On the Road

If you’re too young to remember the On the Road segments of the CBS Evening News, that’s a shame. On the Road, reported by veteran newsman Charles Kuralt, was a treasure. It was a series of short, slice-of-life stories — charming vignettes about America and Americans, both the ordinary and the extraordinary. From 1967 until [...]

Read Full Post »

War of Words

“Tales from the White Hart” is a 1957 collection of short stories by British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. In it are 15 stories told by a scientist, Harry Purvis, to his mates at a London pub called the White Hart. The stories are yarns — shaggy dog stories that end with a pun [...]

Read Full Post »

Problem-Solving

This folksy and entertaining science fiction story is factual in several respects. First, the setting is real. The town of Cave Junction, Oregon, and the Illinois River, protected today as a Wild and Scenic River, are actual places. Second, gold was discovered in the area in the mid-1800s. After the mines played out, the timber [...]

Read Full Post »

The Garden of the Sky

The short story below is interesting because of context. “Star Mother” was written in 1959. Two years earlier, the USSR had placed the first man-made satellites, the Sputniks, into Earth orbit. Two years later, the USSR would send the first human into orbit. 1959 was the year our own Project Mercury began. In 1959, no [...]

Read Full Post »

Something to Gain

Damon Knight (1922-2002) was for many decades an influential and respected author, editor, and critic in the world of science fiction. How influential and respected? Well, the Science Fiction Writers of America awards the annual “Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award” for lifetime achievement in the field. Not too shabby. In 1941, at age 19, [...]

Read Full Post »

Little People

Most writers, like most artists, have a unique style. The science fiction writer R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) was noted for quirky prose and scruffy characters. Not to mention the absurd and the surreal. Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, who described himself as “a cranky old man from Tulsa, Oklahoma,” isn’t widely know or appreciated — maybe because [...]

Read Full Post »

Ralph McGill on Christmas

A couple of years ago, I wrote a short post about one of my heroes, the late Ralph McGill, the crusading columnist/editor/publisher of the Atlanta Constitution. McGill often was called “The conscience of the South.” He was brilliant, articulate, a keen observer of people and events and everything else. The world was his beat, the [...]

Read Full Post »

Time Flies

If you admire people who master a second language, as I do, you’ll surely be impressed by Frank Roger. Born Frank Roger Florimond De Cuyper in 1957 in Ghent, Belgium, he majored in English at the University of Ghent. His career as an author began in 1975. By the 1980s, he was writing fiction in [...]

Read Full Post »

One-Hopper

J. Alan Brown is an Australian writer who will go to great lengths, it appears, to set up the audience. Read on, and don’t fight it. ————— Fine Tuning By J. Alan Brown Published in 2007 “You better be as good as I’ve heard, Mr. Nockity,” Captain Allyson Foster said. “I’m under pressure to get [...]

Read Full Post »

The Root of the Rot

Here’s an old newspaper column from the late, great Molly Ivins that could have been written yesterday. She wrote this in 1997, when the Republicans in Washington, aided by a handful of ersatz Democrats, were dutifully serving their corporate masters while shamelessly and vigorously sticking it to the rest of us. Some things never change. [...]

Read Full Post »