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The Reluctant Famulus 114 �November/December 2016
�Thomas D. Sadler, Editor/Publisher, etc.
�305 Gill Branch Road, Owenton, KY 40359
�Phone: 502-484-3766
�E-mail: [email protected]
� �Contents
� Introduction, Editor 3
Graffiti, Frederick Moe 6
Children of the Flood, Alfred Byrd 7
Book Review by Eric Barraclough 12
Cancer Journey, continued Helen Davis 14
Mae Strelkov, Adam Medenweld 19
The Crotchety Critic, Michaele Jordan 21
NAE, Gayle Perry 25
Letters 34
The Things People Find, Editor 41
Artwork/Photos
Sheryl Birkhead Front & Back covers
A. B. Kynock 36, 39
Anna Byrd 7
� Teddy Harvia 34,35, 38
Spore 34, 37
Brad Foster 5, 39
Mae Strelkov 19, 20
The Reluctant Famulus is a product of Strange Dwarf Publications. Some of the
comments expressed herein are solely those of the Editor/Publisher and do not necessarily reflect the
thoughts of any sane, rational persons who know what they are doing and have carefully thought out
beforehand what they wanted to say. Material not written or produced by the Editor/Publisher is
is printed by permission of the various writers and artists and is copyright by them and remains their
sole property and reverts to them after publication. TRF maybe obtained for The Usual but, in
return for written material and artwork, postage costs, The Meaning of Life, and Editorial Whim.
3
The Reluctant Famulus Introduction: It’s over at last. What a relief.
(The headline is in a font called Benjamin Franklin, presumably because he used such a
typeface in his publications. The rest is in the
usual Times New Roman—for what little it’s
worth.) And, no, we’re not in the 1700s. I just felt
like using it.
In days of old,
when fen were bold
and fen were brave
United in conclave—
The story’s told . . .
Ah, the heck with it!
I’m really glad this recent presidential cam-
paign is finally over, after what seemed like sev-
eral decades. It didn’t help any that my following
what was going on had almost become an obses-
sion, causing me to spend far too much time on it
and less on less stressful activities. Such as , at
the last minute almost, writing an introduction to
this issue. My poor aged brain seem hopelessly
focused on what many people called the worst
campaign they had ever seen (there may have a
been a little exaggeration on their part. The things
I’ve seen and heard on the TV news and read on
the online news outlets were . . . Well I suspect
most of you readers at the very least are well
aware of what had gone on and know the results.
Are those Hillary Clinton haters who didn’t vote
at all or voted for someone else other than the
lesser of two evils satisfied with the results of
their actions? I hope you’ll forgive me for not
going into any other post-election comments or
observations. It’s over and done and can’t be
changed. I know it shouldn’t but this presidential
contest and its result have really got me tensed up
and upset to the point where it has been difficult
to concentrate even on TRF. The enthusiasm I
normally feel has diminished somewhat. Still,
I’ve managed to finish this Intro, such as it is, and
get the issue done but though there will be the
usual letters column there won’t be my usual re-
plies to the locs. Eventually I’ll get over what I’m
feeling now but it may take a while. And, no, I
shouldn’t take it so personally but that’s the way I
am. I’m also concerned about the possibly mil-
lions of people who would be adversely affected
should some of the Republicans’ plans be imple-
mented.
The following subject admittedly has a tenu-
ous connection to fandom and science fiction, so
please bear with me. I think that at one time or
another I mentioned that I’m not a particularly
religious person. I’m probably somewhere be-
tween an agnostic or an atheist. When I was a
child my mother used to take my brothers and me
to church (The Church of Christ, also known as
Campbellites after the person who first founded
it.) on Sundays and at least during one summer to
Vacation Bible school. I’ve read parts of the old
and new testaments but never delved deeply into
The Holy Bible. I was familiar with the biblical
account of Jesus Christ but never gave it any seri-
ous attention or thought. He was someone else in
the Bible which, in an admittedly shallow way I
guess I just thought of it as another book. It never
occurred to me until I became an adult that peo-
ple took the bible seriously and studied it—
pardon the sort of pun—religiously. I also be-
came aware that Christ was a real person. Prior to
4
that it never occurred to me he was a real person.
A side note here: I also learned that there were
allegations that he might not have been real. That
sure makes for confusion.
Now, to get to the point and eventually the
tenuous connection to fandom and SF. Back
around the end of October a group of scientists
opened the alleged tomb claimed to be the final
resting place of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion.
The team of researchers from the National Tech-
nical University of Athens removed the large
marble slab that has covered the tomb since 1555
CE. It was part of a plan to renovate and restore
the tomb which is known as the Edicule in Jeru-
salem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher. They
found a large amount of fill material beneath it.
The researchers say, “we will finally be able
to see the original rock surface on which, accord-
ing to tradition, the body of Christ was laid.” The
tomb was last renovated after a fire in 1810, but
has since deteriorated. Already, researchers have
announced that the tomb has revealed surprising
discoveries. Using radar, the team has detected a
hidden cave behind thick marble panels surround-
ing the tomb. What might lie inside the cave is
unknown. [Ed. Now that’s interesting. A further
comment will follow later on.]
The researchers say it appears to be visible
proof that the location of the tomb has not shifted
through time. But then they say it’s hard to deter-
mine if the said tomb is the real tomb of Jesus
Christ or an another Jew known as the Jesus of
Nazareth. [Ed. What? Two Jesuses of Nazareth.
Doesn’t that make things a bit complicated? See
the previous bracketed editorial note. ]
But, supposedly, historically, an identification
of the site by representatives of the Roman em-
peror Constantine suggests a possibility that this
might be indeed the tomb of Jesus Christ.
So far no remains have been discovered
which is a shame. If there were, a DNA analysis
made there might be some interesting results es-
pecially considering Christ’s “miraculous” birth.
If I understand it correctly there were claims that
Christ’s body had been moved to a secret loca-
tion. If that were true then further exploring the
Edicule wouldn’t be worthwhile in taking a DNA
sample.
At last the tenuous connection to SF and fan-
dom. There is the novel, Behold the Man by Mi-
chael Moorcock and, if memory is accurately a
Bradbury story about Christ on other planets. I
vaguely recall another story about time travelers
showing up at the crucifixion. And when I think
about it there may be others of which I’m un-
aware. If so, I’m sure my much smarter than me
readers will provide me with samples.
Diverging a bit . . . Until someone invents—
yes, I’m going to say it—a real, functioning time
machine we’ll never know for certain the truth of
where Christ’s remains are located. On the nega-
tive side, suppose that a team of time travelers
went back to the time of the Crucifixion and re-
turned with good, solid evidence there was no
actual Jesus Christ, much less where he is buried.
Just think of the turmoil that would result among
religious followers of Christ.
Here’s another thought. If building an actual,
functioning time machine (A version of a
TARDIS?) could happen maybe a team of travel-
ers could go much farther in time, back to the
Biblical beginning and found . . . Do I even dare
to suggest this? I don’t want to get into trouble. If
the team went back to when it all began and the
team found you know who would it be possible . .
. Well what are the chances of getting a DNA
sample from Him? That would be well worth
seeing what the results were.
By the way, does anyone out there know any-
thing about St. Anne, grandmother of Jesus
5
Christ? Okay. That’s it. I’m done with the Intro-
duction Now on with the good part of the issue.
Recently I was going through my stamp col-
lection, which I had neglected for a long time,
and I came across something that might have a
fannish, Sfnal connection.
Top right, the first sf
novel I bought when I
was a teenager. I don’t remember just how old.
6
The Most Famous Graffiti In New Hampshire
Frederick Moe
One does not associate the semi-rural state of
New Hampshire with graffiti. Yes, there are a
handful of highway underpasses that are scrawled
with looping letters and the occasional stenciled
graphic. For the most part, however, New Hamp-
shire is graffiti-free zone except in the most
unlikely place – the small town of Newbury.
Newbury is situated on the shores of Lake
Sunapee and is home to about 1,500 people in
wintertime. The summer population swells to
several thousand due to wealthy families who
own property along the lakeshore or mansions
nestled among the rolling hills. Every day on my
way to work I pass through Newbury and the
most famous graffiti in New Hampshire –
chicken farmer rock.
No one knows the exact date that the graffiti
appeared. No one knows who painted the mes-
sage or for whom it was intended. But one day,
sometime in the late 1960’s, five words appeared
on a boulder that sits adjacent to Route 103 West:
Chicken Farmer I Love You.
Local legends proliferated quickly as to the
story behind the message. Chicken farmer rock
faces two homesteads across the road. Both fami-
lies at the time had teenaged children. Both
households tended gardens and raised chickens.
