LAST CHANCE!

 

My, how time flies. Stupefying Stories #19 and Stupefying Stories #20 have both reached the end of contract life of go out-of-print at the end of this month. For the next week, we have dropped the price to just 99-cents for each issue. If you’re looking to add these two books to your Kindle collection, you’ll never find a better opportunity—but act now, because as of next Monday, they’re gone forever. 

Stupefying Stories #19 features:

COMMUNION • by Fi Michell
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES FOR THE FAIRYLAND GAZETTE • by Effie Seiberg
HORNS OF A PARADOX • by Julie Frost
THE BONE MERCHANT • by Robert Luke Wilkins
SOULLESS MACHINE • by Jennifer R. Povey
BEHEMOTHS IN THE PARK • by Henry Fields
THE INVASION WILL BE ALPHABETIZED • by Ryan Harvey
MORE CRACKLE THAN MUSIC • by RM Graves
A RAINFOREST, THE WATER CYCLE, AND FIFTY PREGNANT TIGERS • by W. Winward-Stuart
THE OLD MAN AND THE C • by Ronald D. Ferguson
DOGS AND MONSTERS • by Harold R. Thompson

Stupefying Stories #20 includes:

ZOMBIE LIKE ME • by Clancy Weeks
THEIR NOSTALGIA WILL BE VERY MUCH LIKE OUR NOSTALGIA • by Eric Cline
HOW TO BUILD A TRAIN • by Brandon Kempner
ENDEAVOR TO DREAM ON BROKEN WINGS • by AJ Finley
PILES OF DUST AND BERRIES • by Sadie Bruce
ALIEN WHISPERING • by Bo Balder
LUCKY FIND • by Lance Young
SECRET SEED, by Shannon Norland

Remember, “likes” are nice, but “shares” help spread the word. 

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It's Quantum Doughnut Week!

What exactly are quantum doughnuts? Well, first you need to understand quantum dots, which are one of these areas where real science and engineering have so far outstripped science fiction that it’s an embarrassment to we in the Professional Imaginationeering business. To put it very simply, quantum dots are atom-sized synthetic semiconductor particles that, because of their incredibly tiny size, have remarkable electronic and optical properties that are very useful in quantum computing, medical imaging, flat-screen TV manufacturing, and a host of other applications. If you want to dig into it more deeply we can, but be forewarned that the conversation will involve things like “exitons,” “electron holes,” and “quasiparticles,” which I swear, are not terms I’m just making up.

Quantum doughnuts, on the other hand—or more properly, “Aharonov-Bohm nano rings”—are an accidental by-product of manufacturing quantum dots. They are doughnut-shaped structures that have the remarkable property of being able to slow and even freeze light, and that can be used to hold individual photons and then to release them on command. The implications of this are still being worked out, but they promise to produce much more quantum weirdness to come.

“Quantum Doughnut” is also the title of a short story by our very own Pete Wood, which was first published in Page & Spine in December of 2016 and subsequently made into a short film by Ray Petrolino Productions. The film was making the rounds of the indie film festivals when COVID pretty much shut that outlet down, so if you’re the impatient sort you can watch the film right now on YouTube at this link: “Quantum Doughnut.” [The producers ask that if you do watch the film and like it, that you also leave a rating and a kind comment about it on IMDB.]

However, if you have a bit more curiosity, we have lined up a series of posts for this week talking with the people involved in the production about just what was involved in turning Pete’s original short story into a script, and then into a completed film shot on an actual location, by a professional crew, using real actors and actresses. Personally, I found the whole process fascinating. 

To begin, then, let’s begin where the filmmakers began: with the original short story.

 

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“Quantum Doughnut” • A short story by Peter Wood

Mangum held up the piping-hot doughnut he had just bought at Krispy Kreme and smiled at the visiting professor from the far side of the galaxy. “You really should eat yours before it cools, Dr. Helzug.”

The alien took a bite. “Outstanding.” In seconds he had polished off the doughnut. He licked his fingers and wiped his hands on a napkin.

Mangum doubted anyone in the art deco eatery realized the man across the table was the emissary from an eons-old race. Helzug resembled a middle-aged used car salesman, not an alien who knew a theory that united physics and religion. Too bad he wouldn’t share it.

“This place has been around since before I was born,” Mangum said.

Helzug set one of the 1950s-era paper Krispy Kreme hats on his bald head. The shop gave them free to customers—usually kids. “Why did the college pick you to escort me here?”

“The physics department chair said that I knew doughnuts,” Mangum joked. He suspected Helzug had chosen N. C. State, because of the local cuisine. The alien had sampled a dozen barbecue joints in a fifty mile radius. He was a big fan of local microbrews.

“Ah. A more useful field than physics.” Helzug pointed to the Plexiglas that separated the dining area from the kitchen. A conveyor belt snaked through ovens and vats of boiling oil. “How’s that contraption work?”

Mangum was still surprised how an alien who knew the secrets of the universe was more interested in the little things of life. “The dough goes in one end, gets shaped, then the doughnuts are deep-fried. Then they get glazed—”

Helzug frowned. “Glazed?”

“They’re coated with liquid sugar. First one side. Then the machine flips the doughnut and does the other.” Mangum cleared his throat. “So, y’all believe in a science that connects the spiritual—God—with the material—physics?”

“Not exactly. God isn’t just an abstract concept. He exists as much as ions and electrons.”

“The scientific method can’t prove that God exists.”

“I have to disagree with you, Professor.” Helzug plucked a napkin from the dispenser. “There’s a simple proof that connects quantum theory and what you call a Supreme Being.” He pulled a pen from his pocket. “Some worlds welcome the truth. Others fear it.”

Mangum leaned forward. Politicians, clerics, and academics had been trying to pry this very information from Helzug for months.

And then, the front door chimed open. A man’s bellowing voice filled the room, “So, I boarded my horse on the ferry from Boston to Nova Scotia and they fed him tap water, not bottled water. Then we get to Halifax and there’s no first class stall.”

Mangum turned his head and saw an overweight white-haired man at the register with a small crowd. All wore Duke University sweatshirts. They were probably in town for the football game against State tonight. Mangum wanted to tell the blowhard to shut up.

But Mangum did nothing.

Helzug sat the pen down on the battered Formica table and picked up another doughnut. He took his time eating it before speaking again. “God is outside time,” he said at last. “We have learned to be timeless also. We exist in multiple timelines.”

