As we look back on the year 2015, I think we would all do well to remember actor/director/comedian Steve Martin's heartfelt message "What I Believe", as true today as when he recorded it back in 1981.
Showing posts with label Words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Words. Show all posts
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Monday, November 30, 2015
NaBloPoMo
Even that ordinarily wouldn't have been enough to get me to participate, but as I lay in bed ruminating before sleep on the evening of November 2, it occurred to me that I could do a couple of posts on the planet Trantor in response to a Facebook post by my friend Christina. At that point, I was off to a solid start without quite meaning to be, and so it seemed a shame not to try to see the thing through. It also helped that I had a new job that afforded me a lot of free time to sit and write blog posts. If you look through the last month's blog posts, you'll see a number that were posted between midnight and 8 am. Those were the ones I wrote while I was on the clock at my job. (It's no coincidence, btw, that I had a similar job back in 2009 when I first participated in NaBloPoMo.)
After the Trantor articles, my interest in national politics gave me plenty of fodder for blogging. If that failed, I could always resort to my series of prophetic utterances, or even do a quick-and-dirty embedded music video. For the most part, though, I was sustained in my quest by the crazy Republican presidential candidates, or the violent actions of my fellow white men.
Will I keep blogging every day? Probably not. My work on the Sobel Wiki has been lagging while I've been focused on blogging, and I'm going to want to get back into that groove. But now that I've got all this free time at my job, I'm pretty sure my blogging output is going to remain higher than it has been for the last year or two. I'm sure the ongoing presidential race will help there, and sadly, I'm equally sure that my fellow white men will continue committing armed atrocities for the foreseeable future. So, expect to see a new birth of freedom here at the Johnny Pez blog.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
For All Nails #319: Strategic Alliance by Johnny Pez
For All Nails #319: Strategic Alliance
by Johnny Pez
Gallivan Airfield
Michigan City, Indiana, CNA
14 November 1935
More than once as he flew across the continent, John Jackson found himself sympathizing with Governor-General Douglas Watson. Like Watson, Jackson had faced considerable resistance from his staff to his plan to travel by airmobile. Too dangerous, they kept telling him. If he died unexpectedly, the company would find itself paralyzed as the heads of the various subsidiaries intrigued to replace him.
Unlike Watson, Jackson had refused to let himself be talked out of his decision. Watson could spare the time; he could not. It would take three days to travel from San Francisco to Michigan City by train or locomobile, and he didn't have three days to spare. With refueling stops in Conyers and St. Louis, the trip would only require 20 hours by airmobile, so airmobile it had to be.
Jackson and his aide Sandoval were only at Gallivan Airfield long enough to go through an abbreviated version of customs before a waiting livery took them out to Galloway Point. Normally, the two men would have spent the forty-minute ride working, but he had yielded to his staff to the point of not bringing any sensitive documents with him into the C.N.A. The C.B.I. was known to be rather suspicious where Kramer Associates was concerned, the fruit of his predecessors' sometimes injudicious attempts to influence North American elections results. While it was unlikely that they would attempt anything as crude as a search of his possessions, there was no point in tempting fate. Instead, Jackson spent his time looking out through the livery's back window at the passing landscape, and conversing with Sandoval.
Sandoval's position as Jackson's chief assistant made him one of the top men in the company, and along with Aikens and Salazar he was in the running to succeed Jackson as president of the company. In the running, but not certain to do so. Like Jackson himself under Benedict, Sandoval would have to prove he had the right mix of daring, prudence, vision, and business acumen if he wanted the top spot. Jackson would have been lying if he had denied taking a certain amount of enjoyment from the competition. Salazar was off in the Philippines paving the way for the upcoming move; Aikens was in Honolulu overseeing the university; and Sandoval was here with him. Only time would tell which of the three had chosen the right path to the presidency.
"Ever been to Michigan City before, Sandoval?"
"No, sir, it's my first time here."
Jackson knew that perfectly well, of course. "I've been here twice before," he continued. "It's a little odd. At first, you think you might be in San Francisco or Henrytown, but then you start noticing differences."
Sandoval nodded. "All of the signs are in English," he noted.
"That's the first thing you notice," Jackson agreed. He nodded toward the passing lokes in the other traffic lane.
Sandoval peered at them for a long moment before saying, "Well, most of them are North American, obviously."
Jackson said, "And the drivers?"
He could practically see the Edison lamp going off over Sandoval's head. "A lot of them are Negroes," he said.
"About a third, I'd say," said Jackson.
"That is a big difference," Sandoval admitted. Back in Mexico, ownership of locomobiles was still mostly confined to Anglos and Hispanos, though the number of Mexicano drivers was growing steadily. Jackson doubted whether there were more than a thousand Negroes in all of Mexico who owned locomobiles. As he always did when he contemplated the racial divisions in his native land, Jackson felt relieved at the company's impending departure for the Far East.
The blocks of flats, row houses, duplexes, and single-family homes they were passing through suddenly gave way to spacious estates, most of them well-fenced. "I take it we've entered Galloway Point," said Sandoval.
Jackson nodded again. "They all look like they've been transplanted from the English countryside. A few of them have been. You can tell the North Americans still look to the British for their notions of gracious living."
At last the livery turned right onto a gravel drive (of course!) leading up to an imposing wrought-iron gate with a uniformed attendant. A brief conversation between attendant and driver, and the gate swung ponderously open. The gravel drive meandered through meticulously-kept grounds to the front entrance of an imposing faux-English-manor. The livery halted, and the driver opened the door for Jackson and Sandoval, then stood at a fair approximation of attention as they emerged.
An elderly, immaculately-dressed Negro came down the steps from the front doors to welcome them. "Good afternoon Mr. Jackson, Mr. Sandoval," he said. "I am Mr. Billington. Mr. Galloway has been expecting you." Jackson recognized the man: Ferdinand Billington, a member of one of the most prominent Negro families in the C.N.A. Forty-two years before, his father had been the first Negro from the Northern Confederation to be elected to the Grand Council; two years ago, Billington's son had been elected to the same seat. Billington himself served as chief counsel for North American Motors, and was one of Owen Galloway's closest friends. He led them up the steps, where two formally-dressed servants, one Negro and one white, opened the doors for them.
The interior of the Galloway mansion matched the exterior in mimicking an English country manor. There was oak paneling everywhere, portraits of various ancestral Galloways hanging from the walls, and even suits of armor. A visitor could be forgiven for thinking the building was centuries old, but Jackson happened to know that it had been built only twenty-five years before, by Owen Galloway's father, who was the first member of the prestigious family to reside in Michigan City.
Mr. Billington led them into a library, currently unoccupied, and told them, "Mr. Galloway with be with you momentarily," before backing out of the room and closing the doors behind him.
Sandoval was looking around the library. He said, "I have the oddest feeling that I've been here before."
"You've probably seen it hundreds of times," Jackson told him. "This is where Mr. Galloway broadcasts his weekly homilies. He has a full set of vitavision equipment stowed in the next room."
"You seem quite well-informed, sir," said a voice behind them. It was the most familiar voice in the English-speaking world, more familiar than any political leader or entertainer. Jackson and Sandoval turned and saw Owen Galloway standing just inside the library's doorway, with Billington standing discreetly behind him.
Galloway was far and away the most popular public figure in the C.N.A. Had he wished it, he could have been Governor-General; indeed, on more than one occasion it had been necessary for him to act to prevent the Grand Council from elevating him to the office. With one speech, he had transformed Governor-General Watson from a political mastermind to a pariah fighting to stay in office. He was the architect of the Galloway Plan, which had arguably prevented civil war from breaking out in the C.N.A. twelve years before. He was also the president of North American Motors, the largest corporation in the C.N.A., and the second largest in the world, and thus in a sense the closest thing Jackson had to a business rival.
"I try to be, sir," Jackson responded.
Galloway gestured for the four of them to seat themselves at the far end of the library, in seats ranged around a low table near a fireplace where a fire burned low. Servants entered and placed plates of pâté, caviar, and other delicacies on the table, and Galloway invited his guests to help themselves.To Jackson's surprise, Galloway's voice was quite animated, and precisely modulated, in startling contrast to the dull monotone in which he gave his weekly speeches to the nation. He supposed that the other man must simply be bad at reciting prepared speeches.
Jackson would have preferred to get right to the point, but he knew that when dealing with North Americans, the formalities had to be observed. Galloway was their host, and it was a host's duty to provide refreshments. So Galloway and Jackson discussed trivialities while they ate together, and Jackson endured it with as much patience as he could muster.
Once they had eaten, and the servants had returned to clear away the plates, Galloway said, "Now then, Mr. Jackson, to what do I owe the honor of your presence in my home? Your representatives assured me that it was not related to business, and I admit I am unsure what other common interests we might share."
"Mr. Galloway," Jackson answered, "we share the same common interest that all men of good will share: the cause of world peace."
Galloway raised a skeptical eyebrow. "You, Mr. Jackson? An idealist?"
"I'll level with you, sir," said Jackson. "My firm seeks to expand into the Far East. For that, I need stable business conditions. And I happen to know that President Silva has plans to wage a war of conquest in that part of the world. The last thing I need is the U.S. Pacific Fleet attacking my business partners, so you and I share a common interest in keeping the peace, even if our motives might differ."
Galloway's face still exhibited skepticism. "And how do you propose that we should pursue this common interest?"
"We each have our own preferred means of influencing opinion," Jackson said. "For you, it is your weekly addresses to your nation. And not just to your own nation, I might add. They are also broadcast in my own country, and I understand that recordings of your speeches are broadcast in other nations around the world, often in translation in those countries where English is not commonly spoken."
"I believe I know what your own preferred method is," Galloway responded. "I understand your Mr. Fuentes took exception to it, and sought to put an end to it. Unsuccessfully, I might add."
Jackson allowed himself a thin smile. "Think of it as an old company tradition. I believe that together, we have sufficient resources at our command to identify those men who represent a threat to world peace, and to see to it that they are not allowed to influence policy in their respective nations. A strategic alliance, as it were."
Galloway shook his head. "Mr. Jackson, I see that you mean well, or at least you mean something. It is my belief, however, that efforts to corrupt the political process, even in the cause of peace, would prove to be a cure that was worse than the disease." He stood up from his seat and added, "I believe that we have nothing more to say to one another. Good day, sir. Mr. Billington, if you would be so kind?"
Billington politely escorted the two visitors to the front door, where they found their livery still waiting. As the vehicle pulled away from the front entrance, Jackson sighed. "Well, Sandoval," he said, "now you see what idealism will get you."
"Are you certain he was wrong, sir?" Sandoval replied. "Isn't that the reason we're leaving Mexico? Seventy years of buying politicians has left the country with a completely dysfunctional political system, so we're moving to the Philippines. And what then? Will we keep jumping from country to country, buying politicians as we go, and then leaving when the political culture becomes too corrupt to function?"
Jackson made no answer, but he knew then and there that when he finally stepped down as head of the company, Sandoval would not be replacing him.
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Autobiographical
-- From Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story
Being perpetually short of money, I wasn't expecting to receive any birthday presents, so I was agreeably surprised on my birthday to find that an anonymous benefactor had left me a woodsman's axe. It was wonderfully balanced, with a head of tempered steel that was sharp enough to split a hair, which I determined by actually dropping a hair on it and watching as the axe's blade neatly split the hair into two.
So great was my joy at receiving this unexpected gift that I immediately rushed from my dorm room, determined to use it on the first tree I came across. That proved to be a cherry tree growing in the middle of the quad. Given the keen nature of the axe's blade, it was the work of a moment to bring that cherry tree crashing down. It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that the university administration might frown on students chopping trees down in the middle of the Yale campus.
My fears proved well-founded when I went to my Perceptions 301 class the next day. Before delivering her lecture, the professor brought up the matter of the downed cherry tree, informing us that every professor at Yale would be asking their students whether they knew anything about the matter.
I stood up from my seat and announced, "Professor, I cannot tell a lie. It was I who chopped down the cherry tree with my new axe."
The professor came toward me. With her was a photographer for the Yale Daily News who paused and snapped my picture.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
"Honesty like that deserves to be rewarded," the teacher told me.
The professor then did something even better. She handed me a ten-dollar bill.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Sic transit gloria mundi
What language do they speak in Latin America? If you answered "Latin," congratulations, you qualify as a wingnut commenter!
Via the Vermont Political Observer comes a story of Why We Can't Have Nice Things. Last year, an eighth grader at The Riverside School in Lyndonville, Vermont had an idea. The USA has a Latin motto, e pluribus unum. Several states have Latin mottoes, including such liberal vanguards as Alabama, Idaho, Oklahoma, and both Carolinas. Why shouldn't Vermont have a Latin motto? Of course, the state already has a motto in English, "Freedom and unity," but the student wrote to Senate Minority Leader Joe Benning to suggest that it would really class the place up if Vermont had a Latin motto too. The VPO notes:
It was too late in the legislative season to introduce the bill last year, but this month Benning introduced Senate Bill 2 to give Vermont a Latin state motto to go along with the English state motto. All was calm, all was bright. Then local TV station WCAX did a story about the bill.
You're ahead of me, right? The station's Facebook page was soon inundated with angry comments from American Freedom Warriors denouncing the idea of Vermont having a Latino motto. Ifyouonlynews.com picked the story up from the VPO, and got some screen caps of the comments to preserve them for posterity:
Richard Mason: We are AMERICANS, not latins, why not come up with a Vermont motto that is actually from us
Dorothy Lynn Lepisto: I thought Vermont was American not Latin? Does any Latin places have American mottos?
Brenda Smolnik: I DON'T THINK SO!!! I hate having to press 1 for English now.
Bill Ogden: Go back to your Latin country
Dan Zucker: The motto is on the language of the foreigners trying to take over the country they shood be chinese, since they are more than the mexicans go back to Kenya! i don't speak ATHEIST.
Linda Murphy: This is America! Not Mexico!
It sounds to me like the next great issue is staring the GOP presidential contenders in the face. Did you know that the USA has a LATIN motto? EPLURIBUSUNUMGHAZI!
Via the Vermont Political Observer comes a story of Why We Can't Have Nice Things. Last year, an eighth grader at The Riverside School in Lyndonville, Vermont had an idea. The USA has a Latin motto, e pluribus unum. Several states have Latin mottoes, including such liberal vanguards as Alabama, Idaho, Oklahoma, and both Carolinas. Why shouldn't Vermont have a Latin motto? Of course, the state already has a motto in English, "Freedom and unity," but the student wrote to Senate Minority Leader Joe Benning to suggest that it would really class the place up if Vermont had a Latin motto too. The VPO notes:
As the idea developed, those involved came up with a motto: Stella quarta decima fulgeat. The translation: “May the Fourteenth Star Shine Bright,” is a nod to Vermont’s status as the fourteenth state to join the union. Nice. Poetic in both languages. Benning brought the student to Montpelier and introduced her to the Government Operations Committee, which would consider her proposal.