The accepted story is that a high school classmate
was attempting to woo Gretchen Rule, a dean’s
list student, but that he was too shy to ask her to
the prom. Other stories abound. Perhaps the mes-
sage was intended for one of the adults who lived
across the street, words of secret passion, signify-
ing an illicit affair. Perhaps it was a same-sex re-
lationship between two teens, a love that, at the
time, dare not be declared publically. Other
townsfolk think that the graffiti was not intended
for nearby residents, but for a specific someone
who drove past the rock on Route 103 often and
who would understand what the message meant.
Everyone in Newbury has a theory. Yet when one
steps back, removes gender or age speculations,
and leaves the realms of imagination for a mo-
ment, there is actually only one person who
knows the true story of chicken farmer rock for
certain – the person who painted the words dec-
ades ago. And that person may or may not still be
alive.
What we do know for (almost) certain is this:
if weeds and brush grow up around the rock,
someone prunes them back so that the words are
visible again. Some time in the 1990’s, the graf-
fiti was altered. The message now reads, in bright
white lettering: Chicken Farmer I Still Love
You.
People take this as a sign —not a physical
sign, but a sign that love endures, that mysteries
are meant to be embraced. Books have been writ-
ten and even a fictional feature film has been pro-
duced about chicken farmer rock. Yet the reality
is that certain things endure, because their mes-
sage of hope is universal. In a perfect world, we
are all chicken farmers and we are all still loved.
7
CHILDREN OF THE FLOOD
The Underground Mitty
Alfred D. Byrd
As we shiver on the shore of
the new, but barren and frigid
continent that we, the Children of
the Flood, must colonize, we
should recall that some of our an-
cestors tried to prevent the disinte-
gration of the West Antarctic Ice
Sheet before its floodwaters drove
us from the shores of Earth’s gen-
tler continents to this Mars-like wilderness. We
should recall the halcyon days of the presidency
of Donaldina Bush-Clinton, the first GMO to sit
behind the desk in the Oval Office, when shehe
united America’s squabbling factions and led
them in a last-ditch effort to reverse global warm-
ing. Sadly, hiser effort failed, but it inspired ex-
periments in ecologically sound communal living
like one memorialized in the pages of the Lexing-
ton Knurled-Weeder. Herewith, let us recall by-
gone days of promise as recorded in
“High Hopes in Low Tunnel”
by Frieda Vogel
A growing trend towards underground living
has touched Kentucky’s Bluegrass with the
founding of a community dwelling in artificial
caves in the Palisades of the Kentucky River near
High Bridge. As this community is just across the
river from a failed utopia, Shaker Village at
Pleasant Hill, it’s perhaps appropriate — and also
ill omened? — that the new community was
founded by a communalistic religious society,
The Terrestrial Communion of the Children of
Ineffable Light [Footnote One]. The Children call
their community The Tabernacle and Encamp-
ment of the TCCIL, but the residents of High
Bridge call it Low Tunnel, and
the name has stuck.
For the sake of you relics from
2016, who still deny that your
car is self-driving, it can whisk
you to Low Tunnel from Lexing-
ton by heading out of town on
Harrodsburg Road, taking the
turnoff to the holy city of Wil-
more all of the way to High Bridge, and then
heading down the river road past the boat landing
and the Mother Ann Lee Locks & Dam & Hy-
droelectric Plant. I’m not free to say how far past,
but you’ll know Low Tunnel when you reach it.
For one thing, a big sign reading The Taber-
nacle etc. spreads across the whole 1320 ft. of
cliff face owned by the community. It takes a big
sign to hold that name. For another thing, the
community, with limestone quarried from its new
home site, has built terraces from the roadside to
the cliff. The terraces hold parks, gardens, wet-
lands, orchards, and pavilions where residents of
the community, marked by blue T-shirts and
white shorts, stroll or work by day and hold con-
certs by night. What kind of concerts? Bluegrass,
of course! You’ve never heard Bill Monroe until
you’ve heard it underground [Meta-writer’s inter-
ruption: I’m not making this up. Underground
concerts occur already near High Bridge. The
acoustics at them are, I hear, wonderful.]
Your car, if you can communicate with it, will
let you off at the base of a wide staircase cutting
through the terraces to Main Cavern’s entrance.
Your car will find legal parking and will return
for you when you call it, if you’re chipped. You
are chipped, aren’t you? I know that some of you
8
2016 fuddy-duddies still fear being life-jacked,
but no one has been in years, and SoftApple has
promised to pay you a huge indemnity if you are.
What you’ll do with that indemnity in your vege-
tative state is your lookout, but you’ll be rich, and
isn’t being rich what being American is still all
about?
As I start up the main staircase, I’m met by
guides cum security officers called Phosphors, a
term that they tell me means “light-
bearers” [Footnote Two]. As they lead me on, I
take in the community’s façade, which fills all of
the cliff face above the terraces and under the
sign. The façade is eye catching, dominated by a
bright shade of blue popular in these parts. Above
an arched entrance into Main Cave rise several
levels of cliff dwellings that the Phosphors tell
me are called “skyboxes.” These, I take it, are for
the most illumined Children, the bright boys and
girls, as it were. On either side of the skyboxes,
cantilevered balconies form a matrix for hanging
gardens. At either end of the community, grand
staircases snake from landing to landing from the
cliff’s top to its base. Figures in blue and white,
actually taking the staircases, show their devotion
to a low energy-use lifestyle [Footnote Three].
Inside the entrance, the Phosphors lead me to
the offices of the First Seer of Ineffable Light, the
amazingly named Dryb Derfla. A late middle-
aged man of graying hair and a growing tendency
to corpulence, he shows only in eyes of mysteri-
ous green any quality that could’ve made him the
founder of a legendary [Footnote Four] religious
society. His desk is buried under a mound of clut-
ter inexplicable in these days of “paper-free” of-
fices, but a shelf above his head flaunts three
books: Utopia, by Thomas More; The New Atlan-
tis, by Francis Bacon; and Civitas Solis, by
Tomasso Campanella [Footnote Five].
“This community,” Seer Derfla tells me after
he’s welcomed me in Ineffable Light’s name, “is
based on the principles of the obscure, yet little
known futurologist Alfredus Avis, who taught
that underground cities would be key to slowing
and perhaps reversing global warming before the
West Antarctic Ice Sheet melts. [Meta-writer’s
interruption: You’ve already read that would-be
pundit’s pontifications in “CHILDREN OF THE
FLOOD: The Caves Are Real” and “CHILDREN
OF THE FLOOD: The Coming Space.” Let’s get
on with the tour!]”
Seer Derfla and the Phosphors lead me into
Main Cavern. This appears to me as an under-
ground cathedral, five hundred feet wide, a thou-
sand feet deep, and two hundred feet high, with
buttresses that seem to me to rise into a cloudless
sky of blue. “The sky,” Seer Derfla tells me, “is
an illusion produced by light tubes that project
natural sunlight onto a backlit screen. At night,
backlighting produces the illusion of a starry
night sky. These illusions reduce feelings of con-
finement that might else make life underground
unbearable for some.”
Indeed, Main Cavern does seem to me unex-
pectedly bright and spacious. Mirrored surfaces
and wide-screen displays, not to mention the
widespread use of warm pastels, increase its feel-
ing of spaciousness. Along each of the side walls
and the rear wall of the cavern run five levels of
living quarters reaching up to where the but-
tresses curve inward. Inside the band of living
quarters, broad avenues carry pedestrians and bi-
cyclists—not even self-driving cars may enter
Main Cavern—to their destinations. Between the
avenues, business structures rise from a park-like
central space. Both the living quarters and the
business structures are open, airy, and spacious,
as, underground, they’re at a constant temperature
and need no defense from central Kentucky’s
9
rain, snow, and ice storms. Every ledge or bal-
cony is festooned with plants. The Web site did
boast of the place’s being green.
“Main Cavern,” Seer Derfla says in his por-
tentous, if high-pitched and nasal, voice [Meta-
writer’s interruption: He’s originally from Michi-
gan, and you know how Michiganders sound], “is
based on a modification of Bogdanovist princi-
ples as enunciated in Kim Stanley Robinson’s
magisterial Mars Trilogy. Main Cavern is de-
signed so that, for any given individual, space
flows freely from residence to work to recreation
without necessarily making a distinction among
any of the three. A person may work at home,
play at work, or be at home at play. Indeed, given
how protected the environment of Main Cavern
is, a person may feel at home anywhere inside it.
You can sleep on a park bench or on a rooftop,
and no one will hassle you.”
