Theodore Sturgeon is nearly forgotten. A part of science fiction’s Golden Age, he was a prolific, very highly regarded author. He wrote a dozen or so novels, but mostly he wrote short stories, more than 200 of them. Today is the 60th anniversary of WC’s favorite Sturgeon short story, “Like Young.” It’s an unmatched parable…
In a better world, Schaeffer Cox’s mental illness would have been diagnosed sooner and the events of Blood of Patriots wouldn’t have happened. His paranoia and delusions magnified his narcissism and shaky grasp on reality. The explosive combination of a pathological liar and remarkably high charisma were exactly the wrong traits for his personality. It still…
Terry Pratchett died back in 2015, but that hasn’t stopped WC from posting his annual tribute to his favorite author. Pratchett’s brilliant body of work, fifty or so novels and dozens of short stories, are a legacy that will outlast us all. Among Pratchett’s many wonderful attributes was his modesty. For a man who sold more…
“Well, some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.” N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy is simply the best fantasy series WC has read in the last 25 years. It’s better than the…
Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier‘s and Bellamy‘s and Morris‘s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a…
WC was home alone, a few weeks shy of his 14th birthday, when the Good Friday Earthquake struck Alaska. The WC family home, built of logs, with vaulted ceilings, shrieked and groaned continuously. Ripples ran through the big picture window on the east wall, making the view outside appear to move nearer and further away.…
Back in 1973, as Watergate was just starting to break, Garry Trudeau, in his three-year old comic strip Doonesbury, weighed in: In those early times, the strip was pretty controversial, and a number of newspapers, including the Washington Post, refused to run the comic.1 Never mind that Trudeau was mocking the left for pre-judging Mitchell.2 Mitchell was…
