Justin Howe's Blog, page 20

Two From 1962

Today’s trip to the vault brings us two science fiction stories from 1962 both written by women and both being contemporary snapshots of their era. But that’s about all they share. The first, “The Sound of Silence” by Barbara Constant, is pitched as melodrama. The second, “The Glory of Ippling” by Helen M. Urban, is pitched more as satire. I’ll put links to each at the bottom of this post. Both are worth the few minutes they take to read.

Onward. Downward.

First up, “The Sound of Silence” by...

Favorite Reads 2018

The first two are from December and can stand in for my favorite reads from December 2018 post.

Breath of the Sun by Rachel Fellman: Lamat is a mountain guide and Disaine is a religious woman come to climb the sacred mountain. A really marvelous piece of fantasy writing that does away with a lot of the grand epic storylines of modern fantasy to focus down on the personal and philosophical.

Semiosis by Sue Burke: Classic science fiction of the First Contact sort where the human colonists must...

Goodbye 2018

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A last nod to 2018 with a sunrise picture from December 30th.

Things published this past year:

“Periling Hand” at Beneath Ceaseless Skies: A story about a guy, a take-out delivery guy, dealing with his shit, on an alien planet where people harvest pollen using living tractors and they make alliances with intelligent stone circles that might or might not be about to fight a civil war amongst themselves. Basically, a mumble-core space western.

“A Ghost Can Only Take” at Reckoning: Not a story...

Coming Soon: Yesterweird

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Back when I read Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and did a chapter by chapter read through marveling at all its marvelous WTFry I thought it would be fun to do more of that. And if you liked that, then you’ll be happy because I’ve decided 2019 will be the year when that happens. Or maybe you won’t be happy, because it’s going to be on Patreon.

For a bit now my wife and I have been talking about using Patreon, she for her comics and me as a tool to keep me motivated and focused on my writing goals....

The Red Star Inn

Had the first session of a new D&D campaign. I’m running it with 5e using Jack Shear’s Krevborna setting. Like all good campaigns do, the first session started in an inn…

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I pretty much rely on three opening scenarios to bring an adventuring party together: escape from jail, shipwreck, or solve a murder. Here I was using the latter. Having read some on the Gumshoe system I used the simple rule that the players will always find the clue. Their dice rolls will only determine how clear the infor...

The Frogs

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This is another fable sparked by class conversation. I’ll assume most of you will be familiar with the frog in the well story. Here’s my treacly version of it.

So there were three frogs that grew up living at the bottom of a well. They lived there all alone happy to know nothing about the outside world. One day after a rainstorm the water in the well rose to the point where the frogs could see the outside world. They saw the sky. They heard the birds. They could smell all the smells in the f...

Favorite Reads November 2018

Chuggachug-chugging along towards 2019… who knows what awaits?

Anywho…

Here’s my favorite reads from November.

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The Auctioneer by Joan Samson: This was scary as all hell. Unrelenting and harrowing where the entropy dial is twisted all the way to 11 and the bad stuff keeps happening and the stakes keep ratcheting upward. To be honest I had to put the book down for a bit because I found it too unrelenting. The story’s about a New Hampshire town that finds itself falling under the influence of a...

Pandora’s Box

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One of my students brought up the legend of Pandora’s Box in a recent class in the sense of learning about something you’ll only regret knowing. For example would you want to know if your spouse was cheating on you? Since this happened at the end of class, we didn’t really get to dig into the idea too much. One thing I might do when/if we get back to the subject is talk about myths and how you can read different things into them. So in my version of the Pandora story, I’ll remove the hope an...

Favorite Reads October 2018

Reading is as much about the books as the journey inside your own head or out of it as the case may be.

Often times when I recall a book to mind I’m not just remembering the book and its events, but my state of mind at the time and the places where I read it. Needless to say this makes parting with books a bit difficult, which certainly plays hell with the notion of ever moving again.

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Other Cities by Benjamin Rosenbaum: The obvious comparison is to Calvino’s Invisible Cities since Rosenbaum’...

Favorite Reads September 2018

[image error]The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carre: I feel like le Carre’s spy novels owe more stylistically to Dickens and 19th century literature than they do to Ian Fleming or Len Deighton. The cast of characters is huge, the plot’s oblique, and the prose ripe with caricature and grotesques. I love the world he crafts, but can understand anyone’s complaint that there’s not enough action. If anything le Carre deflates the action oriented spy story, as the more James Bond a character is, the more lik...