When the protagonist of Knots walked through a fold in the world into a alternate land, it seemed only natural that he would be befriended by a talking cat. Trefoil was only a walk-on character at first, but quickly became a central part of the narrative. I dedicated the book to the cats who kept me company while writing.
In Stellar Horizons, you build your own space program and advance out into the solar system, first tentatively with fragile robotic orbiters and rovers. With each success or failure you slowly gather scientific data and technical experience and move to more and more sophisticated crewed ships, and then bases, perhaps first on the moon, and then other planets.
It’s finally showing signs of spring here in Upstate New York, even though friends from warmer climates have been posting pictures of blossoms for many weeks now. The Ume trees are the first to burst forth (their cousins in Japan have been out for a couple of months now and are already producing fruit.)
After finishing the excellent (but long and relentless) Otherland series, I was in the mood for something lighter, so I picked out some stories in a more humorous vein. I came up with three that satisfied the need, and reviewed them below. It started me thinking about how they used humor in different ways.
I’ve used a lot of aphorisms in my career, short sayings to make a point. Some of my favorites were:
Sufficient unto the day are the meetings thereof
Cheap hardware isn’t
Anything can be accomplished given sufficient caffeine
To explain simply, understand deeply
Midwinter holidays and chaos – and a cat Escher and Emeline have brought a tree into the house to decorate, and Trefoil the cat must investigate, of course. There’s something not quite right about this
A Science Fiction story of first contact Lieutenant Yusmara is an unconventional starship pilot. She steers by rope and canvas, at least in metaphor. She’s at the helm of the Gemini as something pulls onto
A contagious short story Stories are repeated. They evolve. They are cross-bred and spliced. Ideas take on a life of their own. The oldest legends appear in the latest retellings. One day, by design or
A story of a time traveler and a coroner in Chaucer’s era The corpse showed up with an ax in its head and a map in its pocket. Chaucer had not been born yet, and
A Science Fiction story of the multiverse That place where you tripped? What if a prominent but slightly odd physicist told you that’s where two universes intersect, and you’ve just stumbled into a universe that’s