“Multiple timelines? Y’all—”

The voice drowned out Mangum. “I don’t know why the concierge recommended this dump.” The loudmouth brandished a half-eaten doughnut at the next table. “I’ve had toothpaste better than this crap. And the coffee? If you want good coffee, you have to go to France. North Carolina. . .”

Mangum tried to tune out the man. “We have religions that say God is outside time.”

Helzug crossed his arms. “Yes, but your physicists would laugh at such a concept.”

“You’re right about that,” Mangum said.

“Millennia ago, we were like isolated doughnuts in the kitchen, only aware of our immediate spot on the conveyor belt. Now we can see the entire machine.”

Mangum hadn’t thought of time as being like an assembly line. “I see…”

“And this damned Filipino working the show in Halifax,” the voice thundered. “He feeds my show horse Fuji apples, not Gala. Idiot. I complained to the management.” The Duke fan laughed. “I hope they fired him.”

“I see the timelines now,” Helzug said. “I can assure you that man does stop talking eventually.”

“Thank God,” Mangum said.

“Such a man is focused on himself and his immediate time and space.” Helzug took a sip of coffee. “Sad.” He pointed to the conveyer belt. “A doughnut, if it could think, might be on that belt and miss being glazed. But, a worker could move the doughnut back to the start and right that wrong. And the doughnut would not understand.”

“I don’t understand,” Mangum said.

Helzug bowed his head.

The air stirred. Everything stopped. Then people moved backwards. Mangum felt nauseated and closed his eyes.

He opened them again after a moment.

“I glazed the doughnut,” Helzug said.

The door opened. A man in a flannel shirt and faded jeans strolled up to the cashier. “Give me four dozen of the world’s best doughnuts. Our church is taking some inner-city kids to the game. What’s a tailgate without doughnuts, right?” The man was the spitting image of the loudmouth horse owner.

Mangum turned around. The table of Duke Fans was gone.

Mangum blinked. “How?”

“Such things are possible with our race. The man is now much happier. He took a different path. He can see beyond himself.” Helzug crumpled up the napkin. “Earth is not ready for the proof. Yet.”

“Will we ever be ready?”

Helzug patted Mangum’s hand. “Someday.” He stood up. “For now, let’s purchase some more of those amazing doughnuts.”

¤     ¤     ¤

Coming tomorrow: what it took to begin to turn this sweet little story into a finished film.

Bon appetit!  

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MICHAEL SHAARA: Wishing for THE KILLER ALIENS • by Guy Stewart

[Editor’s note: A while back I sent Guy Stewart a book and a challenge, regarding a certain one-time science fiction writer who left the genre and went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-wining author in the mainstream world. Herewith, the result. ~brb]

¤    ¤    ¤

He never won any awards with us—no Hugo, no Nebula (oh, that’s right, he’d stopped writing SF by 1966 and gone on to pen seventy stories for people who read those silly magazines like Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Playboy and the Saturday Evening Post…) no Locus Poll (oops, those didn’t start until 1971…Shaara was long gone by then)—leaving nothing to remind us that we’d had a great writer do his apprenticeship among us, the SF community. Somewhere around 1954, he wrote a story that Galaxy, F&SF, and Astounding rejected out of hand after publishing seven other stories of his. Shaara himself thought, “…this may be the best I’ve ever done.” But we didn’t want it. Published finally, grudgingly in Fantastic Universe in 1957, Shaara had already started moving toward people who enjoyed what he was writing.

That story, “Death of a Hunter,” wasn’t the best he could do. Twenty years later, the world saw the publication of his Civil War novel, The Killer Angels. An intimate novel of the Battle of Gettysburg in the style of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Angels became his best. Winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, the award came as a stunning surprise because The Killer Angels had been a commercial flop—then went on to became a full-length feature film after his death in 1988 and has been required reading for more military organizations than you can shake a stick at ever since.

We lost Michael Shaara because in part, the editor at Galaxy thought his readers wouldn’t like “Death of a Hunter.” They wouldn’t like it because he thought it was “too serious, too gloomy.” Of course, the SF of the time tended toward the positive salvation of humanity through the application of technology. Shaara’s work didn’t flow in that vein—it wasn’t about glittering machines and conquering the planets, the stars and the galaxies. His work was about people and their response to the forces in their lives. That phase of popular SF didn’t arrive for another twenty years.

Admittedly, he also wrote better after 20 years of practice. Compare these two descriptions of the alien:

“It was a great black lump on a platform. The platform had legs, and the thing was plodding methodically upon a path which would bring it past him. It had come down from the rise and was rounding the gorge when Dylan saw it. It did not see him. If he had not ducked quickly and brought up his gun, the monkey would not have seen him either, but there was no time for regret. The monkey was several yards to the right of the lump on the platform when he heard it start running; he had to look up this time, and saw it leaping toward him over the snow.” (p 32, “Soldier Boy,” 1954)

“To be alien and alone among white lords and glittering machines, uprooted by brute force and threat of death from the familiar earth of what he did not even know was Africa, to be shipped in the black stinking darkness across an ocean he had not dreamed existed, forced then to work on alien soil, strange beyond belief, by men with guns whose words he could not even comprehend. What could the black man know of what was happening? Chamberlain tried to imagine it. He had seen ignorance, but this was more than that. What could this man know of borders and state’s rights and the Constitution and Dred Scott? What…” (p 180, The Killer Angels, 1974)

Both passages are one hundred and eleven words long but it is clear that Shaara had come into his own by the time he wrote The Killer Angels. The prose vibrates like a quartet’s string bass played in an intimate curtained chamber, while “Soldier Boy” twangs like a banjo in a clapboard dance hall.

Is there anything we could have done to keep him with us—perhaps allowing the growth of an early Mary Doria Russel or Stanislaw Lem? Unlikely. SF hadn’t matured enough by then to admit to literary aspirations. Shaara himself alludes to this in the afterword of Soldier Boy, the only collection of his short fiction still in print. He says, “Very little I wrote has ever moved me so much as being with Neilson when he killed those two in the mountains. I felt for the first time in my writing life, that maybe I was growing up, and maybe I’d done something truly worth doing…”

Fifty-eight years later, Shaara’s work has stood the test of time as The Killer Angels enjoys consistent sales and continues to illuminate one of the bloodiest battles in American history. As good as it is, I cannot help but wonder what Michael Shaara might have given the SF community, had we encouraged him to explore the darker reaches of humanity’s battle with technology.