It was too late in the legislative season to introduce the bill last year, but this month Benning introduced Senate Bill 2 to give Vermont a Latin state motto to go along with the English state motto. All was calm, all was bright. Then local TV station WCAX did a story about the bill.
You're ahead of me, right? The station's Facebook page was soon inundated with angry comments from American Freedom Warriors denouncing the idea of Vermont having a Latino motto. Ifyouonlynews.com picked the story up from the VPO, and got some screen caps of the comments to preserve them for posterity:
Richard Mason: We are AMERICANS, not latins, why not come up with a Vermont motto that is actually from us
Dorothy Lynn Lepisto: I thought Vermont was American not Latin? Does any Latin places have American mottos?
Brenda Smolnik: I DON'T THINK SO!!! I hate having to press 1 for English now.
Bill Ogden: Go back to your Latin country
Dan Zucker: The motto is on the language of the foreigners trying to take over the country they shood be chinese, since they are more than the mexicans go back to Kenya! i don't speak ATHEIST.
Linda Murphy: This is America! Not Mexico!
It sounds to me like the next great issue is staring the GOP presidential contenders in the face. Did you know that the USA has a LATIN motto? EPLURIBUSUNUMGHAZI!
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Rangers of the north
According to Amazon.com, in the five months since I e-published my novelization of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, I've sold a grand total of two copies. Which is two more than I thought I'd sell.
I can't help noticing, though, that neither of my readers has posted a review of the book on Amazon. Readers, if you're reading this, go ahead and tell the world what you thought of the book. Even if you didn't care for it and only give it a one-star review, that's still better than not having any reviews at all. This is definitely a case where there's no such thing as bad publicity.
I can't help noticing, though, that neither of my readers has posted a review of the book on Amazon. Readers, if you're reading this, go ahead and tell the world what you thought of the book. Even if you didn't care for it and only give it a one-star review, that's still better than not having any reviews at all. This is definitely a case where there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Rocky Jones, Space Ranger
The early 1950s was the heyday of the live-action television space opera. Starting in the summer of 1949 with the premier of Captain Video and His Video Rangers on the DuMont Television Network, a number of science fiction series aimed at children were broadcast on all four American television networks: Tom Corbett, Space Cadet; Space Patrol; Captain Z-Ro; and Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers. Like Captain Video, all of the subsequent series were broadcast live, and as a result, all that remains of them are some kinescopes of a few episodes. With one exception.
In 1951, Roland Reed, the head of Roland Reed Productions in Hollywood, decided to produce his own science fiction television series. He commissioned a script for a pilot episode of a series called Rocky Jones, Space Ranger from one of his writers, Warren Wilson. Unlike the other series appearing on the air at the time, Reed intended for his Rocky Jones series to be shot on film and syndicated to individual stations across the United States. The pilot was produced between January and May 1952, and finally screened for Reed in September. Reed green-lighted production, and over the course of the next year scripts for 26 episodes were written. Because of cast changes for some of the characters, the original pilot episode was never aired, except for some sequences that were re-used in the episode "Bobby's Comet".
The series began to air on various stations in February 1954, while filming of the episodes continued. Sudden cast changes were required when one actor was jailed in February 1954, and another died in June. An additional 13 episodes were filmed between August and October 1954, and the last of these aired in November. After that, Roland Reed Productions ended production of the Rocky Jones series.
The series quickly fell into obscurity, though it lived on in the memories of baby boomers who watched it as children (including science fiction writer John Varley, who named the heroine of his Titan trilogy, Cirocco "Rocky" Jones, after the series' lead character).
Because the series existed physically as a set of film canisters located in the vaults of various television stations, it did not remain in obscurity. Most of the half-hour episodes formed the segments of three-chapter serials, and after the series' original run ended, these serials were formed into 90-minute television movies and were broadcast from time to time, just like the Hollywood B-grade monster movies they superficially resembled.
In September 1992, one of these fix-up Rocky Jones movies, Manhunt in Space, was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, followed by a second, Crash of the Moons, in November. This led to a revival of interest in the series, helped along by the fact that the copyright on the episodes had lapsed. With the series in the public domain, cheaply-produced DVDs of the episodes began to appear for sale.
However, while the original episodes of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger have been preserved for posterity, there is one sense in which Tom Corbett, Space Cadet still has the advantage. From 1952 to 1956, a series of eight novelizations of Tom Corbett episodes were published, and seven of them can be found at Project Gutenberg. Unlike Corbett, and unlike his fellow Space Ranger Lucky Starr, Rocky Jones has never been immortalized in prose.
Well, that's no good, is it? Something has to be done for poor Rocky, and if you want something done right (or at all), you have to do it yourself. So it is that the sprawling Johnny Pez blog empire has spread to a new blog, http://rockyjonesspaceranger.blogspot.com/. Here you will find my ongoing project to novelize the Rocky Jones television series. I'm still working my way through the first serial, "Beyond the Curtain of Space", with the sixth chapter having just gone up yesterday, covering the first seven minutes or so of the second episode. I can't promise that the work will go quickly, since I have a lot of other tasks taking up my time (this blog not being the least of them), but if the internet and I both last long enough, Rocky Jones will see himself ensconced within the field of literature (if not necessarily of print).
UPDATE: 6 July 2014: Four years after this was first posted, I finally completed my novelization of "Beyond the Curtain of Space." Now that it's finished, I've decided to publish it as an ebook on Amazon.com. And since I'm trying to make money from it, I've removed all but three sample chapters of the novelization from the Rocky Jones blog.
If your hunger for a space opera media tie-in written by yours truly is great enough, you can buy your own Amazon Kindle version of "Beyond the Curtain of Space" for a very reasonable $2.99 by following the link over on the sidebar, or this link here. If you're a reviewer, I can email you a free review copy as a text file.
Can I actually make money from my quixotic hobby? We shall see. If by some miracle I actually do start selling dozens or even hundreds of copies of "Beyond the Curtain of Space," I'll naturally novelize more episodes, and maybe even write some original Rocky Jones novels.
Also, too, if you're a Hollywood movie studio looking for an established science fiction franchise to market, I'd like to point out that while the original Rocky Jones series is now in the public domain, my novelization is under copyright, and the exclusive film rights can be optioned for very reasonable terms. Have your people talk to my people.
In 1951, Roland Reed, the head of Roland Reed Productions in Hollywood, decided to produce his own science fiction television series. He commissioned a script for a pilot episode of a series called Rocky Jones, Space Ranger from one of his writers, Warren Wilson. Unlike the other series appearing on the air at the time, Reed intended for his Rocky Jones series to be shot on film and syndicated to individual stations across the United States. The pilot was produced between January and May 1952, and finally screened for Reed in September. Reed green-lighted production, and over the course of the next year scripts for 26 episodes were written. Because of cast changes for some of the characters, the original pilot episode was never aired, except for some sequences that were re-used in the episode "Bobby's Comet".
The series began to air on various stations in February 1954, while filming of the episodes continued. Sudden cast changes were required when one actor was jailed in February 1954, and another died in June. An additional 13 episodes were filmed between August and October 1954, and the last of these aired in November. After that, Roland Reed Productions ended production of the Rocky Jones series.
The series quickly fell into obscurity, though it lived on in the memories of baby boomers who watched it as children (including science fiction writer John Varley, who named the heroine of his Titan trilogy, Cirocco "Rocky" Jones, after the series' lead character).
Because the series existed physically as a set of film canisters located in the vaults of various television stations, it did not remain in obscurity. Most of the half-hour episodes formed the segments of three-chapter serials, and after the series' original run ended, these serials were formed into 90-minute television movies and were broadcast from time to time, just like the Hollywood B-grade monster movies they superficially resembled.
In September 1992, one of these fix-up Rocky Jones movies, Manhunt in Space, was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, followed by a second, Crash of the Moons, in November. This led to a revival of interest in the series, helped along by the fact that the copyright on the episodes had lapsed. With the series in the public domain, cheaply-produced DVDs of the episodes began to appear for sale.
However, while the original episodes of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger have been preserved for posterity, there is one sense in which Tom Corbett, Space Cadet still has the advantage. From 1952 to 1956, a series of eight novelizations of Tom Corbett episodes were published, and seven of them can be found at Project Gutenberg. Unlike Corbett, and unlike his fellow Space Ranger Lucky Starr, Rocky Jones has never been immortalized in prose.
Well, that's no good, is it? Something has to be done for poor Rocky, and if you want something done right (or at all), you have to do it yourself. So it is that the sprawling Johnny Pez blog empire has spread to a new blog, http://rockyjonesspaceranger.blogspot.com/. Here you will find my ongoing project to novelize the Rocky Jones television series. I'm still working my way through the first serial, "Beyond the Curtain of Space", with the sixth chapter having just gone up yesterday, covering the first seven minutes or so of the second episode. I can't promise that the work will go quickly, since I have a lot of other tasks taking up my time (this blog not being the least of them), but if the internet and I both last long enough, Rocky Jones will see himself ensconced within the field of literature (if not necessarily of print).
UPDATE: 6 July 2014: Four years after this was first posted, I finally completed my novelization of "Beyond the Curtain of Space." Now that it's finished, I've decided to publish it as an ebook on Amazon.com. And since I'm trying to make money from it, I've removed all but three sample chapters of the novelization from the Rocky Jones blog.
If your hunger for a space opera media tie-in written by yours truly is great enough, you can buy your own Amazon Kindle version of "Beyond the Curtain of Space" for a very reasonable $2.99 by following the link over on the sidebar, or this link here. If you're a reviewer, I can email you a free review copy as a text file.
Can I actually make money from my quixotic hobby? We shall see. If by some miracle I actually do start selling dozens or even hundreds of copies of "Beyond the Curtain of Space," I'll naturally novelize more episodes, and maybe even write some original Rocky Jones novels.
Also, too, if you're a Hollywood movie studio looking for an established science fiction franchise to market, I'd like to point out that while the original Rocky Jones series is now in the public domain, my novelization is under copyright, and the exclusive film rights can be optioned for very reasonable terms. Have your people talk to my people.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
For All Nails #318: Who You Gonna Call?
For All Nails #318: Who You Gonna Call?
By Johnny Pez
Gallivan Hall, Burgoyne University
Burgoyne, Pennsylvania, N.C., CNA
30 April 1952
He paused at the door to his office. There was a note pinned to the door with the words VENKMAN BURN IN HELL scrawled on it. With a sigh, Professor Peter Venkman pulled the note off and fumbled his key into the lock. He told himself that it least it meant that he had succeeded in making people passionate about economics. He had been looking to stir things up when he published his book, and he had clearly succeeded.
Inside was the old oak desk he had inherited from his father, the bookshelves he had acquired over the years, the framed prints on the walls. The desk was piled high with books, notes, paperweights, and trays, all jostling for room with the dactylograph and telephone, and a vase of flowers. There was a smell of old paper, and begonias. He had just seated himself behind the desk when the telephone rang.
After a brief internal debate, he picked up the handset. “Venkman,” he said simply.
“Professor Venkman?” said a female voice on the other end. The accent was distinctly Virginian. “This is Councilman Mason’s office. Can you hold for the Councilman?”
“Certainly,” Venkman said automatically, not quite understanding the conversation. Did he know a Councilman Mason? Could he be a member of the Burgoyne City Council? Then, a moment later, the combination of the accent and the name brought a sudden epiphany. No, not the City Council, the Grand Council. The country’s national legislature.
Venkman was ready when the familiar voice came on the line. “Professor Venkman? This is Richard Mason.”
“Good morning, Councilman,” said Venkman, and he was pleased at the tone of insouciance he was able to bring to the words. As though he routinely accepted phone calls from North American political leaders. “What can I do for you?”
“I was hoping we could talk about your new book,” said Mason. “I’ve just finished it, and I find your ideas intriguing. Perhaps you ought to consider publishing a newsletter.”
“They’re not my ideas, as such,” Venkman said.
“Yes, Professor, you’ve been careful to give proper credit to Mister Morris and Monsieur De Bow. That’s the mark of a true scholar and gentleman, and one of the reasons I think you’re just the man I’m looking for.”
Was Mason saying what Venkman thought he was saying? “Sir, are you offering me a position with your campaign?”
He heard a chuckle from the other man. In his mind’s eye, an image came to him of Mason on the vitavision with his head tilted back, giving just such a chuckle in response to one of Jeffrey Martin’s borderline-rude interview questions. “You’re not a man who believes in beating about the bush, are you Professor?”
Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. “Councilman, the economics profession is unfortunately oversupplied with people who use words for concealment rather than illumination. As a matter of sheer self-preservation, I’ve had to develop a capacity for cutting through pointless verbosity and getting to the point.”
Another chuckle. “Professor, you make economics sound an awful lot like politics. No, I’m not quite ready to offer you a job, but it is a definite possibility. That’s the reason I’m calling you now, to find out if you’ve got the right sort of, oh, temperament for the job. For example, were you being deliberately provocative when you called your book The Ghost of Lawrence French?”
“To be honest, Councilman, yes I was. Given the state of the world today, and particularly the state of economics, I thought that something provocative was just what was called for.” Venkman shifted in his chair, and glanced out the window. The day was overcast, as it usually was in Burgoyne. In spite of the threatening sky, there were students out in the quadrangle playing an impromptu game of cricket.
“That’s just what I was hoping to hear, Professor Venkman, because I feel the same way myself. Mr. Billington’s devotion to balanced budgets is an admirable thing in the abstract, but I think we need something more to pull us out of the slump we’ve been in since the end of the war. I find your book to be an admirable explication of why that is, and what needs to be done about it.”
“Councilman,” said Venkman cautiously, “I hope you’ll forgive me for saying so, but it sounds to me like you’ve already decided what you want to do, and you’re just using my ideas as a useful way to rationalize it.”
Another chuckle from the Councilman. One of the things Venkman had noticed about Mason was that he wasn’t shy about expressing his emotions. Ever since Owen Galloway started giving his vitavision talks thirty years back, every politician on the national stage had felt the need to curry favor with the voting public by imitating his dull monotone. Even Governor-General Billington mostly kept to the same pattern, with only occasional flashes of dry wit. Mason, by contrast, spoke with conviction, letting his voice and expression show what was in his heart. It seemed to Venkman that the Councilman’s popularity came not so much from what he said, as how he said it. After a generation of Owen Galloway imitations, it was like a breath of fresh air on a stuffy day.
