Pipe smoker, gardener, poet, semi-reformed know-it-all, cat person. https://xitter.cf/t.co/0K6WmuMvtc https://xitter.cf/t.co/E5sQemugyr
Norway 🇳🇴
Joined January 2022
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My rule of thumb: If any ideology requires that the fundamental nature of man be changed for its political aims to be workable, run away like a flaming pig.
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Click this post for archive and 🧵 thread of threads below:
I'm working on a manuscript of English language poems. Some are translations from my earlier Norwegian books, some originals. My questions is: How many pages should a book of poetry be to deserve the name? I'm asking because I always felt Norwegian ones often didn't.
1/4
So when Gyldendal Publishing bought the rights to my first book I told my editor I wasn't quite happy with it. I felt it was a bit short, and there were too few really great poems. But he said anything above 60-70 pages was a waste, and 2 or 3 really good poems was enough.
3/4
Alexander G. Rubio retweeted
Today, I am recommending four essential works by Richard McKenna, a 22-year Navy veteran best known for The Sand Pebbles, who also wrote a handful of quietly brilliant SF stories about the mind’s power to reshape reality.
Casey Agonistes (1958): In a tuberculosis ward, dying men conjure an invisible mischievous ape as their defiance against despair. It’s a funny and heartbreaking short story.
Hunter, Come Home (1963): An alien world’s ecosystem resists colonization, and a young man must choose between his culture’s code of conquest and the planet’s strange, interconnected life This novelette is early ecological SF.
"The Secret Place” (1966): A wartime geologist hunting uranium in the Oregon desert finds the key in a lonely young woman’s childhood fantasy of a hidden world. This short story won the Nebula Award posthumously.
Fiddler’s Green (1967): Castaways adrift and starving in an open boat imagine a better place so intensely that reality begins to bend in this haunting novella.
Check out the quoted thread for the recommended works of Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, Bob Shaw, Clifford D. Simak, Algis Budrys, A.E. van Vogt, C.L. Moore, Cordwainer Smith, C.M. Kornbluth, D.G. Compton, Thomas M. Disch, Alice Bradley Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.), John Brunner, Judith Merril, Hal Clement, James Blish, Jack Williamson, Katherine MacLean, Fred Saberhagen, Jack Vance, Leigh Brackett, Edgar Pangborn, R.A. Lafferty, William Tenn, Kate Wilhelm, Avram Davidson, James H. Schmitz, Eric Frank Russell, Brian W. Aldiss, Carol Emshwiller, Wilson Tucker, Chad Oliver, Zenna Henderson, Pauline Ashwell, Frederik Pohl, Henry Kuttner, Barrington J. Bayley, James P. Hogan, C.J. Cherryh, Margaret St. Clair, Keith Laumer, Charles L. Harness, Howard Waldrop, Rosel George Brown, Gordon R. Dickson, Robert Sheckley, Fredric Brown, Kit Reed, Joanna Russ, H. Beam Piper, Daniel F. Galouye, Sydney J. Van Scyoc, Tom Godwin, Andre Norton, Harry Harrison, Vonda McIntyre, John Christopher, John Wyndham, Michael Bishop, Doris Piserchia, Bob Buckley, George Alec Effinger, Olaf Stapledon, John Varley, Miriam Allen deFord, Raymond F. Jones, Suzette Haden Elgin, Richard Cowper, Bruce Sterling, Josephine Saxton, Mack Reynolds, Phyllis Gotlieb, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Sterling E. Lanier, L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, George Turner, Octavia E. Butler, Philip José Farmer, Somtow Sucharitkul, Charles Sheffield, Sonya Dorman, Clark Ashton Smith, Norman Spinrad, Naomi Mitchison, Suzy Mckee Charnas, Barry N. Malzberg, Paul Preuss, Lloyd Biggle Jr., George S. Schuyler, Damon Knight, Nancy Kress, E.C. Tubb, John Sladek, Joan D. Vinge, Ward Moore, Marta Randall, Robert L. Forward, Ian Watson, Brian Stableford, Keith Roberts, David R. Bunch, Michael G. Coney, Frank M. Robinson, Christopher Priest, Vernor Vinge, Lee Hoffman, Wilmar H. Shiras, Lucius Shepard, David I. Masson, Mildred Clingerman, Leigh Kennedy, Ernest Hogan, Jack Womack, Kenneth Bulmer, Mark Clifton, Kage Baker, Murray Leinster, Evelyn E. Smith, Kris Neville, Edmond Hamilton, James White, Wyman Guin, Emil Petaja, John Boyd, Christopher Anvil, Alan E. Nourse, T.J. Bass, Colin Kapp, Edmund Cooper, Rog Phillips, Mark S. Geston, James E. Gunn, Walter Tevis, Maureen F. McHugh, John Crowley, George O. Smith, Cherry Wilder, F.L. Wallace, G.C. Edmondson, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Pamela Sargent, Robert F. Young, Fred Hoyle, Eleanor Arnason, Bertram A. Chandler, Charles Eric Maine, Tanith Lee, Kathleen Ann Goonan, J.T. McIntosh, Philip Wylie, and Tom Purdom.
