Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

📚 Smut Peddler Presents: Sordid Past edited by Andrea Purcell

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25/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This latest in the Smut Peddler series of erotic comic anthologies continues the fine form of its predecessors: fun, cute, sweet, funny, sexy short tales of people getting it on in various combinations, with just as much plot as any self respecting porn needs (in other words, more than is commonly joked about, but not so much as to overwhelm the main event). As always, nicely inclusive of gender, sexuality, and body types, this collection sets all of its tales in historical ages, from just a few decades to hundreds of years ago.

Michael holding Sordid Past

📚 The Way the Future Was by Frederik Pohl

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21/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A look back at the beginnings of SF fandom through the eyes of one of the people in at the proverbial ground floor. In addition to becoming a noted SF author and editor, Pohl was also one of the group of people who founded much of fandom, including the Worldcon conventions (though he ended up being one of the group banned from the first Worldcon thanks to an early fandom clash…), and knew essentially (and quite possibly literally) all of the classic SF authors. If you’re at all interested in the early years of fandom, this is a fun and easy read covering his life and the fandom world from the 1920s through the mid-1970s.

Michael holding The Way the Future Was

📚 The Empty Chair by Diane Duane

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20/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A strong end to Duane’s Rihannsu series – though it does begin in media res, and as it has been years since I read the preceding book(s), it took me a bit to regain familiarity with some of the characters. Her take on the Romulans, while very different than that explored by the official canon, is very strong and well worth reading.

Michael holding The Empty Chair

📚 The Annals of the Heechee by Frederik Pohl

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19/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A little action, a lot of interesting playing with AIs and “machine-stored intelligences” generated from people when they die, allowing them to keep on going (a concept introduced in earlier books, but more thoroughly explored here). And, again, an unfortunate subplot involving sexualizing young girls (and in this case, for a little variety, adding a predilection for sexualized abuse as well); thankfully, nothing untoward ever actually happens and this is a relatively minor subplot, but the character’s appetites are made well known, and are an entirely unnecessary addition. The Heechee series has a lot of interesting stuff in it, I just wish Pohl hadn’t felt the need to keep putting these bits in as well.

Michael holding The Annals of the Heechee

📚 Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl

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17/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Much like Gateway, the prior book in the series, there’s a lot of really neat hard SF worldbuilding. Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of uncomfortable-by-today’s-standards focus on whether the 14-year-old girl is going to jump in bed with her brother-in-law or the raised-by-horny-computers orphan. Gateway had a little bit of this sort of thing — the main character at one point in that book is in a relationship with a woman who is described as said-she-was-18, looked 16, but even that was questionable — but here it’s a fairly major thread for the first half of this book. Thankfully, it more or less fades away in the latter half, but it was rather painfully obvious that Pohl (who was in his early 60s when he wrote this book) was absolutely part of the “old white men indulging their puerile fantasies” crowd of mid-century SF. In the end, the interesting SF parts kept me invested and I’m proceeding to the next book in the series.

Michael holds Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

Change is Good

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Thanks to the latest horrible thing to fall out of Bill Maher’s mouth, I’ve just added a disclaimer to my On This Day page and to the top of every post that is more than two years old noting that the post may not reflect my current beliefs.

I sincerely believe that learning, growing, examining, and often changing beliefs is an integral part of being a responsible human being. My personal journey socially and politically has been ever leftwards, and there are many posts in the archives that I would not write the same way today, if at all.

Things I know exist in my archives that I would not write today:

  • General mockery of Britney Spears for no real reason other than being a pop queen. (Which, honestly, she’s very good at.)
  • Very suburban-white-background “I listen to all kinds of music except country and rap” sentiments. Lots of at-the-time unexamined racism and classism in those statements, plus they were never really all that true (classic country and “acceptable” rap were always part of my listening habits).
  • Probably a fair amount of other statements with then-unexamined ableism, classism, racism, sexism, homophobic, or transphobic aspects or roots.

I’m sure there is a lot more; those are just the ones that pop into my head because I’ve come across them at one point or another recently while digging into my archives.

I’ve always considered myself to be open-minded and politically liberal, and while that’s true, the older I get, the more I have realized how many ingrained societal biases still exist within that basic framework. Working through those biases, recognizing them, and endeavoring to change them is an ongoing process, and one I hope I never give up on. It’s not always comfortable; it is always necessary.