thisbluespirit: (viyony)
thisbluespirit ([personal profile] thisbluespirit) wrote2025-09-23 09:32 pm

Starfall Stories 49

A [community profile] rainbowfic piece I finally posted a couple of weeks ago:

Name: On the Interpretation of Dreams
Story: Starfall
Colors: Warm Heart #17 (Honesty)
Supplies and Styles: Nubs
Word Count: 1891
Rating: G
Warnings: None.
Notes: Portcallan, 1313; Viyony Eseray, Osmer Nivyrn.
Summary: Proof that Viyony also takes Leion's advice from time to time.

On the Interpretation of Dreams
scintilla10: Emily smiles elusively, looking down and to her left (Revenge - Emily)
a scintilla of time ([personal profile] scintilla10) wrote2025-09-22 05:38 pm
Entry tags:

Signal boost: Femslash fandoms in flux

[personal profile] letzan posted about recent "high velocity f/f fandoms":

I want to shine an occasional spotlight on fandoms that are in flux. There are two kinds of fandoms here:

  • Fandoms that are growing rapidly, which are typically not in the top 20 now, and may never get there, but might be interesting for F/F readers to check out and encourage.

  • Fandoms that are losing ground on the top 20, and seem to be "post-peak." They may well peak again in the future, but it's a good moment to look back at the impressive amount of F/F which has been written so far.


There were some real surprises (to me) in both the list of femslash fandoms that are growing over the last 3 months, and those "losing ground." [personal profile] letzan is also soliciting femslash recs for all of the fandoms listed in the post!

Take a peek for yourself.
pauraque: Guybrush writing in his journal adrift on the sea in a bumper car (monkey island adrift)
pauraque ([personal profile] pauraque) wrote2025-09-22 07:28 am

The Hobbit, aka Hobbit Software Adventure (1982)

[Happy Hobbit Day! This is a revision of a review I first posted to my LJ on October 10th, 2011. It has been edited for clarity and additional information.]

Though apparently a huge success in Europe, this game is more obscure in the US, where it was released as Hobbit Software Adventure. (In the 1980s the word "software" was exciting enough to put in a name. Some early games also advertised on the box that they were "100% machine language!")

screenshot showing image of a hobbit door and a text description of same

The manual calls it "one of the most sophisticated adventures ever designed for microcomputers," so let's don our evening attire, pour a glass of wine, and boot it up.

SOFTWARE! Excited yet? )

You can play the DOS port of The Hobbit/Hobbit Software Adventure in your browser, for an unforgettable evening of text-based sophistication. 🍷
thisbluespirit: (winslow boy)
thisbluespirit ([personal profile] thisbluespirit) wrote2025-09-21 08:34 pm

Fic: A Family Affair (Winslow Boy)

As I mentioned about a month or so ago, I did some AU_gust prompts, starting with flash fic for the prompt Romance, using the UC generator to get a summary for The Winslow Boy. It was a bit of a complicated summary for flash fic, and it's just taken me about, um, seven weeks to straighten this out into being a reasonably more comprehensible bit of AU nonsense than it was at the start. idk why. Anyway, also for [community profile] genprompt_bingo & two [community profile] allbingo squares (for two different bingo fests of theirs, that is, I'm not cheating).

A Family Affair (1472 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Winslow Boy (1999)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Robert Morton/Catherine Winslow
Characters: Catherine Winslow, Robert Morton (Winslow Boy)
Additional Tags: AU-gust | August Writing Challenge 2025, Alternate Universe - Regency, Regency, Unconventional Courtship Generator, Accidental Baby Acquisition, Stranded
Summary: Catherine Winslow's day is getting worse by the minute.
pauraque: paper cutouts of Palpatine smiling as Luke and Vader cross light sabers (star wars palpatine)
pauraque ([personal profile] pauraque) wrote2025-09-21 10:33 am

twin suns of Tatooine taught me everything I know

After some consideration of my options, I have made a Star Wars icon that pleases me. It's a screenshot of the music video for Jeremy Messersmith's "Tatooine" with animation by Eric Power.

