Enjoying Jigsaw Puzzles Over Holiday

 

A few days ago, Melissa bought a Christmas-themed jigsaw puzzle for us...together with our grown children Will and Rebecca...to work on as a collective, fun effort.  We had a good time with it, and it turned out that Melissa and Rebecca each in turn gave me new puzzles, both pet themed.  I enjoyed doing both the dog and cat puzzles...the three ranged from 550-750 pieces.  For me it's a lot of fun to discern different patterns out of the chaos of the unassembled pieces and making them all come together.  Guess I'll now take a short break before tackling some more...

Just Finished Reading The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein

The Door Into Summer, besides being the title of a good 1967 Monkees song (with Michael Nesmith on vocals), is also a 1957 science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein.  In this story, Heinlein reverted back to his old love, which was writing about time travel and speculating about interesting scenarios that can arise from it.  Dan Davis is a talented inventor of robots living in 1970...the future from the author's perspective...and has just survived a limited nuclear war and the end of communism.  His future looks bright with his fledgling company and engagement to pretty Belle Darkin.  But Davis's business partner Miles Gentry and Belle conspire to take over the company and boot him out, leaving him with his only real friend left...his pugnacious cat Pete.  But Davis hasn't thrown in the towel: he makes financial preparations and takes advantage of the burgeoning market in "cold sleep", i.e. suspended animation, ending up awakening in the year 2000...way off there in the future.  There are all sorts of plot manipulations that happen...this is where I leave you, the potential reader, to discover what ensues.  But the bottom line is that Dan Davis uses both cold sleep and time travel to change his life and that of others, much in the same fashion that Harry Potter and Hermione Granger pulled it off in J.K. Rowling's third Harry Potter book, The Prisoner of Askaban...after reading Heinlein's book, Rowling didn't seem quite as ingenious to me as before...

The Door Into Summer has a humorous undertone throughout, and it's a book for cat lovers as the author most likely was one as well.  What stood out to me, besides the usual missed predictions about the future, was one that was eerily on target: Heinlein's (remember he's writing this in 1957) relating of the Stock Market Panic of 1987...which actually happened!  Another thing that made an impact on me was that the author, himself of no religious persuasion, seemed to be acknowledging the presence of a guiding intelligent force in the universe, one that enabled the time-travelling protagonist to avoid committing paradoxes by altering outcomes ever-so-slightly.  I enjoyed this book, but in all honesty prefer some of Heinlein's others...

Weekly Short Story Review: The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith

Paul Linebarger was one of those writers who used a pseudonym for his fiction...in his case it was "Cordwainer Smith".  His stories in the realm of science fiction, written in the mid-twentieth century, were all interconnected with his own imagined universe and timeline for future human history...and that imagination conjured up some very interesting and strange scenarios.  A great example is his short story The Game of Rat and Dragon, appearing in the collection Isaac Asimov Presents: The Great SF Stories #17 (1955) (DAW Books, 1988).  In it humanity is in full extraterrestrial exploratory mode, settling the far reaches of space after Earth has become unsustainable.  But once spaceships passed out of our solar system and into deep space, they discovered horrible psychic predatory monsters waiting in the darkness...only disposed of through bombardment with intense light.  A scheme was devised using telepathic partnership between people and cats...with the humans directing the missions and the felines, with their super-quick reflexes, attacking the enemy by setting off the light bombs.  This foe, lurking in the remote darkness, was envisioned by people as dragons and as giant rats by the cats.  So there's your scenario for this provocative tale...and what makes it provocative?

What intrigued me about it all, and might for you as well...especially if you're a cat-lover...is how the author explored the thought patterns of cats...and how they were translated to their human partners through the connecting "pin-sets".  It's really quite a brief story and I can't recall reading any other of this nature...and it's also very, very funny!

And here's some good news...you can read this story right now, through the following site from Project Gutenberg: [link].  Enjoy!