That’s not the way I work. Sure, things are terrible right now, worse than they’ve been in decades. I’m angrier than I’ve been since I was shouting “Act Up! Fight back! Fight AIDS!” (And I was pretty fucking angry then.) But I don’t believe in giving up or succumbing to doomer instincts.

Except then I saw today’s news that the Supreme Court had legitimized state laws attacking transgender people playing sports, which will certainly be used to even further drive the absolute hatred and bigotry Trump and Republicans have frothingly fomented over the past decade. This guarantees things will get worse before they get better.

Add to that a skin-of-the-teeth decision affirming birthright citizenship — it’s being reported as a 6-3 vote, which is bad enough, but actually only five of the justices affirmed its constitutionality (Kavanaugh found it to be merely legislative, which of course would be easily repealable). This is, of course, a bunch of racist and ahistorical nonsense and, again, things will get worse before they get better. Republican activists will continue to concoct bogus “originalist” legal theories to keep chipping away at what had been settled law since the Civil War.

Oh, and they opened yet another flow of dark money to allow billionaires even more access and control of the levers of government, because those guys have been doing such a fucking bang-up job over the past two years.

In a rare moment of reading the room, I don’t think today is the day to go on an angry-yet-optimistic rant on the perils of despair. This is a day when it’s okay to embrace both anger and sadness, to experience the hopelessness that comes with a radical government bound and determined to attack anyone who does not conform to their narrow and bigoted idea of what it means to be an American. I don’t have the right to tell people who are directly affected by all this to immediately suck it up and take to the ramparts.

So, feel it. Let it sink in. Take some time, a day or two or three. Maybe the whole damn July 4 weekend, since celebrating the idea of America seems odd when the people running America hate that idea so deeply.

In a few days, we’ll circle back. It hurts now and it’s going to keep hurting for the foreseeable future. But we will turn this back and make things right, if not for ourselves now then for the people who come after us.

Until then, take care of yourself and the people you care for. We all need that.

This month I’m previewing some of the books I’ll be reading for the Books & Bakes read-a-thon to benefit Cake4Kids. Grab yourself a copy so you can read along and join in the discussion this summer.

I left home for a Virginia college at 17 and never looked back. Since those distant days, I’ve only lived in Virginia and Washington, D.C., where I’ve spent decades building my own life and family.

But if you ask me where I’m from, I’m going to say Kentucky.

It’s an odd thing, holding on to a home state identity when I left before I became a legal adult. I technically can’t even say that I was “born and raised” in Kentucky — thanks to the draft and the Vietnam war, I was actually born on Camp Pendleton Marine Base outside of San Diego. But my earliest memory is in Kentucky as a toddler: standing in the kitchen of our yellow-brick house while my mom held my still-infant little sister.

And I still have all the sense memories of home. Playing in the creek behind the house. Walking through the fields to Granny and Grandpa’s. “Helping” on my uncle’s farm. Playing Little League on the Fredonia ball field. Staring up at a night sky free of light pollution and dreaming of bigger things.

No matter how long I’m away, Western Kentucky will always be a part of me. I’m specifying the part of the state because Western Kentucky is a different beast than the other, more famous parts: Eastern Kentucky, with its coal-fired Appalachian history, and Bluegrass Kentucky in the center, with its white-fenced bluegrass pastures and expensive horses. Eastern and Bluegrass have their holds on American culture, for better and worse — Loretta Lynn singing from the mountains, coal-miner strikes, the halls of state government, and the Kentucky Derby showing that even country can get fancy.

Western Kentucky, though, not so much. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot there to work with. The most prominent author I know to have done so is Bobbie Ann Mason, whose 1985 novel In Country made a sizable debut and was adapted into a film by Norman Jewison (starring Bruce Willis) that tackled the post-Vietnam war years and PTSD.

That’s all a very long way of saying I don’t see much of my Kentucky home and experience reflected in the books I read. Which is why I’m happy I’ll change that a bit during Books & Bakes with T. J. Martinson’s Blood River Witch, a just-published murder-mystery/thriller that delves into the rural Kentucky area that shaped me as a kid. From the jacket:

I came across Blood River Witch via TikTok, of all places, when the algorithm served me Martinson’s series on literary feuds, Literary Diss Tracks. He’s an assistant professor of literature at Murray State University, down the road and across the Land Between the Lakes from my hometown and where my mom got a degree while I was in middle school. When I heard Martinson — who’s from Illinois — talk about his desire to write about the Western Kentucky area he’s adopted, how could I not sign up?

During my background research for this column I also found that in 2019 Martinson was “pre-emptively fired” from his then-new position teaching at Olivet Nazarene University because his novel, The Reign of the Kingfisher, had a lesbian character and someone complained to the administration. “[Inclusion] is, in my opinion, an ethical imperative that all writers must acknowledge and embrace. I personally wish for everyone to feel welcomed into my stories, especially those who are consistently disenfranchised and whose voices are often erased,” Martinson said at the time. Guess now I’ll be reading two books by him.

So, Blood River Witch is officially part of my Books & Bakes read-a-thon benefiting Cake4Kids. Remember, for every book I read, supporters will pledge $1, $5, or $10 to help bring more smiles to at-risk and underserved children on their birthdays. If you make a pledge, you’ll also get a free six-month, paid-tier subscription to The Back Half, so you can join in the chat about all the books I’ll be reading between July 1 and Labor Day.

Reading is awesome on its own but it’s even better when you have someone to share it with. You can grab your copy of Blood River Witch via Amazon, or you can support your local independent bookstore in person or by ordering at Bookshop.org.

To find out more about Books & Bakes and to make your pledge, visit seanbuggrealtor.com/books-and-bakes. You can follow T. J. Martinson on TikTok, @tjmartinsonwritesbooks.

This month I’m previewing some of the books I’ll be reading for the Books & Bakes read-a-thon to benefit Cake4Kids. Grab yourself a copy so you can read along and join in the discussion this summer.

Back in my editor days, I would occasionally gift books to younger writers I worked with, reflecting things that I saw in their work and (I hope) encouraging new explorations on their part.

One day I handed a copy of Terry Pratchett’s Men at Arms to one of my critics. With a small derisive sniff, he handed it back. On the bright side, that did reduce by one the number of people I would be giving books to in the future.

For those unfamiliar, Pratchett is the late and legendary author of the Discworld books, a series of fantasy novels set on the titular Discworld — a flat world that flies through the universe atop four elephants standing on a giant space turtle. A master of absurdist satire, Pratchett blends nearly every genre trope into a rich stew of linguistically nimble and deeply humanist fables that reflect our own fractured reality.

Take this quote from Men at Arms, which over the years has become a staple of studies and think pieces on poverty:

The Atlantic recently published a piece lamenting Pratchett’s lack of prominence in literature writ large — he’s a legend in fantasy circles but does seem scarce when the topic turns to “mainstream” masters — with the unfortunate hot take that expensive movie adaptations would bring him to the masses. I disagree, in large part because so much of what makes Pratchett special is wordplay, puns, and wry observation that is hard to see translating to screens without massive amounts of voiceover narration. In which case, it would be more efficient to listen to an audiobook.

I prefer the more traditional way of promoting an under-read author, recommending them to everyone I possibly can. So, I’ve chosen Wyrd Sisters as one of my Books & Bakes reads. This was one of the first Discworld novels I read and one that made me into a lifelong fan. Wyrd Sisters is part of the sub-series of Discworld focusing on three witches led by one of his greatest characters, Granny Weatherwax. It’s been a long time since I’ve visited with her and I’m eager to dive back in.

Remember, don’t sniff at genre. No one likes a snob and you’ll miss out on some truly great work.

Leaving behind the storied fields of English humor, I’ll be returning to the States for a classic American literary tradition: the immigrant’s memoir. Given the lamentable state of our country at the moment, now would be the time to do so.

I first read Viet Thanh Nguyen when his debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize. Given that I married into a Vietnamese family, I’ve always kept an eye out for authors who can teach me more about that experience and who I can share with my nieces and nephews — I always want them to have at least some writing in their lives that comes from authors with shared background and experience.

And Nguyen, whose family came to the U.S. as Vietnamese refugees, is the guy to do it with his memoir, A Man of Two Faces. He has been an astute commentator on our current national nightmare in the New York Times and other outlets. Sharp, funny, and exceptionally dapper — a quality not related to literary talent but I still enjoy seeing it, given that I myself am exceptionally un-dapper — he’s well primed to examine America from the inside and out. I’m really looking forward to this one.

I have not set an order for the books I’ll be reading, though these two will likely be in July. I’d love it if you joined me in reading so we can chat about it here at The Back Half. If you’re weaning yourself from the Bezos bullshit, go to Bookshop.org where you can both buy the book and support your local independent bookstore.

The Books & Bakes read-a-thon starts on July 1 and runs through Labor Day. You can make your pledge at seanbuggrealtor.com. All your pledges will go directly to Cake4Kids and help them bring birthday smiles to underserved and at-risk children.

Then there’s the whole quagmire of asking how these writers of the past influenced our tech leaders of the present, particularly those of my generation who ostentatiously tout those influences in the names of their companies, products, and corpo-speak mission statements.

In this January 1982 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories I stumbled on a doozy of wishful techno thinking that definitely reaches forward to today: “Futures Fantastic: Toward Human Immortality.”

To cop a phrase from Battlestar Galactica, all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.

This is basically a round-up of the state of research on aging in the early 1980s by writer J. Ray Dettling, with the goal of promoting funding for more research. Fair enough, enthusiastic support for science and research is one of the more laudable aspects of science fiction as a genre (unless it’s Jerry Pournelle and his ilk advocating for space lasers and targeted nuke strikes). But reading it only gave me deja vu and an immense sense of loss.