Embedded video: Paper cutout animation retelling the plot of the Star Wars Original Trilogy.
sanguinity: woodcut by M.C. Escher, "Snakes" (Default)
sanguinity ([personal profile] sanguinity) wrote2025-09-17 08:51 am

The Brownstone Scrabble Championships (Elementary)

A few of you may remember "Score: Q to 12," in which Sherlock refuses to confine himself to the Scrabble Official Club and Tournament Word List, and Joan refuses to spend any more time trying to make him. (Elementary, Joan & Sherlock, 453 words)

At the prompting of a friend, now there is a sequel, "Score: i√2 to 𓅧," in which the game has continued to evolve. (Elementary, Outsider POV, 221b ficlet)


While I was posting last night, I also archived the DVD commentary I did for "Score: Q to 12" back in 2014. Last month, [personal profile] mific in [community profile] fan_writers was bemoaning the death of the DVD commentary on AO3. And I thought: I've written a bunch, they're just not on AO3; they're all on tumblr and DW. I usually link the main story to them, but I haven't been actually archiving them on the archive site, as I haven't wanted to clutter up the main story with a bunch of extraneous material. But based on that [community profile] fan_writers convo, I thought I'd pull this one over as an experiment. Depending on how it goes, I might pull over the rest of my "DVD extras" -- commentaries, deleted scenes -- for other stories, too.
pauraque: Picard reads a book while vacationing on Risa (st picard reads)
pauraque ([personal profile] pauraque) wrote2025-09-17 09:07 am

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin (2008)

In this sequel to The Three-Body Problem, it's now out in the open that an alien invasion is coming. But the aliens' doomed planet is far away and this is hard SF, so they're not expected to reach Earth for 400 years. The book follows a mostly new set of characters and international organizations as they try to work out a long-term plan to somehow defend Earth against a force with vastly superior technology and no interest in negotiating.

This book is 500 pages long and I don't think it had to be. I found the first half a real slog, as it mostly focused on plot elements that I felt were not plausible (not for speculative reasons, but for No Real Person Would Ever Do This reasons) and, surprisingly, a romance. I don't know if Liu got the criticism that the first book didn't care about people so he decided to put in a love story, or what, but the way he handles it is extremely strange and unrealistic and made me question whether he had ever interacted with a woman in his entire life, so maybe he should have stuck with ideas over people.

It also suffers from a rather flat and awkward English translation that calls way more attention to the fact that it is a translation than the first book's did. (They had a different translator for this one, but brought back Ken Liu for book three.) That's not the book's fault, but it definitely affected my experience of it.

That said, the second half did pick up a lot, and leaned much more heavily into Liu's strengths as a writer: the inventive worldbuilding and the show-stopping cinematic set pieces. I did enjoy that and it brought me back to what I liked about the first book. Liu has a distinctive knack for making even catastrophic and grisly events weirdly fun to read about because of how hard he commits to them and how intricately he constructs their details. Anybody can write about stuff blowing up in space, but not everybody can show exactly why and how it's blowing up, zoom into individual pieces of debris and out to massive chain reactions, and have a reader like me, who is often bored by action scenes, attentively following along every step of the way.

many spoilery thoughtsThe main thing I thought was implausible was the concept of the Wallfacers. Basically, the UN chooses four people and gives them each unlimited resources to develop and enact a plan to defend against the aliens. There's no oversight and anything they do is legal and unquestioned. This is supposed to counter the aliens' ability to remotely surveil Earth; if the plan takes shape in one person's head, then the aliens, who are said to not understand secrets and deception, won't find out about it.

