Amber's Weird Library

What would it be like to live in a post scarcity society? Basic needs like food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, would all be universally met with minimal labor. Would safety be guaranteed? Would there be no crime? I had a dream about it one day that made me think about life in this kind of society in a new way.  I woke up on a couch in a dark room with black walls. There was a kitchen behind me, and I heard a couple talking. They talked about how they stole archaeological artifacts like a knife from Ancient Egypt or a Renaissance painting. The lady talked about how they needed to hide it before others knew they had it. He wished they spent more time in Northern France digging for WWI artifacts. I said that I was also interested in WWI artifacts and the woman became angry.  I noticed she threw her fancy leather jacket with exaggerated shoulder pads into a furnace under a counter in the kitchen. The man showed me his collection of silk ties and scarves in a closet nex...

  Does my lead deliver the most newsworthy fact? Have I attributed every claim that isn't common knowledge? Is every name, number, and quote verified? Have I given a fair hearing to every relevant side? Is there anything in this story I'm not sure about? I don't know where this comes from. But it is good advice

       All of the major social media sites prefer video shorts like TikTok and it is ruining my online experience.  Fun comedy skits and animal videos may dominate but the shorts that go viral are about social issues, usually a copied video posted with the poster's commentary.  The algorithms rewards discussions about airport fight videos or teachers losing it in class. They want everyone to share an opinion on a video clip of a policeman beating a criminal or the close up of a politician's wife to see if she is really a man. Though my favorite websites have devolved into this, I am still not nihilistic about the future of art and expression on the internet.       Twitter used to be my fun place to have discussions and test written ideas but now it has become more like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. They want Jerry Springer like drama and trashy short form videos or endless copies of cute animal clips. This isn't my imagination. On the...

I had a dream that the USA was attacked in several East Coast cities by nuclear bombs. People in towns outside of the cities still went to work like nothing happened. The dream took place in a roadside diner where workers were talking about leaving. They worried about the threat of radiation, but they also didn't want to miss work. Customers fleeing from the cities ran in looking for a place to rest before they continued, most not knowing where they should go. Some were badly burned.  One family that came in was a man and his family. The army was looking for him. He showed us videos of soldiers badly burned walking into the ocean while their skin fell off. The soldiers felt no pain and were smiling and laughing as their bodies fell apart.  The man wanted to take his family far away from the horror. He was planning to take them to El Salvador. I made plans to leave, and the rest of my coworkers supported me. We had one android worker that I asked to come with my family, but he ...

One evening as the sun was setting, I heard a sound I couldn't explain. It sounded like a roar, but it had no source. I didn't hear it with my ears; it stirred my soul. I was confused. Then it was over. I felt settled again. I heard the birds singing in the trees and the wind blowing through the leaves.  I didn't hear it again for a week and forgot about it. Maybe it was some kind anxiety attack. Maybe it was hormones. Then as I was rolling out my garbage can, I heard or felt or became one with that roar.  I looked it up online. Neighbors on message boards asked what it was. So, it was real.  A week later, at the same time, I went outside. Most of my neighbors were also outside. The roar started again. One of our elderly lady neighbors collapsed beside her husband. We rushed to help her. Someone called 911. Her husband said they were trumpets warning about the end of time. A week later, I sat on the porch waiting. I read on a message board that people were meeting near th...

SPOILERS AHEAD      More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon was published in 1953 and won the 1954 International Fantasy Award and a Retro Hugo in 2004. The novel is an important science fiction classic with ideas about the future evolution of humanity through the use of marginalized characters. Theodore Sturgeon's look into the possible future says more about the current world he lived in.      In America in the mid-20th century, a group  of misfits with secret superpowers slowly find one another. We start by meeting an abusive father who controls his young adult daughters. The daughters aren't allowed to have friends, must dress in 19th century clothes, and can't even get dressed in front of mirrors.  One day when one of the daughters was walking in the fenced gardens behind her home, she met a young lonely man drifting in the woods. This loner cannot speak due to an intellectual disability but never starves because he can secretly read and control...

The birds begin to sing on a beautiful spring morning in the trees below the castle on top of the hill.   The King is in his courtyard, rubbing his belly. His advisor by his side looking proud. The Queen is in her dark chambers covering a hole in the floor with some dusty tiles. Two knights tiptoe through the hallway as the light of dawn slowly pours into the windows.   The rays of the sun illuminate the face of the king's favorite statue from an ancient empire that leans against the wall to the right. The face is forever frozen in agony; a sacrifice made to an unknown god. His body contorted and covered with wounds.  The two knights tiptoe by softly laughing.  They hear a scream from the chamber to the right. They freeze and look into each other's eyes. They look at the statue's face. Then they run away to the end of the hall and down the stairs. They do not ask for help.  A maid runs out of the chamber, screaming down the hallway, tripping on the anc...