First, there’s the proliferation of anti-aging buzzwords that remain with us to this day: antioxidants, free radicals, periodic fasting, and (of course) cryogenics. The idea at the time was that antioxidants and related research would extend human life expectancy — read that as “American” life expectancy — by 20 years by the year 2000.

U.S. life expectancy was 74.5 in 1982. By 2000 it had shot up to…76.9! And today it’s gone up all the way to 79.4.1

“A recent Rand Corporation Study concluded that by the year 2020 (only 40 years hence),” Dettling says, “we will have added 50 years to the human lifespan.”

The lesson here, which I don’t believe we’ve learned, is to stop paying so much attention to Rand Corporation studies. Also, the economic and cultural chaos that would be unleashed by nearly doubling the human lifespan in that short of a period would be, well, a good hook for a science fiction story. Not to mention the realization that we should be both cautious in what we wish for and discerning in our acceptance of long-term predictions.

I’m not being Malthusian there, even though this piece once again raises the Malthusian argument that everyone loved — unchecked economic growth would create population growth that would overwhelm agricultural capacity — that turned out to be bunk because economically secure women don’t feel the need to birth six to a dozen babies apiece. (Yes, I’m oversimplifying, it’s fine.) But if you’re tired of Boomers and Gen Xers now, imagine if you wouldn’t be rid of them until 2085 or so.

Anyway, a five year increase isn’t nothing, depending on the quality of those additional years. But given the hostility to science and expertise currently running the nation, alongside a cult-like worship of quackism led by RFK Jr., we’re not gonna be getting that kind of extension in this century. Personally, I think we’ll be lucky if we manage to stay at 79.4 for the next couple of decades, since even that was a rebound from the depths of Covid when life expectancy dipped back to 76.3.

When you gut public health, destroy the nation’s capacity for research, and stop using the vaccines that played a huge role in the life expectancy leap from 1950 (68.1 years) onward, good things aren’t going to happen.

One last gem: “[A] surgical technique called parabiosis was performed in which aged organisms were connected to young organisms like siamese twins. Thus the blood of the young subject could mix with the blood of the older subject. The aged organisms showed immediate signs of rejuvenation and greatly outlived the animals in the control group.”

So that’s where Peter Thiel got his gay vampire plan from.

The Stories

Full honesty, this is not a good issue for short SF stories. Mostly meh with the new stuff and the “Amazing Hall of Fame” re-print, “A Way of Thinking” by Theodore Sturgeon, is just boring in a way that I didn’t expect from a Sturgeon story.

One that stands out in a bad way is Steven Ray Daugherty’s “Comnet 2 Enters the 21st Century,” a Network riff (or ripoff, take your pick) about a future TV network’s rapacious low-brow programming that whacks you over the head with the unrelenting and ubiquitous homophobia that may ultimately drive me off this project: “Alex slides out of his chair, his knees buckling as they collide with the back of Little Tom, who is kneeling under the desk in order to service his boss. (No kidding, it’s a jungle out there.)” That’s followed up with a bunch of proto-MAGA bullshit about the “Federal Bureau of Minority Opinion” and the “Gay Rights Advisory Commission.”

So, let’s just move on to easily the high point of the issue, George R. R. Martin’s “Unsound Variations,” a story about chess that I expected to hate — I really do not care for chess, a game that is wildly overused as a metaphor and framework — but ended up liking very much.

That’s because Martin is a great writer and the chess theme here works well as a larger theme for aging and life choices. A rich, Elon Musk-type calls his college chess buddies together for a cloistered weekend, revealing he has used a time-travel technique to systematically ruin each of their lives as revenge for humiliating him in an undergrad chess tournament. All of that leads to a meditation on aging and life choices, both those we make and those that are made for us:

“Once the game begins, the possibilities narrow and narrow and narrow, the other variations fade, and you’re left with what you’ve got — a position half of your own making, and half chance, as embodied by that stranger across the board. … The might-have-beens are gone.”

I’m not sure I could describe life post-50 more succinctly than that.

It’s easy for people to hate on Martin these days because of their frustration with his incomplete greatest work. But people need to remember he’s long been a prolific part of the science-fiction and fantasy world and we would be worse off without him. Unlike many of the stories I’ve been writing about in Flashback, this one is pretty easy to pick up — it’s part of his Dreamsongs: Volume II short story collection. Give it a go.

Books & Bakes Read-a-Thon

And that’s a wrap on Amazing January 1982. I do have some other things in the pipeline that should be fun but don’t forget about “Books & Bakes,” my summer read-a-thon benefiting Cake4Kids. I’m a volunteer baker for Cake4Kids, which provides birthday cakes to at-risk and underserved kids in our community. It’s a wonderful organization and I’m excited to have this new way to share and support its mission.

There will definitely be some sci-fi and fantasy included over the course of July and August, so you won’t want to miss out. Next week I’ll be posting some previews of the books I’ll be reading (and writing about) on The Back Half.

To learn more about “Books & Bakes” and Cake4Kids, as well as make a pledge, check out my other website: seanbuggrealtor.com/books-and-bakes. Let’s have a great summer reading!

I quickly started reading well above my age and grade level, a fortunate by-product of growing up in a home with lots of books. By sixth grade, I had already delved into Kurt Vonnegut and Stephen King. In middle school I was a lending library for my friends, providing them all the horror and sci-fi books their parents didn’t want them reading.

It’s no surprise, then, that I grew up to be a writer — that was my dream goal. And reading has been with me at every stage of my life, making me a better writer and a better person. My book collection dwarfs what I grew up with, due to my inability to enter a bookstore without buying five or six books just because they look interesting. I’m often actively reading three to four books at a time — a history here, a horror novel there, a piece of classic literature I’ve finally gotten around to — yet my “to be read” pile (actually, piles) continues to grow because so many new things sound so interesting.

While reading was with me from the start, my cooking obsession came later. In the early ‘90s, during my first days in D.C. learning to live on my own, my mother gave me a copy of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. I began dabbling with basic recipes, sometimes successfully, sometimes very much not. But over the years, with a lot of reading and a lot practice, I got good at it. I even taught myself to cook traditional Vietnamese food to impress my in-laws.

But the first thing I loved to cook was super basic: baking bread. As an angsty young man, it was entertaining to make something that required punching. Over the years I got better with practice and now I can say with some pride that I haven’t bought a loaf of sandwich bread in more than decade — I bake my own every week or so.

During the pandemic, like so many others, I focused on baking. But not on sourdough. I wanted to bake cakes. I’d been baking cakes for years but one thing I’d never tried: actual cake decoration. So with videos and books and much trial and error, I taught myself how to use piping tips, how to make frostings and icings, how to shape chocolate into ornamentation, and so many other skills.

Ultimately, I was baking too much for a two-person home to consume and my neighbors had begged me to stop giving them cake and donuts so often. Fair enough. But then I came across Cake4Kids as I was searching new techniques online.

Cake4Kids is a non-profit that provides underserved and at-risk youth with custom birthday and celebration cakes, cupcakes, and cookies. In chapters across the country, home bakers create beautiful cakes to give young people who may feel forgotten in the system something special just for them. I signed up immediately and quickly found myself baking a soccer-themed cake, followed by Fortnite. Bakers don’t meet the kids directly but we hear back from the organizations who coordinate these gifts. Each one I’ve baked has given me an immense feeling of joy.

This spring, Cake4Kids provided its 100,000th cake. It’s a big effort to run a non-profit that provides for kids — training, coordination, education, fundraising, it all adds up. So, while I’ve been supporting the kids through baking, I want to support the organization through reading.

How does that work?

One of my favorite activities as a kid was the read-a-thon, a school-organized fundraiser where we asked friends and family to pledge a certain amount per book we would read over the course of a couple weeks. Voracious little bookworm that I was, I raised far more money doing this than I ever did selling candy bars or candles.

What I’m doing this summer is an individual, grown-up read-a-thon. I’m asking friends, family, subscribers, and clients to pledge a dollar amount for each book I read from July 1 through Labor Day. That’s ten weeks of me working through my to-be-read pile (or using it as an excuse to buy more books). At two books a week, someone who pledges $1 per book would donate $20 to Cake4Kids.

Make Your "Books & Bakes" Pledge Here!

Every Friday, I’ll publish a round-up here at The Back Half of mini-reviews and recommendations of what I’ve read. They’ll be mostly positive because one of the perks of being a grown-up is not having to read bad books. I’ll be reading across a range of topics and genres: my beloved sci-fi and horror, as well as some fantasy, history, and literary fiction (plus, I hope, a couple surprises).

And the more I read, the more support Cake4Kids receives.

I’ll also let you know what books I have on deck so you can read along and share your thoughts here.

It’s a simple plan, combining two things I love — reading and baking — to support an organization whose mission I’m committed to.

An important part of Books & Bakes is the support I’m receiving from the Bediz Group at RLAH, which I joined this spring. One of my goals in making that switch to a new real estate brokerage was finding new ways to give back to the community and I’m delighted that David Bediz and the whole team have helped me make this a reality so quickly.

The Rules of the Read-a-Thon

If I’m asking you to pledge $1 or $5 or $10 per book that I read, then I need to have some guidelines so you know how your support is going to work. Here are the five simple rules for how I’ll approach Books & Bakes.

1. No “short” or “easy” books.

I will be avoiding short books that could be called novellas or are under 200 pages. I’m not going to run up the score by reading things I can easily finish in an afternoon. I love graphic novels but they’ll have to wait until the fall.

2. No behemoth novels.

This is not my time to dive into Joyce’s Ulysses or take yet another run at War and Peace. A “read-a-thon” implies reading a lot of books, not just a lot of one book.