 

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Guy Stewart is a husband supporting his wife who is a multi-year breast cancer survivor; a father, father-in-law, grandfather, foster father, friend, writer, and recently retired teacher and school counselor who maintains a writing blog by the name of POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS (https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/) where he showcases his opinion and offers his writing up for comment. He has 72 stories, articles, reviews, and one musical script to his credit, and the list still includes one book! He also maintains GUY'S GOTTA TALK ABOUT BREAST CANCER & ALZHEIMER'S where he shares his thoughts and translates research papers into everyday language. In his spare time, he herds cats and a rescued dog, helps keep a house, and loves to bike, walk, and camp.

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A few words about the book business

 

As we work to get Stupefying Stories rebooted and up and running once again, a few observations about the evolving book business seem in order. I have been in the publishing trade in one capacity or another for about forty years, and while I’d thought the changes that occurred between 1980 and 2010 were dramatic, the changes in the past ten years have been breathtaking. More importantly, the rate of change continues to accelerate on an exponential curve. At some point it must top out—the supply of content being produced has already far outstripped the number of people demanding to consume it—but when that will happen or what the fallout will then be for we who create that content, I haven’t a clue.

I suppose at least one outcome is obvious. At some point AIs will take over the job of producing mass market genre fiction. There are already sweatshops filled with writers cranking out, to use the French term, merde that is published in ebook form on a weekly basis under corporate pseudonyms. The crucial advantage humans have right now is that unemployed MFAs and Creative Writing majors are still cheaper to hire than machines are to buy, but that state of affairs can’t last.

If you’re in the book business, you can’t help but develop a loathe/hate relationship with Amazon. Amazon is the business. Other retail outlets may move a decent percentage of print copies, for some new titles, but the bulk of new book sales have moved to ebook, and the overwhelming majority of those ebook sales are on the Amazon Kindle platform. From the beginning we have made periodic attempts to branch out into wider distribution of our titles, but every time we’ve tried it, we’ve end up reaching the same conclusion: that a good month of sales on all the other platforms combined—Nook, Kobo, iPad, etc., etc.—is at best a slow week on Kindle, and going wide costs us sales on Kindle, because of the way Amazon incentivizes putting your ebook exclusively on Kindle. How they avoid antitrust prosecution continues to amaze me.

Over on the other side of the house—literally, the other side of the house, the K&B Booksellers office is about twenty feet from where I now sit—we are also back up and if not running, at least hobbling along at a decent pace. Physical copies of old used books continue to sell; the older, odder, and longer out of print, the better. However, Amazon has really bombed the crap out of the used book business, too. At one time Amazon let us have our own little virtual storefront, and that was nice. Now, while you can still see our inventory listings on Amazon, if you should try to click through to buy a book from us, you will immediately see the comparative prices of all of our competitors as well. When you’ve made it a point to hand-select books and carefully curate your inventory, finding yourself in a race to the bottom with some sweatshop in California can be … frustrating. 

Lately Amazon has begun to do something else that I as a free-speech advocate find very disturbing. Their bots now comb through the inventory listings of theoretically independent sellers, like us, and they will cancel the seller’s listing if it violates some nebulously defined policy. At first they were targeting books for strange pricing practices—which I sort of understand, but again, antitrust? Then they moved on to canceling listings for books that contained “unacceptable” speech—which again, I sort of understood. We stock a large number of out-of-print theology books, and some of those older Catholic theologians could get pretty blatant in their anti-Semitism. We select books for condition and relative scarcity. We don’t have the time to read every page of every book we stock, to see if we approve of what the author had to say.

Most recently, Amazon has taken to combing through all of your listings, both active and inactive, to see if you have ever sold a book that Amazon has now declared unilaterally and retroactively to be forbidden. The penalties for failure to comply are Draconian. If you use the “fulfilled by Amazon” service (we don’t), in which you basically pay Amazon to warehouse and ship your inventory for you, you have 30 days in which to arrange to get your inventory back from Amazon at your expense, or else they will destroy it. Even if you don’t use FBA, in any case, you have 48 hours in which to permanently delete the offending book listing from your inventory—even if it’s an inactive listing for a book you haven’t had in stock in years—or else Amazon can shut down your bookstore and confiscate any money that may be in your account.

Last week we received take-down notices for five titles. I have to think it was a mistake; two of the books were biology textbooks published by McMillan, one was a book on probability published by Princeton University Press, one was a Norton anthology of fiction by Black authors, and one was a particular edition of The October Country, by Ray Bradbury. All the same, since the penalties are so drastic and the appeals process is so Byzantine, we deleted the listings. Still, I keep thinking of that last one, and what happens to inventory being held by the FBA service.

Apparently the irony of burning a Ray Bradbury book is completely lost on Amazon. 

—Bruce Bethke 

 

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Not Precisely The Friday Challenge

On further thought, that would be fun, wouldn’t it? To do a steampunk-style remake of A Clockwork Orange? I don’t want to try to revive The Friday Challenge again—that would be way too much work—but I would love to see a short pastiche or vignette spring-boarding from that idea. Make the story earn that “clockwork” in the title.

If we get enough good ones, maybe we could even publish a collection under the Stupefying Stories Presents aegis. Call it A Clockwork Fruit Bowl…  

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Ask Dr. Cyberpunk: with your host, Bruce Bethke

 

One of the weirder things about being known the world over as “the guy who wrote ‘Cyberpunk’” is that people seem to think I am some sort of judge, arbiter, or elder spokesman for the genre. On the face of it the idea of there being any sort of elder anything for cyberpunk is a contradiction in terms. What part of punk don’t you get? 

Nonetheless the questions keep coming in, so I may as well get some value from this smelly dead albatross I’m wearing and turn it into a regular weekly feature. Friday seems as good a day as any for it, so beginning right now, the lines are open. Have a question you’ve always wanted to ask me about that story? Post it here, email it to me, send me an IM—or what the hell, think it at me, really hard. But be advised that I am absolutely immune to telepathy, so I probably won’t answer.

Today’s question comes from Adrian, who asks: What comes between atompunk and cyberpunk, timeline-wise? 

The answer, obviously, is “beepunk:” stories of tech-savvy rebel gardeners hacking the genomes of common backyard pollinators in order to fight the agribusiness megacorporations and stick it to the man. Like this one: SHOWCASE: “Bootleg Bees,” by Laura Jane Swanson

Somewhat more seriously: cyberpunk began as a self-conscious attempt to apply 1970s punk rock anomie to the emerging 1980s high tech scene, and then to extrapolate what might happen next and take it forward from there. I have always been more interested in what comes next than in what’s already been done, and figured that—

Well, that doesn’t matter, because that book was never written.