 Once I read that The Willows by Algernon Blackwood scared cosmic horror writer, H. P. Lovecraft, I knew I had to try it out.  The story follows two men canoeing on the Danube River aiming to reach the Black Sea. They reach an area between present-day Bratislava and Budapest devoid of human civilization and decide to stop to camp on a sand bar while the river swells because of flooding. There, they have a creepy experience with something not of our world, something hiding in the willow trees. Is it something supernatural or something that can be explained by science? It is more horrifying if it has a scientific explanation.  There is a mystical explanation for the creatures. Blackwood was into the occult and theosophy and believed in other realms. He believed that sometimes the line between our realm and the realm of the beyond is thin and things can seep through. That is why we see ghosts, etc.  However, if they are creatures from another dimension, a fourth dimensi...

     Millions of years in the future, when the sun is dying, the Earth has become tidally locked and attached to the moon with cob-like webs make by giant spider looking plants. Half of the planet is always in the daytime and half is always night. Most life lives in the perpetual afternoon . Plants dominate, they hunt, they fly, they hop, they graze, they even fight battles with one another. Humans survived but they look little like the humans of today. They are smaller and have green skin and live in matriarchal tribes hopping through the branches of a giant Banyan tree trying to survive the last years of life on Earth. This is the setting of Hothouse by Brian Aldiss a story that begins as one of survival in the afternoon on Earth but ends up being a deep musing on intelligence and humanity.       Hothouse was originally published as a group of short stories that won the Hugo Award for Short Fiction in 1962 . We follow a tribe of future humans as...

     Solaris is a planet almost completely covered with an ocean of a plasma material. Scientists from Earth have been coming to Solaris for years trying to research this ocean that seems to be one sentient being. If it is one sentient being, then the scientists hypothesize that they should be able to communicate with it.       Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, is the newest researcher from Earth to arrive on the station hovering over Solaris . He is there to meet three other scientists. He instead finds that one of the scientists has taken his life, one is hiding, and one is acting mysteriously and talks about visitors. Then after Kelvin enters his room, he sees his ex-girlfriend from 7 years ago waiting for him.  The problem is that she took her own life 7 years before.       This is the mystery that sets up the novel Solaris . The story is told from the point of view of Kelvin as we follow him on the station trying to figure out...

       After years of hearing about The Witcher I decided to give it a try. The Witcher books are now free for Kindle Unlimited readers so why not? I didn't think I would like it but it ended up being the kind of fantasy that I have been looking for my entire life. I even wrote a story similar to the first short story in the book The Last Wish as a teenager but hid it because I thought it was too weird.  (There must have been something going on in the collective unconscious in the late 1980's and 1990's.)  A similar story flashed in our minds, but, alas, I didn't have the confidence or talent of Andrzej Sapkowski.       I have also longed to read a fantasy story based in Eastern European folklore rather than in Western European folklore so that was an added bonus.      I was introduced to Geralt, the Witcher, in a very stereotyped beginning. The outsider in the tavern being challenged, he fights and kills so that the loca...

    WARNING: SOME SPOILERS       A wandering planet (planet comes from the Greek word meaning wanderer!) appears in the sky near the moon and causes destruction around the Earth. We jump around the world to see how this global disaster affects different people. It seems to affect most in a very sensuous way.     The wandering planet seems to make the people of the world seek to let their inhibitions go and become sexually free in a dated 1960's way. Older men seduce willing younger women in experimental ways. A man desires a cat alien from another species. Group relationships come out in the open. The scenes were probably fresh in 1964 but seem like they came out of an embarrassingly dated mod comedy today.       Free sex and rampant sexism aren't the only dated parts of the novel. There is also racism. One of the characters is a member of the KKK and three of the non-white characters are drug addicts treated as comedy rel...

      I am a little conflicted after finishing episode 5 of the Disney + series Alien: Earth . So far, the only human character I find interesting is the Chief Security Officer, Kumi Morrow of the Spaceship Maginot. That might be on purpose as he is probably the real protagonist rather than Wendy, the Android with the mind of a child. Or maybe that is a big fake out. None of the other humanoid characters really capture my attention. The aliens are the ones stealing the show for me.  I think this opens the world a little more and reminds me a little of Van Vogt's book The Voyage of the Space Beagle.    The Voyage of the Space Beagle follow the crew of men (there are only men) on their five-year mission to explore space outside of the Milky Way Galaxy. Along the way they encounter different aliens that threaten the crew in different ways like sucking the potassium out of their blood or laying their eggs in the men's stomachs. What makes the stories more...