3. Non-Fiction is included.

I’ll sprinkle in some non-fiction, partly for spice and partly because they can be super interesting.

4. Let’s read together!

Every Friday, I’ll publish a Books and Bakes review of the books I’ve read at The Back Half. As a Books & Bakes supporter, you’ll receive a free six-month, paid-tier subscription to The Back Half. I’ll also include a book every week that I’m currently reading so you can read along.

5. You can cap out if my volume is too high.

Whether you’re pledging $1, $5, or $10 (or more) per book, you can set a cap on your total pledge. So, if I hit a four-book-a-week pace — unlikely, but we’ll see — you won’t find yourself stuck with a final tally that strikes fear in your heart. This should be fun, not stressful! That said, any amount you can pledge will be doing great work for Cake4Kids.

How to Support Books & Bakes

This part is super simple: Visit seanbuggrealtor.com/books-and-bakes — just fill out the pledge form and you’re ready to go! Remember, it’s your choice how much you want to pledge and if you want to set a maximum amount. Anything you can contribute will make a difference for at-risk and underserved youth.

Each supporter will receive a free six-month, paid-tier subscription to The Back Half, complete with all the benefits that come with that. That means you’ll get access to the full archive, an e-book edition of my book Boy Does World, and no paywalls on any posts.

Also, I hope you’ll join me in some chats here at The Back Half about the books I’ll be reading — the more people reading, the better!

And there’s always something that sounds interesting. That’s the beauty of books.

Unfortunately, I’ve been finding interesting things then not getting around to reading them for decades at this point. I could easily go for a few years only reading books I’ve bought but haven’t started (or finished). The thought to do so occasionally crosses my mind, especially when staring at all the volumes I have yet to find shelf space for that confront me every morning.

Naturally, I respond to this thought by deciding to re-read something I finished and shelved a long time ago. And not just anything at the moment. I’ve finally given in to a nearly overwhelming urge I’ve had for the past few months to once again pick up Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, the first volume in his famed Wheel of Time series.

Yep, in the face of all my unread novels and histories, I’ve chosen to jump back into a mammoth fourteen-book fantasy series where each novel runs 800-plus pages. As they say, That boy ain’t right.

Funnily enough, I was not a fantasy boy growing up. I read The Hobbit quite young but bounced hard off of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which to this day I have not read. I made a couple half-hearted attempts at other books, such as Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane and Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, and bounced off them just as hard. The tropes — dragons and princesses and chosen one quest stories — didn’t appeal to me. Science fiction and horror were my jam and very little could shake me out of those.

I believe what changed my mind can be summed up in two words: Final Fantasy.

Starting with Final Fantasy 7 on my original PlayStation and continuing through the entire series, I got myself hooked on those same tropes. It helped that FF7 dressed those tropes up in sci-fi drag but even the less tech-centered, more high-fantasy installments that followed had me hooked. Turns out that having a passion for role-playing games translates into a sudden onset of appreciation for fantasy literature.

In the years since, I have torn through many high-profile fantasy series, including a staggering number of Terry Brooks’s Shannara series. I’m particularly fond of Tad Williams, whose Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy manages to take all those tropes and weave something that feels classic in its homages, yet modern in its telling. And of course I’ve read Game of Thrones, which I won’t be going to back to re-read unless I’m certain it will finally be finished.

I may be nuts but I’m not that nuts.

Wheel of Time is actually complete, even though Jordan died in 2007 with the final three books unfinished. Brandon Sanderson, another weirdly prolific fantasy writer I enjoy, stepped in to wrap up the series based on Jordan’s notes and outlines (with the blessing of Jordan’s wife/editor). So I won’t get literary blue balls re-tackling the series.

I’m already well into the second book, The Great Hunt. I’ll be writing more about this series as I once again make my way through it. Jordan’s fantasy world owes as much to Dune as it does Tolkien, with incredibly complex and convoluted world building and political intrigue. I’m specifically reading it through a gender-focused lens this time, which is appropriate for a series where the world’s magic power is explicitly split into male and female halves, with the male half tainted by evil and women wielding immense magical (and political) power.

Jordan has taken some hits for his supposed gender essentialism and I recall some spanking stuff around halfway through that doesn’t help his case. But I don’t remember it being quite so cut and dried — he works through many, many permutations of how such a world might grow and falter, some absolutely horrifying. Perhaps my memory is being influenced by Amazon’s Wheel of Time television series that took some interesting swings at the source material and then promptly got cancelled when it got really good.

Jeff Bezos needed to focus his resources on destroying the Washington Post, instead.

I’ll be revisiting the books here in batches as a longer term project for 2026 (and likely 2027). It will take a while because I have another reading project that I’ll be announcing here on Memorial Day that means I’ll need to suppress my urge to re-read giant-ass novels for the next few months. So many books, so little time.

And stay tuned for what’s coming. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.

Finding My Way Back to Paper

Two years ago I wrote a review here of my then-latest technology acquisition: the Kindle Scribe, a combination e-ink tablet for note taking and writing, as well as an oversized e-book reader. A few months later, I wrote a follow-up, noting how deeply the Scribe had become integrated into my daily work and personal life:

“One last thing that I’ve found myself using far more than expected is notations in Kindle books. … I’ve always taken my notes on paper (or sometimes a laptop) as I read, which creates a disconnect between the text and my thoughts. The Scribe solution is a pop-up box for notes, which is tied to a specific location in the text rather than a location on a page. This works super well for me, especially because I can access them easily through my Kindle app on my laptop for when I’m ready to convert those notes into my own writing projects.”

All these months later, the Scribe is still a major part of my daily life. Sheets of yellow paper and Post-It notes remain banished from my desktop. I take it everywhere, so I’m always ready to take notes on a meeting, scribble down otherwise fleeting ideas, or dip into one of the many (many) ebooks I’ve collected over the years.

Well, scratch that last one. I’ve reverted to old-fashioned books on paper in a major way and in large part because of my Scribe.

I have not adopted some anti-ebook attitude. I think ebooks are great and I still grab a few here and there — since my Scribe is always with me that means I always have something to read that’s not my damn phone.

What actually happened was I started taking too many notes.

Jotting notes inside the text seemed super useful at first, especially for books I planned to write about here at the Back Half. But I quickly started hitting some road blocks, primarily that space was limited to fairly short notes. And as time went on, I found the Kindle app on my laptop to be less and less capable of managing my notes, as well as my highlighted passages, which made using it frustrating rather than illuminating when trying to reference them.

I realized I was having a much easier time when reading physical books, despite my initial concerns about a “disconnect” between my thoughts and the page. Taking my notes on the Scribe, where I could scribble out a few hundred words of thoughts and questions with no problem then export them to my Mac, began to free me up. Given my near-genetic-level aversion to writing in books, this was still a big deal for me and my process.

I want to be clear here: I’m not some collectible-focused dilettante who obsesses over maintaining every book I own in mint condition. Books are made to be read and the act of reading is going to inflict some wear and occasionally tear on them. Still, I am a stickler that they should be handled as gently as possible. Every time I see a person reading a paperback with the front cover bent all the way around to the back a piece of my heart dies. If I see you marking your place in a book by folding down the corner you can be certain I am judging you. Use a business card like a caring person does.

You can imagine how I feel when I see some rando posting on #booktok with a video of their pages underlined and highlighted into full-spread rainbows, plus scribbles in the margins, plus Post-It arrows. It sends shivers up my spine. How does anyone make any sense of performative annotations, anyway?

Now here I am, full circle, yet again expanding my already bursting personal library with new hardbacks and trade paperbacks (pour one out for my beloved and defunct mass-market paperbacks). Though I am making far more use of my local library to keep my expenditures somewhat reasonable, I’m not completely crazed.

Luckily, there are no sides to be chosen here. Reading is reading and while there are aspects of physical books I’ll always love — the smell of an older book, the weight of it on your chest when you start to nap — it doesn’t mean I hate the alternatives. There was a dust-up last week on Threads, our most perplexing social media app, over whether or not listening to audiobooks counts as reading that made me understand why I don’t check Threads that often.

Go read a book, however you prefer, wherever you prefer. You can even write in it if you want. Just don’t tell me.

I just didn’t realize how much there would be.

My eyes aren’t clouded. I remember well the casual homophobia that permeated all media during the Seventies and Eighties. I knew early on what a faggot was and that I was one. Every time I ran into that word in a book or movie, it hurt a little because I secretly knew it meant me. But that part of me quickly grew calloused, which allowed me to maintain my voracious consumption of genre novels and short stories.

Going back and re-reading now I feel sorry for my younger self — and other young queer readers of the time — because the homophobia was so endemic to nearly everything. This isn’t just about genre, homophobia (and its partners in bigotry, racism and misogyny) were everywhere, even books and movies that purported to be sympathetic to homosexuality.

Perhaps sometime I’ll go on my rant about how much I loathe The Boys the in the Band.

All to say that when I decided to dip back into the world of 2001: A Space Odyssey — the film and the book — I wasn’t expecting to be smacked in the face with the anti-gay tropes of the time. Stanley Kubrick’s film has grander ambitions than interpersonal human relationships. Arthur C. Clarke was a fairly progressive humanist and quasi-closeted gay man living with his partner in Sri Lanka. There wouldn’t seem to be a lot of space for inserting random homophobia into either film or book.

One would think.

I no longer have the original version of Clarke’s novel from 1968 (so many books lost to moves and time) so I picked up the “Millennial Edition” from 1999, which includes a foreword recounting his collaboration with Kubrick. It was a unique process, with the two of them crafting the screenplay and Clarke drafting the novel, he says, “with feedback in both directions.” It’s fascinating to learn how Clarke actually rewrote sections after viewing early scenes from the movie.

