Weekly Short Stories: 1999 Science Fiction, Part 9

It's Wednesday and time once again to address what I've been reading in the realm of short science fiction.  The book I'm going through is an anthology, edited by the late Gardner Dozois: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection...covering short stories and novellas published in the year 1999. The tale I'm about to discuss might be termed a novella, and maybe just a long short story (or a short long story).  In any event, here's my reaction to it...

MOUNT OLYMPUS by Ben Bova

Ben Bova is one of those old-school hard science fiction writers who, like Robert Heinlein before him, envisioned what the emerging travel-to and exploration-of neighboring worlds in our solar system would be like in the years ahead of us.  You can learn a lot about astronomy and space travel from this particular story, which presents a fictional scenario about what it would be like to be on Mars, fly a specially-designed plane onto the surface of its massive, long-dormant volcano Olympus Mons, and then set out down into its caldera.  The story, written in plain language without some of those obnoxious literary pretensions I see in other writers, also seeks to be inclusive with the mission's crew, from different parts of the world and with their own special stories, motivations and concerns.  I found myself liking these people and rooting for them, much in the way I would for a Star Trek episode and its characters.  I wonder if Bova included some of those appearing in this story in any other material he wrote.  I liked Mount Olympus and wish there were more stories in the anthology like it...

Next week: more about short science fiction from '99...

Taking Physical Recovery a Day at a Time

I'm continuing to gradually make progress in my recovery from my March 6 prostatectomy surgery that removed a cancerous prostate.  It's a day-by-day process in which I have to be careful between resting enough to allow my body to heal and challenging it in small increments to recover its previous strength and functionality.  While this is going on, I have upcoming appointments, the first one in a couple of weeks with my physical therapist, and then...following a blood test to assess my PSA (protein-specific antigen) level that might indicate some residual cancer remaining in the body...a late-May meeting with my urologist/surgeon to determine my future path of treatment (if necessary).  But there's no point in me being concerned about any of this: through it all I plan to take each day as it comes and do my best with the time allotted me...sounds a bit like Gandalf's advice to Frodo, doesn't it...

UF Wins Men's Basketball National Championship

Congratulations to the University of Florida men's basketball team for winning the NCAA Championship Tournament tonight with an exciting come-from-behind 65-63 win over Houston.  The Gators were trailing at half-time and fell further behind early in the second half, at one time twelve points in back of the Cougars.  Yet as was the case in their previous two tournament contests, they mounted a comeback and squeaked it out in the end.  This is UF's third basketball national title and the first under coach Todd Golden.  Yet it isn't the same kind of feeling I had when Billy Donovan piloted the Gators to championships in 2006 and 2007.  It's a completely different world in college sports, what with the transfer portal enabling schools to take in established players from other colleges...this version of Florida hoops is full of such transfers, especially their star, Walter Clayton Jr..  And their coach Golden had Title IX allegations investigated earlier in the season...and then suddenly dropped without comment.  A lot of us aren't sure what that all means, except that they had something to do with women accusing the Gator coach of stalking.  That being said, Florida won a hard-fought, close and exciting tournament... 

Transformational Progress in Language Learning a Possibility for Me Now

Earlier today I set out as a goal to investigate how to enhance my ability to acquire new vocabulary in the languages I'm studying...with Russian and Spanish the primary focus.  I think I may have hit upon something transformational that provides me all the comprehensible input I require to make the progress I know I am capable of.  Now I just need to stick to a regimen that allows me to attain that progress.  I'll get back to you in a few weeks about this journey, which suddenly has become much more promising.  I give the Canadian polyglot (and my senior by more than a decade) Steve Kaufmann much of the credit for steering me in the right direction...he has a lot of good advice on his YouTube channel...

Walked Today's Depot Parkrun 5K

This morning I returned to Gainesville's Depot Park, a few blocks south of downtown, to participate in their weekly Saturday morning 5K Parkrun.  This event is free...you just need to sign up online to get your barcode so that your results can be posted.  Still cautious about returning to running just four weeks following my prostatectomy surgery, I heeded my doctor's advice and stuck with walking...albeit doing it quickly.  The weather at 7:30 race time more resembled that of June than early April...66 degrees with 95% humidity. But my walk went quite well with me barely perspiring and suffering no discernible loss of energy...I finished at 42:28: click HERE to view the posted results.  Next week I'm hoping Melissa walks the 5K with me...I always enjoy walking with her.  And then, in subsequent weeks, maybe I'll begin to mix in some running as I continue to recover...

