●●○○○ Beyond a Swim - Stan Muir (ss) 2021 Joeline got up very early in order to drive to her nudist club, the better to be able to get in some laps in the swimming pool before anyone else showed up. Which is why she was annoyed when a man jumped in and also began swimming laps. Joeline wasn't thrilled when Jim and Tammy later tried to set her up Matthew, the man who interrupted her quiet swimming. Joeline was still recovering from her mastectomy and breast reconstruction, and while being a nudist was helping with her body issues, like her longtime-nudist friend Sonia had said it would, Joeline wasn't ready for romance. But this is a story in a romance-themed naturist fiction anthology, and momentum takes the story along, without much content. ●●●●○ Bear Head {Dogs of War 2} - Adrian Tchaikovsky (nov) 2021 At the end of the first volume of this trilogy, Bioforms — cyber-enhanced, genetically-modified animals uplifted to sapience — were beginning to get the rights of personhood, with Collars (neural hardware that ensures obedience and loyalty) outlawed. Forty years later, the pendulum has swung back, and controlling Bioforms is the hot topic that politicians and pundits use to distract people from climate change and economic troubles. Professor Honey Medici, the over-engineered bear from the first book, continues to fight for Bioform rights, and general rights of people against their controllers. But she's old, and tired, and one day gives a speech that goes too far. She talks about the game and the metagame. The rules of the game suggest that the people that do real things and know their jobs should be the ones to get promoted. But that's not how reality works. The bosses are the people who can schmooze higher-ups, who can look like they work hard and know things, but in fact don't. This was fine (unless you were a called-out metagamer), but then Honey said that the metagame applied to society, too. That had drawn the notice of Warner S. Thompson, candidate for the Word Senate Seat of Alabama-Virginia¹, a man marked for bigger things. Except he was less a man than a raw id. He could say things and do things, but he had little intelligence, little humanity, little sense of self. He was a parasite, and he knew he'd been seen. Honey had to die. Which is how the story shifts to Mars, where Jimmy, a low-level worker, a biomod human, gets mixed up with things far bigger than himself. Things that include Bees, a distributed intelligence that was sent to begin the terraforming of Mars, but who's gone her own way. And who might be tiring of humans trying to wipe her out, just because she once did something environmentally sensible that cost rich people money. Both Honey and Thompson ended up on Mars, sort of, and the scale of the conflict got bigger. ●●●○○ This Town Ain't Big Enough {Blood 1} - Tanya Huff (ss) 1995 Fourteen months into Vicki Nelson's vampirehood, a much older vampire shows up in Toronto. The ex-cop former PI wasn't having that on her territory, especially when the undead woman murdered two people in a very public way. She must die. Naturally her human boyfriend, Detective-Sergeant Michael Celluci, didn't want her to interfere with police business — or get killed. Henry Fitzroy (Vicki's maker, now living in Vancouver), agrees with the latter, saying Vicki wasn't strong enough. But of course Vicki doesn't listen… ●●○○○ Eating the Goo-ies - Jake Berry Ellison, Jr. (ss) 2018 One day, the men of the world began producing black semen. (Men being men, it took two weeks before one went to a doctor.) There was concern, and eventually it affected all men. Then came the first baby fathered by such a man. She was coal-black: “black hair, black skin, black eyes, iris and sclera, black teeth, black gums, everything.” During the first year, there were riots, and infanticides soared. By the end of the second year, all babies were being born deep black. People adjusted. Some said God had gotten tired of racial bigotry, and had altered humankind. Things more or less went back to normal. Until five years later, when some of the children began killing and eating their parents… ●●●◐○ Problems of Succession {NBL Solutions 2} - Ted Bun (nva) 2020 The second Naked Beach Lady Solutions book sees zaftig nudist Melody approached by the Chief Constable's wife, whose niece has a problem. Hafina comes over to explain it to Melody, and as happens so often and easily in these novels, both women end up nude, enjoying a swim and some sun on Melody's private beach, and then some wine and food delivery while they discuss the case. It seems Hafina's niece, Felicity-Ann, married Lord Andrew Roffham, who recently died in a freak accident. His will leaves management of his estate to his twin brother Henry, until 10-year-old Barty comes of age. Except there now seem to be all manner of money troubles with the estate, despite Andrew having shown Felicity-Ann a few months before he died that he'd put away quite a sum, enough to handle almost any problem. Melody hires librarian Susan — wife of Detective Sargent Gerald Hastings, former junior partner to Melody’s late husband, Detective Inspector John Fabricant — to look into the Roffhams. Susan reports to Melody with some interesting information. (And does so in the nude, with wine and food, since that's the norm Melody induces in other people.) One thing Susan finds out from some recent public photos, is that Henry seems to look as if he's being beaten up fairly often. So, yes, you've figured out Henry now. It's a novella: there's not room for red herrings. Another thing Melody finds out is that she's not the only person on the case. Andrew and Henry's Uncle Alistair was called in by Felicity-Ann's butler Harker (who'd served in the military with the Brigadier, who'd gotten him the job) to look into the business. And, yes, Melody gets Alistair to be a nudist, and he even goes to a nude beach with her. They have a two-week fling, same as Melody did with a man she met in the first book. A pleasant bare mystery. ●●●◐○ The Himalaychalet - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1949 Oona and Jick had rented a cottage in the mountains for the season. Unfortunately, some Martian musicians had rented the nearby chalet, and their zulcitret music sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. Worse, Oona had mentioned this to Mrs. Worthington-Weens, who resided in a nearby cottage. WW advised meditation to rise above the annoyance, and she came — daily — with her personal guru to lead Oona in a meditative session, which involved her poking Oona in the ribs when the younger