He includes some moments from his journal, which is where I hit on this nugget from Oct. 17, 1964:

“Stanley has invented the wild idea of slightly fag robots who create a Victorian environment to put our heroes at ease.”

Goddammit.

Clarke — again, a gay man — included this in his 1999-written foreword so you can see that standards have still only recently and imperfectly changed for this kind of stuff. Though it is darkly amusing that Kubrick almost created C-3P0 and R2-D2 a decade before George Lucas got around to it. This moment also puts one of the ending scenes of the movie — Dave Bowman living out a lifetime in a old-world European hotel room — into a new context.

Does this change the status of these two works of art or my opinion of them? No. It’s just a reminder that homophobia in all these works that I love is like a pebble in my shoe that I’ll never get out, nagging and inescapable.

Mercifully, that pebble doesn’t show up in the actual film or novel, which are both keenly focused on human evolution, consciousness, and technology. That’s not to say that they’re devoid of social context — the relegation of women to the furthest of sidelines may be a product of the time but it is so extreme that it begins to feel like a deliberate choice.

Clarke includes this howler in the novel regarding the use of female names for the extravehicular pods onboard the spaceship Discovery: “They were usually christened with feminine names, perhaps in recognition of the fact that their personalities were sometimes slightly unpredictable.”

No wonder so many women felt there was no place for them in science fiction and fantasy.

To step back and look at both separately, it’s hard not to argue that Kubrick’s film version is the superior work of art, by lightyears. It is audacious in ways Clarke’s can’t even begin to emulate. One of the most visually striking films in movie history actually opens on three minutes of a black screen and haunting orchestral score, that feels like a dare or a warning. Then there’s Kubrick’s devotion to showing the story rather than telling it, especially in the opening section where the monolith bestows the use of tools on our ancestors (and who promptly get to killing).

Kubrick’s 2001 has been analyzed to death so I’m not jumping into takes that have been done ad nauseum for decades. What actually struck me the most was how fast this supposedly ponderous movie feels. Perhaps I’ve grown more patient with age but my memories of the movie — especially the Dawn of Man — were that they were interesting but interminable. Those were false memories. Kubrick is certainly deliberate but everything on screen is communicating something, whether it’s the origins of man’s technology or the intricacies of interplanetary physics. Plus, he goes full on horror movie in the middle: the doomed astronaut’s final spacewalk is terrifying both from the vastness of space and the stalking space pod that the computer Hal commandeers.

Also, it’s quaint that a two-and-a-half hour film has an intermission embedded in the middle, a bladder-friendly accommodation we can’t get these days even during three-hour blockbusters.

The funny thing about 2001, a movie that has launched thousands of interpretations and analyses, is that if you’re confused you don’t have to be. Clarke spells it all out in the book.

Truly, Clarke’s novel is a 1968 version of a YouTube explainer video, answering every who, what, when, where, why and how you may have. Do you have questions about how the monolith changed the early humans, or what they experienced when the monolith touched them? Clark spells it out with the entranced apes:

“They could never guess that their minds were being probed, their bodies mapped, their reactions studied, their potentials evaluated. … Then the man-ape nearest to the slab suddenly came to life. … his body lost its trancelike rigidity and became animated as if it were a puppet controlled by invisible strings. The head turned this way and that; the mouth silently opened and closed; the hands clenched and unclenched. Then he bent down, snapped off a long stalk of grass, and attempted to tie it into a knot with clumsy fingers.”

Or, near the end of the film, when Bowman encounters the giant monolith in space and begins his final kaleidoscopic journey that inspired both acid trips and questions of What does it all mean? Well, here’s what it means:

“Call it the Star Gate.

“For three million years, it had circled Saturn, waiting for a moment of destiny that might never come. In its making, a moon had been shattered, and the debris of its creation orbited still.

“Now the long wait is ending. On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle. An ancient experiment was about to reach its climax.

“Those who had begun that experiment, so long ago, had not been men — or even remotely human. But they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deeps of space, they had felt awe, and wonder, and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they set forth for the stars.”

It would be easy to dismiss this literalism as a bit of a joke when comparing it to Kubrick’s vision, which hints and alludes to these ideas. Despite all the stories of people leaving the theater perplexed about what they had just seen, 2001 the movie isn’t actually all that complicated. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen it multiple times and I am deeply familiar with the core ideas that fuel so much science fiction that it feels very obvious to me.

Still, Kubrick took their shared screenplay and created a meditation on humanity’s place and potential in the cosmos, leaving much unsaid and open to interpretation.

Clarke, on the other hand, had no interest in leaving things unsaid. Clarke was a proselytizer for science and human advancement — he saw the pursuit of space travel as a glorious goal for our species that would drive us outward into wonder as well as heal our worst tendencies. He was deeply optimistic about the use of technology to bring about more equal societies and potentially contact other civilizations that transcended their humble biological beginnings to create cultures of consciousness: beings able to not only observe the universe around them but to appreciate its beauty and wonder.

Which brings me to the other point of difference between these two versions of a story born through collaboration. Kubrick’s work is a masterpiece of film, using every tool at his disposal — editing, lighting, cinematography, visual effects — to create an enduring work that not only holds up beyond its dated world of U.S.-Soviet domination and rigid gender roles but makes profound statements on humanity and the nature of consciousness.

Clarke’s novel is, well, notable for the ideas he conveys.

I don’t mean this as an insult to Clarke who, like many of the writers of “classic” science fiction, was a competent writer rather than a literary stylist. This is “big idea” science fiction, where the premium is on the scientific concepts on display. Isaac Asimov definitely wrote in this vein, particularly his Foundation series, and you still see it today among many “hard science fiction” writers who spend pages on the technicalities of spaceship design while tossing perhaps a paragraph or two to character development.

Again, not an insult. I enjoy a lot of that hard SF focused on orbital mechanics, time dilation at near light-speed travel, and all sorts of fun science stuff. But if you’re looking for stirring prose, this is not the type of work where you’ll find it.

Also, to be fair to Clarke, he does generally consider the film and the novel two separate works despite him being the common creator of the two. And the book does differ in some significant ways, primarily making Jupiter — the climactic location of the film — a waypoint on the journey to Saturn, where the book’s climax takes place. Still, as Clarke himself notes in his foreword, “[E]ven in my own mind, book and movie tend to be confused with each other.”

That’s unavoidable given the status of the film. It’s so unavoidable, in fact, that Clarke abandoned his differentiation when he wrote the sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two, moving the action back to Jupiter. And that novel was then made into a movie sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, an overall fascinating series of events in terms of creation and collaboration. I haven’t seen or read those since the Eighties, so I may add those to my list just to compare. Hell, I could probably do an entire series on science fiction works of the time that posited distant futures dominated by U.S.-Soviet tension and/or collaboration.

Nearly everyone back then really did overestimate Russia and underestimate China.

So, when it comes to 2001: A Space Odyssey, are both the movie and the novel worth spending time with nearly sixty years later? When it comes to Kubrick’s film, unequivocally yes. While some stuff around the edges doesn’t hold up — the lack of women most prominently — the rest is astoundingly prescient and we have Clarke to thank for that just as much as Kubrick’s ability to bring the concepts to life with special effects that still look amazing.

For Clarke’s novel, I’d say that’s for completists, especially if you’re interested in following the story through his entire four-book series, continuing through 2061: Odyssey Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey. It’s been a while since I read them but I recall it getting a little wild by the end. Also, despite the early trip-up I had with the mention of fag robots, overall Clarke remains a charming, if often naive, optimist about humans and technology.

Given the techno-dystopia currently being foisted on us by techbros who claim to be inspired by him, it’s worth going back to the source to see what they’re missing.

My problem was more that, if faced with a choice between saving a baby that’s hanging over a boiling cauldron and saving face for the Democratic party, well, get ready for baby stew because we all knew where Barney’s true loyalties were. That’s why he’s been devoting some of his last moments engaging in hippie-punching to the left on trans issues.

Then Bil Browning published his recollection of Barney — namely, being groped by the congressman as a young, gay political activist. When I saw that Bil had posted it to Facebook I immediately dove into the comments to confirm what I suspected would be there: a horde of my fellow Gen X gay men defending Barney’s handsiness and dismissing any concern over unwanted groping as whining over something that they believe was actually common and fun and expected back in the 1990s.

Bullshit.

Bil has followed up with his own post on this (and he was nice enough to quote me) that I think fairly makes the point that this is crazy talk. But the whole idea has really stuck in my craw now for a couple days.

This is super simple. Keep your fucking hands to yourself, especially if you’re a man in a position of power over the people around you. I’m not just saying that because I had my ass grabbed by anonymous hands so many, many times while making my way through the Sunday night crowd at JR.’s, or working my way to the bar at Tracks, or trying to force my way through that stupidly-narrow hallway between the front and back bars at Badlands.

To be clear, lest someone accuse me of hypocrisy: playing secret grab ass with strangers is a different thing than engaging in some flirty, face-to-face physicality. I did a lot of the latter and had a lot of it done to me. The thing is, those were situations where you could say no.

The fact that I rarely said no does not change the ethical calculus here. That still was true back in the 90s even if we were all acculturated to just accepting it as the way things were.

And, getting back closer to Bil’s story of Barney, it is harder to say “No” or “Stop” to someone who has power over you or influence over your desired career. I’ve spent my time around rich and powerful gay men who take more liberties than they should and, as a twink in my twenties, I let things slide because I didn’t want to rock the boat, I didn’t want to do something that would keep me from moving up whatever ladder I was focused on at the time.

But that’s not the only reason I keep coming back to those Facebook defenses of bad behavior like I’m picking at a wound.

Around 1993, I sliced my knee open on a car license plate while running around clubbing. Probably should have gone to the emergency room but Tracks was calling and I wasn’t gonna miss it. So I patched up with bandaids and promised my friends I’d go to a doctor later.