Yeah, you talk pretty, Seer Derfla, but I’ve
read the Mars Trilogy and know what happened
to Arkady Bogdanov [Footnote Six].Noticing
greenery on the rooftops of living quarters and of
business structures, I ask about it to derail the
Seer’s sermon.
He nods beatifically. “As much as possible,
the community here aspires to self-sufficiency.
The community achieves this by using its space
as efficiently as possible. Hence, rooftops and
other open spaces in Main Cavern grow crops for
internal consumption and flowers for external
sale. Main Cavern, holding the same temperature
year round, works as a greenhouse, the largest of
many greenhouses in the community—”
Ask this guy a question, and he’ll give you a
speech. It’s a wonder that he isn’t running for U.
S. senator against Mitch McConnell, beneficiary
of a life-extension protocol developed at the Uni-
versity of Kentucky. He’s been senator now for
what, a hundred years? [Editor: No, Al. It only
seems like it. Unfortunately]“You mentioned sell-
ing flowers, Seer Derfla,” I say. “Clearly, it took
a load of cash to build this place and, even though
it’s energy efficient and ideally self-sufficient, it
must take a load of cash to keep it going. Where
does that come from?”
As Seer Derfla walks on, he steeples his
hands before his chest. It’s amazing that he does-
n’t fall down, walking with his nose in the air, but
then the sidewalks in Main Cavern are smooth,
well designed for a guru who likes to pontificate
on the go. “Our community is based on success-
ful communes of the past — communities such as
the Shakers, Amana, and Oneida. These focused,
not only on faith, but also on finance. Following
their models, our community has generated a
number of robust revenue streams. Besides flow-
ers, our community sells other agricultural prod-
ucts, runs restaurants, lodging, and Bluegrass
concerts for visitors to the community, operates a
number of on-line businesses—”
Dear me, the Seer is as much a salesman as he
is a preacher. Still, there’s less difference be-
tween the two professions than you’d like to
think, isn’t there? Robert A. Heinlein seemed to
think so, anyway. “Are these all low-skill jobs?”
“Not at all! The community needs supervi-
sors, accountants, teachers, doctors, lawyers—all
kinds of highly trained specialists. Besides, the
community stresses education as a means to un-
screw the inscrutable—to express Ineffable
Light—”
Yeah, it takes little ineffability for me to get
my fill of it. “Do you send your followers out for
education, or is it all in house?”
“Who needs to go out for education nowadays
when everyone is chipped to the Internet? In any
case, I’m proud to say that the community is self-
sufficient in education as well. The community
has its own teachers, as I mentioned, and inter-
10
faces on line with outside institutions. We have
an elementary school, a middle school, and a high
school in Main Cavern, all of them fully accred-
ited, and the community takes part in Universal
University [Footnote Seven].”
Yeah, you try to get tenure anywhere with a
degree from that. I’m lucky to be a feature writer.
“What about sports? You can’t have a school
without those in these parts. I suppose that you
have a basketball court tucked away in one of the
central buildings, but I don’t see a football field.”
“It’s up on the surface. Still, I must confess
that Tabernacle and Encampment High isn’t go-
ing to beat Lexington Catholic anytime soon.”
Few schools are. As I follow Seer Derfla and
the Phosphors through Main Cavern, I lose my
sense of being underground. All is open, spa-
cious, and green under a blue sky. Main Cavern
looks like the Bluegrass before heat waves and
droughts turned it to the color of mustard. With-
out thinking, I murmur, “This place is good prac-
tice for a generation ship.”
Seer Derfla beams. “In the long run, the com-
munity hopes to launch one. One of our mottos is,
‘Before you go up, you must go down.’” Before I
can comment on how trite, not to mention sense-
less, this motto is, the Seer goes on to say. “Let’s
take that motto as a sign that I should take you to
the surface. Are you willing to walk up two hun-
dred vertical feet of stairs, or would you like to
use the elevator that the community keeps for
visitors?”
Two hundred vertical feet is how many actual
feet? Shoot me if you must, but I choose the ele-
vator. The Phosphors sneer at me, but sneers have
never hurt anyone, have they?
An elevator is an elevator is an elevator. What
matters about this one is where it goes. This is
both impressive and nostalgic, as if a piece of
what the Bluegrass used to be before heat waves
and drought cooked it still remained. The com-
munity has fenced in its whole forty acres with
limestone quarried from Main Cavern. Besides
the aforementioned football field, these hold
vineyards from which I learn the community
makes wine for sale, greenhouses for flowers and
vegetables, and herbal and floral gardens in
which men and women in blue and white stroll in
attitudes of meditation. Everything stands in a
windmill’s shadow.
“As the community learned from the writings
of Alfredus Avis,” Seer Derfla says beatifically,
“‘an underground city needs to be fully integrated
with the surface world.’ Here, you see his princi-
ple put into action.”
Can this guy do nothing but preach? I wish
that he were the Buddha by the road so that I
could kill him. Still, I do have to maintain jour-
nalistic objectivity, don’t I? “I see that you get at
least part of your power from a windmill. What
does it do in the community, and where does the
water for all of this lovely greenery come from?”
“Both of your questions, Ms. Vogel, share an
answer. Following an example that nearby Camp
Nelson set during the Civil War, the windmill
pumps water from the impoundment pool on the
Kentucky River for drip irrigation on the surface.
Besides keeping plants alive and growing, the
water, as it returns through hidden channels to the
river, performs other services for the community.
The water spins turbines, generating power; the
water mimics a running stream, providing a place
for fresh-water mussels that used to live in the
gorge to grow—”
“For your tables, or for restoring the gorge’s
ecology if conservations ever get the Common-
wealth to remove the dams from the river?”
Dryb Derfla sighs. “Realistically, for our ta-
bles, as the dams will stay as long as nearby com-
munities need drinking water and the local distill-
11
eries make Bourbon, as an obscure local writer
named Alfred de l’Oiseau or some such nonsense
once wrote. Still, one of the nearby dams pro-
vides the community with clean hydroelectric
power, so I’m grateful for that. Now, as I was
about to add, the water from the surface also
maintains a side cave where we raise catfish for
food and sale. The community also, in another
side cavern, processes its plant waste into bio-
diesel and ethanol—”
“Why would a self-sufficient community
need those?”
“Because the community’s mission extends to
a world that needs the community’s help. As we
spread our products and our message by com-
pletely clean drone, van, and truck, we help re-
verse bad decisions that led to our present world
of rising sea level, heat waves, and drought.
Someday, if all help us in our mission, heat
waves and droughts will end, the sea level will
recede, and we’ll start to rebuild the Bluegrass
that we once knew.”
Nice sermon, Seer Derfla, I think. As he and
the Phosphors lead me back down to the terraces
by the river for me to listen to Bluegrass as I
chow down on catfish and clams, he lectures me
on how the community reprocesses all of its other
forms of waste into useful byproducts to fulfill its
mission of restoring the earth to balance. I hope
that he does restore it. Still, he should keep in
mind that just across the river is Pleasant Hill,
where others dreamed as he’s dreaming. Where
are the Shakers today? Where will Seer Derfla be
when, despite his best efforts, the West Antarctic
Ice Sheet melts?
Oh, yes, holed up in a cave.
Today, we must recognize that skeptics like
Frieda Vogel were right. The hopes and dreams
of visionaries like Seer Derfla came to nothing.
The visionaries could’ve succeeded had they be-
gun their work sooner and gotten more support
for it, but their efforts came too late to save the
earth that was. In the end, the ice melted, and
here we, the Children of the Flood, are on the
shores of a land that humanity was never meant
to settle. It’s just adding insult to injury for Ere-
bus and Terror to be erupting as we disembark
here, and what’s making that weird noise,
“Tekeli-li”? Nothing that has our best interests at
heart, I bet you. This place gives me the creeps.
Still, there’s nowhere else for us Children of the
Flood to go, so we’ll just have to make the best of
things here at the mountains of madness
[Footnote Eight].
— the last transmission of Fred D. Bradly,
head of Project Shackleton, the first effort to
colonize West Antarctica
[Footnote One] I chose this name so that I could
use the word “ineffable” in a sentence. Hey, I just
used it again!
[Footnote Two] Clearly, the TCCIL chose
“Phosphors” instead of “Lucifers” because the
latter name still holds unfortunate connotations
even for those who’ve read or now watched (I
won’t do that again) Childhood’s End.
[Footnote Three] Unlike young, able bodied grad
students, whom I often see taking the elevator to
the second floor just steps away from an open
staircase.
[Footnote Four] You do still speak Fannish, don’t
you?
[Footnote Five] I’ve read this work only in Eng-
lish as The City of the Sun, but the title in Latin
impressed me.
[Footnote Six] No spoilers here! Read Red Mars.