Today, I am recommending four essential works by Tom Purdom, a Philadelphia-based science fiction writer and music critic who enjoyed a remarkable late-career run of more than thirty stories in Asimov’s.
Fossil Games (1999): Left obsolete by each new generation of genetic enhancements, our hero joins thousands of other under-enhanced humans fleeing the Solar System aboard a hollowed-out asteroid. Their voyage turns into a struggle over whether to settle a new world or push on.
Bank Run (2005): On a frontier colony world, a banker finds himself hunted by genetically altered mercenaries in the pay of a debt-ridden landowner who wants to seize his bank. He fights for his freedom with his wits and some white-knuckle financial maneuvering.
The Mists of Time (2007): Two unseen time travelers with clashing views watch a tiny Royal Navy schooner pursue a slave ship off the coast of Africa in the 1840s. A moving tribute to the Navy's campaign against the slave trade.
Romance on Four Worlds: A Casanova Quartet (2015): Four stories follow Joseph Louis Baske, a 21st-century Casanova whose love affairs draw him into intrigue on the Moon, Mercury, Phobos, and in the Kuiper Belt.
Check out the quoted thread for the recommended works of Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, Bob Shaw, Clifford D. Simak, Algis Budrys, A.E. van Vogt, C.L. Moore, Cordwainer Smith, C.M. Kornbluth, D.G. Compton, Thomas M. Disch, Alice Bradley Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.), John Brunner, Judith Merril, Hal Clement, James Blish, Jack Williamson, Katherine MacLean, Fred Saberhagen, Jack Vance, Leigh Brackett, Edgar Pangborn, R.A. Lafferty, William Tenn, Kate Wilhelm, Avram Davidson, James H. Schmitz, Eric Frank Russell, Brian W. Aldiss, Carol Emshwiller, Wilson Tucker, Chad Oliver, Zenna Henderson, Pauline Ashwell, Frederik Pohl, Henry Kuttner, Barrington J. Bayley, James P. Hogan, C.J. Cherryh, Margaret St. Clair, Keith Laumer, Charles L. Harness, Howard Waldrop, Rosel George Brown, Gordon R. Dickson, Robert Sheckley, Fredric Brown, Kit Reed, Joanna Russ, H. Beam Piper, Daniel F. Galouye, Sydney J. Van Scyoc, Tom Godwin, Andre Norton, Harry Harrison, Vonda McIntyre, John Christopher, John Wyndham, Michael Bishop, Doris Piserchia, Bob Buckley, George Alec Effinger, Olaf Stapledon, John Varley, Miriam Allen deFord, Raymond F. Jones, Suzette Haden Elgin, Richard Cowper, Bruce Sterling, Josephine Saxton, Mack Reynolds, Phyllis Gotlieb, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Sterling E. Lanier, L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, George Turner, Octavia E. Butler, Philip José Farmer, Somtow Sucharitkul, Charles Sheffield, Sonya Dorman, Clark Ashton Smith, Norman Spinrad, Naomi Mitchison, Suzy Mckee Charnas, Barry N. Malzberg, Paul Preuss, Lloyd Biggle Jr., George S. Schuyler, Damon Knight, Nancy Kress, E.C. Tubb, John Sladek, Joan D. Vinge, Ward Moore, Marta Randall, Robert L. Forward, Ian Watson, Brian Stableford, Keith Roberts, David R. Bunch, Michael G. Coney, Frank M. Robinson, Christopher Priest, Vernor Vinge, Lee Hoffman, Wilmar H. Shiras, Lucius Shepard, David I. Masson, Mildred Clingerman, Leigh Kennedy, Ernest Hogan, Jack Womack, Kenneth Bulmer, Mark Clifton, Kage Baker, Murray Leinster, Evelyn E. Smith, Kris Neville, Edmond Hamilton, James White, Wyman Guin, Emil Petaja, John Boyd, Christopher Anvil, Alan E. Nourse, T.J. Bass, Colin Kapp, Edmund Cooper, Rog Phillips, Mark S. Geston, James E. Gunn, Walter Tevis, Maureen F. McHugh, John Crowley, George O. Smith, Cherry Wilder, F.L. Wallace, G.C. Edmondson, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Pamela Sargent, Robert F. Young, Fred Hoyle, Eleanor Arnason, Bertram A. Chandler, Charles Eric Maine, Tanith Lee, Kathleen Ann Goonan, J.T. McIntosh, and Philip Wylie.