I hadn’t found a regular doctor at the time, so I chose one from an advertisement in the Washington Blade. I got a quick appointment and couple days later I was sitting pantsless on an exam table as Dr. S— stitched up my knee and gave me my tetanus booster. Then, during the “all done” portion of the visit, he fondled my genitals and gave me a kiss on the cheek, telling me I was so “beautiful.”

It happened so fast. It stuns you.

And I convinced myself that it wasn’t a big deal, I was misinterpreting what had happened, he was just being a little overly friendly. So when I came down with a case of strep throat a few months later, I went back. And I got fondled and kissed again.

That time, I stopped convincing myself.

This wasn’t the first time I’d run into inappropriate behavior in a doctor’s office. The whole reason I went to Dr. S— in the first place was because of the initial doctor I saw in D.C. on Q Street. Or, more specifically, the young physician who did my full body examination there and then pulled my home phone number from my file to call me and ask for a date. Another incident that creeped me out but I declined to do anything about.

A large part of the reason I didn’t report these guys is because, yes, at that time, we were telling ourselves that it wasn’t a big deal. Plus, my highly active sex life was no secret in D.C. and I figured it would hurt me more to report it than it would to just ignore it. Which means other guys probably had the same sexual assault experience I did because I chose not to speak up.

Too many people are still saying it wasn’t a big deal, that it was all in good fun, and everyone actually enjoyed it. As Bil notes in his piece, that’s the sound of older gay men rationalizing their own bad behavior.

I may be getting older but I’m still a fan of forthright sexual antics, of intense flirting, of slutting out to your little heart’s content. None of that is incompatible with keeping your hands to yourself until you know they’re welcome. It’s not incompatible with being respectful of people who are younger than you, who depend on you for their job, who look up to you as role model.

My generation of gay men needs to finally learn that enough is enough.

Sean Bugg first met Landyn in 2014 when they were 18 and participating in the Next Generation Leadership Foundation LGBTQ youth leadership program in Washington, D.C. A decade later, Landyn has built a thriving coaching business and become one of the leading voices on trans fitness and body image.

In this episode, Sean and Landyn talk about Landyn’s personal journey through transition and how fitness became central to their sense of self, the unique relationship trans and nonbinary people have with body image and gym culture, what healthy masculinity actually means, navigating fitness spaces as a trans person, cis passing privilege and the current political climate, and why Landyn walked away from a media career to build something more meaningful.

You can watch the full podcast on YouTube:

Trey Graham is a D.C.-based journalist who covered theater for the Washington City Paper for two decades. He received the George Jean Nathan Award for distinguished drama criticism in 2004. He currently covers theater for the Washington Post. His newsletter, “In Good Company,” is on Substack (treygraham.substack.com).

An Oral History of D.C.’s Gold Coast:

Chapters

00:00 Exploring Southern Roots and Race

02:10 Awareness of Racial Identity

07:16 Cultural Differences in Racial Perception

11:34 Confronting Personal Racism

16:30 Navigating Racial Dynamics in D.C.

23:22 Exploring Ethnic Backgrounds and Class Dynamics

26:47 Literary Influences: Flannery O’Connor’s Impact

33:59 Revelation and Self-Reflection in O’Connor’s Work

40:28 The Intersection of Religion, Class, and Race

47:25 Cultural Reflections: The South’s Complex Identity

50:48 Introduction and Context

51:06 Navigating Difficult Conversations

51:54 Closing Thoughts and Reflections

This is too bad for a number of reasons, such as not having convenient transporters, gorgeous starships, and lots of alien species who look suspiciously like us. Naturally, the most fun reasons are the unlikeliest ones — that’s the appeal of sci-fi stories.

But the real reason life isn’t like Star Trek is a downer: the show’s techno-optimism posited a happy and healthy humanity living in a better world because of human ingenuity and technology, a future that seems increasingly fragile for many and out of reach for most.

Star Trek grew out of early and Golden Age science fiction, tales of rocket ships and derring do, computers and manifest destiny among the stars. It’s long been accepted conventional wisdom that scientists who love science fiction are partial to Star Trek over Star Wars, an intellectual property that is filed under sci-fi but is actually fantasy.

I know, conventional wisdom does not equal truth, but we’re about to delve into a lot of vibes here.

There’s a reason our old flip phones derived from Capt. Kirk’s communicator and our smartphones channel the Next Generation’s data PADDs, while light sabers are still toys. Fun toys, but just toys. Star Trek created a feedback loop of fans who became scientists and engineers who took inspiration from the show, the writers of which in turn took inspiration from the work of scientists and engineers.

That’s the root of tech optimism that drove so much science fiction in its earlier forms. And that root is near death today.

I started down this thought path when I picked up this Flashback’s subject: the March 1982 edition of Analog: Science Fiction/Science Fact, one of the SF mags that carried the biggest torch for that feedback loop between science and speculation. I chose this issue because the cover seemed a perfect encapsulation of tech optimism from the early space and computer revolution: famed writer Arthur C. Clarke on “Future Communications and the Third World.” (Which, to be fair, is headlined inside the magazine as “New Communications Technologies and the Developing World,” which is less problematic from today’s perspective.)

This was a subject close to Clarke’s heart. As a “futurist” writer he did predict many of the things we take for granted today — GPS, small portable computers, near instantaneous communication anywhere on the earth, and more. One of his beliefs, that he delves into here, is that communications technologies would be the liberation of people from politics, that free and open exchange of information across imagined national boundaries would be the primary goal of future generations.

To oversimplify at bit, I consider Clarke to be one of the prime examples of science fiction writers as tech-optimist preacher. Yes, he created the iconic killer computer HAL 9000, along with Stanley Kubrick, for the book and film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Clarke tended to view humanity and its worse impulses as the problem — HAL only went bad because politicized bureaucrats gave it contradictory orders — and technology as the potential solution, whether it comes from humanity or outside the solar system.

In this essay, which he adapted from a presentation he made to a UNESCO gathering as a representative of his adopted home country of Sri Lanka, he argues this explicitly: that the expansion of communications tech from telephone to telex to television for bringing growth to developing nations would require the establishment of a network of communications satellites. He was particularly keen on bringing television worldwide: “Every TV program has some educational content: the cathode ray tube is a window on the world — indeed, on many worlds. Often it’s a very murky window, but I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that, on balance, even bad TV is preferable to no TV at all.”

I’ll skip the Mr. Beast and Real Housewives joke here and move to Clarke’s idea that follows: that the easy recording and broadcast of events would lead to a more free and open society. He specifically looks ahead to a world where cameramen and journalists no longer need cumbersome cassettes but can simply beam the video out to the world.

“The implications of this are enormous,” Clarke writes. “Just one example: how many soldiers would shoot a cameraman, if they knew that millions of people were watching?”

In 2026, we know the answer to this question: far more of them than you would ever have imagined.

The naiveté of sci-fi tech optimists such as Clark is both charming and sad in retrospect. They really wanted a better world and believed we were developing the tools that would deliver it. Clarke gestured at the idea that those tools could be used by both good and evil people, but in his estimation the good of the many would emerge victorious over the politics that had held them back.

Looking back as an adult on the writers and works that I drew inspiration from as a kid, I see that they were simply too optimistic about the power of technology when placed directly in the hands of the people. Blinding themselves to the pessimistic potentials of these technologies is their biggest failing and, I believe, one of the reasons so many evil people today — Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others of my generation who claim to draw their inspiration from classic science fiction — have developed technologies designed to suppress and oppress.

As a young fan and writer, I bought into this idea that connection and computing power would bring people together across national and ethnic lines and held onto that belief for most of my life. But ultimately, we’ve used those tools to sharpen those lines, retreat into more rigid ethnic divides, allow ourselves to be bamboozled by charlatans who sell us surveillance disguised as safety, and watch as social media tears apart the foundations of civil society.

No technology is going to fix us. AI will not solve our problems, Palantir will not protect our nation, Ring will not respect our civil rights when the police state comes calling. Technology will only feed back to us what we feed into it, so any solution can only come from ourselves.

Speaking of evil assholes, hardcore right-winger Jerry Pournelle — a.k.a. “this asshole again” — once more rears his warmongering head, reminding us that while a lot of science fiction writers skewed utopian, there was a large contingent insistent that the idea of utopian peace was for commies and pansies. In his op-ed, “The Defense of the Realm,” Pournelle once again flaunts his militaristic and belligerent attitude toward science and society.

For Pournelle, science (and his science fiction) is about projecting force. Here he’s railing against a lack of government interest in dominating and militarizing space, right about the time when he was part of the ersatz group of writers and thinkers pushing Reagan’s space defense system (i.e. “Star Wars,” the proposed tool of death, not the movie). At one point he proposes a system of “space lances,” a series of satellites armed with hard metal rods that could be fired at ground targets at high speed with massively destructive results. You get the feeling that Pournelle experienced a hard rod when thinking of this crap.

Because I believe that Pournelle — both a writer and a defense contractor — was a pernicious influence on society in his militarism and proximity to the Pentagon, I want to highlight something he complains about here that has always been a hobbyhorse of the right, all the way to the present day: university professors and college students. Pournelle presents without any example or evidence the claim that students of the time were being taught that technology was evil:

“One reason for our technology deficit was our war against technology during the whole of the ‘70s. For a decade our students were taught that technology was evil; that everything is crap and there’s no help for it; that civilization as we know it is wasteful, and even with the most stringent conservation programs, even with the most drastic cutbacks in consumption and standard of living, things will never get better.”

This is bullshit. Pournelle confuses two pessimistic movements in the 70s with “anti-technology” activism.