Just Finished Reading The 5 Resets by Aditi Nerurkar

I have to admit it: I'm a sucker for personal development books, and there is no shortage of them. I also dig podcasts and YouTube channels with this theme...Jim Kwik has a good one.  Recently he talked with Aditi Nerurkar, the author of one such book: The 5 Resets.  So I checked out an audio version from my public library system's Libby app. As she puts it, our brain has two special sections that sometimes work at cross-purposes with each other: the amygdala...which processes danger and produces the stress "fight or flight" response needed for survival...and the prefrontal cortex...used in planning and seeing the big picture.  But people in this modern, digitally-obsessed world of ours today are suffering from unnecessary and harmful chronic stress with that amygdala co-opting their mental functions...she proposes five ways, or "resets", to curtail it and enable them to have much less anxiety and burnout in their lives: 

1--Get clear on what matters most

2--Find quiet in a noisy world

3--Sync your brain and your body

4--Come up for air

5--Bring your best self forward

Aditi Nerurkar has a great premise for this book, but I left it with a laundry list of "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts", giving it a sense of disorganization.  Much of the material I was already familiar with.  Don't multi-task, take breaks with your work, do breathwork, practice mindfulness, cultivate an attitude of gratitude, don't try to change too many things at once, eat well (Mediterranean diet), exercise, get a good night's sleep, prioritize your life according to what's most important, avoid being overly digitally-dependent, and so on.  I enjoyed the book, and perhaps the greatest benefit I drew from it is just that sense of affirmation and enforcement of what seem to me to be pretty common-sense ideas. Now wouldn't you know it, Jim Kwik himself has written his own book, titled Limitlesd, and of course I just had to check out that one, too...I'm reading it now...

Maybe "Greatest" Rock Band List Should be Rephrased as "Favorite"

Whatever the algorithm or AI on Facebook happens to be, it has decided that I'm a rock music fan, especially interested in the classic rock of the twentieth century.  So I get a lot of posts on my newsfeed about this genre, much of it about the Beatles.  The other day I got a post on it from Forbes Magazine listing the 30 greatest rock bands of all time.  Okay, let's see what they've got.  Uh-oh, the Beatles were only listed at number two: sorry, this list is bogus.  Still, the top band in their estimation, Led Zeppelin, happens to be my own list's runner-up to the Fab Four.  Where I have the biggest problems with this list is how highly they ranked acts I dislike and then omitted some of the best ones from their list.  But it's all subjective anyway...better to present a list like this as their ranking of "favorite bands" instead of "greatest bands".  Forbes had Queen at #3...okay, I generally like them but not that much.  R.E.M., my all-time favorite American band, wasn't even on the list...neither were Yes, Soundgarden, the Police, Beach Boys, Moody Blues, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Doobie Brothers or Pearl Jam while several groups I dislike...like Van Halen, Kiss, Oasis, the Clash, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Journey...were on it.  I guess to each his or her own...here are my top ten favorite rock bands:

1 THE BEATLES

2 LED ZEPPELIN

3 R.E.M.

4 RADIOHEAD

5 THE POLICE

6 THE DOORS

7 THE WHO

8 YES

9 THE MOODY BLUES

10 PINK FLOYD

Weekly Short Stories: 1999 Science Fiction, Part 8

I'm still plodding through the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, which presents his picks of the best stories from the year 1999.  Today I'll discuss the next two in the book...

SUICIDE COAST by M. John Harrison

The author examines two converging trends in society: the compulsion of many to engage in daredevil activities, with the rush provided by the experience feeding into an ever-intensifying addiction, and the emergence of virtual reality and gaming, on a scale here so realistic that the story's final paragraphs turn that reality completely upside down.  A little hard to follow, this tale, but that ending was impressive...