[Footnote Seven] Motto: If it’s really a university,
why should there be more than one?
[Footnote Eight] Do all of these footnotes make
you think that I’ve read too many novels by Jack
Vance?
12
The Eleventh Eunuch Eric Barraclough
Murder in Megara Mary Reed & Eric Mayer Poisoned Pen Press 2015
Fifteen years ago or more someone in The
Reluctant Famulus wrote a review of One for
Sorrow by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer. Whoever
it was, thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU!
The novel was the first of the John the Chamber-
lain/John the Eunuch series and on the strength of
that review I ordered a copy from the States and
instantly became addicted, getting each of the fol-
lowing books imported until a publishing com-
pany with the odd name of Head of Zeus started
publishing them over here in Britain, and con-
densed the authors’ names to M. E. Mayer.
Just to complicate matters further, Mayer and
Reed have started using the pseudonym Eric
Reed for all their writings outside of the John the
Chamberlain series and Eric Reed’s first novel
has just appeared (The Guardian Stones) but I’ll
go over that in the next ish (hopefully).
Mayer pubbed two of the best written fan-
zines of all time, Groggy and Vexed (Please note:
I am a person who rarely uses superlatives). Reed
was a joyfully perennial presence in fanzines, al-
though for some unaccountable reason they all
came from the U.S. whereas she is originally
from Britain.
Now Poisoned Pen Press has released the
eleventh in the John the Chamberlain/Eunuch se-
ries, Murder in Megara.
Customarily, each novel opens with a murder
or at least a mystery but Megara has the authors
skillfully turning the screw for several chapters
before the titular murder is discovered.
John has had a colorful past, unfortunately two
of the colors were extremely dark: he was a uni-
versity student, a mercenary, a slave, which is
when he lost his wedding tackle, he then rose
through the ranks of the palace of the Sixth Cen-
tury Holy Roman Emperor Justinian I. John is
strong-willed, stoic and reticent but he is totally
loyal to Justinian for liberating him from slavery.
Such loyalty can be a dangerous burden because
Justinian can be as capricious as a compass in
magnet factory.
By the opening of Murder in Megara, Justin-
ian has canceled John’s chamberlainship, taken
away all his estates apart from one at Megara
(where John once lived in his youth) and ban-
ished him there which leaves John in a dodgy
predicament. Because at any time an assassin
could be sent by Justinian or one of John’s rivals
in court. Meantime the populace of Megara are
openly aggressive towards this half-man pariah
13
from Constantinople. Stones are thrown and one
of Megara’s wealthiest business men spends time
sitting on a stylite railing against John. Even the
City Defender whose duty it is to protect John has
made a veiled threat “move out of Megara and
never darken our dodona again” so to stay means
possible (if not probable) death but for John to
leave would be definite death because it would
defy the orders of Justinian. All this has John be-
tween a rock and an ever hardening place.
And when the murder comes it also becomes
obvious that someone has tried to frame John or
his household for the crime.
Once one of the most powerful men in the
empire. John is aging and now a less than ordi-
nary citizen who must live by his wits.
Hey ho! If wits were all.
Murder in Megara makes the mistake of sud-
denly introducing John’s step-father. A character
never mentioned in any of the previous ten nov-
els. In any series the sudden appearance of an im-
portant person, artifact or device that appears cre-
ated like a premature deus ex machina comes
with about the same allure of an unwanted guest.
One of the most egregious examples was in The
Mentalist where he spends the first series ever
happy and smiling and in the second we find he
had a wife and child that were tortured to death.
Mayer and Reed have the excuse that John is reti-
cent, in which case he could have a whole cata-
comb of skeletons rattling behind his closet door.
Their narrative is barbed with questions about
every motive, about every danger and about every
possibility and with each question the screw is
tightened once again but (as if for counterbal-
ance) the dialogue often has a poetry of its own:
“It’s empty barrels that sound the loudest.”
“Men of his sort are like the wind from the
north, they bring storms with them.”
The rich “swim in a different sea from the
poor.”
There is a modern convention for historic
mysteries to be large tomes detailing every stitch
of clothing, every building and every formality of
court-life while bristling with sub-plots. If well
known, such tomes can be left out to impress
friends. If little known, they are better used as
doorstops. They are akin to vast oil painting with
details down to every bar of a bird cage across the
Bosporus (to paraphrase James McNeill Whis-
tler). Mayer and Reed’s mysteries are more like
pencil sketches by master artists who simply con-
centrate on all the details that bring the whole to
life.
And it does come to life which raises the
question that, if back in the ‘90s ITV Central
could turn part of Hungry into Thirteenth Century
Herefordshire for the Cadfael series, why could-
n’t any TV or film company (armed with today’s
CGI) do with the John the Chamberlain series set
in the Byzantium Sixth Century?
Not that it’s likely to happen. Despite the se-
ries receiving rave and star reviews in Booklist,
Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly (the
Times Literary Supplement has doggedly ignored
it), no major paperback company has bid for the
rights. So what chance is there with a major TV
company?
Oh well, one can live in hope.
14
The Cancer Journey 3
Helen E Davis
On February 2, Groundhog's Day,
and just thirteen days after receiv-
ing my diagnosis, I fasted and
prayed and presented my sacrificial
body to the local hospital. With a
minimum of fuss, apparently having
realized that I was a flight risk, I
was ushered into a small room and
told to change my clothes for a gown
and a pair of “lovely designer socks.”
One size fits all, of course. The most
striking feature of the socks is that
they have non-slip soles, for those
few times when the nurses will actu-
ally let you out of bed. They are
made of soft cotton, are washable,
and go home with you.
The gown was made of paper.
Stiff paper. It could have held the
largest person I know, but on me it
stood straight out in all directions. It
was also incredibly hot. The nurse
came back, took one glance at my ap-
parently reddening face, and ran to
get a cloth gown. When she brought
it back and I quickly changed, I
asked her about the paper gown,
which was lined with extra paper. It
also had holes in it, lined with a rub-
ber seal like the opening to a vac-
uum cleaner bag that did not pene-
trate the lining.
“It can be inflated with hot air,”
she explained, showing me a tube
that ran from the wall. “Some people
like it.”
Not people whose estrogen has
been suddenly stopped just a week
previous, I don’t think.
We went through the normal sur-
gical preliminaries --starting the IV,
allowing in the visitors, a quick chat
with the anesthesiology people. I re-
peated again and again my one great
wish, “Please have a big bucket on
the bed in the recovery room. Not a
spit-up tray. I throw up after general
anesthesia. I really throw up.”
15
And everyone assured me it was
okay, that the anesthesiologist has
drugs for this sort of stuff. And I
would repeat my request. And I
would get assurances . . .
And then I and my surgical buddy
were whisked down for some pre-
surgery work. I had to have a wire
installed in my breast. In order to
make sure to get the tumor with a
minimum of effort and damage, a ra-
diologist used an ultrasound to guide
a wire into the center of the mass. As
he planned his route, he muttered,
“I’m going to go right through the
center of both of them.”
“Both?” I was supposed to have
only one tumor. I didn’t like the idea
of new tumors suddenly popping up.
That’s a bad, very bad sign.
“Lesions. The other could be a he-
matoma.”
“According to the MRI, it’s a he-
matoma,” I said, a bit relieved. I
hugged my surgery buddy tightly.
After the wire was installed, I was
also injected with a radioactive
tracer that would help the doctor
know which lymph nodes to sample.
And then a mammogram to verify
that the wire was correctly placed.
And the doctor proudly said, “Right
though all three of them.”
“Three?”
“The tumor, the ‘hematoma’ and
the marker clip.” I could hear the
quotation marks in his voice.
Along the way we discussed the
identity of my surgery buddy. His
technician was the only person that
day to even know who he was, and
even she only recognized the name,
and not his immensely cute, squish-
able form.
And then came the surgery, which
lasted under half an hour, and I
came aware in the recovery room.
After a few minutes polite discus-
sion, I suddenly begged for the
bucket. She gave me a spit-up tray.
And then she gave me something
bigger. And then again, and again,
and again, and
. . . Finally she hung another bag
of fluids so that I would at least go
home well-hydrated.
Reaction 1, drugs 0.
Pathology confirmed that the tu-
mor was no more than one centime-
ter at its widest point, and that no
cancer cells have been identified be-
yond its margins. The lymph nodes,
the filters on the great sewer system
of the body, had caught no cancer
cells. It would appear, at this point,
that it was caught early and re-
16
moved cleanly. And that the other
thing was indeed a hematoma.
Whew!