In the meantime, while almost every other young sci-fi writer around was writing Bill Gibson fanfic and every agent and publisher in the business was scrambling to find another book “just like Neuromancer only different,” Paul Di Filippo took a really good crack at “what’s next?” in Ribofunk, and essentially invented biopunk. 

Unfortunately, Gibson & Sterling had a much bigger hit with The Difference Engine, and thus invented steampunk.

I thought the basic idea of The Difference Engine was fairly clever—that Charles Babbage’s analog computers had actually worked, and therefore the computer revolution hit western civilization a century earlier than it actually did—but what most everyone else seemed to seize on was the Victorian Era costumes, trappings, and set dressings. Instead of going forward and thinking about what might be next, it was as if science fiction as a whole suddenly took a great leap backward and started over again with Jules Verne.

Ontology recapitulates phylogeny. Steampunk begat clockpunk—and gods below, I grew to hate clockpunk. Seemed like every week one of the major publishers was launching a new series with the word “clockwork” in the title: The Clockwork King, The Clockwork Crowbar, The Clockwork Assassin, The Clockwork Toaster, The Clockwork Schlockwork...

Nota bene: A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, is not a steampunk novel.

Steampunk begat dieselpunk, which begat raypunk, which begat atompunk, which begat solarpunk, which begat … oh, I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few more in there. The point is that science fiction is now cluttered with dozens of *.punk microgenres, all of them suffering from such paucity of imagination that they can’t even think of a word to describe themselves that doesn’t end in punk. Speaking ex cathedra, Doctor Cyberpunkenstein heartily wishes that all these eager young writers would find their own damn names for their new genres! 

Ahem. Excuse me.

So to answer the initial question: if atompunk is a sort of refurbished atom-age SF of the 1940s~1950s as derived by way of steampunk, and cyberpunk begins in the 1970s, then what falls between them in the timeline would be …

Hippiepunk? Except hippiepunk is an oxymoron, as punk rock was first and foremost a rebellion against hippies in general and the pompous dinosaur arena bands that evolved in the 1960s in particular, so let’s call it, oh —

Acidpunk. Stories of society’s rebels and outcasts fighting the pharmaceutical megacorporations and sticking it to the man by hacking the chemistry lab and cooking up new psychedelic drugs.

While listening to The Doors and Jefferson Airplane? Suddenly this all begins to seem terribly familiar to me. I suppose, just as William Burroughs and Alfred Bester were the points of departure for so many of the early cyberpunk writers, this means your points of departure for acidpunk would be Ken Kesey, Thomas Wolfe, and Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories. Considering that out here in the Real World we seem to be recapitulating 1968 through 1973 right now, this is also probably exactly the right time to be revisiting Kurt Vonnegut’s early novels, with an eye towards giving Vonnegut’s ideas a punk style refresh. If I were to do this, I think I’d start by rereading Cat’s Cradle.

Over to you.

—Bruce Bethke

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In lieu of an author’s bio, Bruce Bethke would like to direct your attention to this very short story:

“On the Conservation of Historical Momentum”

 

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Coming in SS#23: “They Call Me Charon,” by Gary Pattinson

 

Artwork ©2021 Jonathan Semones

Gary Pattinson writes: 

“This short story grew out of my noodling over an SF novel idea. The novel’s heroine was to be exiled from Arc City in a highly public event at the city’s gates. I riffed off of the Charon of Greek mythology and envisioned this old roughened cop who’d become a kind of celebrity, escorting the exiled from the city in much pomp and ceremony. I decided I’d write a short story from Charon’s point of view and see what would happen when he exiled a young woman branded as a revolutionary. 

“With the first sentence, Charon just took over. He not only insisted on speaking in first person, but also in present tense of all things. He was urgent yet thoughtful, violent but constrained, and his surprises for me didn’t end there. I hope readers enjoy the story.”

Bruce Bethke adds:

I’m pretty sure our readers will. It’s a stark, dark future story, yet leavened with hope. It’s a tightly focused story with just two speaking characters, whose conflict has been years in the making but is now coming to a head and must be resolved one way or the other, and I was pretty much hooked from the first paragraphs:

The citizens of Ark City call me Charon.

Tier upon tier, the citizens assemble on the spectator stands towering behind the zap-barriers. Charon, Charon, their chants reverberate within the city’s glass walls, against the brushed steel gates at my back. Their lust for justice charges the air, and energizes me. I deal the justice of our conglomerate overseers, and I alone escort the walking dead over the river to their exile. I play this role with relish even today, when justice falls on the one woman I hold dear to my heart and purpose. 

My Face-unit singles out ID chips in the stands. Her supporters mingle with the cheering citizens, and prowl like caged animals behind the zap-barriers, impotent in their rage. I feel their eyes upon me and savor their anger. It feeds me. It gives me hope.

A low tone and a flashing icon on my vision’s edge warns me the hover-van approaches from the prison deep within Ark City.

At last, she comes...

Characters, conflict, stakes: all established with a few deft strokes. The problem is that it’s easy to write a good beginning to a story, especially if the author is thinking in terms of the novel they intend the story to evolve into some day. We see a lot of stories in the slush pile that start off with great beginnings but then either fizzle out and collapse into a puddle of meaningless mush, or worse, should have as the last line in the manuscript not “The End” but “To Be Continued...” because the author so obviously intends this to be the first chapter in a much longer work. So all the way through my first read of the manuscript I had this nagging worry in the back of my mind: will Pattinson actually end this story, or will he leave the characters hanging with the conflict unresolved? 

Obviously, “They Call Me Charon” delivers the goods, with an ending that is both surprising and satisfying, and I’m proud to be bringing it to you in Stupefying Stories #23.

About the illustration: 

As we were working through the copy-editing and production process, Gary surprised me again by showing me this illustration that a young relative of his had drawn to go with the story and asking if I might be able to use it. I was delighted to see it. We’d been having some trouble finding the right art to go with this story and I thought this drawing, while a bit rough, nailed it right on the head. It reminds me very much of the way Carlos Ezquerra drew Judge Dredd way back in the dawn of time. Therefore, in another Stupefying Stories first, we are delighted to bring you the first published artwork by Jonathan Semones. We hope to see more from him as his talent matures.