woman forgot the appropriate response to the chant. Jick had an idea, and called in a friend. Davis brought over an old ultrasonic machine. He set it up to point at Mrs. W's place, and within a day she moved out. A difficult day and night for Oona and Jick, since the old machine leaked back-eddies, which had the couple alternately terrified and depressed for a day. Still, it worked, until… ●●●●○ Hatchery of Dreams - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1961 Proper Bostonian Giles Wardwell wakes up to find Joan (his fifteen-years-younger wife) missing, though the note she left saying she was taking a break from their marriage contains several phrases she would never use. In a daze, Giles searches the house, going so far as to enter her crafts room — which contains an incubator with a basketball-size egg in it. Giles decides to question her friends, with whom she plays bridge every week: Mary Nurse, Margo Cory, and Alice Redd. It may pay to note that all of these surnames came up in the Salem Witch Trials. As he visits them in turn, Giles finds each woman more than a bit odd, that each seems to be suffering — cursed, one might say — and that each is clutching a different weird animal — stuffed, they claim. When Giles notes the hatched egg in her apartment, Alice tells him to go home and wait for Joan's egg to hatch. Following Grizzle will be his only chance to find his wife. Giles will find that there are people worse than witches, such as the Un-American Affairs sorcerers keeping Joan captive. ●●○○○ Gratitude Guaranteed - Kris Neville (ss) 1953 Robotic surgeons had taken over from human surgeons years ago, and Eberhard Harrison still resented it. He worked at Cuddly Pets now, installing Schroeder Bypasses and Dappleby Blocks into animals — mostly lions and tigers, since big cats were popular now — turning them into loyal and obedient animal companions. Then Harrison had an idea. New supercomputers had bioneural components, and the components should work on them. So he staged a fight, destroying some components in the process, but not before pocketing a pair. He then quit before he could be fired, and got a job with a biocomputer maintenance company. Eventually, his new firm got a call to fix Bessie, the brain that ran the Moss-Eagleberg ultramarket, and Eberhard inserted his components, giving himself full ordering capability, without associated billing or records. Then Eberhard and his wife Mignonetta got busy ordering. Unfortunately, Bessie was too grateful. When Eberhard ordered one piano, she sent two, and so on. Things quickly got out of hand. The story had some interesting bits, but it's too contrived, and at least a third too long. ●●●○○ The Orchid and the Oak - Mel Cowan (ss) 2025 Alistair Finch was a top architect of a prestigious firm. The high-pressure job had nearly driven him to a breakdown, until he'd found an outlet two years ago: spending weekends at Whispering Oaks naturist village, where he was just "Al". Transitioning back to wearing the expensive suit at work every Monday was brutal, but Finch survived. Then, after a big success, management at Sterling & Vance decided to have a mandatory team-building retreat at Serenity Valley, an upscale glass-cube-cabins resort bordering Whispering Oaks. The two resorts shared some hiking trails and a stream leading to a forest pool. Finch's two worlds collided when the rich folk took a hike, and encountered the nudists, and began to make snide comments, and Finch was left to make a choice. ●●●◐○ The Wrong Number {Ambassador to the Stars 01} - David Collins (nov) 2023 I like Collins' Artifact series, so I thought I'd try some more; he has many. Skipping the war ones, this seemed like fast, light adventure. The book begins in a similar "regular guy just stumbles into alien stuff" way. Steve White is 24, fresh out of the military, living with his parents for the summer until he starts college on the GI Bill. He visits the pond he played at as a boy, and happened to be standing between three white rocks when someone 43 light-years away dialed a wrong number, and the "rocks" teleported him to another planet. He's greeted by a tall, deep-blue semi-insectoid Amazonian woman, Countess Petra GunMuller, and the short grey-skinned transporter tech who misdialed. By the rules of the League, as the first of his species to transport to a world of one of the 72 Races — now 73 — he was the Ambassador of Earth assigned to the Pathless world Zigiproll. Pathless techs take his iPhone and modify it, so now it can suck in human media from the internet at a prodigious rate for later sale: humankind can make a fortune from this, and as ambassador, Steve gets two percent. He buys a six-seat spaceship, and appears in orbit (the stones project a cone into the sky for larger objects), parking near the International Space Station to get NASA's attention. The same type of dealings that happened in the early Artifact books go on, with Steve and Cobalt (the Pathless royal larva who underwent directed metamorphosis to the form of a human woman to be his partner in maintaining the Pathless-human relationship) dealing with the US government and military, and so on. Light, fast adventure. ●●○○○ Mr. Boy - James Patrick Kelly (nva) 1990 This tale has a lot of "weird for weirdness's sake" stuff in it. Peter Cage — "Mr. Boy" to his friends — is stunted: he periodically gets a medical procedure to keep him physically twelve years old forever (or at least as long as his rich mother keeps paying for his rejuvenation). His mother is mostly a sheet of skin over a scaffold, forming a two-thirds-scale Statue of Liberty. His best friend, Stennie, had had himself twanked — gene-modded — to look like a yellow stenonychosaurus. The plot is that Comrade, Mr. Boy's hacked android assistant, has stolen (as a stunting gift) an autopsy photo from an encrypted database, and now an AI lawyer is after Mr. Boy, continually popping up when Mr. Boy is in virtual reality. Also, Mr. Boy — 12yo in body, 25yo by calendar — has met a teenage girl (for whom he's both too young and too old) who is stirring new feelings in him. So, star-crossed young lovers at odds with their parents, plus a bit of crime and consequences. Growing up can be hard. ━━━━━━━━━━ Week Nineteen's numbers added to year-to-date totals: 149+7 ss | 09+0 nvt | 08+2 nva | 39+2 nov | #books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction ━━━━━━━━━━ [1] Since those states don't share a border, it must be the whole AL-GA-SC-NC-VA swath, possibly including Florida, though that might get included with the Caribbean.