I GREW UP ON KING CRAB. In Seldovia in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s king crab was king, with all the guys shipping out on crabbers like the Teejin and the Amatuli and the Frances E. and the Katie K. and the Rosie G. and the Shishaldin. As a teenager I earned money for…
Kabul, spring, 1323 IT TOOK A month for Jaufre to force himself back into health, or enough so that he could walk some distance mostly without aid. He never sat where he could stand, never stood where he could walk, and if he could only run ten steps before he had to stop, breathing hard,…
Read more “He is sulking,” Shasha said, and stalked from the room.
I thought I’d read all of Zane Grey’s novels when I was a kid until I stumbled across this title in an antique store in Edmonds, Washington, a while back. His plots are much of a muchness, cowboy heroes riding to the rescue of virtuous heiresses in peril from greedy, amoral bad guys, and a…
A FRIEND BROUGHT HER HUSBAND to visit from New Jersey, and I took them to Homer. We were walking on the Spit when Laura Anne said, “Is that an eagle?” I glanced up and said, “Yeah,” and kept walking and talking, until about a block later I started getting the fishy eye from other people…
Read more That’s basically what a bird is to me, a flying pooper.
Kabul, spring, 1323 IT HAD BEEN a cold winter, one snowstorm after another, followed by thaws and rain, followed by freezing temperatures that turned everything to ice, followed by more snowstorms. The people of Kabul emerged from their homes like pale, thin ghosts of themselves, blinking dazedly in the sunlight of longer days, not quite…
Here is a writer who has taken 3-D printer technology seriously to heart and figured out what might be done with it in future. In this case he has facilitated teleportation in a way Alfred Bester and Steven Gould never did. Sixteen-year old Jessica, entirely unwillingly, is teleported from Earth to Carver 1061c, a planet…
Read more Immediately thereafter everything goes straight to hell.
TURN RIGHT OUT OF of the three-story lighthouse, walk between the ice cream cones topped with cherries and pass beneath the candy canes, and one of the first things you see is Hansel and Gretel’s cabin complete with witch. This witch has a cutout where her face should be, so that people can have their…
Talikan, spring, 1323 JOHANNA SPENT AS long as she could in caring for North Wind after her ride – feeding him, watering him, grooming his coat, polishing his hooves – partly because his company was so much more acceptable than that of anyone behind the harem doors, and partly in hopes that the sheik’s son…
Read more He answered her with civility, familiar to a demon though she might be.
A solidly researched book on the first American women in space, including some new stories you won’t find elsewhere. There were six women out of the 1978 astronaut class of thirty-five, and the women got all the attention, sometimes to the men’s disgruntlement. Although some of them must have been grateful when they saw the…
Read more Nowadays we don’t even blink when a woman astronaut flies to the ISS
It’s about eleven-thirty, most of the ship has turned in. I’m brushing my teeth and Engineer Officer Lt.Tony Erickson knocks on the door to tell me we have a SAR case. I shoot up to the bridge. A fisherman on a longliner about 25 miles away has got a fishhook through his eye. His skipper…
Read more A fisherman on a longliner about 25 miles away has got a fishhook through his eye.