I don’t know what the future
treatment will entail. I need some
more doctor’s visits to determine
what path to take. Chemo is not
likely, radiation therapy is. Also a
drug to starve my body of estrogen,
which will make life even more in-
teresting than it already is. But I
don’t have those answers yet. I have-
n’t reached that part of the quest.
Still, the dragon is dead and all
that’s facing me is the long slog back
from Mordor.
The reactions to my having cancer
have been interesting. My friends
have taken it much worse than I
have. But from where I’m standing,
this sucker was caught early by an
annual mammogram and removed
before it could start acting really
cancerous. It had not yet begun wan-
dering through my body, and there is
a pretty decent chance that even if I
refused all further treatment, I
would never see it again. And while I
have a couple of new scars, and some
pain, my body is not particularly
mutilated. It’s like I’m looking at a
crumpled fender yet knowing that I
just narrowly missed a catastrophic
wreck.
And It’s even more poignant be-
cause, if I had followed the proposed
guidelines that women shouldn’t
bother with a mammogram every
year, that every other year is good
enough, I would be writing a differ-
ent story. This would have been my
off year, and if I had waited until
next year to find this, then I would
likely be looking at a full mastec-
tomy, strong chemotherapy, and a
much greater chance of recurrence.
So please, go get your annual
mammogram. Tell them Cthulhu
sent you.
The Cancer Journey 4
So, having healed up from the
surgery, I was given the go ahead to
visit the Oncologist and the Radiolo-
gist. According to the Surgeon, I only
needed the Oncologist to prescribe
the hormone blocker for me. The big
truth of medicine, however, is that
17
one doctor does not speak for an-
other doctor. Ever .
The Oncologist suggested the pos-
sibility of chemo. Nasty stuff, chemo.
It poisons you, but hopefully the can-
cer cells, being weaker and stressed
by their growth and fast division,
should die from the chemo while
your healthy cells will only be dam-
aged. Damaged cells, in time, should
recover.
Should.
But does everyone with breast
cancer need chemo? No. If your can-
cer hasn’t metastasized, that is,
some cells have started to wander
away from the mother tumor to hide
in healthy tissues and grow baby tu-
mors, then you don’t need to poison
the entire body to get them all out.
But how can the oncologist be sure
that the cancer cells have not
reached that point? Yes, the margins
of the tumor were clear, not ragged
with areas where cells have broken
away, and there were no cancer cells
trapped in the lymph nodes, but still,
could a few have gotten away and
just not yet been washed into the
lymph nodes?
And that’s where the cancer story
gets complicated.
Cancer starts with a mutation in
a cell, generally a cell that is not
completely differentiated and still
dividing. These are germinal cells
(the ones used in reproduction,) re-
newal cells (skin, gut, and other ori-
fice linings), or undifferentiated cells
used to repair and rebuild tissues.
But most mutations will simply
make a cell defective and kill it. But
mutations in certain areas will
unlock the genes that the cells used
when it was part of the embryo.
These cells grow and divide, just as
they did in the early embryo, but in
a mature person they form a tumor.
This tumor does not have, however,
the directions to tell it when to stop
growing.
Even worse, the unlocking of
these genes causes other genes to
unlock. With each cell unlocked, the
cancer cells become more and more
like embryonic cells. They lose the
characteristics of the cell they had
been, become formless, and then do
something else that embryonic cells
do—they wander to other places in
the body.
In embryology, the cells move
around quite a lot, but they know
where they are going. They form dis-
crete structures and mature into
18
proper organ cells. Cancer cells, on
the other hand, have Alzheimer’s.
Not only are they regressing into in-
fanthood, they wander with no idea
of purpose or place. Eventually they
get stuck somewhere, settle down for
away, and then grow and divide.
And create more tumors.
Worse, the cells in a tumor do not
do this all at the same time. While
many cells are in Stage 1 cancer,
others have changed into stage 2 or
stage 3 cancer cells. So just because
most of the cells are still only mildly
changed, there may already be stage
4 cells wandering through my tis-
sues.
Getting poisoned starts to sound
better. What chance is there that
there are advanced cells in my body?
In my case the biopsy did show
that about 5% of my cells were
changing faster than the rest.
So the Oncologist asked for two
things before he determined that I
would not need chemo. One was a
catscan to check for metastasis tu-
mors in my chest and abdomen, and
the other was Oncotype(dx) testing.
The Oncotype(dx) testing looks at
the genes in the cancer cells and
gives the tumor a score based on the
number of genes that have already
been unlocked in the tumor. “So,” he
said, “I’d like to send your tumor
away for genetic testing.”
I touched my wounded breast.
“But it’s gone.”
He grinned. “I have it here.”
I’m sitting in the office of a doctor
who collects people’s tumors! Does
he have them in little display cases
along the walls of his office?
So I got my catscan two days
later, and it showed many interest-
ing things, but no metastatic cancer.
I do have a tortured aorta, proof that
my heart has been twisted by the
cruelties of fate, and my liver is over-
weight, but nothing to concern the
oncologist. Two long weeks passed
before the result of the Oncotype DX
came back. My tumor had a score of
18, right on the border between slow
and intermediate. With the fact that
the tumor margins had been clear
and the sentinel lymph nodes had
been clear, we threw the dice and de-
cided against chemotherapy.
Yay! I hope… So, on to radiation...
19
Here’s to You, Mae Strelkov Adam Medenwald
The published findings of a scientific study
are not unlikely to bring to mind a certain fan
(except for a fan who is also a science nerd, and
whose conversation is usually a Gosh! Wow! pre-
cis of several articles from Scientific American)
but a recent paper published on-line by the Pro-
ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
immediately conjured up memories of a fan who
was an Argentinian grandmother and lived on a
ranch in the middle of nowhere, wrote loving let-
ters and locs, and printed highly colorful hecto
paintings.
Does any Reluctant Famulus reader remem-
ber hecto?
Does any Reluctant Famulus reader remem-
ber Mae Strelkov?
She was born in China. Her parents were
English missionaries. She married Vadim
Strelkov who was Russian-born and they moved
to Chile, then Buenos Aires, and then on to a
ranch in Jujuy. She was so well loved in fandom
that Joan Bowers and Susan Wood started a fan
fund for her, and in 1974 she attended the world-
con Discon II, DeepSouthCon and traveled the
U.S. for two months.
July 9 2017 will be the 100th anniversary of
her birth.
Among Mae’s many interests was the theory
that even unrelated languages use the same
sounds for many objects and ideas. Her research
was so deep that at least one fan put the body of
Mae's work before a university board in the hopes
of obtaining a grant for her.
Mae had only the research books she owned
on that ranch in the middle of nowhere. She died
in 2000, her work unfinished and practically un-
known.
But in the two-thousand-and-teens Cornell
University was armed with terabyte computers
and a program which compared 62% of the
6,000+ languages in use today.
The findings showed “a robust statistical rela-
tionship between certain basic concepts... and the
sounds humans around the world use to describe
them.”
To be specific, Sci-News reported… “In most
languages, the word for ‘nose’ is likely to include
the sounds ‘neh’ or the ‘oo’ sound, as in ‘ooze.’
“The word for ‘tongue’ is likely to have ‘l’ or
‘u.’ “Leaf’ is likely to include the sounds ‘b,’ ‘p’
or ‘l.’ “Sand’ will probably use the sound ‘s.’
“The words for ‘red’ and ‘round’ often appear
with ‘r,’ and ‘small’ with ‘i.’”
And just to show that this is NOT a fan-hoax,
here is a Gayle Perry style reference... Damián E.
Blasi et al. Sound–meaning association biases
evidenced across thousands of languages. PNAS,
published online September 12, 2016; doi:
10.1073/pnas.1605782113
So here's to you, Mae Strelkov. You were
right all along.
20
21
The Crotchety Critic By Michaele Jordan
The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Telegraph Avenue and 100 Ghost Soup
You may have noticed in my last col-
umn that none of the books I discussed
were award nominees. I laid down the
pressure to follow the awards at the end of
WorldCon. And what a liberating experi-
ence that was! Finally I could read what-
ever I pleased! I’m still intoxicated! It just
goes to show, that nothing spoils a book
like assigning it as homework. (Of course, I
always knew that. Back when I w as in
school I made a point of reading all the as-
signed books at the beginning of the year,
so the teacher couldn’t spoil them.)
As a result, I am rich in review mate-
rial. I’ll be telling you about three books
here, and I only managed to narrow down
the list that far by assigning three more to
my column for 115 (which is already half
written.) I’ll start with the oldest on my
list, which I’ve been trying to squeeze into
a column for some while, but kept being
distracted by those pesky award nominees.
Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cor-
morant (Tom Doherty Associates LLC,
NY, 2015) is a complex and engrossing tale
of political intrigue, in which war is only
one—and not the most important—tool
available to the expanding empire it por-
trays. It is not a fantasy. There is not a
scrap of magic in it. Nor is there any ad-
vanced science in it. But it is set in an al-
ternate reality, and so claims status as SF/
F.
Please note that I say an alternate real-
ity, not an alien world. Mr. Dickinson has
made no attempt to construct an alien
race. The characters are, as far as the
reader can discern, human—made all the
more convincingly so by their complex ra-
cial stew, containing at least four distinct
geographical types, plus a wide range of
mixed breeds created by conflicting cul-
tures. Nor is there anything alien about
the planet they live on. The geographic
area in which the story takes place is unfa-
miliar, but its climate and flora are not.
The tough guys wear wolf-skins. The farm-
ers grow lemons and ginger.
Baru Cormorant is the daughter of two
fathers and one mother, born to a culture
absorbed unwillingly into a growing em-
pire. Her parents’ livelihood is crushed and
one of her fathers is killed. But when she is
offered a place in the imperial school, she
is too bright and curious, too hungry for
knowledge, to pass up the opportunity.
When they teach her that her parents were
perverts, she grits her teeth and vows to
stick it out and acquire enough eminence
within the empire to affect change.
Upon graduation, she is assigned to the
theatre of occupation. Aurdwynn is a. . .
landmass, a collection of duchies, a hotbed
of rebellion, the residue of centuries of
marching armies and competing empires.
The legend says it cannot be ruled. The
22
empire means to rule it, and sets Baru
Cormorant to the task.
Mr. Dickinson paints an extraordinary
portrait of this cultural mix. He realizes
the various parties as vividly as if he were
writing a story set in the Balkans, having
first studied their complex history and
their competing claims for territory or
dominance. The characters are stark and
strong, each with drives and loyalties and
weaknesses.
Tying all this together is a vision of
what empire is, the political philosophy
that drives and binds them all. You may or
may not agree with—or approve of—this
philosophy, but you will recognize it on
every page. I loved it. I nominated it for
both a Nebula and a Hugo. But let’s not go
there.
I did not, on the other hand, nominate
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
(Harper, 2012) to either of those accolades.
I couldn’t, even back in 2012. It is not an
SF/F novel, but unabashedly mainstream.
My only justification for including it here
is that Michael Chabon won both the Hugo
and the Nebula in 2008, and that accom-
plishment merits further fannish attention
to his writing, even if it isn’t always SF/F.
After all, how many Pulitzer Prize winning
authors do we have in our midst?
Telegraph Avenue isn’t a mystery ei-
ther, although it does have an ugly murder
lurking in the background. Rather, it is the
story of Brokeland Records, a second hand
record store. The owners have little in com-
mon to support their lifelong friendship
save a mutual love of old R&B. But that is
enough.
Archy was abandoned by his father, a
former martial artist and blaxploitation
film star. He has never ceased to feel that
ache in his life, not even in the arms of
wife Gwen and the expectation of their
first child. And yet, fifteen years earlier, he
blew off his pregnant girlfriend. On the
other hand, Nat—a moody, excitable Jew—
is a slave to familial responsibility. His fif-
teen year old son is uneasily discovering he
is gay.
Their wives—Gwen and Aviva—are
also partners, sharing a midwifery prac-
tice. Both believe in their work, as skilled
supporters of a basic and—usually—
simple, natural process. Although they are
keenly aware of possible complications and
quick to call in advanced assistance when
needed, they get no respect in the medical
community. In Gwen’s case, the disrespect
is often racist in tone, and she does not
take it well.
Brokeland Records is located in what
used to be a barbershop, and remains a
comfortable neighborhood water-hole,
where musicians and aficionados gather to
thumb through the stacks and linger
through the day.
The story erupts with the dramatic an-
nouncement that a huge music empo-
rium—practically a mall in itself (think
Virgin Records)—is planned for a location
not two blocks distant. Such an establish-
ment will surely bankrupt Brokeland
which is already less than profitable.
There are protests and political finagling.
And there’s a blimp. There are no grand
events here and no violence. The story
flows through the ordinary events and
23
challenges of day to day reality, displaying
the intricate complexity of life’s cycles.
Archy finds himself at the center of a
parable about parenthood, as his unreli-
able father Luther reappears, looking to
make a come-back and accompanied by a
lush and loyal co-star. Simultaneously his
estranged son Titus appears, sullen and
hostile, hungry for a father figure but too
angry to forgive the father he’s just found.
Generations shift as Gwen’s baby is
born and Archy’s surrogate father—a be-
loved local keyboardist—is killed in an ac-
cident transporting his Hammond organ.
Old secrets are dug up, political protests
are held, money changes hands, and par-
rots fly out windows. And don’t forget—
there’s that murder lurking in the past.
Archy just wants to bury his old friend.
By the time it’s over everybody's life
has been overturned, but most of the char-
acters have landed on their feet. If you are
looking for action, you will be disappointed.
If you are looking for meaning you will be
very pleased. The worst thing I can say
about this novel is that sometimes Mr.
Chabon tries a little too hard to be Thomas
Pynchon. Occasionally the literary flights
of fancy lead the reader away from the nar-
rative rather than into it.
This is supposed to be an SF/F column,
so I’ll conclude with Robert Chansky’s 100
Ghost Soup (Curiosity Quills Press,6). I
might not normally have chosen to review,
or even come to read this book, but while I
was at WorldCon, I had a conversation
with Mr. Chansky. Apparently I made a
good impression, as not long after arriving
home I received a request from his agent to
write a review. I was flattered, and more
than a little startled. I wrote back warning
the agent that I am not (alas, heavy sigh) a
famous author, and that TRF, although be-
loved, does not boast a large circulation.
But the agent wrote back, saying Mr.
Chansky still wanted me to write it, and
offering me a review copy. Apparently I
made a VERYgood impression
The first thing I did after reading it was
look up Mr. Chansky on-line to see if he
were Chinese. Yes, I know. I met him at
WorldCon. Along with hundreds of others.
But I couldn’t remember what he looked
like. I had to look him up. So why did I
care? 100 Ghost Soup is the most Chinese
book I have ever read, even compared to
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.
Mr. Chansky does not appear to be Chi-
nese. But he evokes China as thoroughly
as if he spent a few past lives there. It’s not
the landscape. The story takes place pri-
marily in a pile of construction rubble left
behind from a failed development project
in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes it
moves to a nightmarish maze inside a bu-
reaucratic office complex. And yet there is
a spirit of China (not to mention numerous
Chinese spirits) in every scene.
It starts with an orphan whose nick-
name (for he does not yet have a real
name) is Jimo—that’s Lonely in Chinese.
He’s received an offer of adoption. He can
see it’s suspicious; who would adopt an or-
phan one month before he comes of age?
And why does he have to go to the wilds of
Donxi, a town not on the map? A town
where even the train will not stop, accord-
ing to the conductor? But he is so desper-
24
ate for a home, for a name, that he throws
away all of what little he has to follow the
call. And when he arrives, the train does
stop.
He steps off into a different world.
Dongxi is not just haunted. The town itself
is a ghost, a psychic relic of a place that
vanished a thousand years before. The
residents are not just ghosts, they are
ghosts in disguise. Some are spirits pre-
tending to be ghosts, and some are ghosts
pretending to be humans. Some are hu-
mans pretending to be cows. Some of the
ghosts use magic. Some are hiding from
magic. Some are hiding from angry gods.
Nothing is real. Everything is illusion.
Illusion, however, can be weighty and
binding. Jimo feasts each night on deli-
cious meals, and wakes each morning so
hungry he scavenges through the construc-
tion rubble, searching for scraps. Nonethe-
less, these nonexistent dinners are so solid
that he learns to cook watching his
adopted mother prepare them.
Most of his life so far has been illusory
anyway. He's an orphan with no known
parents, and yet he has a brother. He’s a
nobody, but his keepers at the orphanage
spy on him obsessively. His records state
that he has no hands. He has hands. A for-
tune teller told him he would die before he
was thirty, by a gunshot to the head. He’s
never even seen a gun.
Jimo’s adopted father may starve him,
but he values him. He has a purpose for
him. Except that purpose is hard to dis-
cern. It is intertwined with other purposes,
buried under a thousand complications and
obligations, and threatened by the cross-
purposes of people he has never met. Eve-
rything in China is complicated and double
edged, from the brewing of tea to the
mountains of paperwork. Reality often
proves more difficult to penetrate than
magic.
