Updates to Songs Like Rusty Cage
I made a few edits and changes to Songs Like Rusty Cage and the first Highway Virus story. For the latter, the beginning is a little different, shorter mostly. For…
Science as a Wedge
Back in the day, there were always rumors about big colleges accepting more freshman than the school could handle – but then forcing these wide-eyed fledglings through an intensely difficult…
Hammett’s Red Harvest
The plot of Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett, plays out, in a microcosm, for larger events in the U.S. What starts the main sequence of events in the book is…
The Midwife Toad
The Case of the Midwife Toad, by Arthur Koestler, focuses on the dispute between the neo-Darwin clan and Lamarckian proponents of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The personal disputes that…
Short Story – Toy Lists
The short story “Toy Lists” is about an obsessive worker and his need to make a connection with another human in an anonymous and impermanent work environment. (Edits from the…
The Mundane
We have lost our sense of the mundane. That was one of the great things about Philip K. Dick. He didn’t make science fiction about the Space Prince or the…
A Legacy of Annihiliation
Palahniuk takes an expansive approach to the culling song in his book Lullaby. For those who have not read the book, it features a bedtime poem, the recitation of which…
Rekindling Bloodlust, Die Hard style
There is no cliché that is too cliché for Die Hard, but the film holds itself together quite nicely, right to the end, wrapped up as neat as a Christmas…
Thinking on the Highway Virus 1
I started the Highway Virus series, short stories of a future apocalyptic world, following the global fears of the bird flu virus several years ago, where I imagined a future…
Snowmobiles of Doom
“Every generation wants to be the last.” That is one of the many mantras repeated throughout Lullaby (like Palahniuk’s own version of “so it goes”) – and that certainly feels…