Poor Space Victoria. Captain Eleanor is gonna be the death of her yet.
For those of you who don’t know, This is Captain Eleanor, of the spaceship HMS Iolanthe, star of the comic Utopia, Unlimited.
Victoria is her long-suffering lover, friend, and humachinal bodyguard, programmed to keep her safe no matter how many people she has to kill. And, despite her looks, she’s very good at it.
Also, in Captain’s world, it’s next to impossible to visit Earth (off-limits to let the poor planet heal). So she’s taking advantage of this rare opportunity to at least experience a parallel Earth.
And Edison once visited the Iolanthe to get sober.
Next time: Eleanor confronts Larry and Stephanie and-well, there’s a surprise. Maybe more than one. You’ll see.
Kind of think “The Eleanor people like” is just not as catchy as the obviously superior “Soft Eleanor.”
I don’t think anything will ever top “Soft Eleanor.” Thank The Dread Pirate Queen Eleanor for that line. She wrote it.
I can’t speak for the germs and splinters, but what’s wrong with a few bugs? Nothing, I say. Bugs build character!
I see that wagon Edison jumped off has decided to chase her around. Good luck, she’s a quick dodger.
“Good luck, she’s a quick dodger.” An Artful Dodger, one might say. Yeah, she’s pretty nimble when it comes to staying off that particular wagon.
And bugs do build character, I suppose.As long as they’re not crawling on you.
Fun Fact: I will go out of my way, sometimes to ridiculous lengths, not to kill a spider. My mom read “Charlotte’s Web” to me as an impressionable youth, and ever since then I’ve been Mr. Catch and Release.
You may call it silly, but if a giant radioactive spider ever escapes from a lab and terrorizes my town, I know who’s gonna be safe…
Stories influence people. I dabbled for a while with trying to write. I’m pretty good with English and like my own writing, but gradually came to realize that I can’t write because I can’t think of anything that resembles a plot. But I digress. I read Heinlein’s last half dozen or so books, in which he refined the concept of “multi-person pantheistic solipsism” (and I can’t believe I remember that phrase without looking it up…), and convinced me that a sufficiently popular storyline will create a universe of its own. In other words, killing off random spear-carriers in a story in some universe affects a real person. This means I choke up when trying to write any kind of conflict in a story.
Ah, well. I still read as much as my eyes can stand.
Stories do influence people.
I’m in the same boat. I know the English gooder and like my writing, but I’m terrible at prose.
I know what you mean about the spear-carrier killing. James White wrote a Sector General story that really made me angry at him. It was kind of funny the effect a deceased author had on a fan.
I have a terrible time killing characters. It really shook me up when I had to do it in “Lyssa and the Pirates.” Sometimes you just have to report what’s happening, even if it’s something you don’t like.
I really liked the Sector General books and read all of them. And I’m more than a little annoyed that Amazon wants $12 each to buy them for Kindle. These aren’t new blockbusters! Hospital Station (book 1) was published in 1963, it says here. E-book prices generally tick me off anyway, as their costs are paying the author, the cover artist and the typesetter. A few pennies for incidental costs like hosting the purchase. But no paper, no ink, no printing, no SHIPPING, no disposal of unsold copies. How DARE they charge $11.99? Especially since I’ve already bought all these books once in paperback.
I’ll pay $11.99 for the 3-book starter omnibus, but I’ll be damned if I’ll pay that much for each novel. I need an e-reader now because I’m getting to the point where I simply cannot focus that small and e-readers have adjustable type size. I’ve mentioned, I think, that my personal dead-tree library would have filled at least four of your used-bookstore bookcases, if not more. And I can’t read them anymore 🙁
I’m so sorry you can’t read the paper versions anymore, Tru. Since I have a hard time reading electronically, I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t read paper books anymore.
I don’t know if the Sector General series comes in large type. Though it’d be worth checking with your local library. They can go to WorldCat (the world library catalogue. You can go there too) and look up large print books. When I worked at my library, I used it to find lots of novels in Russian for a patron. They might even have it in audiobook form.
$12 for the first three ombibuses (sp?) isn’t bad, if they’re the same as the print omnibusses. If so, you’ll get the first nine novels. But yeah, $12 for one novel? That’s crazy.
Then you’ll get the one where they go to the drifting space colony. That’s the episode that angered me so much I’ll never read it again.