone artifacts. Earth is suddenly finding thousands of similar
artifacts, some apparently here for thousands of years, others just
arriving. And, uh, the aliens are mentioning something about life
everlasting. . . you just have to give up your biological body.

Very near the end, the story makes an abrupt jump 25 years into the
future. Is this an attempt to do a Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy
in one book? Now, dolphins and neanderthals are under the umbrella of
"human," and a lot of people are android or cyborg, including Tor the
reporter. Humans are trying to help the alien 'bots see if the worlds
they left tens of thousands of years ago still exist. They discover
that Earth has been a contact battleground not for just millennia but
for eons, as they unearth a deadly rogue killer from the Old Wars in
the asteroid belt. Now we see the stone aliens as
johnny-come-latelies, spreading through the galaxy like a virus. And
an old race of lurkers is watching it all unfold ... silently, for
now..

Faced with this new knowledge, what should humanity do? Become
cybernetic space seeds? Go back to its primitive days, hiding so the
dangerous galaxy loses interest? Or fight our way out?

Ultimately, I felt the ending was kind of a cop-out. On the other hand, no one
swims with the dolphins like Brin. It's just a bit of a disappointment that the
characters we invest so much time in never decisively resolve anything for
either themselves or their newly discovered AI and biological galactic neighbors.

Coming Soon: Lost Worlds, Retraced Anthology

Third Flatiron has announced the lineup for its Fall 2013 anthology, "Lost Worlds, Retraced." Thirteen great stories coming on September 1! Here's a preview:

Table of Contents

The Sun Greeter by Marilyn K. Martin
Gods & Emperors by Jonathan Shipley
The Grim by Konstantine Paradias
Parallelobirds by Soham Saha
Jango Rides Again by Maureen Bowden
The Story of How Akamu and Elikapeka Created the City Under the Ice by DeAnna Knippling
Lindow Five by Judith Field
Schrodinger's Soldier by Ron Collins
Breach of Contract by Andrew Kozma
Not Alone by Sarah Hodgetts
Ninth From the Sun by Bruce Golden
Parallel Universe by Will Morton
The Real Story by Neil Davies 

Podcast, Anyone?

Also, we're excited to announce that we will be doing podcasts of selected stories beginning next month. When the "Podcasts" tab appears (around September 1), you'll be able to subscribe to our RSS feed.

Review of Museum of Seraphs in Torment, by David Pinault

I first heard about David Pinault when a fellow author
described him as a "real-life Indiana Jones." He is a middle eastern
scholar and prof of religious studies at Santa Clara University--not
to mention a heckuva writer.

Pinault takes us on an exciting world-spanning thrill ride that kicks
off during the "Arab Spring" demonstrations in Egypt. Ricky Atlas, a
disgraced Egyptologist, is in the midst of robbing the Egyptian Museum
in Cairo. Thieving pays well, but it's dangerous. While dodging
bullets, Ricky wonders whatever happened to his old grad school chums,
Iggy Forsythe, Hattie Kronsted, and Francis Hammond, fellow students who shared in his
disgrace. Ricky scores the finial of the Wand of Solomon, but his
mysterious boss says he's not off the hook and sends him to Yemen to
get the wand itself.

The scene changes to Arizona, where Annie Martinez, a Burger King
assistant manager, has been collecting small artifacts illegally from
Montezuma's Castle National Monument for her little roadside "Museum
of Seraphs." A scraggly homeless man hangs around her tiny
storefront. We suspect he's one of Ricky's old friends and find
ourselves involved in a mystery of what may be Egyptian artifacts in
Arizona. Maybe there's a link to the Aztecs?

And why is everyone after the Wand of Solomon? We're back in Sanaa,
Yemen, where Ricky narrowly escapes Egyptian jihadis who are also
seeking the wand. Atlas has God on his side, though, in the form of
his lucky coat--and CIA Hellfire Predator drones. He's got the wand;
let's see if he can keep it.

It's a blast following Ricky and his friends pursue an ancient
connection that will change the world.

Pinault provides lots of authentic sights, sounds, and dialog
throughout this fast-moving adventure. I can highly recommend "Museum
of Seraphs in Torment: An Egyptological Fantasy Thriller," available on Amazon.

The book needs a nicer cover (and shorter title), but hopefully those will come as the
book gets the attention it deserves.