Many things about this concept invite skepticism, but my biggest issue is how the presentation glosses over the complexity of human societies. Liu assumes that essentially everyone in the world will tacitly support whatever the UN does, with no significant debate or objection, even when it directly affects people's lives. He has the Wallfacers using so many resources for their massive defense constructions that it's crushing the global economy, and people just twiddle their thumbs and let it happen. He often paints global reactions with an extremely broad brush, like "people felt/thought X" as though all of humanity were a monolith. I can't speak for countries other than my own, but in this situation I can confidently say that half the people in the US probably wouldn't even believe the aliens were real, and even if they did, they sure as hell wouldn't put their faith in four people arbitrarily selected by the UN to save us all.

Sometimes Liu seems to know there are problems with these ideas, as when the narrative flashes forward a couple of centuries and the Wallfacer project is seen as one of the many "silly" things attempted during the initial panic over the invasion. Then again, Wallfacer Luo Ji's plan does basically work in the end, so I wasn't really clear on what the book was trying to say here.

I did enjoy the future worldbuilding, where most humans live in underground cities of massive treelike skyscrapers that hold up the ceiling where a holographic sky is projected. He did a slightly better job here of showing that cultures aren't all the same; a lot of people in the future are "hibernators" who were put into stasis in the past at various times and reawoken later, and their attitudes often differ from people who are native to the future. This also helped build a believable friendship between Shi Qiang and Luo Ji, since they're the only two people they know from their time. (I think this is the only compelling human relationship in the book, certainly better than whatever the hell was supposed to be happening with Luo Ji and the imaginary woman he made up in his head who turned out to be real somehow... It's a long story.)

I was also interested in the concept of the accidental generation ships. Almost the entire Earth fleet is destroyed by an alien probe that they thought was harmless, and the few crews that barely escape believe (understandably) that returning to Earth is suicide and that continuing to flee is humanity's best hope for survival. This entire scenario plays out over the length of a chapter, but whole books could be written about it! The part where they realize that they have too many people to keep alive long-term and some will have to be sacrificed read like an homage to "The Cold Equations," though I don't know if that story is as well-known among Chinese SF readers.

Of course it's also consistent with the book's generally pessimistic outlook on space exploration. I did know before I started reading what the "dark forest" solution to the Fermi Paradox is, but I didn't know the hypothesis was named after the book!! The idea is that the reason we haven't found aliens is that the galaxy is fucking dangerous and any planetary civilizations that foolishly jump around waving their hands and flashing neon signs trying to make first contact only make themselves a target. Aliens are out there, but the ones who have survived are the quiet ones. As a person whose favorite SF canon is Star Trek, this obviously doesn't align with my preferred way of looking at things, but it's internally consistent and not implausible, so I can roll with it.

I am invested enough to read the third book, and looking forward to getting back to a translator who knows what he's doing at least.
evil_plotbunny: (bed)
evil_plotbunny ([personal profile] evil_plotbunny) wrote2025-09-15 11:30 am
Entry tags:

Yuletide noms musing

Is this thing still on?

I fell badly out of the habit of posting here, but I miss it, so this seems like a good way to break the ice.

As usual, I have come up with way too many fandoms with no fic on the archive. Some have tags due to us importing the tagset the first year, but no fic. Some haven't even managed that. It seems like every year I discover a few new fandoms that would have had a fandom if fandom had existed at the time of release the way it does now.

So here is a list in no particular order with no details. If anyone is still reading this, you can give me a number request and I'll write a small blurb. I'm not expecting the fandoms to be recognized except from previous noms of mine, but I'm hoping the act of writing blurbs will help me narrow it down.