Alexander G. Rubio retweeted
Some abandoned Cold War military objects are very interesting.
Communist Yugoslavia built secret submarine tunnels like this one on Croatian island of Vis.
Vis was Yugoslavia's most heavily militarized island in the Adriatic.
During the Cold War era such naval tunnels were kept secret, with camouflage designed to blend into the rocky coastline.
The main purpose of this particular secret tunnel on Vis called Jastog Tunnel was to be used as a shelter for torpedo boats during an air attack.
Vessels could enter the tunnel, remain hidden, and sortie when needed.
Vis Island was restricted to foreigners and largely closed as a military zone by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) from 1945 until 1989.
Today, the island has more than 30 abandoned military buildings from that era such as underground command centers and artillery bunkers, and around 20km of underground tunnels.
The abandoned military buildings on Vis like the Jastog Tunnel are open to the public and can be explored by visitors.
In my opinion, very interesting Cold War aesthetics. It looks like something out of a James Bond movie.
Alexander G. Rubio retweeted
Křivoklát Castle is one of the oldest and most important medieval royal castles in the Czech Republic.
Its origins go back to the 12th century, when it was used as a hunting lodge for Bohemian princes. Understandable when you look at the magnificent forests surrounding the castle.
Then in the 13th century, the “Iron King” Přemysl Ottokar II, who famously pushed the borders of Bohemia deep into today’s Austria and beyond, further developed the site into a massive royal fortress and center.
Even the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV of the House of Luxembourg was held at the castle under house arrest as a child following medieval royal power struggles.
King Vladislaus II (Jagiellon) rebuilt and expanded the castle in the late 1470s, turning it into a grand Late Gothic royal residence.
Alexander G. Rubio retweeted
Africans who enrich Europe are needed at home.
Africans who do not are not needed in Europe.
Alexander G. Rubio retweeted
There is a work of history called "Philippica." It was written by a contemporary of Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon, a Greek historian called Theopompus.
The work is meant to be a history of the Macedonian Empire, but the author seems to have gone on various tangents, causing it to be a universal history of the world. It's 58 books long and naturally would be an invaluable source for the ancient world; it's also completely lost.
But a later, written Latin work succinctly called "Philippic Histories and the Origin of the Whole World and the Places of the Earth (Historiae Philippicae et Totius Mundi Origines et Terrae Situs)" by Pompeius Trogus likely draws heavily from it. It's somewhat shorter, 44 books long, so perhaps it is a kind of Latin summary of the work of Theopompus. Also like Theopompus' work, it's lost as well.
But an abridgment of this Latin version of the Greek history was made in the second century: "Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus" by Justin. It's "one-sixth the length of the original" and has been described as a "capricious anthology." Naturally, "the work was very popular at the time of its release, quickly overtaking the principal," and survives to this day.
Family picture taken on occasion of the funeral of my great-great-great-grandmother (had to do some math on that one) Maren Sofie Pettersen, who died at the ripe old age of 101 in 1930. My grandfather is 3rd from the bottom left, and his grandparents behind him.
Alexander G. Rubio retweeted
#FolkloreSunday
European folklore says that if a bat flies into your house on Halloween, it is a sign that your house is haunted.
It was believed that the ghosts would invite the bat into the house.
🎨 Tom Shropshire
Alexander G. Rubio retweeted
3/The eight-pointed star is directly linked to the astral worship of the Near East—specifically to the symbol of Ishtar (the Akkadian goddess of love, war and fertility)—as well as to the Egyptian deity Hathor. It appears to have been used as an amulet and an emblem of authority.
Alexander G. Rubio retweeted
It's a play, like so much of being human is, not in the sense of being dishonest, but being aware of the base animal forces, and tapping into it, while keeping up with the dance steps and the script.
"You're a whore, but my whore." xitter.cf/AlexanderGRubi2/status…
Alexander G. Rubio retweeted
Lord knows I have no problem with women being kinky. And I've no problem with them indulging it vicariously through erotic stories. But it IS porn. Most men don't issue TikTok ultimatums to people in their lives that they have to approve of their porn collection.
Alexander G. Rubio retweeted
The good thing about women is they follow the rules. The bad thing about them is the same.
"You have to bake the buns a bit longer next time."
"But the recipe says 15 minutes."
"Not every oven is the same."
"But the recipe says..."
"They're as white as a Welshman's arse, woman!"
Lord knows I have no problem with women being kinky. And I've no problem with them indulging it vicariously through erotic stories. But it IS porn. Most men don't issue TikTok ultimatums to people in their lives that they have to approve of their porn collection.