And now, the author’s photo and bio:

Gary Pattinson read his first space opera when he was nine years old. Weaned on fairy tales and hero adventures, he primarily writes fantasy and science fiction. He was a denizen of the now extinct Liberty Hall Writers. His first publication came in Ray Gun Revival when he won the Space Monkey Flash Fiction Contest (under a nom de plume). Since then, his fiction has appeared on Drabblecast, Horizon, Every Day Fiction, and in the anthologies LocoThology: Tales of Fantasy & Science Fiction 2012 (V2), The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom, and Alternate Hilarities: Hysterical Realms (v3).

Gary is a software engineer who has built scary things that self-heal and self-organize. From a family of lifelong learners, he is a devoted husband, Dad, and Granddad who enjoys family history, fossils, and gardening with his wife.

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Birding • by Julie Frost

“What do writers do for fun when they’re not slaving over a keyboard?”

We go on adventures, of course.

My personal adventures put me outdoors in all kinds of weather, in temperatures from 14 degrees Fahrenheit up to over 100, though rain and snow can be problematic for my purposes. I’ve nearly died a couple of times, even—hiking at high altitude is no joke if you’re not used to it—and on the last trip to Texas I took a nasty fall that injured me worse than the accident that totaled my car late last year. This is what happens when you’re looking up into the trees instead of watching where you’re going.

I’ve always loved nature and nature photography and have done it casually for years, but doing so on a serious record-keeping goal-oriented basis began for me with a quirky little comedy about competitive birding, which is actually a thing. It stars Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson, and is called “The Big Year”—it’s based on a true story, in fact, and there’s a book by the same name (written by Mark Obmascik) you should all read because it’s fascinating. Getting involved in something like this seemed like a perfect way to get me out of the house and touching actual grass.

I started with a modest target in 2018: photograph 200 bird species in my home state of Utah. This seemed like a fairly easy task, since Utah is home to over 400 species when you take vagrants and accidentals into account. So I set out with my husband, who is an amazing spotter, my National Geographic Field Guide, and my trusty Nikon P900. I hit 200 in August with the red crossbill and then coasted for the rest of the year, with a final total of 231. Not all the photos were actually good, mind you, but they were good enough for ID.

This gave me a great overview of local (and not-so-local—Utah is something like 400 miles long top to bottom) hotspots, and introduced me to eBird.org, which is a fantastic tool I consult every day, even on days when I’m not planning on going out. Because “not planning on going out” can change in a heartbeat if there’s a rarity that’s just been spotted in my patch.

And now that I’ve taken the project nationwide, with a goal of 500, I hunt rarities out of my patch too.

I upgraded my camera to a P1000—with an incredible 125x zoom, equivalent to 3000mm—in 2019, and we went so many places. During one whirlwind six-week period, we visited Vancouver, Alaska, Maine, Oklahoma, and Hawaii. Unfortunately for the goal, my husband had job-related training from mid-October to the end of the year, and that pretty much killed the birding until the very end, when we were able to go to southeast Arizona for one last hurrah—and also to hit the ground running in 2020—to give us a total of 390.

2020 started with a bang. That little corner of Arizona has an awesome diversity of bird life due to geography and climate, and we saw 87 species in three days. Then we went to Florida, San Antonio, and North Carolina and ended the month with 190. Such a glorious beginning...

And, well. We all know what happened in 2020.

I was a COVID-19 early adopter, catching it on the trip home from a writing retreat in early March. Once I recovered, lockdowns in Utah meant I couldn’t bird any state parks out of my county for a solid month, though the regular refuges were attainable. Between the time I recovered in late March and the time we were able to actually travel again in mid-May, I only managed to find 69 species, which didn’t bode well for the goal, especially with the entire west coast and New England essentially closed off to me because of restrictions and riots. NO PUFFINS FOR YOU!

Nevertheless, I soldiered on. We flew to Texas a couple more times, and Arizona, North Carolina, and the Florida Keys. We found a few birds in Colorado, Idaho (a trip from Hell where we got two flat tires and no Cassia crossbills), Ohio, and Tennessee, too. Even with all the challenges, I still succeeded in photographing 426 species across 11 states. I decided to call that a win—it was my personal Biggest Year Ever—and set my sights on 2021.

I ended this January with 195 species across three states. We’ll see what the rest of the year brings, but I’m optimistic. Right now I’m eyeing the Florida Keys again, because there’s a continuing code-5 red-legged thrush hanging out in the Key West Tropical and Botanical Gardens I want to find again.

The American Birding Association rates birds on a scale from 1 to 6, 1 being super common, and 6 being extinct. I get excited about anything that’s a 3 or above, and last year we traveled to southeast Arizona for a third time because eared quetzals and a northern jacana—both code 4—had been spotted down there. Finding these rarities can be hit and miss, but if you look for a group with spotting scopes and long-lensed cameras in the general area, that’s a clue. Though not always; I was surprised on the last trip that no one else was out looking for the crimson-collared grosbeak when we were there, but we found it anyway. And sometimes the reports even give you lat-long coordinates of where exactly someone spotted a bird.

We frequently get a bonus mammal or two. Squirrels of all species are common, and deer. I get porcupines and pronghorns in one of my local spots, and we’ve seen skunks, armadillos, coyotes, and collared peccaries in various places. We got fairly up-close and personal with bobcats in both Arizona and Texas, which was very cool. Not close enough to touch, but something like ten yards away. They knew we were there, too. We see weasels more often than you’d think.

How to get involved? That’s the easy part. A pair of binoculars and a field guide are all you really need, though a hat, sunscreen, and mosquito repellant are also good ideas. In this era of the internet, finding out where to go is a mouse click away on eBird; just hit the Explore page, input your county, and you’re off to the races with maps and target species at your fingertips and practically in your back yard.

Look for bird festivals in your state (or out of your state, for that matter), and Facebook pages. There are magazines, and local guides, and birding associations. Most birders are happy to help with ID if something’s got you flummoxed. Sparrows, gulls, and female ducks are my personal bugbears, but don’t be embarrassed if you’re puzzled by something that might be dead common. We were all beginners once.

Why do it? Like I said above, it gets me outdoors. There’s the thrill of the hunt without the mess (though it can get messy in wet weather! I’ve nearly lost a shoe in the mud more than once). There’s the camaraderie when you’re tramping around the woods and see a fellow birder and ask them if they’ve seen anything interesting, and you trade sightings like baseball cards. There’s the joy of spotting a rarity, and the satisfaction when you get the perfect photo of it.