First, there was the anti-nuclear movement. There was a reason for this movement: we were all living in a Cold War under a constant background threat of nuclear annihilation. Pournelle and his ilk all got boners from the idea of nuclear weapons and mutual assured destruction, while those of us who were kids were taught how to hide under our desks from atomic blasts. Relatedly, there was the fear of nuclear power, which given the technology of the time proved well-founded in 1979 with the Three Mile Island nuclear plant disaster, just seven years before Chernobyl. This was a movement about a specific type of technology, not technology writ large.

Second, there was a lot of Malthusian nonsense in the air during the 60s and 70s, most popularly rendered in the classic sci-fi overpopulation movie Soylent Green (1973), which was based on Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel, Make Room! Make Room! To again oversimplify a bit, Malthusian theory says that increases in agricultural production leads to unfettered population growth that will ultimately spark social disorder and societal collapse.

The thing is, that turned out not to be true. What actually happened in the U.S. (and other wealthy, highly developed countries) is that living standards rose, birth control became widely available, and the population never exploded because the majority of women didn’t want to or need to give birth to four, five, six, or more babies.

Again, Malthusian theory is not an argument that technology is evil in the way that Pournelle is trying to claim. And the theory was controversial, as well as pretty racist, given how focused its proponents were on the so-called “third world” countries that Clarke was advocating technological solutions for. Pournelle is just a perpetually aggrieved right-wing warhawk who hates university professors because they teach ideas he personally hates.

Hilariously, he said this in 1982 during the first age of personal computing, at the dawn of 80s tech glam. We were sending Voyager probes on journeys to deep space, where they continue transmitting data to this day. The nation was agog with pride for the successful new Space Shuttle. I may not consider Star Wars to be “real” science fiction but I’ll be damned if it didn’t play a crucial role in re-popularizing sci-fi for the masses, along with films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Hell, E.T. the Extraterristrial came out three months after Pournelle published his claptrap. Pournelle holds a willfully blinkered view that belies his sclerotic, anti-liberal, and anti-humanities thought.

But what Pournelle is ultimately arguing for is the privatization of space: “that NASA and the government cannot and should not continue to dominate the space environment, and the sooner they get out of the way, the sooner we will have a real space program.”

You’ve probably noticed that this is the reality with live in today, with the refocusing of the government’s efforts on the militarizing Space Force and leaving space access and future exploration to Musk’s Space X, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, and others. Sadly, it hasn’t gotten us much beyond exploding rockets, Katy Perry in space, and multi-billionaire megalomaniacs. And it has to be noted that these privatized programs have yet to surpass what NASA, even with its flaws, accomplished during the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Instead, they’ve made wild promises and subordinated science and research to crony capitalism.

We’ve lost so much to the neo-Gilded-Age billionaires currently running the country’s technological explorations and Pournelle helped pave the way. While I maintain some level of optimism for our future — and the futures we imagine and hope for via science fiction — we’re living through dystopian times driven in part by the dark side of sci-fi writers who were sowing the seeds for that collapse for decades.

One last moment of crankdom from this issue: editor Stanley Schmidt’s lead op-ed is a classic, “I just got back from vacation and have a deadline, so here’s a notebook dump,” in which he muses about 1) the perception of overpopulation driving bad public policy (good point), 2) why private cars should be prioritized for transportation policy (bad point), and 3) how some people are hypocrites about the environment because they don’t realize that some natural formations in the western desert closely resemble strip-mined lands back in the east (truly bonkers point).

Finally, he complains about the “idiot lights” on car dashboards and his perception of a society reverting from the pinnacle of written language to the crass pictograms used for road signage and other areas where language barriers may pose actual dangers. I’m curious how he’s adapted to a world of emoticons and The Office GIFs.

Out of all the sci-fi mags of the time, Analog was certainly the crankiest.

And the Rest…

The short stories in this issue made no impact on me at the time or on this revisit, with one notable exception: Greg Bear’s “Schrödinger’s Plague,” which was my introduction to the concept of Schrödinger’s cat, quantum mechanics, and the uncertainty principle. It’s too much for me to attempt to explain so if you’re unfamiliar I’d recommend the wiki. Suffice to say that there is a cat in a box with a bottle of poison that may or may not be released by the the quantum-level decay of a radioactive atom, which means that the cat is both alive and dead until someone opens the box and observes it.

In Bear’s box the cat is replaced by a deadly rhinovirus and the story plays as if the beginning of Stephen King’s The Stand was an academic comedy of manners. One rather prickly professor has decided to prove or disprove Schrödinger’s paradox and now the fate of the world potentially depends on whether the other professors unwillingly pulled into the experiment can believe that the rhinovirus was dead when the box was opened.

Easy enough. Unless you’re a hypochondriac.

This was also my introduction to Bear, who would become one of my favorite science fiction authors in the 90s. I would highly recommend checking out his work, from his nano-tech thrillers Queen of Angels and Slant, to his space operas The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. He’s a versatile writer with a broad range, certainly on display here in Analog.

Elsewhere in the issue, book critic Tom Easton argues that in order for art to be Art it must be widely read, universal, and controversial. I’ll just say I think that’s hogwash and leave it at that. The letters to the editor section exists for aggrieved men to complain that their competence isn’t acknowledged. Seriously, the letters capture the vibe that infected GenXers who are ruining us today through their solipsistic megalomania in Silicon Valley.

And that’s a wrap on the March 1982 Analog. For the next Flashback, we’re going to jump back further in time to 1968 for a book and movie combo that debuted when I was still an infant: Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The two worked closely together but the film and novel have some significant differences that are interesting both in their predictive nature and in their creative process. I know the movie holds up, but does the book? We’ll find out next time.

I wasn’t in D.C. yet — I was actually three hours south on Interstate 81 in Lexington, Va., studying print journalism at Washington and Lee University. Each morning at the campus bookstore, three daily papers were for sale: the Post, the New York Times, and the Washington Times. Both Times were not for me, because I wasn’t that interested in New York and I had no patience for the cult of Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

Plus, the Post had three full pages of comic strips. Comics were one of the ways I taught myself to read, slowly sounding out the words from the strips in newspapers at my grandparents’ house when I was four. Hell, the funny pages are probably the thing I miss most today.

Those newspapers back home in Kentucky, however, never felt like a “hometown” paper when I was a kid. Whether it was the Paducah Sun or Hopkinsville’s Kentucky New Era, they always arrived on a one-day delay so they weren’t sources of breaking news. They were enough to give me the news bug, along with watching Lou Grant on TV, but I had longed for something bigger.

The Post back then was a massive product, thick with copy even on Monday, the least newsy day of the week. And as I started taking journalism classes and editing the school newspaper, heading to D.C. and working for the Post was my ultimate goal. The Post taught me about the city, about Virginia, about the rough-and-tumble world of politics. Where else would I want to end up?

Obviously, life didn’t follow that course for me. By my senior year I was in an existential crisis about whether I really wanted to be a journalist. I still headed to D.C. but my first job, covering tax and securities issues on Capitol Hill, was such a nightmare I left journalism for almost a decade.

But while I temporarily abandoned journalism, I didn’t abandon the Post. I’ve never lost my voracious appetite for news and the Post never stopped feeding it. I had my rituals with the daily paper, primarily starting with the funnies because a lifetime habit is hard to kill. When the Saturday edition arrived with the Sunday supplement encased in transparent yellow plastic, woe be to anyone in the house who opened that package before Sunday.

There are rules, you know.

It wasn’t until the aughts that I began transitioning from paper to pixels with the Post, not because I found print lacking — I was still publishing my print magazine at the time — but because the writing was on the wall. Change is the great constant and it’s unhealthy to reflexively oppose it.

Like many journalists and readers, the purchase of the Post by Jeff Bezos gave me serious pause. I knew that the days of somewhat benevolent family benefactors — the Grahams, the Sulzbergers, the Binghams — were gone and never coming back. I hoped Bezos would be an owner who saw the value in a well-funded (yet profitable) newspaper. For the first few years and the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” era, that seemed attainable.

But a scorpion has to sting because it’s in its nature. Here we are with a once-great paper at death’s door, reduced to carrying water for the hyper-specific business interests of its owner. It was obvious this was coming for years now. Bringing in a British Fleet Street purveyor as publisher signaled pretty clearly that Bezos was collecting nails for the coffin.

I stuck through as long as I could. I did cancel my subscription after Bezos spiked the Kamala Harris endorsement editorial but, to my chagrin, I came back a few short months later because it’s hard to be without even mediocre local news coverage. Then came the bloodbath of the editorial page and other sections. Friends and colleagues of mine who still worked there were cut loose or walked out. Writers whose work I’d had admired for years were suddenly in the wind.

With that, I had to say my final goodbye to a newspaper that had meant so much to me over the years — even through the times when it pissed me off with its coverage of HIV/AIDS, the gay community, or LGBTQ media. No daily newspaper is perfect. They are too big and contain too many voices for that. But before Bezos, the Post at least appeared to try.

Everyone here, whether in D.C., Maryland, or Virginia, loses because Bezos decided to strangle our hometown paper. Like so many other cities across the nation, one of our most vital organs is failing, in this case on purpose. Barring some miracle, it seems unlikely we’ll have resurrection or successor (if you think the Washington Times is an option there are plenty of proverbial bridges out there for you to purchase).

A lifetime habit may be hard to kill but Bezos proved to be a skilled assassin.

A couple of those were re-reads: Infinite Jest in preparation for a podcast I recorded last spring, followed by the complete and uncut The Stand that I re-read for the umpteenth time since I was a kid (we’ll get to the why of that choice in a minute).

I do love a massive novel. When one clicks, it transforms into a journey. It can be a fantasy, a space opera, a horror classic, or a journey through the American subconscious. No matter how different they may be, each dives into characters, situations, and locations you don’t want to see end but you can’t help racing toward the conclusion. They’re the equivalent of a heavy blanket and cozy chair on a snowy day.