    Pennington Wise or Patty Fairfield - Carolyn Wells
    Penny Parrish - Janet Lambert
    Hagen Series - Kay Hooper
    Smith & Sullivan (Big Finish Audio Dramas)
    Vampirina Teenage Vampire (TV)
    Brick House Books - Nina Rhoades
    Girl Scouts Series - Margaret Vandercook
    Greycliff Girls - Harriet Pyne Grove
    Maida Westabrook - Ines Irwin
    Tucker Twins - Nell Speed
    Kitty Telefair - Florence Stevenson
    Cathy Leonard - Catherine Woolley
    Over the Hills to Fabylon - Nicholas Stuart Grey
    Betsy Series - Carolyn Haywood
    The Four Corners Series - Amy Ella Blanchard


ETA: What will probably happen (because it always happens) is that I'll nominate a bunch of fandoms no one knows and end up signing up with half those and half things other people nom, just to make myself matchable (and usually there's something I hadn't even thought of that I would have nominated myself).
pauraque: Guybrush writing in his journal adrift on the sea in a bumper car (monkey island adrift)
pauraque ([personal profile] pauraque) wrote2025-09-15 07:45 am

Onde (2022)

This unusual game depends on a unique movement mechanic that's a little hard to describe, but I'll try. You play as a creature that can only survive on the surface of a bubble. There are little helper creatures that you can direct to create new bubbles that you can grab onto when they intersect with yours. If you mess up the timing and get stranded without a bubble, you die and go back to the last checkpoint.



Though it sounds weird when you try to put it into words, it's actually easy to intuit how it works when you're doing it, and it quickly felt natural and fun to do. There's no text in the game in part because you don't need it. The best fit genre is probably puzzle platformer, as you're leveraging the environment and your abilities to navigate past obstacles.

The game is visually stunning, with fractal-inspired kaleidoscopic imagery that is suggestive of coral reefs and cosmic nebulae. It's a matter of interpretation what the setting actually is and what the characters are. Are you a jellyfish? An alien? A bacterium? A fundamental particle? I have no idea!

In general I was okay with the abstract nature of the game, but at times it can make your goals unclear. Since you don't really know what you're doing or why, it's hard to gauge where you are in the story arc or if you're near the end. I did enjoy it, though, even if I couldn't really give you a synopsis what happened in it. It took me 3.5 hours to finish the game without going back for achievements.

Accessibility note: The blurb calls it a "sound-surfing platformer" which implies sound is part of the gameplay, but that's not the case. The music is nice but it's only aesthetic, and the game can be played perfectly well without hearing.

Onde is on Steam and GOG for $13.99 USD. I got it on sale for two bucks and was satisfied with my purchase. Steam also has a free demo that should make it clear whether it's for you.
scintilla10: Isabella leaning her head back to laugh (Galavant - Isabella)
a scintilla of time ([personal profile] scintilla10) wrote2025-09-14 06:16 pm

Fandom Gift Basket, Writing, Knives Out & Lego

[community profile] fandomgiftbasket is open for fills until Oct 12, and has a spreadsheet of all requests for ease of browsing and filling.

My basket is here!

♥ I've been doing some writing! \o/ I've been writing some little fills for Fandom Gift Basket, and I'm also already making good progress on my [community profile] ficinabox assignment. (I just got my swaps! I'm even more excited by what I'm creating!) It's so nice and affirming to be feeling some good writing energy after experiencing burnout for so much of the year.

♥ There's a new Knives Out movie coming out this fall! Delighted to see more Benoit Blanc solving mysteries. The cast looks fun, too! Here's the trailer.

♥ I'm enamoured with this Sherlock Holmes book nook lego set! Lego Sherlock and Watson are so cute! There's a murder board! And I just love how Baker Street folds up into a book nook with the classic Holmes silhouette on the side. Incredibly charming!!
brightknightie: Darius pours tea for Duncan. (Other Fandom HL Darius)
Amy ([personal profile] brightknightie) wrote2025-09-14 05:57 pm

Looking forward to HLH_Shortcuts '25

In case anyone here missed the news elsewhere, [personal profile] killabeez announced [community profile] hlh_shortcuts 2025, the annual Highlander fanfiction exchange on the AO3. I'm glad to have it to look forward to. I loved to read it for years before I began writing for it, and since I started writing for it, I've written some things that I'm very satisfied with.