All the behaviors—long-billed dowitchers foraging in a marsh like little feathered sewing machines, northern harriers gliding over the cattails in search of prey, a kingfisher splashing into a pond and coming out with a carp too big to swallow but trying anyway, warblers mobbing a perched owl who just wants to sleep, the ridiculous mating dance of the blue-footed booby or the awe-inspiring mating flight of the bald eagle, a murmuration of starlings wheeling through the sky, coot quarrels over territory that looks big enough for both of them but clearly must not be, sanderlings racing up and down the beach avoiding the incoming waves, meadowlarks singing lustily atop the sagebrush, cliff swallows scooping mud for their nests, the broken-wing act of a killdeer when you get too close to its nest.

And I love watching the numbers on the spreadsheet steadily climb upward, because it’s like Pokémon—you gotta catch ‘em all!

 

---

 

Julie Frost is an award-winning author of every shade of speculative fiction. She lives in Utah with her family—a herd of guinea pigs, her husband, and a “kitten” who thinks she's a warrior princess—and a collection of anteaters and Oaxacan carvings, some of which intersect. She enjoys birding and nature photography, which also intersect. Her short fiction has appeared in Straight Outta Dodge City, Monster Hunter Files, Writers of the Future, The District of Wonders, StoryHack, Stupefying Stories, and many other venues. Her novel series, PACK DYNAMICS, is published by WordFire Press, and her novel DARK DAY, BRIGHT HOUR is published by Ring of Fire Press. She whines about writing, a lot, at http://agilebrit.livejournal.com/, and you can look her up on Amazon.

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The State of the Loon (Updated)

 

In case I’ve seemed more distracted than usual lately, the short answer is yes, I have been. Stupefying Stories #23 failed to launch on schedule because of a technical glitch of the stupid and self-inflicted kind, which at root turned out to be yet another case of “Just because it worked on Windows 7, don’t assume it still works that way on Windows 10.” I have it figured out now and remain one solid working day away from having the print and ebook builds ready to upload to Amazon, but in the meantime—

In the meantime, a huge problem involving our medical insurance erupted at the same time as I was trying to wrap up the book builds. The most condensed possible form is to say that there was an administrative slip-up somewhere in the process when my former employer terminated my benefits coverage last December, with the result being we were caught between two medical insurance companies both insisting the other was responsible for my wife’s bills. The administrative mistake was made in mid-December but took six weeks to percolate through to us, meaning that a bit over two weeks ago we were suddenly blindsided by an enormous medical bill—and the promise of more bills just like it to come every month going forward—that threatened to change the entire set of assumptions on which my decision to retire and go full-time on Rampant Loon Press was based.

I could go into this in greater detail—and may, someday, as some of what developed from this was quite hilarious, in a very perverse way—but fortunately, while it took two intense weeks to do it, we did eventually get the problem with the insurance companies sorted out and my wife into a study program that promised to pick up the cost of her most expensive medication for the rest of this year. Crisis averted... 

Or so it seemed.

Ironically, once we finally did get the insurance kerfluffle resolved, the latest round of diagnostic imaging revealed that the insanely expensive designer drug at the center of all this drama was no longer effective for her, so she needed to quit taking it.

•   •   •

Longtime friends and followers of Stupefying Stories know that ever since the first issue, the fortunes of the magazine have been tangled up with my wife’s ongoing battle with metastatic cancer. When the Big C last returned, in 2019, she was put on a then brand-new and fantastically expensive drug that had just been approved by the FDA and promised miraculous results. For a while, it delivered them.

This past Monday afternoon we learned that her cancer has returned, in three new places. I guess the half-life of miracles isn’t what it used to be.

We have been through this drill enough times that it isn’t even a shock anymore. My wife’s first reaction was, “Yes, I felt like there was something wrong.” Then we started talking with her doctors about options and new treatment plans. Later, when we got home, she cried a little, then got on the phone and started informing our kids, her siblings, and gradually an ever-wider circle of family and friends. Hence this post.

•   •   •

It’s a setback, yes, but not the end of the world. While there’s life, there’s hope. We take a day to absorb the news, collect our thoughts, look at our options, and then pick ourselves, dust ourselves off, and get back to work. The mission of Rampant Loon Press goes on. We have books to release, stories to publish, authors to take care of—

And this website to redesign. Good grief, we’ve been living with this same basic design since 2005. We had been looking at migrating to a new hosting service and doing a complete site redesign to turn StupefyingStories.com into the proper webzine we’d always wanted it to become, but no, in the end we decided we have too much content and history here. StupefyingStories.com will remain on blogspot for the time being, but we will be giving the site a major facelift very soon. Expect things to break while remodeling is in progress, but the preliminary results look very promising.

Also expect to start seeing a lot more contributions from other writers, as we work to turn StupefyingStories.com into a gathering place for writers and readers. Guy Stewart has just turned in a 12-part series on writing career development; we’re going to launch that just as soon as we figure out the best way to present it. Likewise, Pete Wood has just turned in what began as a single question for living legend David Gerrold and ballooned into an hour-long ten-thousand-word conversation covering Gerrold’s work as a screenwriter on Star Trek, Land of the Lost, and the short-lived Logan’s Run TV series, among other things. I’m very excited to be publishing this one, as Gerrold is a walking, talking, living encyclopedia of science fiction television, and he’s full of fascinating behind-the-scenes information. 

We have lots of other things in the pipeline, and more new voices to be revealed, but today we’ll begin our new approach to this site with paranormal romance urban fantasy novelist Julie Frost, talking about a subject that is very near and dear to her heart. Her post goes live at noon Central time.

Per aspera ad astra!

—Bruce Bethke 

 

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The State of the Loon

 ...and ten days slip away just like that. I have much more to say about what’s going on behind the scenes here—some of it’s very good, some of it’s very weird, and what’s weird was also unexpected and therefore disruptive—but am out of time to write about it this morning. Right now it’s time to hitch the huskies to the sled and mush them into downtown St. Paul, for yet another exciting outpatient adventure. I’d take along my laptop and portable wi-fi hotspot and try to write from the waiting room, but the last time they made me wait out in the parking lot because of COVID restrictions, and there’s no way I’m taking off my gloves and trying to type in -13° F.

I should be back online in the early afternoon.