“Well, not so much to rationalize, Professor, as to confirm my own ideas,” said Mason. “I read Mr. Morris’s General Theory myself back in the day, and I found it very convincing. And I was here in Burgoyne back in ’38 and ’39, so I was able to see the policies of your colleague Professor French in action. As you yourself pointed out in your book, the contrast between Mr. Morris’s policies in Britain and Professor French’s here in North America provided an unparalleled opportunity to determine who was right and who was wrong. Mr. Morris was proved right, and Professor French wrong. You say you wish to exorcise Professor French’s ghost from the halls of power here in Burgoyne. I am prepared to do so, and I would very much enjoy your assistance in doing so, if you are willing to provide it.”
Once again, Venkman felt the need to cut to the chase. “You wish me to join your campaign as an economic advisor, then?”
“No, Professor Venkman, I do not.”
Venkman found himself at a loss. “Then, I’m not certain … “
Again, there was that chuckle. “You, Professor, are a man with a talent for clear prose and the pithy phrase, and a knack for explaining the more, shall we say, impenetrable intricacies of economics in a way that the layman can understand. That talent would be wasted in the rough and tumble of a political campaign. What you need, sir, unless I am much mistaken, is a platform from which to speak on the economic issues of the day. And I may have just such a platform from which you might speak. You are familiar, are you not, with Mrs. Pynchon?”
Venkman, of course, was quite familiar with her. “The publisher of the Burgoyne Tribune?”
“The very one,” said Mason. “Mrs. Pynchon’s family, and the Tribune, have long been mainstays of the Liberal Party, and I know for a fact that she would be pleased to offer a weekly column to the author of that notable work of popular economics, The Ghost of Lawrence French.”
“And I would write for your campaign?” Venkman found the idea distasteful.
“You would write on whatever topic happened to seize your fancy, Professor. Have no fears on that score. As long as you maintain the intellectual standards of both the newspaper columnist and the professional economist, you would have free rein.”
As Venkman considered the idea, he could not deny that he found it attractive. There was a dreadful amount of foolishness published in the country’s newspapers and general interest magazines, to say nothing of the vitavision, on the subject of economics. It would be bracing to have the chance to counteract it on a regular basis.
“Very well, Councilman,” he said at last. “You can tell Mrs. Pynchon that if she’s willing to risk it, so am I.”
“Splendid, Professor, just splendid!” Mason enthused. “I’ll inform the dear woman, and she can set the wheels in motion. Oh, and if she should ask what name you have in mind for the column, what should I tell her? Knowing the newspaper business as I do, I suspect that she’ll want to associate it in some way with your book. A spectral theme seems called for.”
Venkman thought about it. “The Exorcist?” he suggested. “That might turn a few heads.”
Mason sounded less than enthusiastic. “If you’ll forgive me, Professor, that strikes me as perhaps a trifle obscure. Apart from the occasional enthusiast for religious history, it would mean little to the general newspaper reader. I also suspect Mrs. Pynchon would find it somewhat lacking in what the journalistic profession calls ‘sock’.”
Sock, eh? Venkman grinned suddenly. “In that case, Councilman, how about The Ghost Buster?”
“Just the thing, Professor,” said Mason with another chuckle. “Just the thing! You may expect to hear from the Tribune in the near future. For now, I must bid you a reluctant farewell.”
“Good-bye, Councilman,” Venkman replied. “And thank you.”
“Oh, no, Professor. Thank you!”
A click, and Mason was gone. Venkman set the phone’s handset on its cradle, and leaned back in his chair. The cricket game was still going on outside.
A newspaper columnist, he thought to himself, and smiled.
THE END
Saturday, February 15, 2014
For All Nails #317: The Specials
For All Nails #317: The Specials
By Johnny Pez
Nacogdoches, Jefferson, USM
7 October 1908
When Junie woke up in the middle of the night to find her father and mother fully dressed, she didn’t have to wonder what was happening. She knew that the Specials had come for them.
“Get dressed, Junie,” her mother told her. “We’re leaving.”
Without another word, Junie began to get dressed, while her parents woke Jemmie and Lily and set them to dressing as well. In spite of the darkness, they all acted quickly, and in five minutes, the whole family was dressed, and preparing to leave.
While her body was putting on her ragged clothes, Junie’s mind kept going over the secret words that every slave in Mexico knew: “The first snake goes down into the valley, and the second snake goes up into the mountains.” After she finished dressing, she let her finger trace out the signs that she knew went with the secret words: SVSM.
Her mother and father led the three children out of the shack, and into the moonless night. The light of the stars let her make out two more figures in the darkness: two men, dressed as they were in the rags of slaves. Junie knew, though, that the two men weren’t slaves. They were the Specials, and they were here to lead them across the river Jordan to freedom.
The Specials didn’t speak; they simply gestured for the slaves to follow them, and the slaves did. The Specials led Junie and the others through the plantation’s recently-harvested cotton fields, until they came to a dirt road. Stepping out onto the road felt to Junie like stepping out of her old life, and into a new one. Up until then, the slaves hadn’t been doing anything wrong. They could go where they liked around the plantation, but going out onto the road without permission from Master Henry or the overseer was forbidden.
The Specials led them down the dirt road in the starry night, farther and farther away from the plantation. To left and right, there were the same fields of cotton, looking strangely naked with the puffs of cotton gone. After they had been traveling for a time, Junie heard the sound of a wagon approaching from behind them. The Specials heard it too, and led them all into a cotton field on their right.
The wagon was just passing by, and Junie thought her heart would freeze when she saw one of the Specials stand up and let out a sharp whistle.
The wagon came to a halt. The driver, a white man, looked over at the Special and said, “That you, Cliff?”
“It ain’t President Flores,” the Special answered.
The driver let out a laugh and said, “All right, hop on up.” The Specials led the slaves out of the field and to the back of the wagon. There were half a dozen bales of cotton there, but the driver did something to one, and Junie saw that it wasn’t a real bale of cotton, just an empty barrel made up to look like one. The white man said, “Don’t worry, plenty of room for everyone.”
The Specials helped the slaves up onto the wagon, and into the false cotton bales. Junie was relieved to find that there was a bag filled with straw to lie down on inside the bale. While she lay there waiting for the rest of her family to hide themselves, one of the Specials said to the white man, “Took you long enough to find us.”
Junie held her breath while she waited for the white man to scold the Special for sassing him. Instead, the white man just laughed again and said, “All these goddamn back roads look alike. Don’t these people know about signs?”
“Signs cost money,” the Special answered. “You know what these people are like when it comes to spending money they don’t have to.”
“Don’t I just,” said the white man. The conversation left Junie completely adrift. Who was the driver, and why didn’t he act like any white man she had ever met?
Junie was in one of the false bales along with Jemmie and Lily, while her mother and father were together in the other one. In spite of the jolting of the wagon, her brother and sister were soon fast asleep, but it seemed to Junie that she was awake for hours and hours in the dark. She must have fallen asleep, though, because she was suddenly awakened by a light.
She sat up, startled, to find that the false bale had been opened up again, and daylight was pouring into it. The two Specials and the white man were standing there, and Junie was finally able to get a good look at the three of them. One of the Specials was a man of middle years, while the other looked to be little older than Junie herself. The white man looked like every other white man Junie had ever seen, and she felt a wave of fear shake her as he stood there. But the older Special was saying, “It’s all right, children. We’ve stopped for the day. You can all come out, it’s safe.”
Junie crawled out of the false bale, and the younger Special helped her down to the ground. They seemed to be in an old barn that was half falling down. There were three other people in the barn, all of them white, who were looking after the horses. They ignored the slaves emerging from the back of the wagon. When they were all out, the white man left to join the others with the horses.
“Where are we?” asked her father.
“Safe house,” said the older Special. “We need to give the horses a chance to rest. And us too, of course. Come with me.”
The two Specials led her family out of the barn, and across a yard to an old plantation house that was almost as broken-down as the barn. Inside, though, there was food and water, and a solid table surrounded by chairs. “Have a seat,” the older Special invited them. The fleeing slaves sat, and the Specials joined them at the table. The food was simple jerked beef, with some raw vegetables and two loaves of bread.
Junie’s family talked among themselves, but seemed reluctant to speak to the Specials, who ate along with them in silence. But the younger Special was sitting next to Junie, and she was bursting with questions, so she finally worked up the courage to speak to him. “Sir?” she asked.
“Call me Park,” the Special answered.
“Park,” Junie said, feeling strange as she did so. “Who’s that white man?”
“That’s Luke,” said Park. “He’s one of us.”
“A Special?” said Junie, astonished.
“That’s right.”
It had never occurred to Junie that there might be white men among the Specials. It gave her a vague sense of disappointment. “I never would have guessed it,” she finally said.
“Mighty useful having a white man along,” the older Special added. “Saves us a lot of trouble.”
Junie supposed it would. A white man driving a wagon would provoke no suspicion from passers-by, where a black man could expect to be stopped on general principles.
“Park,” she spoke again. “How many times you been across the river?”
“This is my first,” said Park.
Again, Junie was taken aback. She supposed, when you thought about it, that every Special had to have a first time going across the river to bring back escaped slaves, but it still struck her as odd.
“You afraid?” she asked him.
“Damn right I am,” the Special said. “But don’t you be. My Pa here’s an old hand at this. He’ll see us through.”
“That’s your Pa?” This seemed to be Junie’s day for being astonished.
“Sure. Makes sense, when you think about it. If we want folks to believe I’m his son, it sure helps that I really am his son.”
Junie’s mind was awhirl. This business of escaping across the river Jordan to freedom suddenly seemed a whole lot more complicated that she had been expecting.
“Your name is Cliff?” she asked Park’s father. She remembered that the white man had called him that.
“That’s right,” he said. “You’re Junie?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How old are you, Junie?”
“Fifteen, sir. Uh, Cliff.”
Cliff smiled at the slip, and Junie felt herself warming at the sight. “Cliff, how long before we reach the river Jordan?”
“Well, it’s properly called the Arkansas, but plenty of folks I know call it the Jordan. Depending on the roads, we ought to be there in ten days, give or take a couple.”
Ten days! It seemed like an eternity to Junie. Ten days on the road through Jefferson, the whole time under constant risk of discovery. “I wish we could just fly there!” she suddenly exclaimed.
“Maybe we could,” said Park with a chuckle. “Go down to Jefferson City and steal an airmobile. Assuming they have any airmobiles at Jefferson City.”
It took Junie a moment to place the word. Airmobiles were flying machines that the Tories had invented. She had been inclined to skepticism when she first heard about them, but her father had assured her that they were real.
“Park,” she said, “if the Tories can build airmobiles, and locomobiles, and all that, why can’t they march down to Mexico, and free all the slaves?”
Park shook his head. “Folks in the C.N.A. don’t like the idea of going to war, most of them. Man named Thomas Kronmiller wanted to do just that, and tried to make himself governor-general, but not enough folks went along with him. Instead we got men like Mr. Hemingway and Mr. Merriman who think we ought to leave well enough alone.” It was clear from the tone of his voice what Park thought of Mr. Hemingway and Mr. Merriman.
Cliff spoke up then. “Who do you think is paying for all this, Park?”
Junie was just as puzzled by the question as Park seemed to be when he answered, “Paying for what?
“For you, and me, and Luke, for starters,” said Cliff, “and all the rest of us here in Mexico. Paying for this house, and the wagon, and the guards we keep sweet so they let us go by. Paying to keep our farm in Dickinson County running while we’re busy down here.”
“Well, we do, I guess,” Park finally said. “The Ess Vees.”
Cliff shook his head. “This all costs much more than the Ess Vee could afford. We’ve got the whole country helping out, and that’s a fact. And it’s men like Mr. Hemingway and Mr. Merriman who keep the money coming, and Mr. Gallivan and Mr. McDowell before them.”
“Well, if it’s so expensive,” Park countered, “then why not just go to war and have it done with once and for all?”
Cliff shook his head again. “A war may sound mighty fine, if you’re just talking about it. But it’s a fact that when a war comes, nothing goes the way you think it will. Mr. Gilpin found that out the hard way, and a lot of good men paid dearly to help him learn, your great-uncle Billy included.
“What we’re doing here may not be as exciting as fighting a war, but it’s a better, quieter way to bring freedom to our people here. The Mexicans are content to turn a blind eye to what we do, and the reason they are is that they know they don’t have to worry about Mr. Hemingway or Mr. Merriman sending an army across the border.”
Cliff was silent after that, and Park and Junie were too. He had given her a lot to think about, especially the idea that the Mexicans were letting the Specials steal their slaves away.
After the meal, Cliff and Park led the slaves to another room with several beds in it, then left on some business of their own. Her parents took one, and her brother and sister took another, leaving Junie to sleep alone in hers. It was the first time in her life that she had ever been in a real bed.
Junie woke with a start several times, wondering where she was, before remembering that she was in the old plantation house. The last time she woke, it was dark in the room; she and her family had slept the day away. She lay awake after that, staring into the darkness, until she heard a sound of footsteps and a light approaching. She sat up in the bed, stricken with fear, until she saw that it was Cliff and Park carrying a lantern. “Are we leaving now?” she asked them.
Cliff nodded, and went over to wake up her parents, while Park did the same with Jemmie and Lily. They had another meal at the table before going out to the barn. As the others returned to their hiding places in the false bales, Junie asked Cliff, “Can I ride up top with you and Park?”
Cliff looked over at Luke, who shrugged. “Fine with me,” he said. And just like that, Junie found herself seated next to Park as Luke and Cliff led the horses out of the barn and down a weed-choked drive that led to the road. The two older men joined them on the seat, and with Cliff taking the reins, they resumed their journey north to the river Jordan.
Although she sometimes spoke with Cliff, and once or twice with Luke, Junie spent most of her time talking to Park. He told her about life in the Ess Vee, which for most people meant farming. When she asked him if there were many white people there, Park said that about a third of the people were white. For the most part, whites and Negroes lived apart from each other, though this was becoming less true in the major cities of Fort Lodge and Saint Louis.
“It’s also not true in the Militia, including the Special Militia,” Park said. “We couldn’t do our work if it was. Some of us think that the whole confederation would work better if we didn’t keep ourselves apart.”
Junie thought it sounded more sensible to keep things the way they were. Even knowing that Luke was a Special himself, she found it hard to be in his presence. She could imagine nothing better than living in a whole town with only other Negroes around.