Sign-ups will be October 1-11, with assignments out by October 14, and submissions due December 15. As usual, the first story will be revealed on December 20, as the winter solstice is Duncan's birthday, and subsequent stories will be revealed a few per day as long as they last, to be followed by the author guessing game.

scintilla10: text: Our world is crumbling around us! (B&B - crumbling around us!)
a scintilla of time ([personal profile] scintilla10) wrote2025-09-14 05:52 pm

New Macdonald Hall fic!

When I saw a Macdonald Hall pinch hit for [community profile] raremaleslashex, I couldn't resist snapping it up! Here's what I wrote, now that authors have been revealed.

want the world to know (AO3 | DW)
Macdonald Hall series - Gordon Korman
Bruno/Boots, Cathy, Diane, Miss Scrimmage | rated T | 2700 words | no archive warnings apply
Tags: Hijinks & Shenanigans, hiding in a closet, Forced Proximity, First Kiss
Three-quarters of the way up the drainpipe on the east side of Miss Scrimmage's Finishing School for Young Ladies, Melvin "Boots" O'Neal felt something give under his foot. He scrambled frantically for the window ledge, and clung to it in desperation as the section of drainpipe that had, until very recently, been his foothold, broke off from the wall and went crashing into the shrubbery below.
pauraque: bird flying (Default)
pauraque ([personal profile] pauraque) wrote2025-09-13 11:18 am

assorted Star Wars

Recently I have watched or rewatched several Star Wars. Here are my thoughts.


Andor season 2

spoilers )


Rogue One

spoilers )


Original Trilogy

spoilers? I make fun of the movies a lot even though I like them. also cn: I ship Luke/Leia )

We plan to watch the prequel trilogy next. I saw The Phantom Menace in the theater and I think I watched like half of Attack of the Clones on TV, or maybe I'm just remembering the memes. It's gonna be a good time!
graycardinal: Shadow on asphalt (Default)
graycardinal ([personal profile] graycardinal) wrote2025-09-11 01:52 pm

[Fic (Amnesty: Into a Bar)] All in the Subtext (Miraculous Ladybug/Batman)

One more step toward catching up with all my outstanding prompts for the FIcathon That Goes Into A Bar....

Title: All in the Subtext
Author: [personal profile] graycardinal  /[profile] gray_cardinal 
Prompt: Gabriel Agreste goes into a bar visits a Gotham City bookstore…and meets Barbara Gordon!
Fandoms: Miraculous Ladybug / Batman: TAS
Word count: ~1700
Rating: Suitable for all ages.
Warnings: None.

Ninety-five percent of the volumes on Codex Antiquaria's shelves were simply old, and little more than that, each waiting for one of the half-dozen people on Earth with a unique interest in the particular topic whose subject that work concerned.

Not surprisingly, the remaining five percent – the grimoires, the spell-books, the alchemical field guides, the encyclopediae of magical artifacts – drew most of the paying customers.


pauraque: Picard reads a book while vacationing on Risa (st picard reads)
pauraque ([personal profile] pauraque) wrote2025-09-10 04:02 pm

Amazing Stories, Vol. 38, #8 (August 1964)

As I was cross-checking Le Guin's short stories to make sure I had access to all of them, I realized I was missing "Selection" which is a story written during the period covered by The Wind's Twelve Quarters but not included in it. The going assumption seems to be that Le Guin left it out because she didn't like it, but the editor of the monthly sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories liked it enough to print it in the August 1964 issue. You can buy a copy of this issue for about five US dollars, which happens to almost exactly track inflation from its cover price of 50 cents. So... I bought one! And since I bothered to do that, I figured I'd read the whole thing and report my findings.

Notes on the issue and what's in it )

My comments on the stories contain spoilers.