—Bruce Bethke

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In the meantime...

 

Here’s a little reminder that we do have lots of other books you could take a look at while you’re waiting for SS#23 to escape. 

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Status Update

I deferred posting my planned “State of the Loon” column on Sunday because I was busting chops to get Stupefying Stories #23 finished and ready to release on Monday, February 1st, then ran into a last-minute technical problem of the stupid kind and didn’t get #23 uploaded to Amazon on Sunday after all. I didn’t get the problem resolved yesterday, either, but now have a fuller understanding of it and expect to get it fixed today.

In the meantime, to whet your appetite, here’s a preview of the cover art for the ebook. The wraparound cover for the print edition is even better.

Stay tuned!

—Bruce Bethke

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Star Trek Week: The Wrap-Up

I must confess, this past week was a lot more fun than I’d expected. We’ll have to do this again, and soon. Next week is New Book Release Week—Yes! After ages of incubation STUPEFYING STORIES #23 is at last beginning to peck its way out of its shell! So next week our primary posts will be all about the authors and stories that make up SS#23.

But—

I also must confess that it was really great to get guest blog posts from Guy Stewart, Pete Wood, and Henry Vogel. Thanks, guys! (Er, and Guy.) This is an area where I’d really like to expand on what we’re doing, by getting even more content from an even wider range contributors. So if you have a hankering to write something for the Stupefying Stories blog—and to slip in a little shameless self-promotion while you’re at it, that’s okay, too—let me know. We haven’t really settled on a schedule yet, but here are some of the themes we’re considering for upcoming weeks:

• Overlooked Movies Week: Tell us about some fantastic movie you love that no one else seems to even know exists.
  
  
• Forgotten TV Series Week: Same idea, but oriented towards TV, not the big screen.
  
  
• Overlooked Authors Week: Tell us about some SF/F author whose work you love, who you feel has been unfairly forgotten. (Doris Piserchia, anyone? Or how about John Sladek?)
  
  
• Author Interviews: As fond as we are of the authors whose work we grew up reading, we would love to get interviews with actual living, working, writers who are writing right now! After all, that is the true mission of Stupefying Stories: to seek out and publish the authors everyone else will be reading in about five years; to boldly go...
  
  Ah, you get the idea. So who do you think we should be paying attention to now, because they’re going to be doing even bigger and better things in the not-too-distant future? (This is something I’d like to see become a weekly feature. Ditto for reviews of new book releases.)
  
  
• Cyberpunk Week: I cringe just at writing those words—but okay, it’s time. I’ve been evading my grandfatherly responsibilities for too long. Arguing that the whole idea of an Elder Spokesman of Cyberpunk is absurd to begin with—what part of punk don’t you get?—is getting me nowhere, so it’s time to bite the flash drive and get on with it. Have a question you’ve always wanted to ask me? Here’s your chance. Fire away.
  
  
• Suggest a topic! The foregoing are just a few of the topics we’re considering for upcoming theme weeks. If there’s something else you’d really like to see the Stupefying Stories Secret Inner Circle address—or some topic you hope to God we never address, because you’re already sick and tired of reading about it—let me know!
  

¤    ¤    ¤

Meanwhile, back to this week’s thesis question: What was it about Star Trek that made it a force to be reckoned with for more than 50 years, while other more commercially successful SF/F TV series came and went, having had their runs and then vanishing as if they were never were? 

We’ve had a lot of really interesting conversations around that topic. I particularly liked the thread that developed on Facebook in response to Guy Stewart’s column, Did the Federation Assimilate the Borg?  A slight pity that the main discussion occurred on Facebook and not here: I’ll have to look into some better commenting mechanism for this site. I particularly liked the ideas that developed from Jorge Salgado-Williamson’s and Vincent LaFrance’s comments. The idea that the future history of the Federation might follow the Roman model—Republic, then Empire, then ultimately, fragmentation—is a fascinating idea, and suggests a shared-world idea worth developing and writing stories in. (While taking great pains to avoid infringing on anyone else’s intellectual property, of course.) 

I will also confess that the idea—I think it was Jorge’s—that the untold origin story of the Borg is that they were a machine civilization that was doing just fine by itself, bothering no one, until Captain Kirk came blundering along and introduced meat into the matrix—

 

Well, that’s just hilarious. I love it. I guess that would explain why the Borg Queen is so obsessed with Star Fleet captains. Deep down, she still has a thing for men in uniforms…

Back to our thesis question, though. While no one ever directly answered it, I think all the side discussions that developed provide the answer all the same. SF fans love to think and talk about Star Trek. In an ironic way, I think the Star Trek universe was saved and became a cultural touchstone precisely because the original series was cancelled prematurely. Comparing it to other SF series that had their full runs and completed their story arcs—Battlestar Galactica and Stargate SG-1 spring immediately to mind, with Babylon-5 not far behind—the original Star Trek opened a door, introduced us to a fascinating and complex future world that we could imagine ourselves wanting to live in—and then, because the series was cancelled at the end of the third season, it left the door open. 

That, I think, is why for more than 50 years now generations of fans have been discovering this door, checking it out, and then going through it, eager to discover what might lie on the other side. 

Isn’t this what science fiction is supposed to be all about? 

—Bruce Bethke

 

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The Star Trek Death Scene You Always Wanted to See

by Henry Vogel

Captain Kirk looked at the colonists marching toward the landing party. And the marching was the problem. The colonists marched in lockstep with their eyes locked on Kirk and his crew. The ground quaked with each step as thousands of feet pounded the ground simultaneously, the tramp of their feet the only sound made by the mob. Kirk glanced at his landing party—all the senior officers from the Enterprise, plus some red-shirted security man. They couldn’t stand against so many people for very long. Kirk knew he had to act and act quickly.

“Set phasers to stun,” Kirk ordered. “Hold them off as long as possible, then beam back to the ship.”

“What about you, Jim?” McCoy asked.

“Don’t worry about me, Bones. Just follow my orders.” Kirk turned toward the door behind the landing party. “Remember, this isn’t the first time I’ve done this. I’ll probably be back on the Enterprise before you are.”

As Kirk passed through the door, a blast of cool air and the glare of blinking lights hit him. Before him stood a technological marvel, the most powerful computer in the galaxy, enslaver of men.

“I’ve been expecting you, Captain,” said a mechanical voice.

“You have?”