Or an oversized umbrella and sun-drenched beach, if that’s your happy place.

Tom’s Crossing, by Mark Z. Danielewski

Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a post-modern, meta horror novel from 2000, was a sensation and still reigns as one of the most experimental and difficult books in the genre. The story of a house that’s bigger on the inside unfolds as a surreal tapestry through a story inside the story, inside a documentary film, inside footnoted research. His use of typography and layout are an intrinsic part of the story and have become near synonymous with his reputation as a writer.

I haven’t read it since its debut so I would be hard pressed to provide a summary without cribbing from Wikipedia. But certain images and scenes, full of dread and foreboding, have stuck with me over the years. Danielewski is a distinctive writer, regardless of the typesetting and layout shenanigans (which I enjoyed, though they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea) and the idea of him taking on the western genre appealed to me.

Tom’s Crossing is Danielewski’s 1,200-page odyssey through a harsh yet beautiful mountain range in 1982 Orvop (doubling for Provo), Utah. Despite the length, the plot appears straightforward. Kalin March, the teen son of a single mother who recently moved them to Orvop in an ongoing search for stability, finds himself as a topsider-wearing outcast in a cowboy-booted high school. Unexpectedly, he befriends the popular Tom Gatestone, son of a prosperous and prominent Mormon family, over their shared love of two near-forgotten horses that are destined for slaughter. The two boys hatch a plan to save the horses by riding them into the mountains and setting them free. When Tom unexpectedly dies of cancer, Kalin promises him he will lead the horses to freedom at Tom’s Crossing.

That sounds like a spoiler but it’s not. Tom dies in the first few pages and the rest of the novel follows Kalin — a preternaturally gifted rider who also harbors a darker second gift — as he attempts an arduous journey through rockslides and ice, all the while pursued and hounded by the villainous Orwin Porch, patriarch of another powerful (but feared rather than respected) Mormon family who has falsely accused Kalin of murdering the youngest of his brood of sons.

Danielewski lets you know the general destination of the plot from the first line: “Hard to figure out how so much awful horror could’ve started out with just them two horses and not a one yet named….” He repeatedly makes clear that a bloodbath is coming — the tension comes from following these heavily fated characters through tribulations that swing Kalin between exaltation and near despair. It’s a western at heart, not a horror novel, but horror lies as a constant between the lines.

While Danielewski only briefly dabbles in some minor typography — a silkily curved line of text regarding a snake, for example — Tom’s Crossing’s narrative focuses more on how people use art to interpret and understand the world around them. From the first page of the novel, townsfolk create paintings, poems, sculptures, and stories about Kalin’s quest and final confrontation with Porch, their voices stretching from 1982 to the mid-21st century. The name of the book’s “author” is obscured on the title and copyright pages — it’s a journey and puzzle in itself to determine who the near-omniscient, time-spanning narrator actually is.

I’ll note here that I’m not a western fan. I find most western films boring and I’ve never cracked a novel by any giants of the genre. But 200 pages into Tom’s Crossing I realized I was so engrossed I hadn’t taken any notes since the first few pages. Every character, no matter how prominent or incidental, is drawn with exceptional care and detail. Every scene is crafted with meticulousness that could overwhelm but instead illuminates just how broad Danielewski’s canvas is. And while much of what happens is violent and horrific, this remains an adventure story at heart.

Tom’s Crossing ultimately tied for my favorite book of 2025, alongside Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. They both deal with the trauma inflicted on the indigenous tribes of the west, though to different degrees and from vastly different perspectives. I consider myself lucky I got to read them both so close to each other. Perhaps there’s hope for me and the western genre, after all.

King Sorrow, by Joe Hill

My first novel by Joe Hill was N0S4A2, which I luckily picked up before I knew he was the son of Stephen King. My feelings on so-called nepo babies have softened over the years but a part of me will always be a young writer convinced that it’s just unfair for some people to have such a head start on the rest of us.

Then I got older and more fully understood that’s just how the world works, through money and connections and influence. Though I admit I still have a little kernel of bitterness as a person who came from none of those.

Still, we can’t control who we were born to and in the end we all should be judged on what we do, not where we popped out of. And over the years Hill has proven to be a solid horror writer in his own right. Which makes it funnier that his latest novel, King Sorrow, is a pure homage to the massive horror-fantasy tomes that made his father one of the most successful writers in history.

Back in 1989, student Arthur Oakes finds himself ensnared in a criminal plot to steal rare books from is college library. He bands together with his friends to bring a powerful being into existence — the dragon King Sorrow — to free him from his tormentors. That freedom comes with a price: Every year at Easter the group must choose a person to die or else King Sorrow will devour them instead. They find ways — some of them reluctantly, some with gusto — to choose a suitably abhorrent annual sacrifice.

But King Sorrow is a loquacious trickster who delights in crafting linguistic traps to bait his keepers into their own demise.

In many ways, this is a Gen X version of King’s novels that deal with Boomer angst (mainly Vietnam and the Kennedy assassination) and it’s always nice to have my generational cohort find a seat at the culture table. Still, Hill firmly plants himself in his father’s world with references that his characters in the same timeline as his father’s early novel The Dead Zone and a riff on Firestarter. Generally, this all works pretty well, though a few times it dips into the sweaty, as when he notes of a nighttime drive, “It was full dark, no stars.”

There are a number of set pieces throughout the book as the characters slowly break apart under the pressure of their Easter duty. One in particular stands out: King Sorrow tricks one of the group onto a transatlantic 747 flight that the dragon stalks in the air. If she can’t murder a specific passenger on the flight, then King Sorrow will tear the plane from the sky. It’s a tense and often funny sequence that ultimately lays down many of the plot points for the latter half of the book.

Despite the 800-plus pages, King Sorrow moves along a sustained clip, though it flags here and there as it navigates a fairly large cast of characters with shifting allegiances and secret alliances. Hill isn’t afraid to let some of his main characters be somewhat terrible — and a couple ultimately outright monstrous. There is another villain, related to the initial book-theft scheme, who hovers around the edges of the narrative in a very King-ian way, especially because that villain’s denouement is anticlimactic.

If you’re missing this style of novel from King as he continues his focus on crime novels and Holly Gibney, then Joe Hill has put together a healthy dose of the classic for you.

The End of the World as We Know It, edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene

As you can tell, even when I wasn’t reading Stephen King last year I was still kind of reading Stephen King.

Case in point, The End of the World as We Know It, an original anthology of stories from a wide selection of current horror writers all taking place in the world of King’s magnum opus, The Stand. I had been looking forward to this since I first heard of it — I actually pre-ordered, which I rarely do. The Stand was one of the earliest King novels I read, my mom’s Literary Guild book club edition that had been beaten within an inch of its life when loaned out to a family friend.

I was horrified that someone could do that to a hardback book.

I was also horrified by The Stand, in the best way. What appealed to me most, and still does, are the science-fiction aspects of a massive plague sweeping the world. The first half or so of that original version of The Stand were what brought me back to it multiple times as a kid — I was fascinated by the interconnected tick-tock of a man-made disease spreading through America and across the world, another story of man’s folly with technology. The latter half of the book where it morphs from science fiction into Christian supernatural horror is compelling but lesser, to me.

And, yes, I’ve read and re-read the complete and uncut edition from 1990, which I appreciate for packing in even more of the horror of the epidemic itself. I re-read it again after The End of the World as We Know It, just on an urge. It was the first time I’d revisited it since covid and, yep, it hits different now.

A collection of stories set in King’s apocalyptic world is a good idea because such a massive canvas gives space for so many approaches and styles. Unfortunately, too many of the authors stick to a purely American story of a world-wide apocalypse. That’s understandable in King’s original story, although even he hints at the possibilities of the broader world in The Stand when Randall Flagg, the Dark Man, muses briefly that there may be others like him in other places and nations. None of the stories in this collection pick up on that idea, sticking instead to a U.S.-centric focus where the rest of the world dreams of the Dark Man and Mother Abigail but don’t figure into the grand battle

.

That’s not to say there aren’t interesting takes here, there certainly are. Catriona Ward’s “The African Painted Dog” tackles the initial plague from the point of view of a canine in a zoo. “Kovach’s Last Case” by Michael Koryta tracks a hard-boiled homicide detective on the trail of a serial killer at the end of the world (in this case, Cleveland). “The Legion of Swine” by S.A. Cosby posits a farming family eking out a living after the plague in Southwestern Virginia and navigating how much trust to have in strangers who could be in service of Mother Abigail or the Walkin’ Dude. Tim Lebbon takes the story into orbit with “Grace,” where a group of astronauts know their inevitable fate but play a surprising role in the battle between good and evil below them.

There are some misses, most prominent of which is Richard Chizmar’s “Moving Day,” which is basically a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern story that exists mostly to write about actual characters from The Stand. And some of the later stories that stretch into the far future don’t really connect (though the metafictional tale of a character cut from the original novel, Nat Cassidy’s “The Unfortunate Convalescence of the Superlawyer,” is an amusing twist on the real-world publication of the expanded edition).

One thing that bothers me about most of the stories — and that bothered me again when I re-read The Stand afterward — is the handling of the dreams characters have of Randall Flagg and Mother Abigail. Those dreams are the catalyst for so many of the characters, yet the dreams are nigh invariably deterministic. No one seems to be making a choice about which road to follow; the good people dream of the magic woman, the bad people dream of the dark man. For a book (and a group of stories) that posits to be about the struggle between good and evil and making righteous choices, there’s remarkably little free will involved.