"The HoneyEarthers" by Robert F. Young

A scuzzy rich space dude tries to horn in on his son's young wife... or does he??Said rich space dude is Aaron Price, who owns a company that harvests water from Saturn's rings. His spoiled son Ronny leaves his wife Fleurette, and Aaron tries to manipulate him into not going through with the divorce by threatening to turn him in for tax evasion. Ronny flees the planet, and Aaron, who's been lusting after Fleurette for years, takes her to a romantic resort on the moon, where he finally reveals the truth: He is a time traveler, and Ronny isn't his son, but his younger self with "space fugue" amnesia brought on by a traumatic incident where he almost died working on the Saturn water-harvesting project. We don't get a super clear picture of Fleurette's reaction to this, but she basically runs like hell, which is the only part of the story that makes any sense.

I disliked this novelette so much it was hard to get through it. The SF elements are boringly infodumpy, the time travel plot is unnecessarily complicated and confusing (my synopsis simplifies it a LOT), the interpersonal drama plays like a bad soap opera, and the prose is so painfully overwrought and filled with clumsy metaphors that I occasionally wondered if it was satire. "The girlish dress she was wearing began below her shoulders, and the firelight had already fallen in love with her smooth clear skin. Meadow flowers grew around her, and her mouth had the redness of the wild raspberries that grew in the fields of his youth. Spring resided in the dew-brightness of her eyes; her cheeks held the hue of frost-kissed leaves." (This character is human, so I don't believe he meant her cheeks were green, though I don't know what he did mean.) I guess we're supposed to think Aaron's behavior towards Fleurette is okay in the end because it turns out he is secretly her husband, but for most of the story we see him as her father-in-law, so he comes off like a disgusting creep. The way the author chooses to constantly emphasize how young and girlish and naive Fleurette is made my skin crawl. I had never heard of this author before, and at the end of this story I was relieved to depart from his presence.

"Selection" by Ursula K. Le Guin

On a colony planet where a supercomputer matches everyone to their genetically and socially optimal spouse, a woman is displeased with her match.Joan doesn't have any specific reason to dislike Harry, she just finds him annoying and is pretty pissed to be stuck with him, though he likes her well enough. One day they're out skiing and Harry gets in an accident and breaks his leg. Seeing him vulnerable changes Joan's perspective on him and they end up happy together after all. The punchline: We go back to the guy who runs the matchmaking program, and find out that the supercomputer is far too busy with mission-critical processes to actually match the colonists up, so when nobody's looking he just draws names out of a hat.

This story was amusing but pretty slight. I saw the ending coming a mile away since there wasn't really anywhere else it could go, at least not for a writer who obviously isn't going to come out in favor of eugenicist arranged marriages. The execution could be better, but the idea that there are no predestined perfect matches and that relationships are what you make of them is a sensible one that I broadly agree with. I don't see any obvious reason why Le Guin wanted to bury this story; the prose is a little rough (by her standards, mind you, not by the standards of, say, Robert F. Young) but I don't think the story is significantly worse than the weaker entries in The Wind's Twelve Quarters. But as a writer I do understand that sometimes you look back at particular pieces and cringe for reasons that may not make sense to anyone else.

"Valedictory" by Phyllis Gotlieb

A trainee in a time travel project visits herself as a child.Her childhood was hard, but she doesn't say how, nor does she have a clear picture of what she hopes to accomplish. She imagines she might tell her younger self to hang on, that things will get better. But when she sees herself at recess, singing and playing in spite of everything, she realizes how deeply she'd underestimated her own resilience, and returns to her present without saying anything to herself at all.

This story hit me like a truck and left me in tears. You don't need to know exactly what the protagonist's struggles have been, because the author taps into a universal truth for those of us who went through a lot of shit when we were younger—no matter what happened, we survived it and we're still here. The prose is clear and evocative, and a light touch is used with the speculative premise so it doesn't overwhelm the character work.

This was by far the best story in the issue and I'd be interested to read more by the author. Has anyone read her stuff?

