Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 44

The Myth of the Veneer

THE MYTH OF THE VENEER

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“The secret world of the Mafia is a concave mirror that reflects and magnifies our world. If looked at properly, it can illuminate aspects of society that are normally out of focus and taken for granted. When we peel away the veneer of law and moral convention, we enter a world where social relations are in their raw state, the use of violence is pervasive, information uncertain and betrayal a common currency, and where the natural bonds of family lov...

Story Excerpt Sunday: from Rotten Row by Chaz Brenchley

Rotten Row

by Chaz Brenchley

Sometimes you wait a long time, at a ’Chute. The network’s busy all over: at any node people are always arriving, leaving, passing through. And whatever the pressure, they can still only process one discard at a time, coming or going. You get delays. Everywhere, you get delays.

Not at NeoPenthe, when you’re going up the line to Rotten Row. They hustled me through the concourse as though I were political, as though the taint of my ambition might rub off if they let me...

Getting into Space

(Picture fromhere.)

The fundamental problem with getting into space isconservation of momentum.

Specifically, we need propellant. A space ship throw propellant out the back. Momentum must be conserved so when a mass is cast out in one direction, the ship moves in the opposite direction. Momentum is often defined in terms of mass (m) times velocity, such that:

m(1)v(1) = m(2)v(2)

Where m(1) and v(1) are, in this case, the mass and velocity of the propellant and m(2)v(2) is the mass and velocity of...

Percy’s Boys

In another post I mentioned Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel.

I think it serves as an example of a story that caught the imagination of the following century, even though the book itself these days is barely readable: dull plot, plodding prose that is occasionally risible, and an utterly unexamined racist, classist paradigm.

But in others’ hands, the story improved immensely, even leading to inspiration and heroism, as mentioned before, in the case of the diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who wa...

Here’s Looking Back at You

Relying on its superb camouflage, the swamp collie* stalks its prey.

I suppose everyone has had the experience of looking into an animal’s eyes and wondering what thoughts were passing through its mind, or how it was experiencing the moment. When learning to train an animal, the wonder becomes tinged with frustration, as one realizes how poorly one hears the animal even when it’s frantically semaphoring its thoughts and emotions. What chance of sensing its internal life, then, when the animal...

Not Legal Fiction: The Supreme Court and Reproductive Rights

The picture on this post was created after last year’s fight over a draconian anti-abortion law in Texas – the one that brought Wendy Davis to national attention and led her to run for governor. It’s based on a flag from the Texas Revolution against Mexico, though that flag lacked ovaries (it had a cannon).

After I heard that the U.S. Supreme Court had concluded that a corporation was able to have religious beliefs and could therefore refuse to cover contraception for its female employees, I d...

WWW Wednesday 7-2-2014

WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading.

• What did you recently finish reading?

Ghost Point, by James Hetley. Wow, did I get into this book right off the runway. Ended up reading madly most of a night.

The time is 1979, the place, Ghost Point, Maine, just as winter starts. Dennis Carlsson, a big, blond, blue-eyed, one-legged Viet Nam vet unexpectedly sees a Vietnamese woman in a cafe, and flashes back to one of his many horrible combat experiences: he sees an enemy soldier, and she see...

BVC Eats: dirty rice

comfort food all year round

Jen’s Dirty Rice

3 cups hot, freshly-cooked rice

(rice can be made with a knob of butter and maybe meat stock instead of water)

¾ to 1 lb chicken livers, washed, patted dry, cleaned, and diced

8 tablespoons butter (1 stick or ¼ lb)

1 T kosher salt

1 T dried oregano

1 T dried basil

1/8 t powdered cayenne pepper

1 T powdered garlic (yes, because it tastes different from fresh)

Crush all the dry seasonings in a pestle until they’re aromatic. Put them in a large frying pan with t...

Your Mileage May Vary

My first fantasy, The Stone War, is about love of place (and what happens when you privilege love of place over the love of the people around you).And one reviewer couldn’t get past the fact of that. Reading between the lines, Ithink this person was not the sort to whom place is important (“Oh, I can live anywhere. One place is pretty much like another”). The idea of a whole book centered around love of place was just…alien to him. I doubt very much that anything I could have done would have...

BVC Welcomes James A. Hetley

Please join Book View Café in welcoming James A. Hetley as our newest member.

James A. Hetley also writes as James A. Burton. He lives in the Maine setting of his Hetley-authored contemporary fantasy novels The Summer Country, The Winter Oak, Dragon’s Eye, and Dragon’s Teeth. His residence is an 1850s house suitable for a horror movie, with an electrical system installed while Thomas A. Edison still walked the earth, peeling lead-based paint, questionable plumbing, a furnace dating back to Ted...