... until there are no more years left

XKCD again. Life is a balance between this moment and the hopes and dreams of the next. Somehow, we have to do both.

-JRS

Cold Hands

Copperwood Press has just released Jeff Duntemann's second anthology of short stories called Cold Hands and Other Stories on Lulu. Where his first anthology, Souls in Silicon, which I reviewed on GoodReads, deals with Jeff's AI fiction, Cold Hands and Other Stories collects what he describes as "everything else" - Spaceflight, aliens, religion, calculus, witchcraft, and Steam Locomotives. Particularly steam locomotives cobbled together from parts made by alien maker machines that were intended to be something else entirely.

To expand a little on that last bit, there are two stories set in Jeff's Drumlin world. I've read both the Drumlin stories included in this book (though Drumlin Wheel may well have been an earlier edit than the final one in the book). The Drumlin world is a planet nobody actually intended to colonize. Nobody even knew it existed, for that matter. Through a severe malfunction of their starship, however, a group of colonists did wind up marooned there, and they found it passing strange. Most notably, besides being extremely similar to Pleistocene era Earth, there are these alien artifacts called thingmakers that will make objects if you tap patterns into their drums…

It's an interesting world, and the more I delve into it (to say nothing of pestering the hell out of Jeff with questions and extrapolations on it) the more it's intriguing me. More on that later. Meantime, I've already ordered my copy of Cold Hands and Other Stories. and I have no qualms about recommending it on the strength of the two stories I've read, and of his other work. Jeff can Write. I'll post a review when the book gets here.

-JRS