One by one, the days went past, each spent at a different safe house. From time to time, Junie would ride with the Specials; other times, her mother or father or siblings would. One night, she saw a river glinting in the moonlight, and thought that their journey was over. But to her disappointment, it wasn’t the Jordan they were approaching, it was another called the Rio Colorado. They passed through a town called Hermión, then crossed a bridge over the Rio Colorado. There were two white men in the gray uniforms of the Mexican Army manning a toll gate. Junie was terrified, but Luke casually tossed a coin to one of the soldiers, and the other raised the gate. Junie remained frozen in her seat until they had trundled over the bridge and were rolling along the road on the far side.
It was raining when they set out from the last safe house south of the river Jordan, but Junie still wanted to spend the trip up on the seat with the Specials. Cliff had refused, though, saying that this close to the border all the runaway slaves would have to remain concealed in the false bales.
Lying in the false bale beside Jemmie and Lily, it seemed to Junie that they had been there for an eternity. She was too keyed up to sleep, and every minute she was certain that they would be discovered by soldiers from the army, or worse, from the Jefferson Brigades. With the army, Park had told her, you could often bribe your way out of trouble. But the Brigades were different. They were run by the Kramer Company, which Park said was bigger and richer than the government itself, and mean as a snake besides. If the Brigades caught you, they’d shoot you down on the spot, no exceptions.
When, finally, the wagon creaked to a halt, Junie felt herself go dizzy with fear. Was it the army, or the Brigades? She heard the wagon’s gate go down, and felt a rush of cold air as the false bale was opened up.
Cliff’s voice came out of the darkness. “Children, get up. We’re here!”
Within moments, Junie and her siblings had scrambled out of the wagon, and their parents soon joined them. It was still raining, and the weather had turned cold, but Junie didn’t care. She looked around, but in the darkness it was hard to make anything out. Cliff said, “Join hands and follow me,” and the runaway slaves did.
Cliff led them away from the wagon, which rolled away behind them with Luke at the reins. Junie could tell that they were in among trees, and Cliff led them carefully between them. Finally, after maybe fifteen minutes, they emerged from the trees, and Junie could hear the sound of water rolling past. They were here! They were here on the banks of the river Jordan!
“You all right?” a whispered voice asked. She could tell without looking that it was Park.
“I’m fine, Park. What happens now?”
There was the flare of a lucifer, and Junie could see Cliff lighting the wick of a lantern. Park explained, “There should be a boat on the other bank, waiting for our signal. Once they get it, they’ll row over and pick us up.” Cliff held the lantern up with the lamp covered, then uncovered it three times, paused, then three times more. Through the rain, Junie could see a distant light blink twice.
“Did you see it?” Park asked.
Junie nodded, then realized he wouldn’t be able to see her in the dark and added, “Yes. That was them?”
“It was,” Park confirmed.
And it was. Ten minutes later, a boat with six men rowing it had come up out of the darkness. Two of them, Junie couldn’t help noticing, were white. One of the men in it threw a rope, which Park caught. Junie and her parents joined him in drawing the boat to the south bank of the river Jordan. One of the rowers got out, and between them Park, Cliff, and he were able to help the slaves on board.
Junie could feel a pool of water at the bottom of the boat as she hunkered down, and she worried for a moment that it was sinking. The rowers seemed unconcerned, though, so she tried to put the thought out of her mind. One of the men was calling out time as the rowers maneuvered the boat across the river Jordan.
Looking ahead of them, Junie saw that a lantern was casting a steady light over a spot on the north bank, and the boat was making for it. As they came closer, she could make out the man who was holding it. He was wearing a black uniform with silver trim, and Junie thought her heart was going to leap from her chest when she saw the SVSM marks on his shoulder boards.
More men emerged into the lantern’s light, also in uniform. One of the rowers cast the rope out, and the uniformed Specials caught it and pulled the boat to the bank. One by one, members of Junie’s family were helped out of the boat, and onto the north bank of the river Jordan, onto the Promised Land.
Cliff and Park were the last to reach the bank, and as the rowers pulled the boat up onto the riverbank, Cliff walked up to the man with the lantern, saluted, and said, “Serjeant Clifford Monaghan, Southern Vandalia Special Militia.” There was something odd about the way he talked. Back in Jefferson, he had sounded like every other Negro Junie knew. Now his words were somehow more precise, more formal. More educated, Junie realized.
Park did the same, in the same precise manner of speech, saying, “Constable Parker Monaghan.” Then he added, “All present, sir. No losses.”
The man handed the lantern to one of the other uniformed Specials and returned their salute. “Captain George Carpenter,” he answered, also in the same style speech. “Well done, Serjeant, Constable.” Then he turned to her father and said, “Welcome to Southern Vandalia, Mister … “
“Carter,” her father answered. “Jack Carter. My wife Sara, and my children Junie, Jemmie, and Lily.”
It was the first time Junie had ever heard her father give his full name to anyone but another slave. And then it struck her like a wave: they weren’t slaves any more. They were free. She felt hot tears running down her face among the cold drops of rain.
“Mister Carter,” Captain Carpenter finished. “If you and your family would come this way, we can get you properly settled in.”
Junie reached out to take Park’s hand in hers, and together they followed Captain Carpenter through the night, into the Promised Land.
THE END
Friday, October 18, 2013
For All Nails #315: If This Be Treason
The For All Nails may be moving a bit slowly these days, but it hasn't stopped. Now up at the Sobel Wiki is the third vignette featuring Abigail Burgoyne, Dowager Duchess of Albany:
For All Nails #315: If This Be Treason
by Johnny Pez
Springfield, Massachusetts, N.C., CNA
22 February 1817
Abigail Burgoyne, Dowager Duchess of Albany, shivered in spite of the fire that burned before her. Her host had made his apologies when business called him away, leaving her alone in the lushly appointed sitting room, with only the blazing fire in the hearth to keep her company.
It had taken all her powers of persuasion to get her son to agree to allow her to visit Springfield. He had finally relented when she pointed out that she was the ideal person to infiltrate the conspiracy centered at the Springfield Armory. She was prominent enough to gain access, but above suspicion of espionage due to her age and sex. Above all, in a situation where the loyalty of all was suspect, she was the only person he could absolutely trust.
In two weeks, building on what Johnny had already learned or deduced from other sources, she had been able to pierce to the heart of the conspiracy. Now she was an honored guest of the ringleader, the man whose avarice and treachery had cost the lives of so many people, and corrupted one of the centers of the Northern Confederation’s military power.
In her bedroom, not far away, was a copy of Jay’s Notes on the Perfidy of Our Former Friends. If her host had her room searched (and she had no doubt that if he hadn’t already, he soon would), it would help to convince him that her reputation as a sympathizer with the rebels of ’75 still held true. The book also served as the key to the cipher she had been using to report her discoveries to her son.
Much of the time, her visit to Springfield was nothing more than the social call it appeared to be. She had been genuinely pleased to renew the acquaintance of the many friends she had made during her long tenure as the ruler of the Burgoyne social scene. Being in Springfield, of course she would call upon Sally Dale, the wife of the armory’s superintendant, whom she knew from Colonel Dale’s days as the Southern Confederation’s delegate to the Grand Council.
She was soon able to establish that Dale knew nothing of the secret sale of weapons from the armory to the members of Tecumseh’s army. However, conversations with Sally’s circle of friends had allowed her to piece together enough information to lead her to the head of the conspiracy, and secured an invitation to spend the night here in his home.
Her musings were interrupted by the sound of the sitting room door opening. Turning from the fireplace, she saw her host enter.
Major Stephen Decatur, the Inspector of Ordinance at the Springfield Armory, was a man in his late 30s, with the solid build and dark, aquiline features of his French grandfather and namesake. His wide mouth grew wider as he smiled at Abigail and said, “My apologies again, my lady, for deserting you. I unfortunately had business to attend to that would brook no delay.” His voice was deep, and he spoke with the broad accent of his Philadelphia youth.
“No apology is necessary, Major,” Abigail answered. “I understand. You are a man of consequence, with much to occupy your attention. My late husband was the same way.”
Major Decatur seated himself near the fire, and she took a chair near him. “I would have liked to meet your husband,” he continued. “Of course, I was born after his great victory at Saratoga, and only a child when he was Viceroy. But I learned of his deeds at school, and I may admit to you that it was his example that led me to seek a soldier’s life, much to the dismay of my mother.”
“Was your father more accommodating of your wishes?” Abigail asked.
“I never knew my father,” said Decatur, as his wide mouth turned down. “During the Rebellion, he sided with the rebels, and captained a privateer. That proved to be his undoing. When the Congress agreed to return to British rule, my father and the other privateer captains were arrested and charged with piracy. My father was hanged in the same month as the rebel leaders in London.”
Abigail closed her eyes. “I am sorry, Major. That should not have been. Your father was a patriot, and deserved better of his country.”
“Many men who deserved better failed to receive it after the Rebellion,” she heard him say. “I say nothing against your husband, you understand. He sought to reconcile the two sides, and there was many a rebel who would have shared my father’s fate had it not been for General Burgoyne’s clemency.”
Abigail opened her eyes again, and saw that the Major’s frown had deepened. “Still,” she said, “there were too many who did, and more who fled for fear of their lives. I came close to doing so myself.”
Now the Major’s expressive face showed surprise. “You, my lady?”
Abigail found her mind going back to the days after the Rebellion, as it had done so many times before. “Lord Albany was my second husband. My first was Dick Conrad, a soldier in General Washington’s army. He died in the winter of ’78, at the encampment at Valley Forge. And there I was, a traitor’s widow in New-York City with no friends and no prospects. When I heard of General Arnold’s plan to build a Patriot settlement in Spanish Louisiana, I planned to join him. It was only Johnny’s proposal of marriage that persuaded me to stay.”
“And just as well for you that you did,” Major Decatur said. There was no need for him to enlarge on his comment; General Arnold’s party had crossed the Mississippi in June of 1780, and never been heard from again. “I confess I find it odd to hear the Dowager Duchess of Albany speak of going on the Wilderness Walk with General Arnold. I wonder now that you remained in Burgoyne after the Duke’s passing, my lady; to hear you tell it, you would have been content to leave for Jefferson.”
Abigail’s eyes drifted toward the fire as she spoke. “I might well have, had it been a matter of myself alone. However, by then I had the boys to think of. In spite of his lofty title, Little Johnny was the son of an American mother, and I meant to bring him up in the land of his birth.”
“American?” said Major Decatur. “That’s not a word one hears often these days. One might think you were still a rebel at heart.”
“One would be correct,” Abigail answered as she continued to stare into the flames. “Parliament does nothing for us that we might not do for ourselves. It was the Georgians who took Florida from Spain. It was we who took Louisiana, not the British.”
“Are we not British, then?” said Decatur softly.
“We are Americans,” Abigail said, equally softly. “Or, if you must, North Americans. The British keep us weak and divided, but the day will come when we are united, as we were under the Congress. And on that day, we will live, and breathe, and even die if need be, as North Americans. And the whole world will know that we are our own people, and not merely an inferior sort of British.”
There was a long silence, which the Major finally broke. “Would it surprise you to learn, my lady, that there are others who believe as you do?”
Now Abigail turned her gaze from the fire, to look into Decatur’s eyes. “Belief is a simple matter. It means nothing if there are no deeds to match the words.”
Decatur laughed. “Deeds enough! There have been blows in plenty struck against the creatures of King George the Mad and his debauched Regent. Blows that have shaken this rotten Confederation of theirs to its foundations! I tell you, my lady, that it was the weapons of this very arsenal that allowed Tecumseh’s warriors and John Howard’s enslaved brothers to rise up and fight for their liberty!”
“You seek to jest with me, surely,” said Abigail. “How could these weapons find their way into the hands of Indians and slaves?”
“It is no jest, my lady,” said Decatur earnestly. “All across this wilderness of North America there are men who believe as you and I do. They have confederates among the Indians, and among the slaves, and among the Free Quebec Party as well. Tecumseh’s war and Howard’s rebellion are only the beginning. We will not rest until the Tory Confederation has been brought down, and the United States of America raised up in its place.”
Abigail rose from her seat now, went to a window, and drew aside the blind. There was nothing to see but darkness beyond. She raised her hand to her cheek, then let it rest upon the windowsill.
Still staring out the window into the night, she said, “I was in Burgoyne, you know, when Tecumseh’s army took Allegheny City. I saw them burn it. I saw the people there fleeing for their lives.”
“A regrettable necessity, my lady,” she heard Decatur’s voice from behind her. “Are you familiar with Jefferson’s Apologia?”
“I am,” said Abigail. “I know the lines you refer to. ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’ Jefferson wrote them knowing that his own blood would shortly be shed by the tyrants of London. And yet, I wonder. How will your new United States of America be raised up when the people of the country lie dead, slain by the weapons you have distributed? Will it be raised up by Tecumseh’s warriors? By Howard’s slaves? By Monsieur Ribot’s dissidents?”
A note of fear was creeping into Decatur’s voice. “My lady? I do not understand.”
Abigail remained by the window. She thought she could make out shapes in the darkness, but she might be mistaken. “Where is the United States of America, Major? It is already here. It will not replace the Confederation; it will be the Confederation. Its capital will be the city I live in, the city you tried to destroy, the city that bears the name of my husband, and my sons, and myself.”
Finally, she let the blind drop. There was no longer any question about what she had seen in the darkness. Turning, she saw that Major Decatur had risen from his seat. “What are you saying?” he demanded. “What have you done?”
“I am here on behalf of my son, the Duke of Albany,” Abigail responded. “He knew that weapons from the armory had found their way into the hands of Tecumseh’s army. I came here to learn who was responsible, and I have.”
There was a smashing sound in another part of the house. Abigail fancied that it was the sound of a door being forced open. Major Decatur began turning his head abruptly, as though seeking a means of escape. Then he turned his attention on her, and his hands clenched into fists. “Traitor,” he hissed.
There was a rush of footsteps, and the door to the sitting room was flung open. Men in the red uniforms of the Massachusetts Provincial Militia poured into the room, led by a man in civilian clothing. “Mother!” he exclaimed. “Are you –“
“I am unharmed, Johnny,” said Abigail. “Allow me to introduce Major Stephen Decatur, the man you’ve been seeking. Major, my son, John Burgoyne, Duke of Albany.”
As the militiamen bound Major Decatur, Johnny placed a gentle arm around her shoulders and led her from the room. She did not spare Decatur a glance as she murmured, “If this be treason, then make the most of it.”
For All Nails #315: If This Be Treason
by Johnny Pez
Springfield, Massachusetts, N.C., CNA
22 February 1817
Abigail Burgoyne, Dowager Duchess of Albany, shivered in spite of the fire that burned before her. Her host had made his apologies when business called him away, leaving her alone in the lushly appointed sitting room, with only the blazing fire in the hearth to keep her company.