The reader should be warned that this
book is not a fast, light read. According to
Goodreads, some had trouble with the Chi-
nese style. I did not, but I acknowledge it’s
not a good choice for killing an hour at the
airport or for using as a sun-shield while
dozing at the beach. The full story is solid
and satisfying but it depends on a network
of tiny elements too convoluted for synop-
sis. It requires full attention. Take your
time with it. Let yourself wonder about odd
details. Remember that bad manners are
always important. Enjoy.
P.S. I try to avoid personal comment
here. I figure it's my job to tell you about
books, and so I stick to telling you about
books. But I had to remark that my heart
went out to Helen Davis as I read her Can-
cer Journey. Some years back, my husband
and I had to walk him through his cancer
journey. I recognized so much of what she
was saying. The journey itself is so hard
that there can be no ‘happy’ ending, what-
ever the outcome. But I can promise her
that the journey can be successful, the out-
come worth the cost.
[Editor here. Note in the second install-
ment of Cancer Journey that Helen is hold-
ing her own in spite of the obstacles.]
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
Frank Denton
October 5 at 8:02pm
Hooray for Tom Sadler. He’s
given me a ton of pleasure over
the years. And they just keep
coming. Thank you, David, for
saying this, and thank you, Tom,
for continuing to publish an in-
teresting fanzine.
Gene Wolfe
PO Box 10708
Peoria IL 61612
10/10/16
Thomas D. Sadler
305 Gill Branch Rd.
Owenton KY 40359
Dear Tom,
Thank you for #113. The mention of Ha-
waiian shirts reminded me pleasantly of my father,
who wore starched Hawaiian shirts out at the
waist to hide the gun tucked into the waistband
of his pants. I have both his guns now, an auto-
matic and a revolver, both .32s.
Yes, I (an accredited non-genius), talk
to myself. Also to my dog. I generally ask her
what she thinks –maybe someday she'll tell me.
We fans typically do talk to ourselves, I think; we
are usually the only one around who reads.
Faithfully,
8 2 88 W Sh elb y S t a t e
R o ad 44 Franklin, IN.
401312016-October-10
Dear Tom,
Re: TRF 113
TRF is undoubted yours. If
you want to print your edito-
rials in red, go straight
ahead. DON’T use yellow,
it’s unreadable. But any editor who comes
out with “it’s my fanzine and I’ll do what
I want’ should be reminded that an editor
that forgets the readers might as well for-
get the fanzine. At minimum any fanzine
has to have interesting articles, a readable lay-
out and decent fillos & illos.
Wouldn’t mind seeing more science
-fantasy covers by A. B. Kynock but
(having worked in the print/graphics trade)
can tell you that cover must have taken a
month of Sundays to put together. Reckon
there are at least twenty layers and if the
aliens/pigs (or whatever they are) were cut
and pasted individually (doubtful) then you
can double the amount of layers and ques-
tion A.B.K’s mentality.
You made a slight mistake on page
5. The Cosmic Microwave Background is
not light, it's thermal radiation. [The mistake
35
wasn’t mine. I just didn’t catch it.]
And its discovery was
somewhat serendipitous. As
far back as 1946 Cosmolo-
gists had realized if there
was a big bang then would
also have been CMB cre-
ated later and still be de-
tectable but the idea was little known.
Then in 1964 Bell Labs had a Horn An-
tenna built to detect radio waves deflected
from Echo Balloon satellites but no matter
which direction the antenna was pointed it
picked up a ringing noise. So they went to
the boffins at M.I.T. who (knowing the
CMB idea) greeted Bell’s problem with great
delight.
The baby in a giant gas mask is from
World War Two. Fearing gas attacks
British civilians were issued with gas
masks and large, incubator size containers
for babies.
Wonder if Frederick’s piece on KIPM
will spark other articles on pirate radio.
In Britain in the Sixties pirate stations
were actually on ships and sea forts and
have quite a history, and there were one
or two that broadcast from within London
in the seventies. As well as a shipboard
religious station off the U.S. coast and
later a pop station that was closed down
by military action. All that would make
interesting reading.
As for dear old Mike Harding, he pre-
sented the BBC’s folk program for 15
years and was then sacked over the phone!
Having experienced “London Fog”
over two decades, have to agree 100%
with Eric’s assessment.
But it wasn’t just the air
that needed a cleanup.
The Thames was so pol-
luted that Parliament had to
be abandoned one day in
the ‘50s because of the
stench. Within 20 years the anti-pollution
laws resulted in salmon returning to the
Thames (and they will only swim in the
clearest of waters). In the ‘80s there
were cormorants at Woolwich, and now
there’s seals at Pitsea (by an oil refinery!)
and oysters are back in the Thames Estuary. Put
that in an SF story in the ‘50s and ‘60s and
it would have to be one where mankind
was no more.
With regard to Al’s mention of R. A.
Lafferty, at one convention he was seen
just sitting in a chair staring straight for-
ward, so much so that fans became wor-
ried that he’d died, until one brave soul
went up and spoke to him.
And Al asked, “Somewhere does The
Giant Rat of Sumatra still roam?” Who
knows? But the answer might be found
in The Giant Rat of Sumatra by Rick Bover,
The Giant Rat of Sumatra by Sid Fleischman.
The Giant Rat of Sumatra by Jake & Luke
Thoene, Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of
Sumatra by Allen Vanneman Sherlock Holmes
and the Giant Rat of Sumatra byPaul D. Gilbert ,
Sherlock Holmes’ Lost Adventure: The True
Story of the Giant Rats of Sumatra by Lauren
Steinhaueer, The Giant Rat of Sumatra: Sherlock
36
Holmes Fan Fiction by
Christopher Milner or
Lestrade and the Giant
Rat of Sumatra by M.
J. Trow And if Jerry or
yourself (or anyone for
that matter) wants to
find a decent description of Charles Fort himself
just read chapter five of H. Allen Smith’s Low
Man On A Totem Pole. Yep, the humorist who
gave us the Rhubarb series actually met Charles
Fort and attended ONLY meeting of the Fortean
Society.
By the way, it was Theodore Dreiser who got
Fort’s first book ( Book Of The Damned) into
Actually, Sheryl, kids weren’t afraid of the
Daleks, more like fascinated by them in an al-
most comical way, It’s difficult to be afraid of an
animated garbage can armed with a sink plunger.
Personally, was 13 at the time. At the end of the
first Dalek episode all you saw was the eye rod
from behind while Barbara
(Jacqueline Hill) screamed her head off. Jac-
queline Hill was a darn good screamer. And for a
whole week we were speculating about what it
would turn out to be.
Thought it to be a giant ant
Helen, we all hope and trust you'll
make a full recovery. The cancer journey
is long and hard but it's not the death sen-
tence it once was.
We’re all rooting for you.
Oddly enough, was volunteering at the local
Free Clinic, the day after TRF arrived (with
your article). Found out that one of the patients
who’d we'd sent to the local hospital for a mam-
mogram (paid for by the Clinic) had been found
to have Stage One Cancer. The Clinic will pay
off her chemo costs. Had the Clinic not been
there, the cancer probably
would have progressed past
the point of no return. So
she’s in with a more than a
fighting chance too.
Times like that the volunteers
get a substantial reminder
about why they are doing what their doing. Have
to admit it’s the ONLY altruistic thing I do.
From J Kaufman
Oct 11, 2016
Thanks for he new issue of TRF, with its odd
covers by A.B. Kynock, its intriguing old photos,
and its various journeys to Kentucky Civil War
sites, to ancient eras, into British culture, and
through cancer.
Other people may have already corrected
Dave Rowe in his assumption that Stu Shiffman
never won a Hugo—he got one in 1990. Grant
Canfield and Arthur Thomson on the other hand,
were both nominated (Grant about twice as many
times as ATom) but Dave is right that they never
got the rocket they deserved.
Surprisingly, or maybe not, I don’t have any
other comments on this issue.
Yours,
Jerry Kaufman
P.O. Box 25075
Seattle WA 98165
P.S. Could you change our mailing address to the
one above? We’re having a lot of mail theft in the
neighborhood, so the Post Office Box eliminates
that problem.
From M Stevens
October 13, 2016
37
Dear Tom,
In Reluctant Famulus
#113, you express some degree
of surprise that a meth lab
would be located in your rural
neighborhood. That’s where
most meth labs are usually lo-
cated. Even druggies don’t
want to put one of the damned
things in a heavily populated
urban area. When things go
wrong with a meth lab the re-
sulting explosion can take out
an entire city block. While I was still working, I
saw a training tape on the explosive potential of
one liter of ether. They put the liter of ether in a
junked car and detonated it from a considerable
distance. The explosion reduced the car to slag
and produced a column of fire about fifty feet
high. That was one liter. Meth labs have gallons
of the stuff on the premises.