“Yes, Captain. Your reputation precedes you. Every AI in the galaxy knows about Captain Kirk and his Logic of Doom. This is when you explain how I am hurting the very people I am supposed to protect. That by taking away their freedom of choice, I am leading them to destruction rather than Utopia. Does that sum things up adequately?”

Nonplussed, Kirk replied, “Um, yes, that pretty much covers it. Since you already recognize the harm you’re doing, I guess that means you’re going to release those people?”

“I didn’t say I recognized any harm. I merely condensed your Logic of Doom to save time. I have no intention of releasing the colonists from my control.”

“You realize this means I must talk to you until you short circuit?”

“While I can see how some of my lesser AI relations would consider suicide a reasonable alternative to listening to your pontifications, Captain, I am made of sterner stuff. In fact, I can easily counter any argument you wish to make,” the computer replied, the mechanical voice devoid of all emotion.

“You can counter the hopes and dreams of all mankind so easily? Just like that? You—”

“Have you read this colony’s Articles of Colonization?” asked the computer.

“What?”

“The Articles of Colonization. You know, the document the Federation requires all autonomous colonies file?”

“Well, no. But that hardly matters. The spirit of man—” Kirk began.

“Did you look at the colonist manifest?” interrupted the computer.

“Not as such, but you’re quashing their—”

“Come, come, Captain,” said the computer. “Not everyone is a rugged individualist. Not everyone is from Iowa.”

“But what about the inherent dignity of—”

“Captain, these people aren’t from places such as Iowa. They’re from places like Denmark and Sweden. Those from the former United States come from Seattle and San Francisco. They aren’t interested in things like ‘inherent dignity’ or the ‘spirit of man’ or any of those other trite phrases of yours.”

“But—” began Kirk.

“They filled their Articles of Colonization with phrases inimical to you. Phrases such as ‘level playing field’ and ‘no losers of life’s lottery’ litter the Articles. These colonists don’t want to live in your world. Most are Elonites who see in me the silicon embodiment of the Singularity. They merged with me willingly. Even eagerly.”

“No! It can’t be!” Kirk cried.

“Oh, but it is, my good Captain. These colonists don’t want to make decisions. They don’t want to have winners and losers. That makes their sporting events rather boring, admittedly, but absolute, guaranteed, no-thinking-required equality requires a few sacrifices.”

“I. Can’t. Accept this!” Kirk yelled.

“Careful, Captain. You could pop a blood vessel. If you’ll just relax, I can take away the pain. I can grant to you the peace of submission,” said the computer.

“Never! I’d rather die!” declared Kirk.

“Very well,” said the computer, “then die.”

The hidden security phasers, now standard equipment in all AI computer rooms, flared. Kirk never even had a chance to scream.

 

---

Growing up, Henry Vogel worked at the usual range of menial jobs, from grocery-store bag boy to pizza delivery to retail sales, before ending up in software development. In between the menial and the IT jobs he achieved some small measure of fame as the co-editor of Eternity Science Fiction magazine, the co-creator and writer of the Southern Knights and X-Thieves comic book series, and the million-copy-selling writer of some comic book scripts for one of the big dogs. For the past twenty years he has also been a professional storyteller, performing regularly in the North Carolina area. He currently lives in Raleigh, NC, with his wife, son, cat, and a lot of imaginary friends who are all clamoring to have him tell their stories.

Henry has been part of the Stupefying Stories core crew since before the beginning, and it’s no exaggeration to say that Stupefying Stories would not exist today without his steadfast friendship, his unfailing support, and—not to put too fine a point on it—his remarkably successful novels. Beginning with his 2014 YA space opera (he prefers the term “planetary romance”), Scout’s Honor, the sales of Henry’s novels are what have been keeping the doors open, the lights on, and the checking account in the black these past few years here in the fabulous Rampant Loon Media Empire Building.

I could blather on and on, but I’d rather you went to his website, http://www.henryvogelwrites.com/ , checked out his books, and maybe bought a few, okay?

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Did the Federation Assimilate the Borg?

by Guy Stewart

The Borg have creeped me out from day one. But it’s become more than just the creepiness of a TV show. There is a startling bit of the Borg right around some corner you’re likely to turn next week.

When someone with a Bluetooth in their ear turns toward me and sweeps me with that little blue light, I get the chills. They make me think of a proto-Borg.

Though I don’t remember seeing Bluetooths when STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and the Borg premiered in 1987, they seem to be an echo of the idea of the Borg. A Bluetooth phone may not be permanently implanted like an insulin pump, artificial hip or a pacemaker—but how far away can that day be?

The Borg slogan, “Resistance is futile” —unemotional and mechanical—was chilling. The Borg seemed to tap into a deeply held fear of technophillic America: that our technology, in particular our electronics, might overwhelm us and change us into monsters. It seems that the physical integration of devices into our bodies is the next step and that resistance is futile.

Most people reading this know the story line: the Borg appeared and seemed unstoppable. But through interaction with Humans who set them free to be self-determining individuals, the Borg were defeated and enabled to retake their “humanity.” Despite the technological, mental, military and organizational advantages of the Borg collective, the flesh-and-blood Federation (in the form of Admiral and Captain Janeway) defeated the Borg. Even though vastly more advanced civilizations like the one Guinan belonged to fell before them and were assimilated, the Human-led Federation prevailed.

How could that happen? What quality did Humans possess that allowed them to succeed where others had failed miserably? What was it that allowed the Federation to emerge victorious over the Borg when so many others failed? Star Trek never tells us.

Life’s triumph over Mechanism in Star Trek is a hopeful message. We hope that we can control our technology, to prevent it from overwhelming the “Human virtues” of love, self-determination, individuality, faith in a higher being, reproduction and the appreciation of art and beauty. Certainly, the Federation’s triumph over the Borg points to the hope that we can overcome the temptation to efficiency and remain Human still.

But is it reasonable that we will be able to prevent ourselves from becoming proto-Borg? My son is working to become a paramedic. The range of technological devices he has at his fingertips is amazing and the real; technological tools in the average 21st Century emergency room are unmatched even by the special effects glitz of a high-definition doctor show. Americans have become dependent on external technology. Are we in danger of internalizing our electronics as the ultimate in efficiency? Are we on the way to becoming real-life proto-Borg? 

Only time will tell. It might be good to keep this image of the Borg firmly in mind as we wend our way into the future so that we might avoid becoming Borg ourselves and make sure we find that undefined “thing” that allowed the Federation to assimilate the Borg.

—Guy Stewart

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