It had taken all her powers of persuasion to get her son to agree to allow her to visit Springfield. He had finally relented when she pointed out that she was the ideal person to infiltrate the conspiracy centered at the Springfield Armory. She was prominent enough to gain access, but above suspicion of espionage due to her age and sex. Above all, in a situation where the loyalty of all was suspect, she was the only person he could absolutely trust.
In two weeks, building on what Johnny had already learned or deduced from other sources, she had been able to pierce to the heart of the conspiracy. Now she was an honored guest of the ringleader, the man whose avarice and treachery had cost the lives of so many people, and corrupted one of the centers of the Northern Confederation’s military power.
In her bedroom, not far away, was a copy of Jay’s Notes on the Perfidy of Our Former Friends. If her host had her room searched (and she had no doubt that if he hadn’t already, he soon would), it would help to convince him that her reputation as a sympathizer with the rebels of ’75 still held true. The book also served as the key to the cipher she had been using to report her discoveries to her son.
Much of the time, her visit to Springfield was nothing more than the social call it appeared to be. She had been genuinely pleased to renew the acquaintance of the many friends she had made during her long tenure as the ruler of the Burgoyne social scene. Being in Springfield, of course she would call upon Sally Dale, the wife of the armory’s superintendant, whom she knew from Colonel Dale’s days as the Southern Confederation’s delegate to the Grand Council.
She was soon able to establish that Dale knew nothing of the secret sale of weapons from the armory to the members of Tecumseh’s army. However, conversations with Sally’s circle of friends had allowed her to piece together enough information to lead her to the head of the conspiracy, and secured an invitation to spend the night here in his home.
Her musings were interrupted by the sound of the sitting room door opening. Turning from the fireplace, she saw her host enter.
Major Stephen Decatur, the Inspector of Ordinance at the Springfield Armory, was a man in his late 30s, with the solid build and dark, aquiline features of his French grandfather and namesake. His wide mouth grew wider as he smiled at Abigail and said, “My apologies again, my lady, for deserting you. I unfortunately had business to attend to that would brook no delay.” His voice was deep, and he spoke with the broad accent of his Philadelphia youth.
“No apology is necessary, Major,” Abigail answered. “I understand. You are a man of consequence, with much to occupy your attention. My late husband was the same way.”
Major Decatur seated himself near the fire, and she took a chair near him. “I would have liked to meet your husband,” he continued. “Of course, I was born after his great victory at Saratoga, and only a child when he was Viceroy. But I learned of his deeds at school, and I may admit to you that it was his example that led me to seek a soldier’s life, much to the dismay of my mother.”
“Was your father more accommodating of your wishes?” Abigail asked.
“I never knew my father,” said Decatur, as his wide mouth turned down. “During the Rebellion, he sided with the rebels, and captained a privateer. That proved to be his undoing. When the Congress agreed to return to British rule, my father and the other privateer captains were arrested and charged with piracy. My father was hanged in the same month as the rebel leaders in London.”
Abigail closed her eyes. “I am sorry, Major. That should not have been. Your father was a patriot, and deserved better of his country.”
“Many men who deserved better failed to receive it after the Rebellion,” she heard him say. “I say nothing against your husband, you understand. He sought to reconcile the two sides, and there was many a rebel who would have shared my father’s fate had it not been for General Burgoyne’s clemency.”
Abigail opened her eyes again, and saw that the Major’s frown had deepened. “Still,” she said, “there were too many who did, and more who fled for fear of their lives. I came close to doing so myself.”
Now the Major’s expressive face showed surprise. “You, my lady?”
Abigail found her mind going back to the days after the Rebellion, as it had done so many times before. “Lord Albany was my second husband. My first was Dick Conrad, a soldier in General Washington’s army. He died in the winter of ’78, at the encampment at Valley Forge. And there I was, a traitor’s widow in New-York City with no friends and no prospects. When I heard of General Arnold’s plan to build a Patriot settlement in Spanish Louisiana, I planned to join him. It was only Johnny’s proposal of marriage that persuaded me to stay.”
“And just as well for you that you did,” Major Decatur said. There was no need for him to enlarge on his comment; General Arnold’s party had crossed the Mississippi in June of 1780, and never been heard from again. “I confess I find it odd to hear the Dowager Duchess of Albany speak of going on the Wilderness Walk with General Arnold. I wonder now that you remained in Burgoyne after the Duke’s passing, my lady; to hear you tell it, you would have been content to leave for Jefferson.”
Abigail’s eyes drifted toward the fire as she spoke. “I might well have, had it been a matter of myself alone. However, by then I had the boys to think of. In spite of his lofty title, Little Johnny was the son of an American mother, and I meant to bring him up in the land of his birth.”
“American?” said Major Decatur. “That’s not a word one hears often these days. One might think you were still a rebel at heart.”
“One would be correct,” Abigail answered as she continued to stare into the flames. “Parliament does nothing for us that we might not do for ourselves. It was the Georgians who took Florida from Spain. It was we who took Louisiana, not the British.”
“Are we not British, then?” said Decatur softly.
“We are Americans,” Abigail said, equally softly. “Or, if you must, North Americans. The British keep us weak and divided, but the day will come when we are united, as we were under the Congress. And on that day, we will live, and breathe, and even die if need be, as North Americans. And the whole world will know that we are our own people, and not merely an inferior sort of British.”
There was a long silence, which the Major finally broke. “Would it surprise you to learn, my lady, that there are others who believe as you do?”
Now Abigail turned her gaze from the fire, to look into Decatur’s eyes. “Belief is a simple matter. It means nothing if there are no deeds to match the words.”
Decatur laughed. “Deeds enough! There have been blows in plenty struck against the creatures of King George the Mad and his debauched Regent. Blows that have shaken this rotten Confederation of theirs to its foundations! I tell you, my lady, that it was the weapons of this very arsenal that allowed Tecumseh’s warriors and John Howard’s enslaved brothers to rise up and fight for their liberty!”
“You seek to jest with me, surely,” said Abigail. “How could these weapons find their way into the hands of Indians and slaves?”
“It is no jest, my lady,” said Decatur earnestly. “All across this wilderness of North America there are men who believe as you and I do. They have confederates among the Indians, and among the slaves, and among the Free Quebec Party as well. Tecumseh’s war and Howard’s rebellion are only the beginning. We will not rest until the Tory Confederation has been brought down, and the United States of America raised up in its place.”
Abigail rose from her seat now, went to a window, and drew aside the blind. There was nothing to see but darkness beyond. She raised her hand to her cheek, then let it rest upon the windowsill.
Still staring out the window into the night, she said, “I was in Burgoyne, you know, when Tecumseh’s army took Allegheny City. I saw them burn it. I saw the people there fleeing for their lives.”
“A regrettable necessity, my lady,” she heard Decatur’s voice from behind her. “Are you familiar with Jefferson’s Apologia?”
“I am,” said Abigail. “I know the lines you refer to. ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’ Jefferson wrote them knowing that his own blood would shortly be shed by the tyrants of London. And yet, I wonder. How will your new United States of America be raised up when the people of the country lie dead, slain by the weapons you have distributed? Will it be raised up by Tecumseh’s warriors? By Howard’s slaves? By Monsieur Ribot’s dissidents?”
A note of fear was creeping into Decatur’s voice. “My lady? I do not understand.”
Abigail remained by the window. She thought she could make out shapes in the darkness, but she might be mistaken. “Where is the United States of America, Major? It is already here. It will not replace the Confederation; it will be the Confederation. Its capital will be the city I live in, the city you tried to destroy, the city that bears the name of my husband, and my sons, and myself.”
Finally, she let the blind drop. There was no longer any question about what she had seen in the darkness. Turning, she saw that Major Decatur had risen from his seat. “What are you saying?” he demanded. “What have you done?”
“I am here on behalf of my son, the Duke of Albany,” Abigail responded. “He knew that weapons from the armory had found their way into the hands of Tecumseh’s army. I came here to learn who was responsible, and I have.”
There was a smashing sound in another part of the house. Abigail fancied that it was the sound of a door being forced open. Major Decatur began turning his head abruptly, as though seeking a means of escape. Then he turned his attention on her, and his hands clenched into fists. “Traitor,” he hissed.
There was a rush of footsteps, and the door to the sitting room was flung open. Men in the red uniforms of the Massachusetts Provincial Militia poured into the room, led by a man in civilian clothing. “Mother!” he exclaimed. “Are you –“
“I am unharmed, Johnny,” said Abigail. “Allow me to introduce Major Stephen Decatur, the man you’ve been seeking. Major, my son, John Burgoyne, Duke of Albany.”
As the militiamen bound Major Decatur, Johnny placed a gentle arm around her shoulders and led her from the room. She did not spare Decatur a glance as she murmured, “If this be treason, then make the most of it.”
Monday, March 5, 2012
You got space opera in my historical fiction!
Historical novelist Sharon Kay Penman has a blog post up where she talks about her favorite novels from 2011, and asks her readers to talk about books they've read recently and why they enjoyed them. Penman's readers understandably tend to prefer historical novels, so I was reluctant to intrude with my usual science fiction. However, some of Penman's other readers also talked about other genres, so I decided it would be all right. Here's the comment I posted:
Probably the best books I've read in the last year (apart from yours, Sharon!) were a science fiction trilogy by Walter Jon Williams called Dread Empire's Fall, about a civil war in a multispecies interstellar empire. It's like A Song of Ice and Fire in the sense that Williams takes as many genre tropes as possible and turns them on their heads -- the genre in this case being space opera rather than fantasy.
The books are well-written and entertaining, but the main reason I like them was because they helped to keep my spirits up and take my mind off my troubles when I was forced to move from Rhode Island to Pittsburgh in the fall.
Probably the best books I've read in the last year (apart from yours, Sharon!) were a science fiction trilogy by Walter Jon Williams called Dread Empire's Fall, about a civil war in a multispecies interstellar empire. It's like A Song of Ice and Fire in the sense that Williams takes as many genre tropes as possible and turns them on their heads -- the genre in this case being space opera rather than fantasy.
The books are well-written and entertaining, but the main reason I like them was because they helped to keep my spirits up and take my mind off my troubles when I was forced to move from Rhode Island to Pittsburgh in the fall.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Harl Vincent Resurrected
Longtime readers of this blog (assuming there are any) will know that I have been determined to make it the internet's central source for the works of Harl Vincent, a prolific science fiction writer of the Gernsback Era who has since fallen into near-total obscurity. (Never mind why.)
It is therefore with great emotion that I announce the publication, um, eight months ago, of the first Harl Vincent story collection, Harl Vincent Resurrected: The Astounding Stories of Harl Vincent by the Resurrected Press. Resurrected seems to specialize in publishing science fiction and mysteries that have entered the public domain and been posted at Project Gutenberg. Thus, all eleven stories in Harl Vincent Resurrected come from the pages of Astounding Stories magazine between 1930 and 1933 (and all of them can be found on this blog's Harl Vincent sidebar).
In addition to a dead-tree version, Harl Vincent Resurrected is also available as an ebook on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook platforms.
And if anyone at the Resurrected Press is reading this and would like to publish a companion volume of Vincent's Amazing stories, drop me a line. I've posted nine stories from Amazing on this blog, all of them in the public domain, and I'm sure they'd make for a fine book.
It is therefore with great emotion that I announce the publication, um, eight months ago, of the first Harl Vincent story collection, Harl Vincent Resurrected: The Astounding Stories of Harl Vincent by the Resurrected Press. Resurrected seems to specialize in publishing science fiction and mysteries that have entered the public domain and been posted at Project Gutenberg. Thus, all eleven stories in Harl Vincent Resurrected come from the pages of Astounding Stories magazine between 1930 and 1933 (and all of them can be found on this blog's Harl Vincent sidebar).
In addition to a dead-tree version, Harl Vincent Resurrected is also available as an ebook on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook platforms.
And if anyone at the Resurrected Press is reading this and would like to publish a companion volume of Vincent's Amazing stories, drop me a line. I've posted nine stories from Amazing on this blog, all of them in the public domain, and I'm sure they'd make for a fine book.
Monday, February 13, 2012
I, Robot: To Protect by Mickey Zucker Reichert
November 2011 saw the publication of I, Robot: To Protect by Mickey Zucker Reichert, the first addition to Isaac Asimov's positronic robot series since the publication of Alexander C. Irvine's Have Robot, Will Travel in 2004, and also the first novel in a projected trilogy. When the books were first announced in 2009, they were described as a prequel trilogy to Asimov's original story collection, I, Robot, centered on the early life of Dr. Susan Calvin, the collection's central character.
Having just finished I, Robot: To Protect, I think it would be more accurate to describe this as a reboot rather than a prequel. In the introduction to I, Robot, Asimov gave some of the details of Susan Calvin's curriculum vitae: born in 1982, received a bachelor's degree from Columbia in 2003 and began graduate work in cybernetics, received a Ph.D. in 2008 and joined United States Robots as a robopsychologist. In other words, Calvin was a roboticist who became interested in robotic psychology.
In Reichert's novel, Calvin is a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry who becomes involved in a project to use nanorobots for psychiatric diagnoses, and who also befriends Nate, an android with a positronic brain. In other words, Calvin is a psychiatrist who becomes interested in robotic psychology. Changing Calvin from an engineer to a medical doctor allows Reichert to make use of her own background as a medical doctor, giving the novel a hefty helping of verisimilitude.
As I've noted elsewhere, Reichert also pushes Calvin's date of birth forward from 1982 to 2009. She pretty much had to do this, because if she had stuck to Asimov's original timeline, she would have wound up writing an alternate history novel set in an alternate 2008, rather than a science fiction novel set in the future.
Despite the updating of the story milieu and the change in Calvin's profession, Reichert maintains thematic continuity with Asimov's original positronic robot stories by focusing on the Three Laws of Robotics. The Three Laws were arguably Asimov's major contribution to science fiction. (He once predicted that after everything else he did was forgotten, the Three Laws would still be remembered.) By giving his robots a built-in moral sense, Asimov helped to illustrate the sources of human morality, because once you conceive of a being with an innate set of moral standards, it highlights the way that humans acquire (and, sadly, fail to acquire) their own moral standards.
Reichert is a veteran fantasy writer who has been publishing professionally for over twenty years, so she knows how to write readable prose, and proves it here. More than that, though, along with the story's plot involving doctors, mental patients, and terrorists, Reichert looks at how people react when they find themselves sharing their world with innately moral beings: beings who can think and feel as well as humans do, but who are primarily forbidden to injure humans or allow humans to be injured; who are secondarily required to obey humans; and who are only tertiarily required to protect themselves.