HUNTING MOTHER by Sage Walker

As in the previous story, the author here combines two different ideas.  One is how people would survive...without declining...on board a multi-generational spaceship travelling to the stars for eventual settlement.  The other is the notion of genetically modifying humans by grafting onto their genes the genetic material of certain animals.  I found this tale a little depressing and too "far out" in more than one way as a dying mother, one of those genetic scientists on board this vast ship, has to deal with her own son, modified with predatory instincts (and claws) of a cougar...

Next week: more SF from '99...

Looking Back after Four Months of Retirement

It's now been four full months since I left my job at the United States Postal Service and began retirement.  Unlike a few of my predecessors, I have never had the slightest urge since then to take up any part-time paid work.  I do not miss in the slightest having to brave the often horrendous daily city traffic as I used to, arrive at my workplace, and then spend hours surrounded by cameras and spy windows trained on the workroom floor (and me) while enduring alpha male supervisors with pecking order complexes.  That said, my main (MDO) supervisor was thoroughly wonderful and I do strongly miss working with her, as well as with the overwhelming majority of rank and file people who have blessed this organization over the years.  As for the actual work I did, I treated it seriously enough to allow myself to get somewhat upset whenever something went wrong on the part of others...which was often enough.  For the most part, I was allowed some autonomy in my work, which I appreciate.  No job I imagine is completely stress-free, and mine was no exception.  Still, I liked the structure of discipline it imposed on my time, although since leaving there I have been replacing it with my own personally fulfilling projects.  Soon after my retirement, a reunion celebration was held at a local Mexican restaurant near my home, but I didn't attend.  I'm glad I didn't, after seeing the posted photos showing who all was there.  Sure, there were many good people, but also a couple of not-so-good as well. Since I retired I have had absolutely no desire to visit the place or know how things are going there.  Absolutely none.  During COVID, I felt that the people running this facility took a dangerously lax approach to the pandemic, and the decision to export our processing to distant Jacksonville only hurt customer service while limiting employee options.  I was also tired of a few clerks over the years obviously being hired on a special fast track into management, given special cushy assignments and the run of the building with little accountability, in contrast to the rest of us who had to wait our turn on a register and often have to wait for years to get a preferred assignment.  But here I am now, on the other side of all that...   

My Running and Walking Report for March 2025

For the first five days of March I practiced running some at home, but following my surgery on the 6th, I have been told to cool that kind of activity for at least six weeks to allow for healing.  But walking? That's okay, but I didn't really resume that more moderate activity with any gusto until the catheter into my bladder...inserted 11 days before and the source of a bit of restriction and pain...was finally removed on the 17th.  Since then I've walked three of my 3.3 mile loops around my home neighborhood, and even managed to do a Depot Parkrun 5K walk this past Saturday, the 29th.  When I do resume some running...I'm looking right now at the last half of April...it will be only light, limited jogging-in-place within my home: no racing anytime soon.  Besides the walking I'm been doing this month, I've also been engaging daily in a no-impact exercise I created and dub "rock-running", whereby in a standing position I rock back and forth simultaneously on my feet, balancing the motion by thrusting my arms forward and back.  It accomplishes my goal of getting myself into a zone of increased heartbeat, moving my body and doing some minimal resistance work (without weights).  My recovery from the surgery at this writing seems to be going well enough...I just need to have some patience with it all.  I'll probably go back to Depot Park two or three times next month and continue walking the course...

My Songs of the Month for March 2025

March, by all accounts, should have been a month in which I listened a lot to music.  After all, I had my prostate cancer surgery on the 6th and, for the most part, have been taking it easy at home recovering from it.  But it's not as simple as it used to be when I was younger and we had a number of radio stations to easily tune in to for the current hits.  Let's see, back in 1973 my songs of the month for January, February and March were You're So Vain (by Carly Simon), Love and Happiness (by Al Green) and Hummingbird (by Seals and Crofts).  In this digital information era it should be easier to find good rotations of current hits...but other than Gainesville's local pop music station WYKS ("Kiss 105"), which plays a lot of (in my opinion) insipid, uninteresting music, there is no alternative rock station playing today's songs...and I'm just not attuned to country or hip-hop...although I kind of dig songs that fuse them with rock.  True, 100.5 WHHZ plays alternative rock, but they're focused more on past hits, as are other local classic rock and oldies stations.  Instead, I have been relying on channels on my Amazon Music account.  Here's my list of favorites for March '25, overlapping quite a lot with the ones from the previous two months:

1 UNDER THE RUG by Arcy Drive

2 STARBURSTER by Fontaines DC

3 ZERO SUM by the Smile

4 BESTIES by Black Country, New Road

5 EVERYONE OUT by Diiv

Under the Rug has a magnetic, old-time rock sound to it...nice to hear that hasn't completely fallen by the wayside.  But if I were to pick a "song of the year" for 2025 so far, it would have to be Starburster...

Walked Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

It's been a little more than three weeks since my prostatectomy surgery, and although my physician does not want me running until a few more have passed by, he has encouraged walking.  So on this Saturday morning I walked the four-lap course through Depot Park, a few blocks south of downtown.  It was 60 degrees at the 7:30 race time with a 90% humidity.  My intention was to do a brisk walk, but not try to set any personal walking records either...after all, I'm still recovering and healing.  As it was, it was relatively easy to cover the distance this way, finishing at 44:52...enough to pass Stephen King's standard of 4 mph in his dystopian novel The Long Walk but more than six minutes slower than my 5K fastest walk. It's been a while since I last did a Parkrun...six weeks ago was the previous time.  There were a lot of people in the park today, and not just for our event.  But although it could be annoying at times with some other participants carelessly crossing my path, making me pivot to avoid colliding with them, I did enjoy getting back to the old routine.  I did not sweat a single drop during the walk nor did I experience any pain or fatigue.  Until the "okay" to resume running comes my way, I guess this walking will have to be the theme of my Depot Parkrun participation...unless, of course, I choose to volunteer some Saturdays there instead.  Click HERE to view today's results...

Major League Baseball Regular Season Now Underway

The official opening day for Major League Baseball's 2025 regular season began yesterday...although more than a week earlier it actually started in Japan with a two-game series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs.  Baseball is one of those sports that I can have on the TV and watch, with it not being important if I find myself distracted with another activity.  I find it interesting how the broadcasters show an imaginary virtual strike zone for each pitch...and how, just as often as not...on the close pitches the plate umpire calls it wrong as a strike or ball.  I think at this juncture that I'm pretty much cured of the notion of having a favorite team to follow...just get a game going and I'll figure the rest out for myself, and it doesn't matter how lopsided the score gets.  Baseball is a game that I have never personally played, although in physical education class in high school we did softball...I was a pretty decent singles hitter but never had any training with fielding or pitching.  In those classes I always had, as an "instructor", jock coaches who just got games going without teaching anything about the sport...and the kids who played in leagues outside school naturally dominated (and got higher grades). I remember back in the late 1970's and early 1980's how the "Superstation" WTBS, under Atlanta communications tycoon Ted Turner, would show every Atlanta Braves game live.  Now, though, that sort of service is solely reserved for paid premium subscribers and if I want to see baseball, I have to accept whichever matchup that they feel like serving up.  No problem, but I do get a little tired of seeing, for the overwhelming part of 2-3 hours that make up a typical game, all these multimillionaires just standing around doing nothing, the only consistent workhorses being the pitcher on the mound and the catcher behind the plate...

Kudos to UF Men's Basketball Team, Now in Elite Eight

My congratulations go out to the University of Florida men's basketball team as they have advanced all the way up to the Elite Eight in the NCAA 2024-25 championship tournament after putting on a strong second half to defeat Maryland, 87-71 earlier this evening.  I remember following the Gators' two (consecutive) basketball championship seasons much more closely (2005-06, 2006-07) and can even recall their starting lineups from back then...I know hardly anyone on this year's team.  Yet they're Gators, my alma mater, so "go team go" as they like to say.  Florida will play Texas Tech on Sunday for the West Regional final.  The winner will be in the vaunted Final Four.  Looks like some of Florida's old conference rivals, like Auburn, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky, are headed that way, too, with this weekend's remaining games to sort much of that out. And then there's Duke and Houston, two schools that could easily win it all.  Should be fun to follow...