But that’s a quibble and hobbyhorse of mine, built on far too many re-readings of a book I’ve adored since childhood. As a collection, The End of the World as We Know It has a high enough hit-to-miss ratio to make it worth your time. If, like me, you’ve enjoyed pondering all the stories that seem to exist just outside the margins of King’s vast tapestry then you’ll find plenty to enjoy here.

This episode we’re diving into one of the magazines that shaped me as a reader and writer, the famed Amazing Science Fiction Stories. By 1982, Amazing had been on an extended rough patch, losing readers in a shrinking market for short genre fiction. This issue highlights some of the strategies the editors tried to attract new readers — big names in the genre and classics from the past — along with some of the weaknesses that plagued the magazine, like bad art and abysmal copyediting.

So, join in as we take a trip to the early ‘80s, complete with Nazis, sequelitis, and simmering racial tensions. Sound familiar?

For those who may not remember, by day (and night, since I’m self-employed) I’m a real estate agent. That means my personal business and bottom line depends on a network of relationships and trust that I’ve built over the years.

Axiomatic among real estate agents is the idea that you must never, ever express controversial or political opinions. To do so will cost you the business of anyone you disagree with, the belief goes, so it’s better to keep your opinions to yourself and focus on what’s important: making bank. It’s the gold-blazer, Lexus SUV version of Michael Jordan’s infamous declaration against taking a political stand: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

Unsurprisingly, my belief about that axiom is Fuck that.

I started my career as a Realtor almost exactly ten years ago, just a few months before Trump launched his presidential campaign with a racist lie, and I watched as the nation declined to take his buffoonery and belligerence seriously. I’m glad my exit from the full-time journalism world coincided with that disaster — I can’t imagine having to cover this mentally diseased motherfucker day in and day out for a living. Since the man never shuts his lying, orange gob, it doesn’t matter what your beat is as a reporter, the mad wannabe king will insert himself into it.

Now, here we are in 2026, ten years after the United States collectively decided to stick a fork in an electric socket to see what happened, and this time Americans decided to see if sticking their dick in the socket might work out better.

That’s all my profane way of saying I don’t give a fuck if my opinions cost me business. It doesn’t take much of a search to find my deep, decades-long history of opinion and humor writing. I have no problem working with people of different political beliefs — hell, I enjoyed being able to debate and spar with a lot of people over the course of my life, at least until Trump came along and Republicans ruined their goddamn minds. And lord knows, I’ve worked with clients in real estate who have starkly different opinions and outlooks than I do. I’m here to help people conduct real estate transactions not run a political salon.

That said, I’ve dropped a landlord client when I realized they were racist and homophobic. That’s not money I want. And if I found myself dealing with a Trump supporter who looks around at the current state of the nation — marauding secret police snatching up brown people, those same police murdering a woman in broad daylight, and a president hell bent on acquiring Greenland because he didn’t get a medal — and says, “I like this,” I’ll fucking drop them, too. Because many of my past, present, and future clients have been and will be at risk under these racist, fascist policies.

This stance by myself and others causes a lot of confusion and butthurt for conservatives who have spent years claiming the right to refuse service to queers and sluts, then whine about how no one wants to play with them. Fuck ‘em. They made this world what it is right now and frankly they can suck on it.

Could I bring a little more tact and little less profanity to my public utterances? Sure, I could. But I won’t.

Here’s the thing: This level of pure anger I’m feeling and expressing is new to me. Again, my entire oeuvre is out there — I have a long history of using humor when dealing with political subjects, even life and death subjects. Looking back over my time with ACT-UP/DC and in AIDS activism in general, there was still a sense of joy and play in the face of terrible events that were killing us and hateful politicians who were dehumanizing us. Perhaps I’m too old and jaded, but finding joy in the madness around us is beyond me at the moment (though, bless the freaks and weirdos and other glorious human beings who’ve donned frog and pony costumes to bring a touch of the absurd to protests against fascist pricks).

There’s another mode of expression that I’m well trained and versed in: the slightly above it all, examining all sides, eminently reasonable, and ultimately morally vapid American newspaper op-ed voice. Print may be dead but the implacably centrist both-sides-ism of the commentary class will never die. I can and have used this voice in the past, in ways I’ve come to regret. I don’t believe that I ever had a level of importance in my little corner of the media world that would confer guilt on me for our present situation — but I can give you a list of the people who have had it and do bear responsibility for our media’s ongoing inability to take seriously the crumbling of the constitutional order.

So, I’ve lost my sense of humor when it comes to ICE brutalizing citizens and non-citizens alike. I’ve repudiated the Solomonic and soporific narrative that is the American political commentariat I once aspired to. What’s left?

Apparently, screaming “Fuck this shit, you fucking fascists!” on every social media channel and web page that I have.

I mean, it’s not graceful or poetic or timeless in its beauty. But it’s true and that counts for something.

Has it cost me business? Possibly. Do I care? Not one fucking bit. I have had a lot of privilege in my life when it comes to my work. I’ve spent less than a year working in truly corporate media in my early career and that was too much. Beyond that, I’ve had the luxury of working for people who were on the same page as me or, most often, working for myself. I also have a measure of personal safety and insulation from that potential loss of business — it would be immoral of me not to use my voice in whatever way I can given that privilege.

Have I lost other things? Oh, definitely. About a week after the killing of Charlie Kirk, I got summoned to a Realtor tribunal about my social media posts and whether I could continue in a leadership role. I was presented with a selection of Facebook posts I had made and told that questions had been raised about my use of profanity. That was pretty funny because not all the posts contained profanity but they sure as hell were all political. Ultimately, I was made to do a song and dance defending my posts — which I did because I stand behind what I write, profane or not — and they decided I could continue and I decided I wasn’t really interested in being in leadership anymore.

Star chambers will do that.

Still, in the grand scheme of the ongoing decline of the U. S. of A., that is some small fucking ball. Boo hoo for me, someone tried to slap my wrist and I just continued doing what I was doing. Though perhaps with a little more gusto because I can be a petty little bitch when I want to.

Meanwhile, ICE and Border Patrol are snatching people off the street because those people are brown or speak with an accent. They’re shooting, beating, and tear-gassing citizens who follow and document their abuses. They’re disappearing citizens and non-citizens alike. The Department of Homeland Security, that bastion of nativist blood-and-soil bullshit since its inception post-9/11, lies about their actions and the people they abduct with impunity, their only goal being to get overly credulous mainstream media and ass-kissing conservative media to repeat those lies in hopes they’ll take hold in the population.

All I have right now in the face of that is my voice. Perhaps, if things continue to decline, there’ll be other things I need to do, following in the footsteps of the Minnesotans who are demonstrating heroism by the minute. Until then, I can speak and write. Even if the only people who hear me are those who agree with me, we need to reinforce and support each other as we fight to bring our country back from the brink. The alternative is to keep my head down, my mouth clean, and my mind focused on the great capitalist goal of making money at the expense of everything and everyone else.

Fuck that.

I hadn’t yet entered my packrat era at fourteen years old. But they stuck around in various boxes and apartments and townhouses until settling here in Falls Church where they made their way onto shelves where I keep my various relics of the past.

When I picked up the subject for this Flashback — the March 1982 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories — the cover immediately struck me as unfortunately relevant, what with the Nazis and Hitler and the babe with a machine gun. Ha ha, Nazis, guess we’ve been seeing a lot of those lately! Fine, …

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The finger was white, both racially and from the lack of blood. A few dark specks stained the tissue paper he had pulled away, mostly around the base of the finger where a small bit of bone protruded.

No, it’s fake, he thought. It’s just a rubber finger he keeps in here to scare anyone who looks through his stuff.

Steve had run into such practical jokes in other quests through medicine cabinets: chattering teeth and the like. He also knew that some men used their bathrooms as self-promotion vehicles, leaving extra-large condoms conspicuously around or stocking up a few high-priced toiletries before throwing a big party. Steve knew the real stuff – the stuff that actually gets used – would…

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But habits do change over time. Perhaps our tastes move from genre page turners to the classics shelf. Maybe the pressures of career and adulthood chip away at our free time to dive into new narratives.

But books are always calling. If you’re like me, they’re calling from the many, many “to be read” tomes stacked around the house or clogging up the e-reader.

Louis Bayard — bestselling author of The Wildes, Jackie and Me, The Pale Blue Eye, and more — joins me on The Back Half to talk about a lifetime of reading, from our earliest forays into books to how we see our reading habits evolving in the future. Plus, how being a professional writer means you’re also a professional reader.

Listen here on Substack or via Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

I’d been waiting for Final Destination: Bloodlines to hit one of the too-many streaming services I subscribe to, so when it turned up on HBO Max on Aug. 1, I was ready to dive in. I’ve loved scary movies since I first discovered the horror section in the cheapo, wood-paneled video store that sprung up in my hometown when I was a high school freshman.

Sure, I discovered and loved a lot of higher-brow cinema via VHS but it was blood-and-guts that kept me up late on weekend nights while my parents were asleep and wouldn’t be alarmed by the frankly disgusting stuff that I picked out. Especially from Italy, those films were wild. So my intestinal fortitude for gore and horror was set pretty …

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I was still in elementary school in my little town of 300-odd people when my friend’s father was murdered, shot to death in the cab of his truck.

Juvenile delinquents broke into my father’s body shop and stole a set of expensive wheels. Another bunch got into his “junkyard” — where he kept cars for spare parts and glass to use for repairs — and smashed every windshield and mirror.

I won’t even get into all the fights, I don’t want to be here all day. But I can tell you I know two people who had parts of their noses bitten off in what might euphemistically be called “physical altercations.”

Drinking and driving was rampant, with a cold beer in a coozie nestled in the crotch being among the most popular automotive accessories. My dad fixed a lot of the wrecks that happened due to…

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