Essay: "Mort Weisinger: The Superman Behind Superman" by Sam Moskowitz

Moskowitz profiles the editor of Superman and related comics.This pretty extensive biography details how Weisinger got his start in science fiction, writing stories and editing fan and pro zines, before becoming instrumental in the growth of the superhero genre. I'm not a comics person so this wasn't of strong interest to me, but in the pre-Wikipedia age I'm sure it was nice to have a well-researched piece on an important figure from the fandom.

I did enjoy the recounting of the time in 1933 when Weisinger's mentor and co-editor Allen Glasser sold a story to Amazing that turned out to be plagiarized, causing the magazine's then-editor to freak out and refuse to work with anyone associated with Glasser. In turn this led Weisinger to shun Glasser and start his own zine with blackjack and hookers other friends. The drama! (I also liked Moskowitz's description of Glasser as "a slightly older scientifictioneer." There's a word we should bring back.)

"Furnace of the Blue Flame" by Robert Rohrer

In a post-apocalyptic future, a hero battles a dictator who controls the people by suppressing knowledge.The dictator claims to use magic, but the hero recognizes his powers as forgotten technology—the titular Furnace is a nuclear reactor which he uses to torture dissidents with radiation poisoning. The hero leverages forbidden scientific knowledge to sabotage it and break his control.

This was well-written, well-paced, and it held my attention. I appreciated that it didn't dance around pretending to be fantasy for longer than necessary. I thought it was interesting that the villain's stated motivation is to prevent a reignition of the wars that devastated civilization. He thinks if he can just terrify everyone into absolute obedience, war will never come again. I also thought it was smart to have the hero fully understand the risks of bringing technology back, believing that power must come with an ideology of mercy. The old fashioned sword-and-sorcery style of storytelling with a noble manly hero is played very straight, and that left me cold, but I'd say the piece is successful on its own terms even though it's not really to my taste.

"Zelerinda" by Gordon Walters

Two men, one with psychic powers, search for alien life on a planet with a weather system of liquid metal instead of water.It's hard to write a synopsis of this novelette because nothing happens in it. Various plot elements are introduced and none of them go anywhere. The psychic guy is afraid of being found out and locked away in a psionics research lab, but that never happens and his abilities have no impact on the mission. His brother was investigating the planet before them and disappeared, but they never find him, dead or alive. They think they find a structure, but it's just a cave. They come up with different theories about how life could exist on this world, but they're all wrong. There are no aliens, it's just a dead world with weird weather. The end.

This story is so long and so pointless that when it ended I felt actively angry that my time had been wasted on it. It takes ages for them just to get to the planet—why did we need all those scenes of the psychic guy being woken up to come to an emergency meeting and their boss waffling on forever??—and when they get there the search for life is full of unnecessary detail and repetition. The writing style also grated on me, especially the overly verbose and self-consciously "clever" dialogue. All the characters sound the same (just like the narrative voice, in fact) and have no development or real conflicts. You could write "liquid metal weather" on a post-it and get as much out of it as I got from this story.

Review column: "The Spectroscope" by Robert Silverberg

Silverberg reviews Starswarm by Brian Aldiss, The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, Ninth Series ed. Robert P. Mills, and Escape on Venus by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Starswarm takes previously published stories and retcons them into a connected narrative with some edits and linking commentaries. Silverberg finds this project "misguided and lamentable" and the commentary "sententious and ponderously coy" but he likes a few of the stories as stand-alones.

He gives a glowing review to the Fantasy and Science Fiction anthology, naming "Flowers for Algernon" first among the standout entries and calling the book "a must for a science fiction library."

Silverberg had apparently panned Burroughs' other works as "unmitigated trash" and "subliterate claptrap," so it is with some sheepishness that he admits to liking Escape on Venus for its more lighthearted comic tone. "Mitigated trash and literate claptrap, I suppose—but fun to read."