Weekly Short Stories: 1999 Science Fiction, Part 7

Well, this month it hasn't exactly been weekly short stories on this blog...the last time I wrote this Wednesday feature was exactly three weeks ago...the day before my prostatectomy surgery.  But here it is again, and I'm picking up where I left off by discussing the next tale in the book I'm currently going through: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, edited by the late Gardner Dozois and featuring his picks of the best sci-fi from the year 1999.  Once again, I encountered a novella, this one by the renowned writer Frederik Pohl...

HATCHING THE PHOENIX by Frederik Pohl

Pohl was a major figure during the fabled Golden Age of science fiction in the twentieth century, a contemporary of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein.  Like them, he tended to write in a plain, easy-to-follow style that also reminded me of writers in other genres like Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King...this has sadly become more difficult to find in the genre of science fiction.  Hatching the Phoenix is just one of many stories in Pohl's fictional Heechee universe, in which an alien race, thought extinct, has bequeathed to a future space-faring humanity its advanced spaceship technology.  This story is told in the first person by its protagonist Klara, a super-wealthy investor/entrepreneur who reminded me of a more human and less fascist Elon Musk.  Klara is sponsoring and overseeing a special project, using black holes and gravitational mirrors, that has sent a ship, the Phoenix, to the original star system that was the site of the supernova explosion in 1054 AD creating the Crab Nebula.  The intention behind the project is to determine whether intelligent life had evolved on any of this system's worlds before the supernova wiped it out.  There's a lot of interpersonal relationship stuff in this story, and Pohl managed to slyly inject a bit of humor in it all.  But what impressed me the most was his prescient depiction of "shipminds"...similar to Clarke's 2001 Hal...that eerily predicted where we all seem to be speeding willy-nilly toward in our present times: near-total dependence on artificial intelligence.  Hatching the Phoenix was long, but an enjoyable read.  Wish I encountered more stories written this way...

Next week: more science fiction from 1999...

Little Victories in My Recovery

I'm plodding on ahead with my recovery from the prostatectomy surgery on March 6, savoring little victories as I go along.  For example, although I'm not supposed to run for a few weeks as this would interfere with my healing from the operation, I can walk...I'm encouraged to do so. Still, I'm not trying to speed-walk like I was doing before entering the hospital.  No, but I still try to maintain at least a moderate pace although if I'm walking with others, I'm only too happy to follow their pace.  This morning I decided to go out into my home neighborhood and walk my 3.3 mile loop course.  It was 71 degrees with 61% humidity...not quite as cool and dry as I would have liked, but I realize that as spring progresses it's just going to get worse.  I had no problem finishing the course (at 54:18) and never felt any pain or loss of energy.  It was fun to get out in the sun and go down all the familiar streets, greeting others as I passed by them.  Little victories, I think, are indeed important in a recovery like the one I'm experiencing...

Just Pick a Side

Hard Rock, the entertainment/resort company that is prominent in my home state of Florida, has recently been airing a slew of TV commercials, some featuring recording artist Post Malone, that tout their online "service" allowing players to gamble on sports.  I suppose that if you're into that, then good for you...it's just that much easier to put your hard-earned money on the line.  So in this vein I see a company responding to a demand within the population that satisfies them.  I see other companies likewise doing this.  For example, many addicted cigarette smokers welcomed the advent of vaping, which did away with the carcinogenic tobacco elements they would breathe when "lighting up",  but which still provided them that craved nicotine effect.  Again, a demand met by companies' innovations...good for them, again.  Where I have a problem, though, with both of these examples is when the companies go out of their way to create new "needs" among the potential consumer pool that previously did not exist.  Making vaping seem cool to young people who never touched a cigarette in their lives is like this.  Or go back to Hard Rock, expanding the gambling to generally ignorant folks who don't know enough to at least make an educated guess about who will win or lose a sports contest.  With them, their latest pitch is a gimmick they have on their app whereby participants can still lay down their money and bet by simply "picking a side".  It all sounds so fun and inclusive, or at least that's how the ads make it look: come on and join the party!  But here again is a company expanding its consumer base to create a need that simply wasn't there before.  I guess, though, that's the essence of advertising, isn't it, to make the fool targeted potential consumer feel somehow inadequate or less than acceptable if they don't climb aboard with the company's agenda...  