The second volume in the trilogy will presumably be called I, Robot: To Obey. I can hardly wait.
Having just finished I, Robot: To Protect, I think it would be more accurate to describe this as a reboot rather than a prequel. In the introduction to I, Robot, Asimov gave some of the details of Susan Calvin's curriculum vitae: born in 1982, received a bachelor's degree from Columbia in 2003 and began graduate work in cybernetics, received a Ph.D. in 2008 and joined United States Robots as a robopsychologist. In other words, Calvin was a roboticist who became interested in robotic psychology.
In Reichert's novel, Calvin is a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry who becomes involved in a project to use nanorobots for psychiatric diagnoses, and who also befriends Nate, an android with a positronic brain. In other words, Calvin is a psychiatrist who becomes interested in robotic psychology. Changing Calvin from an engineer to a medical doctor allows Reichert to make use of her own background as a medical doctor, giving the novel a hefty helping of verisimilitude.
As I've noted elsewhere, Reichert also pushes Calvin's date of birth forward from 1982 to 2009. She pretty much had to do this, because if she had stuck to Asimov's original timeline, she would have wound up writing an alternate history novel set in an alternate 2008, rather than a science fiction novel set in the future.
Despite the updating of the story milieu and the change in Calvin's profession, Reichert maintains thematic continuity with Asimov's original positronic robot stories by focusing on the Three Laws of Robotics. The Three Laws were arguably Asimov's major contribution to science fiction. (He once predicted that after everything else he did was forgotten, the Three Laws would still be remembered.) By giving his robots a built-in moral sense, Asimov helped to illustrate the sources of human morality, because once you conceive of a being with an innate set of moral standards, it highlights the way that humans acquire (and, sadly, fail to acquire) their own moral standards.
Reichert is a veteran fantasy writer who has been publishing professionally for over twenty years, so she knows how to write readable prose, and proves it here. More than that, though, along with the story's plot involving doctors, mental patients, and terrorists, Reichert looks at how people react when they find themselves sharing their world with innately moral beings: beings who can think and feel as well as humans do, but who are primarily forbidden to injure humans or allow humans to be injured; who are secondarily required to obey humans; and who are only tertiarily required to protect themselves.
The second volume in the trilogy will presumably be called I, Robot: To Obey. I can hardly wait.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Robot/Foundation Publication History
Following up on the Insanely Complete Robot/Foundation Fiction List, and at the request of my email correspondent Jim Syler, I now present the components of Asimov's future history re-arranged in order of original publication. In the case of short stories, I'm including the name of the book or magazine where they were first published. In the case of works with multiple titles, I'll be listing the original publication title first, followed by subsequent retitlings.
"Strange Playfellow/Robbie": September 1940, Super Science Stories
"Reason": April 1941, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Liar!": May 1941, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Robot AL-76 Goes Astray": February 1942, Amazing Stories
"Runaround": March 1942, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Foundation/The Encyclopedists": May 1942, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Bridle and Saddle/The Mayors": June 1942, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Catch That Rabbit": February 1944, Astounding Science-Fiction
"The Big and the Little/The Merchant Princes": August 1944, Astounding Science-Fiction
"The Wedge/The Traders": October 1944, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Blind Alley": March 1945, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Dead Hand/The General": April 1945, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Paradoxical Escape/Escape": August 1945, Astounding Science-Fiction
"The Mule": November/December 1945, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Evidence": September 1946, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Little Lost Robot": March 1947, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Now You See It--/Search By the Mule": January 1948, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Mother Earth": May 1949, Astounding Science-Fiction
"--And Now You Don't/Search By the Foundation": November/December 1949/January 1950, Astounding Science-Fiction
Pebble in the Sky: January 1950
"The Evitable Conflict": June 1950, Astounding Science-Fiction
I, Robot: December 1950
"Satisfaction Guaranteed": January 1951, Super Science Stories
Tyrann/The Stars, Like Dust: January/February/March 1951, Galaxy Magazine
"The Psychohistorians": September 1951, Foundation
The Currents of Space: October/November/December 1952, Astounding Science Fiction
The Caves of Steel: October/November/December 1953, Galaxy Magazine
"Risk": May 1955, Astounding Science Fiction
"First Law": October 1956, Fantastic Universe
The Naked Sun: October/November/December 1956, Astounding Science Fiction
"Insert Knob A in Hole B": December 1957, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
"Galley Slave": December 1957, Galaxy Science Fiction
"Lenny": January 1958, Infinity Science Fiction
"Feminine Intuition": October 1969, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
"Mirror Image": May 1972, Analog Science Fiction and Fact
"Light Verse": September-October 1973, The Saturday Evening Post
"...That Thou Art Mindful of Him": May 1974, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
"A Boy's Best Friend": March 1975, Boy's Life
"The Bicentennial Man": February 1976, Stellar-2
Foundation's Edge: June 1982
The Robots of Dawn: October 1983
Robots and Empire: September 1985
Foundation and Earth: October 1986
"Robot Dreams": November 1986, Robot Dreams
Robot City: Odyssey by Michael P. Kube-McDowell: July 1987
Robot City: Suspicion by Mike McQuay: September 1987
Robot City: Cyborg by William F. Wu: November 1987
Robot City: Prodigy by Arthur Byron Cover: January 1988
Robot City: Refuge by Rob Chilson: March 1988
Robot City: Perihelion by William F. Wu: June 1988
Prelude to Foundation: November 1988
"Christmas Without Rodney": December 1988, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
Robots and Aliens: Changeling by Stephen Leigh: August 1989
"Strip Runner" by Pamela Sargent: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"Trantor Falls" by Harry Turtledove: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"Balance" by Mike Resnick: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"PAPPI" by Sheila Finch: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"Plato's Cave" by Poul Anderson: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"Foundation's Conscience" by George Zebrowski: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"Carhunters of the Concrete Prairie" by Robert Sheckley: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"Blot" by Hal Clement: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"The Fourth Law of Robotics" by Harry Harrison: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"The Originist" by Orson Scott Card: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
Robots and Aliens: Renegade by Cordell Scotten: November 1989
"Too Bad!": November 1989, The Microverse
"Cal": 1990, Cal
Robots and Aliens: Intruder by Robert Thurston: February 1990
Robots and Aliens: Alliance by Jerry Oltion: May 1990
Robots and Aliens: Maverick by Bruce Bethke: August 1990
Robots and Aliens: Humanity by Jerry Oltion: November 1990
"Kid Brother": Mid-December 1990, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
"Forward the Foundation/Eto Demerzel": November 1991, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
"Cleon the Emperor/Cleon I": April 1992, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
Caliban by Roger MacBride Allen: March 1993
"The Consort/Dors Venabili": April 1993, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
"Wanda Seldon": April 1993, Forward the Foundation
"Epilogue": April 1993, Forward the Foundation
Robots in Time: Predator by William F. Wu: April 1993
Robots in Time: Marauder by William F. Wu: July 1993
The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg: September 1993
Robots in Time: Warrior by William F. Wu: October 1993
Robots in Time: Dictator by William F. Wu: February 1994
Robots in Time: Emperor by William F. Wu: June 1994
Robots in Time: Invader by William F. Wu: September 1994
Inferno by Roger MacBride Allen: October 1994
Utopia by Roger MacBride Allen: November 1996
Foundation's Fear by Gregory Benford: February 1997
Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear: February 1998
Foundation's Triumph by David Brin: May 1999
Mirage by Mark W. Tiedemann: April 2000
Chimera by Mark W. Tiedemann: April 2001
Aurora by Mark W. Tiedemann: April 2002
Have Robot, Will Travel by Alexander C. Irvine: May 2005
I, Robot: To Protect by Mickey Zucker Reichert: November 2011
I, Robot: To Obey by Mickey Zucker Reichert: September 2013
"Strange Playfellow/Robbie": September 1940, Super Science Stories
"Reason": April 1941, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Liar!": May 1941, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Robot AL-76 Goes Astray": February 1942, Amazing Stories
"Runaround": March 1942, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Foundation/The Encyclopedists": May 1942, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Bridle and Saddle/The Mayors": June 1942, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Catch That Rabbit": February 1944, Astounding Science-Fiction
"The Big and the Little/The Merchant Princes": August 1944, Astounding Science-Fiction
"The Wedge/The Traders": October 1944, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Blind Alley": March 1945, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Dead Hand/The General": April 1945, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Paradoxical Escape/Escape": August 1945, Astounding Science-Fiction
"The Mule": November/December 1945, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Evidence": September 1946, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Little Lost Robot": March 1947, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Now You See It--/Search By the Mule": January 1948, Astounding Science-Fiction
"Mother Earth": May 1949, Astounding Science-Fiction
"--And Now You Don't/Search By the Foundation": November/December 1949/January 1950, Astounding Science-Fiction
Pebble in the Sky: January 1950
"The Evitable Conflict": June 1950, Astounding Science-Fiction
I, Robot: December 1950
"Satisfaction Guaranteed": January 1951, Super Science Stories
Tyrann/The Stars, Like Dust: January/February/March 1951, Galaxy Magazine
"The Psychohistorians": September 1951, Foundation
The Currents of Space: October/November/December 1952, Astounding Science Fiction
The Caves of Steel: October/November/December 1953, Galaxy Magazine
"Risk": May 1955, Astounding Science Fiction
"First Law": October 1956, Fantastic Universe
The Naked Sun: October/November/December 1956, Astounding Science Fiction
"Insert Knob A in Hole B": December 1957, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
"Galley Slave": December 1957, Galaxy Science Fiction
"Lenny": January 1958, Infinity Science Fiction
"Feminine Intuition": October 1969, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
"Mirror Image": May 1972, Analog Science Fiction and Fact
"Light Verse": September-October 1973, The Saturday Evening Post
"...That Thou Art Mindful of Him": May 1974, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
"A Boy's Best Friend": March 1975, Boy's Life
"The Bicentennial Man": February 1976, Stellar-2
Foundation's Edge: June 1982
The Robots of Dawn: October 1983
Robots and Empire: September 1985
Foundation and Earth: October 1986
"Robot Dreams": November 1986, Robot Dreams
Robot City: Odyssey by Michael P. Kube-McDowell: July 1987
Robot City: Suspicion by Mike McQuay: September 1987
Robot City: Cyborg by William F. Wu: November 1987
Robot City: Prodigy by Arthur Byron Cover: January 1988
Robot City: Refuge by Rob Chilson: March 1988
Robot City: Perihelion by William F. Wu: June 1988
Prelude to Foundation: November 1988
"Christmas Without Rodney": December 1988, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
Robots and Aliens: Changeling by Stephen Leigh: August 1989
"Strip Runner" by Pamela Sargent: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"Trantor Falls" by Harry Turtledove: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"Balance" by Mike Resnick: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"PAPPI" by Sheila Finch: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"Plato's Cave" by Poul Anderson: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"Foundation's Conscience" by George Zebrowski: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"Carhunters of the Concrete Prairie" by Robert Sheckley: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"Blot" by Hal Clement: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"The Fourth Law of Robotics" by Harry Harrison: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
"The Originist" by Orson Scott Card: September 1989, Foundation's Friends
Robots and Aliens: Renegade by Cordell Scotten: November 1989
"Too Bad!": November 1989, The Microverse
"Cal": 1990, Cal
Robots and Aliens: Intruder by Robert Thurston: February 1990
Robots and Aliens: Alliance by Jerry Oltion: May 1990
Robots and Aliens: Maverick by Bruce Bethke: August 1990
Robots and Aliens: Humanity by Jerry Oltion: November 1990
"Kid Brother": Mid-December 1990, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
"Forward the Foundation/Eto Demerzel": November 1991, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
"Cleon the Emperor/Cleon I": April 1992, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
Caliban by Roger MacBride Allen: March 1993
"The Consort/Dors Venabili": April 1993, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
"Wanda Seldon": April 1993, Forward the Foundation
"Epilogue": April 1993, Forward the Foundation
Robots in Time: Predator by William F. Wu: April 1993
Robots in Time: Marauder by William F. Wu: July 1993
The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg: September 1993
Robots in Time: Warrior by William F. Wu: October 1993
Robots in Time: Dictator by William F. Wu: February 1994
Robots in Time: Emperor by William F. Wu: June 1994
Robots in Time: Invader by William F. Wu: September 1994
Inferno by Roger MacBride Allen: October 1994
Utopia by Roger MacBride Allen: November 1996
Foundation's Fear by Gregory Benford: February 1997
Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear: February 1998
Foundation's Triumph by David Brin: May 1999
Mirage by Mark W. Tiedemann: April 2000
Chimera by Mark W. Tiedemann: April 2001
Aurora by Mark W. Tiedemann: April 2002
Have Robot, Will Travel by Alexander C. Irvine: May 2005
I, Robot: To Protect by Mickey Zucker Reichert: November 2011
I, Robot: To Obey by Mickey Zucker Reichert: September 2013
Thursday, February 2, 2012
The Insanely Complete Robot/Foundation Fiction List
As I've noted before, my major claim to fame on the internet is a list of all the stories in Isaac Asimov's positronic robot/Foundation timeline (both by Asimov himself and by other writers) that I first posted on Usenet back in 1998, and which was picked up by Ed Seiler for his Isaac Asimov Home Page. Oddly, though, I've never posted the list here on my own blog. Until now.
The impetus for this monumental undertaking is twofold: first, an email from an Asimov fan named Jim Syler asking about the date of "Satisfaction Guaranteed", and second, the recent publication of the first of Mickey Zucker Reichert's trio of novels featuring a young Susan Calvin, I Robot: To Protect.
Including Reichert's novel in the list, though, presents me with a bit of a problem, and I'd like to talk about it. Back when Asimov collected his robot stories in I, Robot in 1950, he set the stories very specifically in the years 1998 through 2052. He also established Susan Calvin's birth in the year 1982. Those would have seemed like safely distant future dates back in 1950, but the passing years have caught up with I, Robot, as they eventually do to all science fiction stories set in the future. The earliest of the stories, "Robbie", is now set in a 1998 that never was, and the 26-year-old Susan Calvin that Reichert is writing about would be living four years ago. When Reichert was faced with this problem, she decided (wisely I think) to push Calvin's birth forward twenty-seven years to 2009, and set the story in the year 2035.
So, how do I fit in Reichert's born-in-2009-Calvin novels into my list with the original born-in-1982-Calvin stories by Asimov himself? I've decided to place I, Robot: To Protect in 2008, which is where it would have gone if Reichert had kept to Asimov's original timeline, and note parenthetically that the novel sets itself in 2035. It's an imperfect solution, but the best I can come up with. And since the story "Satisfaction Guaranteed" has a similar dating problem, I'll do the same with it.
