Another Humble Bundle science fiction/fantasy collection!

While a lot of this collection is from authors that I don’t follow regularly or don’t know at all, there are three standouts for me: The Jack Vance Treasury, Barry Hughart’s The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, and John Scalzi’s The Mallet of Loving Correction. Master Li and Number Ten are excellent stories set in medieval China, very cool stuff, and I would buy it just to have that one book as an ebook.

Other books in the collection are: Brayan’s Gold by Peter V. Brett, The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison (did he register his name?), The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Jacaranda: A Novella of the Clockwork Century by Cherie Priest, Muse of Fire by Dan Simmons, Inside Job by Connie Willis, Black Hat Jack by Joe R. Lansdale, The Hunter from the Woods by Robert McCammon, Academic Exercises by K.J. Parker, Amityville Horrible by Kelley Armstrong, Tortured Souls: The Legend of Primordium by Clive Barker, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang, The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard, Nobody’s Home: An Anubis Gates Story by Tim Powers, and the ever popular More Books Coming Soon!

The sale is up for another four days, and again, are multi-format ebooks and DRM-free! This sale supports the charity Worldbuilders, with which I am not familiar.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books

You have been, and always will be, our friend.

Leonard Nimoy passed away Friday, and there are so many links that I'm not going to bother with one.

It cued an interesting moment. I'm now working full-time, and my wife bought me a really nice BluTooth speaker called an OontZ (by Cambridge Soundworks) so I listen to music most of the day. Yesterday I was listening to all of my Beatles, it was actually the second day of this and I finished up.

Well, I had not yet heard the news. Our network/system admin Rob came in and told it to my boss, whose office is directly across the hall from mine, and Rob turned around and told me.

I was kinda gobsmacked. I remember when Dee Kelly died, and I wasn't surprised as he was the oldest member of the regular cast. James Doohan had a massive heart attack a couple of years before he passed, again, no big surprise. And Majel Barret's passing, for some reason, was just 'another celebrity death', which is sad because she's one of the few cast whom I've seen in person.

But Nimoy had a different stature. The odd thing was that I'm not sure that I saw the original run of Star Trek, I think perhaps the first thing that I remember him in was Paris in Mission: Impossible. I know I was watching Trek in the initial reruns as we were constantly playing it in '71 when I was in the 3rd grade, and the series ran from '66 to '69. So that's probably my oldest memory of ST:TOS. And I always preferred Spock over Kirk, and my pursuit of computer science has probably reflected that.


So here's where the Beatles come back in to the picture. As Rob told me about Leonard's death, my phone was playing In My Life. I can be very sensitive to music, and I feel myself softening and being close to tears just thinking about the lyrics.

There are places I remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all.

Several songs affect me for various reasons: Jackson Brown's For A Rocker always puts a lump in my throat, Manfred Mann's Runner can also. So now I think I have another association.


I was the president of a science fiction/fantasy film club in Phoenix for over 20 years, and I'm still a member and still in contact with the treasurer who really runs the thing. And I sent him a link to the NPR story about Nimoy this afternoon. He replied that he felt fortunate to have seen Nimoy give a presentation at a ComicCon, I believe the Phoenix one, and he talked about his life, including a stint as a taxi driver and picking up one John Fitzgerald Kennedy.


Leonard Nimoy was definitely an amazing person and leaves behind a lot of great work that we can remember him by.