Title: Behind Closed Doors - The Sam & Sybil Collection Chapter 6 
Characters: Sybil Ramkin/Sam Vimes
Rating: T, overall
Warnings: This particular chapter is set around Jingo
Disclaimer: They're not mine. All belong to the genius of Pterry.... I just take them out every so often and return *almost* the same as before...
Summary: Sybil finds domesticity harder than she thought.

Current Mood: artistic

http://365tomorrows.com/05/26/moving-forward/

http://365tomorrows.com/?p=4072

Author : D. R. Pinney

The other side of Ray’s bedroom door was the universe. A brilliant collage of billions of galaxies spreading out through all of infinity just over the threshold. The sight of it was so staggering that he fell back, an insane scream rising but failing to escape, like in a dream. He must be dreaming! When he realized there was no possible way that something like this could occur in the waking world his scream of unabashed terror left his lips as shameless, uproarious laughter.

‘Man,’ he thought, getting to his feet, ‘I must’ve fallen asleep downstairs with Star Trek on.’ It made perfect sense to him. When the conscious mind finally gives in to its exhaustion the subconscious acts goes into hyperdrive, dissecting all its backup data it received that day in wild and marvelous ways.

All day and night Ray had been filing his taxes. The new software he downloaded was supposed to make it easier but it only pissed him off worse than ever and the hideous glow of the screen gave him a troll-sized migraine.

Every few minutes he would look away from the blasted thing to the Trek marathon on one of the local broadcast station. He’d never been a Trekkie or Trekker growing up and all the series’ blended together in a Menagerie (wasn’t that the title of an episode?) of alien diplomats, planets that looked like southern California, phaser blasts, torpedo’s and cyborgs. He didn’t watch it because he cared much for whatever was happening on screen, it simply offered a little escape from the monotony.

At one point, when the concept of time had slipped from him, he looked up and saw a ship, which wasn’t the Enterprise, cruise through a vibrantly colored, unnamed nebula, sending the cosmic gasses spiraling out into space. The image was tranquil and surreal in the gloom of his dinky apartment.

He thought he remembered thinking, ‘There’s more out there than taxes and dead-end jobs. There are planets where they live for the beauty and awe of the universe that we ignore by filing taxes and downloading software,’ but wasn’t sure, he may have said it out loud.

All his life he had dreamed of doing things the people around him thought impossible. That didn’t necessarily mean space travel, maybe just Earth travel, he’d even settle for coast to coast travel. There were mysteries in the world he wanted to be a part of. But couldn’t. He had to be practical, that was what the world told him to do. Too many nights he wondered what would happen if he just tried it, took the first step forward.
Given the extreme pressure he had been under his subconscious had a LOT of room to stretch and really try things out once he finally surrendered to sleep.

He regarded the expanse of the incalculable number of worlds and possibilities they held with a wonderment he had never known. This was the sort of thing the word beauty was meant for and yet it fell embarrassingly short.

For a moment he hoped that he wasn’t dreaming. He hoped that he could step away from this comparatively minuscule space into the vastly enormous outer space. Perhaps he could catch a ride on a passing comet and visit the most distant burning emerald in the sky.

The notion filled him with enough pure white excitement that he felt he might fly there on his own.

“What the hell?” he said. “If this is a dream there’s no harm in trying.”

He closed his eyes and stepped forward.

http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/post/23737817722

G-G the book.

In honor of the Glorious 25th of May...

Art and Fic prompt claiming is now open for Disc Fest II (2012)

To view all the prompts, see the LiveJournal post or Dreamwidth post - and if you're interested in participating as an Author or as an Artist, make sure you read the Fest information at the bottom of the prompt claiming post.

*Feel free to publicize the Fest wherever you think there might be interest!

"FLASHMAN AND THE TIGER" (1999) Book Review

I wrote this REVIEW of George MacDonald Fraser's 1999 book, "FLASHMAN AND THE TIGER".

If you want to leave me good wishes, that would make me happy!

Current Mood: happy

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/05/quick-useful-sandman-slipcase-post.html

A hasty post...

There's a slipcased set of Sandman on the way. It's going to be published in November. I'm so happy. This is something that I have been asking DC to make for a very long time, and I am genuinely thrilled it's going to exist. It will look almost like this. (If you look carefully you'll notice that the final book in the box shown here is not The Wake. That's because that edition of SANDMAN: The Wake has not been published yet.)

(Here's the Amazon listing for it -- they've dropped it from $200 to $125. And I'm sure there are other such deals elsewhere on the web.)

DC are also going to be selling the Slipcase with some copies of The Wake. So if you have the rest of the  books already, you can simply put them into the slipcase.

According to Bleeding Cool, retailers have until this weekend to get their orders in for November to guarantee that they'll get them. So if you want one, either if you want a copy of The Wake with a Slipcase, or the set of all the books, you should talk to your Local Comic Shop now. (How do you find your local comic shop? You could always use http://www.comicshoplocator.com/)

(The current edition of paperbacks contains the same colouring as the Absolute editions, although, obviously not all the extra material in each of the Absolutes. If you already bought the Absolute Sandmans 1-4, feel proud of yourself. You are not required to buy the books again. You are never required to buy again what you already have.)

http://365tomorrows.com/05/25/technobabble/

http://365tomorrows.com/?p=4070

Author : Bob Newbell

“Captain,” exclaimed chief engineer Chen, “the quanto-gravitetic drive has been hit! If we don’t reverse the polarity of the phase rectification circuits within the the next three minutes, the magnetometric decouplers with be completely de-energized!”

Captain Rodriguez frowned. The sneak attack from a hostile Fomalhauti starship had taken out the SS LaForge’s primary warp field initiators. “Chief,” said the captain, “I need power from the quantum instantiation generators routed to the tachyonic transmitter array.”

“But, Captain,” Chen replied, “there’s no way the Heisenberg manifold can take that kind of punishment. The magnetohydrodynamic conduits will undergo an exponential quantum re-entanglement feedback before the Bussard ramjets can possibly compensate.”

The LaForge shuddered as she was struck by another Fomalhauti barrage.

“Captain,” said the ship’s navigator, “we just lost the monopole capacitors! The ship’s superluminal transrelativistic flux inversion sensors just went offline!”

Rodriguez slammed his fist on the armrest of his command chair. The situation was untenable. “That’s it!” he roared. “Chen, I want you to channel an anti-meson stream directly into the turboencabulator, even if it means sacrificing the entire photino containment chassis!”

Another shudder. Another Fomalhauti direct hit.

“Sir,” said Chen, “if I open the anti-meson stream to full power, then I can’t guarantee the singularity transducer won’t undergo a quantum tunneling cascade that will make every superconducting isoprocessor on the ship suffer a causality paradox.”

“It’s a risk we’ll have to take,” said the Captain. “Now, I want all the ship’s quark inverters set to–”

Captain Rodriguez never finished his sentence. A Fomalhauti missile destroyed the LaForge killing all aboard. A subsequent investigation by the United Earth Interstellar Defense Force Committee on Combat Operations resulted in a new engagement protocol being implemented. In all hostile encounters with the Fomalhauti that came after, all UEIDF starship captains were required, until such time as hostilities had ceased, to limit his or her orders to the words “Return fire.”

Cover art for my novelette "Faster Gun,"  (Working title: "John Henry Holliday is Sick of the These Time-Traveling Assholes") forthcoming on Tor.com this summer.

The artist is Richard Anderson.

Current Mood: pleased