Foreword: This story is fiction framed in ethnology. First published by Altair Magazine of Australia, which no longer exists.  The illustration was scanned from the magazine. Updated in 2010 to honor the Vancouver community, whose Canadian and First Nations societies evoked great beauty - a Navajo ideal; Navajo (Di’neh) being the ancient cultural cousins to the Nootka prior to an epic migration from the Vancouver region to the desert SW USA - with the totems and other symbols and artisans of human hope despite it all. The story is based on the surrealistic world view and social hierarchy of native...

Foreword: This story is fiction framed in ethnology. First published by Altair Magazine of Australia, which no longer exists.  The illustration was scanned from the magazine. Updated in 2010 to honor the Vancouver community, whose Canadian and First Nations societies...

There were many adjectives one could use to describe Laney Sul, with her laser cut black hair and her even sharper black eyes, with her quick hands and even quicker brain. Patient was not one of them. With six standards...

I hate hospitals. Most people do, I know, but with a family prone to cancer, hard drinking, hard smoking, and other forms of self-destruction, I'd spent far too many hours in hospital waiting rooms. Bad enough when it was an...

Science-Fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson was my student at University of California, San Diego, in the late-70s and early-80s, both in an undergraduate class and as a doctoral candidate: I directed his dissertation on character systems in novelist Philip K. Dick,...

It's coming isn't it? Why do you think so? You know I hate riddles, just tell me. What do you think is coming? Can't you just say yes or no? Why do you always ask me questions? So I can...

Maeldom candidus rex (MCR) had ruled a great portion of Planet Thrae since time immemorial. It had not always been that way, but with the passage of time, MCR was able to attach to his blanched exterior an arbitrarily, high...