So, with all that out of the way, here is my current version of the Insanely Complete Robot/Foundation Fiction List, consisting of the date, the story title, and (where necessary), which Asimov collection it can be found in. Following Ed Seiler's lead, works in black are by Asimov himself; works in blue are by other writers with the approval of the Asimov Estate, and works in red are by other writers but are not necessarily canonical:
1995 - "A Boy's Best Friend" (The Complete Robot)
1998 - "Robbie" (I, Robot; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2004 - "Robot AL-76 Goes Astray" (The Rest of the Robots; The Complete Robot)
2008 (2035) - I, Robot: To Protect by Mickey Zucker Reichert
2009 (2036) - I, Robot: To Obey by Mickey Zucker Reichert
2010 - “Insert Knob A in Hole B” (Nightfall and Other Stories)
2015 - “Runaround” (I, Robot; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2015 - “Reason” (I, Robot; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2016 - “Catch That Rabbit” (I, Robot; The Complete Robot)
2021 - “Liar!” (I, Robot; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2023 (1995) - “Satisfaction Guaranteed” (The Rest of the Robots; The Complete Robot; Earth Is Room Enough)
2024 - “Balance” by Mike Resnick (Foundation’s Friends)
2026 - “Blot” by Hal Clement (Foundation’s Friends)
2029 - “Little Lost Robot” (I, Robot)
2031 - “Cal” (Gold)
2032 - “Evidence” (I, Robot; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2032 - “PAPPI” by Sheila Finch (Foundation’s Friends)
2032 - “Lenny” (The Rest of the Robots; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2033 - “Risk” (The Rest of the Robots; The Complete Robot)
2033 - “Escape!” (I, Robot)
2034 - “Galley Slave” (The Rest of the Robots; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2035 - “First Law” (The Rest of the Robots; The Complete Robot)
2036 - “Plato’s Cave” by Poul Anderson (Foundation’s Friends)
2052 - “The Evitable Conflict” (I, Robot; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2055 - “Robot Dreams” (Robot Dreams)
2058 - I, Robot
2063 - “Feminine Intuition” (The Complete Robot; Robot Visions; The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories)
2065 - “The Fourth Law of Robotics” by Harry Harrison (Foundation’s Friends)
2090 - “Christmas Without Rodney” (Robot Visions)
2120 - “Kid Brother” (Gold)
2140 Robots in Time by William F. Wu (six volumes)
1. Predator
2. Marauder
3. Warrior
4. Dictator
5. Emperor
6. Invader
2150 - “Light Verse” (Buy Jupiter and Other Stories; The Complete Robot; Robot Dreams)
2170 - “Too Bad!” (Robot Visions)
2180 - “That Thou Art Mindful of Him” (The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories; The Complete Robot)
2200 - “Carhunters of the Concrete Prairie” by Robert Sheckley (Foundation’s Friends)
2160-2360 - The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg
2425 -“Mother Earth” (The Early Asimov)
3421 - The Caves of Steel
3422 - The Naked Sun
3423 - “Mirror Image” (The Best of Isaac Asimov; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
3424 - “Strip-Runner” by Pamela Sargent (Foundation’s Friends)
3424 - The Robots of Dawn
3604 - Robot City (six volumes)
1. Odyssey by Michael P. Kube-McDowell
2. Suspicion by Mike McQuay
3. Cyborg by William F. Wu
4. Prodigy by Arthur Byron Cover
5. Refuge by Rob Chilson
6. Perihelion by William F. Wu
3605 - Robots and Aliens (six volumes)
1. Changeling by Stephen Leigh
2. Renegade by Cordell Scotten
3. Intruder by Robert Thurston
4. Alliance by Jerry Oltion
5. Maverick by Bruce Bethke
6. Humanity by Jerry Oltion
3616 - Mirage by Mark W. Tiedemann
3617 - Chimera by Mark W. Tiedemann
3618 - Aurora by Mark W. Tiedemann
3623 - Have Robot, Will Travel by Alexander C. Irvine
3624 - Robots and Empire
3730 - Caliban by Roger MacBride Allen
3731 - Inferno by Roger MacBride Allen
3736 - Utopia by Roger MacBride Allen
4850 - The Stars, Like Dust
11129 - The Currents of Space
827 GE (12411 ) - Pebble in the Sky
977-978 GE - “Blind Alley” (The Early Asimov)
12020 GE - Prelude to Foundation
12028 GE - “Eto Demerzel” (Forward the Foundation)
12028 GE - Foundation’s Fear by Gregory Benford
12038 GE - “Cleon I” (Forward the Foundation)
12048 GE - “Dors Venabili” (Forward the Foundation)
12058 GE - “Wanda Seldon” (Forward the Foundation)
12067 GE - Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear
12067 GE - “The Psychohistorians” (Foundation)
12068 GE - Foundation’s Triumph by David Brin
12069 GE - Epilogue (Forward the Foundation)
12067-12070 GE - “The Originist” by Orson Scott Card (Foundation’s Friends)
49-50 FE (12117-12118 GE) - “The Encyclopedists” (Foundation)
79-80 FE (12147-12148 GE) - “The Mayors” (Foundation)
134 FE (12202 GE) - “The Traders” (Foundation)
154-160 FE (12222-12228 GE) - “The Merchant Princes” (Foundation)
195-196 FE (12263-12264 GE) - “The General” (Foundation and Empire)
270 FE (12338 GE) - “Trantor Falls” by Harry Turtledove (Foundation’s Friends)
310-311 FE (12378-12379 GE) - “The Mule” (Foundation and Empire)
316 FE (12384 GE) - “Search by the Mule” (Second Foundation)
376-377 FE (12444-12445 GE) - “Search by the Foundation” (Second Foundation)
498 FE (12566 GE) - Foundation’s Edge
498 FE (12566 GE) - Foundation and Earth
1056 FE (13124 GE) - “Foundation’s Conscience” by George Zebrowski (Foundation’s Friends)
1302 FE (13370 GE) - “No Connections” by Randall Garrett (The Best of Randall Garrett; Takeoff [both are Randall Garrett collections])
Now, not all of the dates listed above are what you might call canonical. Some of them are, but some are just wild-ass guesses on my part. Here's where they all came from:
“A Boy’s Best Friend”: Given the speed with which space is being explored and settled, a date of 1980 for the establishment of Lunar City seems reasonable. Assuming Anderson Senior was one of the original settlers, that places the story in 1995.
“Robbie”: Stated in I, Robot.
“Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”: After robots are banned from Earth in 2003-2007, before Susan Calvin joins US Robots in 2008.
“Insert Knob A in Hole B”: Before the use of robots on space stations, hence before “Reason”.
I Robot: To Protect: As stated in the novel, 2035. Based on Susan Calvin's age, given her birth in 1982, the story should take place in 2008.
I Robot: To Obey: As stated in the novel, 2036. Based on Susan Calvin's age, given her birth in 1982, the story should take place in 2009.
“Runaround”: Stated in I, Robot.
“Reason”: Six months after “Runaround”.
“Catch That Rabbit”: Six months after “Reason”.
“Liar!”: Stated in I, Robot.
“Satisfaction Guaranteed”: As stated in the story, takes place fifty years after World War II, i.e. in 1995. However, the characters have the same titles as in “Liar!”, and Susan Calvin is more knowledgable about emotions, so the story takes place after "Liar!". Also, Tony has more advanced vision than Dave in "Catch That Rabbit!"
“Balance”: Susan Calvin’s robotic servants flatter her in a manner similar to Herbie from “Liar!”, but she seems much more at ease with the idea, which places the story after “Liar!”
“Blot”: Story of the first exploratory mission to Miranda. Given a mission to Mars in 1998, a first expedition to Mercury in 2005, and bases on Titan in 2025, a mission to Uranus in 2026 seems reasonable.
“Little Lost Robot”: Stated in I, Robot.
“Cal”: Cal seems to be the prototype for the EZ robots of “Galley Slave”, so allowing a few years for the design and production of the latter places the story in 2031.
“Lenny”: Peter Bogart is now Senior Mathematician, so the story comes between “Little Lost Robot” and "Risk".
“Evidence”: Stated in I, Robot.
“PAPPI”: Immediately after “Evidence”.
“Risk”: Takes place ‘some years’ after “Little Lost Robot”.
“Escape”: Within a few months of “Risk”. (In I, Robot, "Escape" comes immediately after "Little Lost Robot", but logically, ought to come after "Risk".)
“Galley Slave”: Stated in the story.
“First Law”: Stated in the story.
“Plato’s Cave”: Shortly before Stephen Byerly becomes Regional Coordinator.
“The Evitable Conflict”: Stated in I, Robot.
“Robot Dreams”: Late in Susan Calvin’s career with US Robots.
I, Robot: The links between the stories are set fifty years after Susan Calvin joins US Robots in 2008.
“Feminine Intuition”: Five years after Susan Calvin retires from US Robots in 2058.
“The Fourth Law of Robotics”: Susan Calvin’s great-niece has her job.
“Christmas Without Rodney”: Slighting reference to the 20th century suggests the story takes place in the 21st. Common use of robot servants suggests the latter part of the century, when the Frankenstein Complex has faded away.
“Kid Brother”: Acceptance of household robots on Earth dates the story to the same general era as “Christmas Without Rodney” and “Light Verse”.
Robots in Time: Stated in volume 1, Predator.
“Light Verse”: Features a robot that is capable of original artistic expression (as was Andrew Martin), at a time when robot servants are accepted (as was Andrew Martin). These both suggest that the story takes place near the beginning of The Positronic Man.
“Too Bad!”: Sometime in the 22nd century, before the creation of the simplified robots in “That Thou Art Mindful of Him”.
“That Thou Art Mindful of Him”: Takes place about two hundred years after US Robots is founded (i.e. circa 2182). Mentions that the Machines phased themselves out of existence a hundred years earlier (circa 2082).
“Carhunters of the Concrete Prairie”: The combination of interstellar exploration and robots places this story at the time of the settlement of the Spacer worlds.
The Positronic Man: Andrew Martin is about a hundred years old “nearly two centuries” after Susan Calvin’s death in 2064.
“Mother Earth”: Takes place at the end of “the first few centuries of interstellar travel” when the Outer Worlds “were controlled, politically and economically, by Earth.” (quotations from The Caves of Steel, Chapter 5).
The Caves of Steel: Takes place a thousand years after emigration to the Outer Worlds ends. It also takes place 19 years after Elijah Baley first meets Jessie Navodny “back in ’02.”
The Naked Sun: Takes place one year after The Caves of Steel.
“Mirror Image”: Takes place one year before The Robots of Dawn i.e. one year after The Naked Sun.
“Strip-Runner”: Takes place after Elijah Baley starts his Outside group, but shortly before The Robots of Dawn (since the events in that novel aren’t mentioned in the story).
The Robots of Dawn: Takes place two years after The Naked Sun.
Robot City: Takes place about twenty years before Robots and Empire (Han Fastolfe is still alive, and the number of Settler worlds is smaller than in RaE).
Robots and Aliens: Takes place one year after Robot City.
Mirage: Features older versions of characters from the Robot City series, but takes place before the disappearance of the Solarians in Robots and Empire.
Chimera: Takes place one year after Mirage.
Aurora: Takes place one year after Chimera.
Have Robot, Will Travel: Takes place five years after Aurora.
Robots and Empire: Takes place two hundred years after The Robots of Dawn.
Caliban: Takes place a century after the Solarians vanish.
Inferno: Takes place one year after Caliban.
Utopia: Takes place five years after Inferno.
The Stars, Like Dust: Takes place a thousand years after Earth suffers nuclear bombardment (perhaps in an attack by the more conservative Spacer worlds).
The Currents of Space: Takes place five centuries before the founding of the Galactic Empire. (Note: Foundation’s Edge takes place about 22,000 years after interstellar travel begins, i.e. 24,000 CE. This is 12,566 years after the founding of the Galactic Empire, which sets the Empire’s foundation around the year 11,500. For no good reason, I’ve chosen 11,585 CE for the year 1 GE.)
Pebble in the Sky: Stated in the novel.
“Blind Alley”: Stated in the story.
Prelude to Foundation: Stated in the novel.
“Eto Demerzel”: Eight years after Prelude to Foundaton.
Foundation’s Fear: Shortly after “Eto Demerzel”.
“Cleon I”: Ten years after “Eto Demerzel”.
“Dors Venabili”: Ten years after “Cleon I”.
“Wanda Seldon”: Ten years after “Dors Venabili”.
Foundation and Chaos: Same time as “The Psychohistorians”.
“The Psychohistorians”: Takes place two years before Hari Seldon’s death in 12,069 GE.
Foundation’s Triumph: Takes place after “The Psychohistorians”.
“Epilogue”: Hari Seldon’s death.
“The Originist”: Begins shortly after Hari Seldon’s trial, ends several months after Seldon’s death.
“The Encyclopedists”:Takes place 50 years after the Foundation is established in 12,068 GE.
“The Mayors”: Takes place 30 years after “The Encyclopedists”.
“The Traders”: Takes place “two decades” before “The Merchant Princes”.
“The Merchant Princes”: Begins “almost 75 years” after “The Mayors”, ends six years later.
“The General”: Begins “over 40 years” after Hober Mallow’s meeting with Onum Barr in “The Merchant Princes”.
“Trantor Falls”:Takes place forty years before “The Mule”.
“The Mule”: Takes place 17 years after Han Pritcher joins the Army in 293 FE.
“Search by the Mule”: Takes place five years after the end of “The Mule”.
“Search by the Foundation”: Stated in the story.
Foundation’s Edge: Stated in the novel.
Foundation and Earth: Takes place immediately following Foundation’s Edge.
“Foundation’s Conscience”: Stated in the story.
“No Connections”: Takes place sometime after the establishment of the Second Empire.
(And now . . . the same list re-arranged in publication order.)
The impetus for this monumental undertaking is twofold: first, an email from an Asimov fan named Jim Syler asking about the date of "Satisfaction Guaranteed", and second, the recent publication of the first of Mickey Zucker Reichert's trio of novels featuring a young Susan Calvin, I Robot: To Protect.
Including Reichert's novel in the list, though, presents me with a bit of a problem, and I'd like to talk about it. Back when Asimov collected his robot stories in I, Robot in 1950, he set the stories very specifically in the years 1998 through 2052. He also established Susan Calvin's birth in the year 1982. Those would have seemed like safely distant future dates back in 1950, but the passing years have caught up with I, Robot, as they eventually do to all science fiction stories set in the future. The earliest of the stories, "Robbie", is now set in a 1998 that never was, and the 26-year-old Susan Calvin that Reichert is writing about would be living four years ago. When Reichert was faced with this problem, she decided (wisely I think) to push Calvin's birth forward twenty-seven years to 2009, and set the story in the year 2035.