Update on Pathology Report After Surgery

The pathology report on my surgically removed prostate and lymph nodes was posted on my medical portal online Friday evening...supposedly, the urologist who performed the surgery on March 6 is going to call me on the phone tomorrow to discuss it and my path forward.  Melissa, who is a registered nurse and understands the often arcane jargon presented in laboratory reports and summaries, concurred with me that this pathology report had some very good news.  The prostate was substantially compromised with an aggressive form of cancer: this was expected...and obviously, not the good news.  The good news is that it is now out of my body and the lymph nodes...the first destination of such a malignancy on its way to metastasis...have been analyzed and determined to be clear.  Now I'm a cautious person in many respects, and I would rather hear this all straight from the doctor's mouth.  So that's where I'm at right now, waiting for that call.  In any event, I will be having a blood test to determine my PSA (protein-specific antigen) level before my follow-up visit to this urologist in late May.  The PSA level has with it a relatively high correlation with the probability of cancer, so that test will be pretty important with all of us hoping and praying that it will be very low... 

Unsportsmanlike Behavior Among Professional Athletes and Coaches

I have been watching sports on TV of late, mainly golf, tennis and basketball.  I have to tell you, it kind of grates on me whenever I see an athlete or coach get overly angry about something and begin to act like a baby in front of the camera.  Not naming anyone specifically, but these are top-level figures who have achieved a reputation for quality in their respective areas.  It's one thing to pitch a fit on the court or greens because your shot went wide or you didn't get the call you wanted...sometimes that kind of behavior is rationalized as a way to motivate oneself or teammates to play with more passion.  But I've also seen how some of these, after the match or game has ended, refuse to participate in the traditional congratulations with the other side and/or attend press conferences.  I know that, in at least the professional sphere, athletes and coaches often have the responsibility of making themselves accessible to the press written into their contracts, and as such should consider this as much a part of their "game" as what transpires during the competition.  So, no, I don't like to see folks lose their composure while playing, but that's a lot more understandable...in the midst of heated, intense competition...than just storming off in a huff after it's all over...

A Week After My Prostate Removal Surgery

It's now been eight days since I underwent anesthesia and surgery to remove my malignant prostate at UF Health here in Gainesville.  Since then, my recovery has been a bear, but I'm making good progress so far in spite of the pain, discomfort and limitations on my bodily functions and mobility.  After discharge the day after the six-hour operation, which employed laparoscopic robotic surgery to remove the prostate and some surrounding lymph nodes, I've been at home with an established recovery routine...and my dear Melissa to care for me.  We're also grateful for the well-wishes and food train donations from some of our cherished friends.  This procedure requires the temporary insertion of a Foley catheter into the bladder afterwards...very annoying but so far I'm withstanding it well.  It's scheduled to be removed this coming Monday, and afterwards it will be another fork in the recovery road as I use Kegel exercises...and time...to eventually regain my ability to control my own bladder.  The prostate and those removed lymph nodes are in pathology now, with the latter being tested to confirm that, indeed, the cancer had not spread to them.  If it has, though, they have a treatment program with that, too.  I guess my two main concerns during this phase of recovery have been the restoration of digestion and excretion, shut down during surgery due to anesthesia and inserted CO2 gas, and dealing with pain and the agents used to alleviate it.  I feel I'm now finally at the stage where I can rely on over-the-counter pain relief like Tylenol and Aleve without needing to ingest the prescribed drugs that can have their own side effects.  So far, so good with all that, but of course I have to take things from one day to the next.  Ever since the morning after surgery I have been ambulatory, with no difficulty in walking.  Of course, anything like running or resistance training is a matter to be delayed for a few weeks.  I thank everyone for your concerns and prayers, and I am indeed grateful to live in such a time, place, and circumstances that would enable me to enjoy such high-level medical treatment...