First, I will list the stories by year, giving a short description and review of each.  WARNING: SPOILERS 1970- "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" by Samuel Delany -  This is a literary science fiction tale of thief and master impersonator, known by aliases that all have the initials H.C.E., rising from being a lowly crook to a wealthy criminal overlord in a vibrant interplanetary underworld.  He is being pursued by the Interplanetary Secret Service Agent,  Maud Hinkle , who mysteriously knows about his past, present, and future. We follow H.C.E.'s life using monthly criminal code words based on semi-precious stones, The story introduces the concept of holographic information storage which can unravel a person's entire life trajectory using a single date point. It brings up questions of self-determination and the surveillance state. This was my favorite story from the 1970's because the world Delaney created comes alive and the questions about ...

 We think of time as something linear- past, present, future. But what if it was a helix that spirals and weaves the past, present, and future together as a whole?  I am a middle-aged woman who grew up in a Conservative home in Tennessee. Now I have my own conservative home. We move a lot.  I wanted to write stories. I wanted my stories to be read by Levar Burton on Reading Rainbow. I wanted my stories to be read in universities. I wanted my stories to be read on my blog that has no followers. I didn't write them down. They aren't good enough. Earth- 21 degrees north of the equator in the Pacific Ocean. After I landed in Hawaii, I threw my luggage into my non-air-conditioned dorm and immediately looked for a job. I didn't look Polynesian enough to work at the Polynesian Cultural Center. Another girl got the position to tutor English because I never studied Spanish but studied Japanese instead. I ended up serving food in the cafeteria.  In between classes and before w...

     At the start of summer, I thought I had an easy TBR list: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. But as the summer unfolded, I found myself drifting into a drearier direction. (Though I did read and enjoy Dogs of War .) Instead of sticking with my "must read" science fiction list, I wandered into darker genres that fit the mood of my stressful summer - weird lit and horror.        I started this detour after reading the Introduction to one of my favorite books, A Case of Conscience by James Blish. The introduction was written by Greg Bear, another of one of my favorite authors. In the introduction, Bear compares A Case of Conscience to the horror story The Turn of the Screw . Like A Case of Conscience , The Turn of the Screw also has an ambiguous, unsettling ending so I decided to read it.  After finishing The Turn of the Screw , I became interested in finding more book...

         Strange is the night  where black stars rise And strange moons circle through the skies, But stranger still is                             Lost Carcosa        This haunting  poem introduces The King in Yellow,  a collection of weird tales, first published in 1895  by Robert W. Chambers.  The first four short stories reference a forbidden play called the King in Yellow that, once read, drives its reader to insanity.  (Warning, spoilers ahead!)      The first story perfectly sets the uncanny tone of the book by beginning in a New York in that takes place in an alternative 1920, imagined by Chambers in 1895.  After the USA and Germany ended a war over the Samoan Islands , the USA entered a new era of prosperity and beauty under a centralized government. "Everywhere good architecture was replacing bad, and even in...

Mild Spoilers :                 In H.G. Wells , The Island of Doctor Moreau , the main character, Edward Prendick, uncovers the horrific experiments of Dr. Moreau who was trying to uplift animals using vivisection . After a disaster on the island, Prendick is stranded for 10 months with Dr. Moreau's beast people, whose animal natures slowly resurface while they lose their humanity. Amid this, Edward finds a loyal and protective friend in the Dog man whose canine instinct drives him to serve his human master. What if scientists in the future could exploit this canine instinct for loyalty for the cause of evil? What if scientists created beast men as weapons of war?  The 2017 dystopian novel Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky explores this issue with updated science using genetics and cybernetics and how this would impact future human evolution.       In the near future, scientists have turned away from AI robots and ...

 Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky June is going to be very busy. I hope to read Solaris by the end of the month too . 

       The Golden Age of Science Fiction began in July 1939 when the story "The Black Destroyer" by A.E. van Vogt was published in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. This story later became part of a fix up novel published in 1950, The Voyage of the Space Beagle.            The Voyage of the Space Beagle follows a crew of 1000 chemically castrated men, on the starship Space Beagle on their five-year mission in inter-galactic space to seek out new life and explore new worlds. It is a reference to Charles Darwin's five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle. The story centers on the scientist, Dr. Elliott Grosvenor and his new science of Nexialism, a multidisciplinary approach to knowledge.       The Space Beagle meets up with four different alien species. The first one is a cat-like alien called the Coeurl that sucks the potassium out of its victims. The second is a bird-like species called the Riim with telepathic ...