So, how do I fit in Reichert's born-in-2009-Calvin novels into my list with the original born-in-1982-Calvin stories by Asimov himself? I've decided to place I, Robot: To Protect in 2008, which is where it would have gone if Reichert had kept to Asimov's original timeline, and note parenthetically that the novel sets itself in 2035. It's an imperfect solution, but the best I can come up with. And since the story "Satisfaction Guaranteed" has a similar dating problem, I'll do the same with it.
So, with all that out of the way, here is my current version of the Insanely Complete Robot/Foundation Fiction List, consisting of the date, the story title, and (where necessary), which Asimov collection it can be found in. Following Ed Seiler's lead, works in black are by Asimov himself; works in blue are by other writers with the approval of the Asimov Estate, and works in red are by other writers but are not necessarily canonical:
1995 - "A Boy's Best Friend" (The Complete Robot)
1998 - "Robbie" (I, Robot; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2004 - "Robot AL-76 Goes Astray" (The Rest of the Robots; The Complete Robot)
2008 (2035) - I, Robot: To Protect by Mickey Zucker Reichert
2009 (2036) - I, Robot: To Obey by Mickey Zucker Reichert
2010 - “Insert Knob A in Hole B” (Nightfall and Other Stories)
2015 - “Runaround” (I, Robot; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2015 - “Reason” (I, Robot; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2016 - “Catch That Rabbit” (I, Robot; The Complete Robot)
2021 - “Liar!” (I, Robot; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2023 (1995) - “Satisfaction Guaranteed” (The Rest of the Robots; The Complete Robot; Earth Is Room Enough)
2024 - “Balance” by Mike Resnick (Foundation’s Friends)
2026 - “Blot” by Hal Clement (Foundation’s Friends)
2029 - “Little Lost Robot” (I, Robot)
2031 - “Cal” (Gold)
2032 - “Evidence” (I, Robot; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2032 - “PAPPI” by Sheila Finch (Foundation’s Friends)
2032 - “Lenny” (The Rest of the Robots; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2033 - “Risk” (The Rest of the Robots; The Complete Robot)
2033 - “Escape!” (I, Robot)
2034 - “Galley Slave” (The Rest of the Robots; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2035 - “First Law” (The Rest of the Robots; The Complete Robot)
2036 - “Plato’s Cave” by Poul Anderson (Foundation’s Friends)
2052 - “The Evitable Conflict” (I, Robot; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
2055 - “Robot Dreams” (Robot Dreams)
2058 - I, Robot
2063 - “Feminine Intuition” (The Complete Robot; Robot Visions; The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories)
2065 - “The Fourth Law of Robotics” by Harry Harrison (Foundation’s Friends)
2090 - “Christmas Without Rodney” (Robot Visions)
2120 - “Kid Brother” (Gold)
2140 Robots in Time by William F. Wu (six volumes)
1. Predator
2. Marauder
3. Warrior
4. Dictator
5. Emperor
6. Invader
2150 - “Light Verse” (Buy Jupiter and Other Stories; The Complete Robot; Robot Dreams)
2170 - “Too Bad!” (Robot Visions)
2180 - “That Thou Art Mindful of Him” (The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories; The Complete Robot)
2200 - “Carhunters of the Concrete Prairie” by Robert Sheckley (Foundation’s Friends)
2160-2360 - The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg
2425 -“Mother Earth” (The Early Asimov)
3421 - The Caves of Steel
3422 - The Naked Sun
3423 - “Mirror Image” (The Best of Isaac Asimov; The Complete Robot; Robot Visions)
3424 - “Strip-Runner” by Pamela Sargent (Foundation’s Friends)
3424 - The Robots of Dawn
3604 - Robot City (six volumes)
1. Odyssey by Michael P. Kube-McDowell
2. Suspicion by Mike McQuay
3. Cyborg by William F. Wu
4. Prodigy by Arthur Byron Cover
5. Refuge by Rob Chilson
6. Perihelion by William F. Wu
3605 - Robots and Aliens (six volumes)
1. Changeling by Stephen Leigh
2. Renegade by Cordell Scotten
3. Intruder by Robert Thurston
4. Alliance by Jerry Oltion
5. Maverick by Bruce Bethke
6. Humanity by Jerry Oltion
3616 - Mirage by Mark W. Tiedemann
3617 - Chimera by Mark W. Tiedemann
3618 - Aurora by Mark W. Tiedemann
3623 - Have Robot, Will Travel by Alexander C. Irvine
3624 - Robots and Empire
3730 - Caliban by Roger MacBride Allen
3731 - Inferno by Roger MacBride Allen
3736 - Utopia by Roger MacBride Allen
4850 - The Stars, Like Dust
11129 - The Currents of Space
827 GE (12411 ) - Pebble in the Sky
977-978 GE - “Blind Alley” (The Early Asimov)
12020 GE - Prelude to Foundation
12028 GE - “Eto Demerzel” (Forward the Foundation)
12028 GE - Foundation’s Fear by Gregory Benford
12038 GE - “Cleon I” (Forward the Foundation)
12048 GE - “Dors Venabili” (Forward the Foundation)
12058 GE - “Wanda Seldon” (Forward the Foundation)
12067 GE - Foundation and Chaos by Greg Bear
12067 GE - “The Psychohistorians” (Foundation)
12068 GE - Foundation’s Triumph by David Brin
12069 GE - Epilogue (Forward the Foundation)
12067-12070 GE - “The Originist” by Orson Scott Card (Foundation’s Friends)
49-50 FE (12117-12118 GE) - “The Encyclopedists” (Foundation)
79-80 FE (12147-12148 GE) - “The Mayors” (Foundation)
134 FE (12202 GE) - “The Traders” (Foundation)
154-160 FE (12222-12228 GE) - “The Merchant Princes” (Foundation)
195-196 FE (12263-12264 GE) - “The General” (Foundation and Empire)
270 FE (12338 GE) - “Trantor Falls” by Harry Turtledove (Foundation’s Friends)
310-311 FE (12378-12379 GE) - “The Mule” (Foundation and Empire)
316 FE (12384 GE) - “Search by the Mule” (Second Foundation)
376-377 FE (12444-12445 GE) - “Search by the Foundation” (Second Foundation)
498 FE (12566 GE) - Foundation’s Edge
498 FE (12566 GE) - Foundation and Earth
1056 FE (13124 GE) - “Foundation’s Conscience” by George Zebrowski (Foundation’s Friends)
1302 FE (13370 GE) - “No Connections” by Randall Garrett (The Best of Randall Garrett; Takeoff [both are Randall Garrett collections])
Now, not all of the dates listed above are what you might call canonical. Some of them are, but some are just wild-ass guesses on my part. Here's where they all came from:
“A Boy’s Best Friend”: Given the speed with which space is being explored and settled, a date of 1980 for the establishment of Lunar City seems reasonable. Assuming Anderson Senior was one of the original settlers, that places the story in 1995.
“Robbie”: Stated in I, Robot.
“Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”: After robots are banned from Earth in 2003-2007, before Susan Calvin joins US Robots in 2008.
“Insert Knob A in Hole B”: Before the use of robots on space stations, hence before “Reason”.
I Robot: To Protect: As stated in the novel, 2035. Based on Susan Calvin's age, given her birth in 1982, the story should take place in 2008.
I Robot: To Obey: As stated in the novel, 2036. Based on Susan Calvin's age, given her birth in 1982, the story should take place in 2009.
“Runaround”: Stated in I, Robot.
“Reason”: Six months after “Runaround”.
“Catch That Rabbit”: Six months after “Reason”.
“Liar!”: Stated in I, Robot.
“Satisfaction Guaranteed”: As stated in the story, takes place fifty years after World War II, i.e. in 1995. However, the characters have the same titles as in “Liar!”, and Susan Calvin is more knowledgable about emotions, so the story takes place after "Liar!". Also, Tony has more advanced vision than Dave in "Catch That Rabbit!"
“Balance”: Susan Calvin’s robotic servants flatter her in a manner similar to Herbie from “Liar!”, but she seems much more at ease with the idea, which places the story after “Liar!”
“Blot”: Story of the first exploratory mission to Miranda. Given a mission to Mars in 1998, a first expedition to Mercury in 2005, and bases on Titan in 2025, a mission to Uranus in 2026 seems reasonable.
“Little Lost Robot”: Stated in I, Robot.
“Cal”: Cal seems to be the prototype for the EZ robots of “Galley Slave”, so allowing a few years for the design and production of the latter places the story in 2031.
“Lenny”: Peter Bogart is now Senior Mathematician, so the story comes between “Little Lost Robot” and "Risk".
“Evidence”: Stated in I, Robot.
“PAPPI”: Immediately after “Evidence”.
“Risk”: Takes place ‘some years’ after “Little Lost Robot”.
“Escape”: Within a few months of “Risk”. (In I, Robot, "Escape" comes immediately after "Little Lost Robot", but logically, ought to come after "Risk".)
“Galley Slave”: Stated in the story.
“First Law”: Stated in the story.
“Plato’s Cave”: Shortly before Stephen Byerly becomes Regional Coordinator.
“The Evitable Conflict”: Stated in I, Robot.
“Robot Dreams”: Late in Susan Calvin’s career with US Robots.
I, Robot: The links between the stories are set fifty years after Susan Calvin joins US Robots in 2008.
“Feminine Intuition”: Five years after Susan Calvin retires from US Robots in 2058.
“The Fourth Law of Robotics”: Susan Calvin’s great-niece has her job.
“Christmas Without Rodney”: Slighting reference to the 20th century suggests the story takes place in the 21st. Common use of robot servants suggests the latter part of the century, when the Frankenstein Complex has faded away.
“Kid Brother”: Acceptance of household robots on Earth dates the story to the same general era as “Christmas Without Rodney” and “Light Verse”.
Robots in Time: Stated in volume 1, Predator.
“Light Verse”: Features a robot that is capable of original artistic expression (as was Andrew Martin), at a time when robot servants are accepted (as was Andrew Martin). These both suggest that the story takes place near the beginning of The Positronic Man.
“Too Bad!”: Sometime in the 22nd century, before the creation of the simplified robots in “That Thou Art Mindful of Him”.
“That Thou Art Mindful of Him”: Takes place about two hundred years after US Robots is founded (i.e. circa 2182). Mentions that the Machines phased themselves out of existence a hundred years earlier (circa 2082).
“Carhunters of the Concrete Prairie”: The combination of interstellar exploration and robots places this story at the time of the settlement of the Spacer worlds.
The Positronic Man: Andrew Martin is about a hundred years old “nearly two centuries” after Susan Calvin’s death in 2064.
“Mother Earth”: Takes place at the end of “the first few centuries of interstellar travel” when the Outer Worlds “were controlled, politically and economically, by Earth.” (quotations from The Caves of Steel, Chapter 5).
The Caves of Steel: Takes place a thousand years after emigration to the Outer Worlds ends. It also takes place 19 years after Elijah Baley first meets Jessie Navodny “back in ’02.”
The Naked Sun: Takes place one year after The Caves of Steel.
“Mirror Image”: Takes place one year before The Robots of Dawn i.e. one year after The Naked Sun.
“Strip-Runner”: Takes place after Elijah Baley starts his Outside group, but shortly before The Robots of Dawn (since the events in that novel aren’t mentioned in the story).
The Robots of Dawn: Takes place two years after The Naked Sun.
Robot City: Takes place about twenty years before Robots and Empire (Han Fastolfe is still alive, and the number of Settler worlds is smaller than in RaE).
Robots and Aliens: Takes place one year after Robot City.
Mirage: Features older versions of characters from the Robot City series, but takes place before the disappearance of the Solarians in Robots and Empire.
Chimera: Takes place one year after Mirage.
Aurora: Takes place one year after Chimera.
Have Robot, Will Travel: Takes place five years after Aurora.
Robots and Empire: Takes place two hundred years after The Robots of Dawn.
Caliban: Takes place a century after the Solarians vanish.
Inferno: Takes place one year after Caliban.
Utopia: Takes place five years after Inferno.
The Stars, Like Dust: Takes place a thousand years after Earth suffers nuclear bombardment (perhaps in an attack by the more conservative Spacer worlds).
The Currents of Space: Takes place five centuries before the founding of the Galactic Empire. (Note: Foundation’s Edge takes place about 22,000 years after interstellar travel begins, i.e. 24,000 CE. This is 12,566 years after the founding of the Galactic Empire, which sets the Empire’s foundation around the year 11,500. For no good reason, I’ve chosen 11,585 CE for the year 1 GE.)
Pebble in the Sky: Stated in the novel.
“Blind Alley”: Stated in the story.
Prelude to Foundation: Stated in the novel.
“Eto Demerzel”: Eight years after Prelude to Foundaton.
Foundation’s Fear: Shortly after “Eto Demerzel”.
“Cleon I”: Ten years after “Eto Demerzel”.
“Dors Venabili”: Ten years after “Cleon I”.
“Wanda Seldon”: Ten years after “Dors Venabili”.
Foundation and Chaos: Same time as “The Psychohistorians”.
“The Psychohistorians”: Takes place two years before Hari Seldon’s death in 12,069 GE.
Foundation’s Triumph: Takes place after “The Psychohistorians”.
“Epilogue”: Hari Seldon’s death.
“The Originist”: Begins shortly after Hari Seldon’s trial, ends several months after Seldon’s death.
“The Encyclopedists”:Takes place 50 years after the Foundation is established in 12,068 GE.
“The Mayors”: Takes place 30 years after “The Encyclopedists”.
“The Traders”: Takes place “two decades” before “The Merchant Princes”.
“The Merchant Princes”: Begins “almost 75 years” after “The Mayors”, ends six years later.
“The General”: Begins “over 40 years” after Hober Mallow’s meeting with Onum Barr in “The Merchant Princes”.
“Trantor Falls”:Takes place forty years before “The Mule”.
“The Mule”: Takes place 17 years after Han Pritcher joins the Army in 293 FE.
“Search by the Mule”: Takes place five years after the end of “The Mule”.
“Search by the Foundation”: Stated in the story.
Foundation’s Edge: Stated in the novel.
Foundation and Earth: Takes place immediately following Foundation’s Edge.
“Foundation’s Conscience”: Stated in the story.
“No Connections”: Takes place sometime after the establishment of the Second Empire.
(And now . . . the same list re-arranged in publication order.)
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