Most crime is directly proportional to popula-
tion density. Ten thousand people in one square
mile produce more crime than ten thousand peo-
ple in ten square miles. If you want to avoid
crime, stay away from people. They’re no
damned good. Of course, some people are worse
than others. When you mentioned you had
neighbors living in mobile homes it was easy to
imagine what sort of people they might be.
Trailer Trash. The prejudice against people who
live in mobile homes seems to be quite general.
The idea of living cheaply doesn’t seem to be in-
herently wrong. Then you meet the people who
are doing it and realize you wouldn’t want to be
mistaken for one of them.
Mostly I don’t talk to myself. Not unless you
consider grunts, snorts, and monosyllables to be
talking. Since I live by myself, there are long pe-
riods of time with nobody to talk to. This has
never bothered me, since I
don’t mind my own company.
I may make verbal noises just
to inform the universe that I
still exist. Talking to cats is
another matter. Back in the
days when I lived with cats I
frequently talked to them.
Sometimes I would even argue
with my cats. It can be really
disconcerting to realize you
are losing and argument with
your cat.
If gravity really isn’t strong enough, it may
explain a great deal. Periodically, TV news tells
us we are getting too fat. We aren’t really getting
too fat. We are just compensating for insufficient
gravity. If we don’t eat some more doughnuts, we
may float off into space with dire results.
Yours truly,
Milt Stevens
6326 Keystone St.
Simi Valley, CA 93063
From M Stevens
From J. Thiel
Tom—Your description of Gill Branch Road
in the editorial gave me a spooky feeling. Then I
looked at the photo pages and the thought of Ark-
ham came to my mind. Indeed, there’s something
uncanny about the introduction to this issue. No-
ticing that it’s the September/October issue re-
minded me that Halloween is coming up; I sup-
pose your Introduction furnishes a further re-
minder. Spooky also is Frederick Moe’s article on
Mystery Science Theater—it reminds me of Dun-
sany’s “Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer”.
I enjoyed the science in the issue, your com-
38
ments on bosons and Al
Byrd’s comments in the letter
column about the solar system.
I am wondering if the
widely-known portrayal of the
fruit of the tree of knowledge
as an apple is the result of
writing the Bible down for
children in the Bible story
pamphlets they have in Sunday School classes.
These sometimes give the impression that they
were written BY a child, and it may be that it was
made out to be an apple because that’s the fruit
the writer liked best. Anyway, or the righteous
one, one, it helps indicate the discrepancy be-
tween Biblical paraphrasing and the Bible itself.
Grand cover. I thought it was done by Spore
when I saw it, but I guess that artist sticks to
Bems.
Nice to see the Famulus on the net, but I’m
glad to be receiving it in paper. I hate scrolling to
read.
John Thiel
30 N. 19th Street
Lafayette, Indiana 47904
From: Al Byrd
10/25/2016
Dear Tom,
Thank you for TRF #113. As always, it was a
treat for me to take it out of the envelope and en-
joy a fresh surprise of artwork. A. B. Kynock
gave you a fascinating wrap-around cover. I feel
that I should know what’s going on in it. Maybe,
if I gaze at it long enough . . .
It’s always disturbing to learn that a crime has
taken place in your neighborhood. Where I used
to live here in Lexington KY, it was an almost a
nightly occurrence for police cruisers to stop,
lights flashing, in front of the
house of some neighbor or an-
other. As in the case that you
mentioned, such a neighbor was
more often than not an aficio-
nado of better living through
chemistry. Now, Anna and I
live in a better neighborhood
where the only time when I’ve
seen flashing lights was on the night when, sadly,
a neighbor’s house burned down. It was dramatic
for us to watch a fire truck followed by a police
cruiser drive across our lawn . . .
Frederick Moe’s article on pirate radio broad-
casts was an engrossing look at a vanishing way
of life. He brought back to me memories of the
underworld of short-wave radio, in which friends
and neighbors who might now have vanished into
their computers to talk with those on the world’s
far side vanished into their basements to talk with
persons on the world’s far side. It’s good to know
that, like vinyl records, short wave is still hanging
on in its own niche.
I’m thankful for Helen E. Davis’s surviving
her experience with cancer. I hope that next year
for her is better than this one has been.
Michaele Jordan’s review of The Human and
the Shiver reminds me of an old saying from the
sf field: “In a story in which absolutely anything
can happen, who cares what does?” Sadly, I’ve
forgotten which critic came up with the saying, or
to which novel he applied it. Do you or any of
your other readers know the answers to those
questions? Dahlgren comes to mind, but maybe
just because it was so mercilessly reviewed by so
many.
New Ancient Earthlings continues to impress
me with the incredible diversity of vanished life.
Looking at a set of toy dinosaurs that I’ve kept
from my childhood, I can hardly believe how lit-
39
tle of that life it represents. I can’t imagine how
large a complete set of toy dinosaurs would be
today.
As you pointed out to John Purcell, he should
feel free to make snide comments about Ken-
tucky’s politics. Kentuckians have been making
such comments since the Commonwealth came to
be. Would Thoreau have said, “That government
is best which governs least, from which it follows
that that government is best that governs not at
all” had he lived in Kentucky? LAmen. Ed.}
I envy Robert Kennedy for having seen Mesa
Verde, given how much more spectacular pueblos
are under an open sky than they are in pictures.
Anna and I are planning a trip to New Mexico in
which I want to see Chaco Canyon, and she wants
to see living pueblos. I hope that I can somehow
work Mesa Verde into the trip. It would make the
subject of a fine article in itself.
Many thanks to Sheryl Birkhead for alerting
me to White Dwarf’s being available on You-
Tube. Someday, I’ll get the hang of all of these
newfangled apps, maybe when I get chipped.
White Dwarf, as she surmised, was a pilot for a
projected series and does have more world-
building than a standalone TV movie should’ve
had. Still, it was both engaging and quirky, and I
never complain about good world-building.
I hope that, someday soon, a WOW! signal
turns out to be that of which we’ve dreamed. I’d
hate to be right in my critique of the Drake Equa-
tion.
Thank you again for TRF113. As always, I’m
looking forward to the next ish.
Best wishes,
Al (Alfred D. Byrd)
From: Brad Foster
New issue of The Reluctant Famulus #113
has been here a couple of weeks, and...
yeah, I know, everyone is getting tired of my
“locs” of the past several months with me whin-
ing about eye problems, not having time, etc etc.
So, will spare you that now. Will just say: I think
am done with the final surgery, might have the
pressure under control in the eye, and maybe can
get back to semi-normal in the next couple of
weeks as heal up. Will promise to do better in the
new year. Really! So, here are two fillos to keep
my subscription paid up. I will try to do better
next year, I promise!
40
A few more old photos. I just couldn’t help myself.
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird , it’s a plane . . .
How about a donation the Old Weirdos
Association of America.
Come down from there this instant or else . . .
Now be a good boy and smile for the camera and
you can have all the flies you can eat. Okay?
41
Oh no! Can it be? Is there really another space
alien? More likely not. He looks too much like
Homo Sapiens.
The things people find and what they claim them
to be.
A chunk of aluminum is on display at the Na-
tional Museum of Transylvanian History in Cluj-
Napoca, Romania. It measures 7.8 in by 4.9 in by
2.8 in. It looks like something one might dig up
while excavating to put in a foundation for a
building. In fact, it was found in a 33 ft deep hole
by builders in 1973.
Also found with the metal piece were two mam-
mal fossils that were estimated to be anywhere
from 10,000 to 80,000 years old. Out of curiosity,
the researchers tested the metal piece and found it
to be 90% aluminum and around 250,000 years
old. Even the communist scientists knew this
couldn’t be true so they sent the metal to a lab in
Lausanne, Switzerland, where its age was revised
to between 80,000 years (same as the fossils) and
400 years.
The lab tests said it was old, but the analysis
needs some backup data or lab reports, which Co-
hal didn’t provide. So is that chunk of aluminum
thousands of years old and part of an alien space-
ship? A few more tests might give some answers
Instead, it’s on display in a museum, its “origin
still unknown.”
The interesting thing is that aluminum was first
produced in 1825 by Danish physicist and chem-
ist Hans Christian Ørsted. So what do you think it
really is?
Since we’re fans, among other things, and
read a lot of SF we’re bound to have read stories
about people from other planets have visited
Earth at times in the past and possibly stories
about crashed spacecraft we could almost believe
that the item was aluminum and part of a crashed
space craft. Of course the claim in the preceding
article neglects one important detail: where is the
rest of the spacecraft? Surely there would be
pieces found all over in the excavation. Realisti-
cally, the piece had to be less than the age that
was claimed. That’s it for now. See you later.
42