Hi, Jeff Patterson here. Jeff Patterson, 11 on Twitter. Welcome to another episode of Three Horsemen, and welcome once again, always my co-host, Fred Giesh. Good evening, Jeff, and welcome in spirit, our third co-host, Mr.
John Stevens. I'm going to sign once everyone. Hats off to the ochre. He's not dead.
Well, let's hope not. Just moving slower. Yes. John, we miss you, buddy.
Yep. We agreed. So what's new, Jeff? Not too much.
Had to go to the launch party for Chuck Windig's new book, Wanderers. Got to meet him for more than five seconds. I met him once in San Antonio for five seconds, but I got to meet him in person. That was neat.
That was my nerd moment for the week. And aside from that, I've just been doing some reading and some writing and some researching and all that fun stuff. So what are we going to, what kind of trouble are we going to get into tonight? Well, I wanted to talk about some books.
Okay. We haven't talked down books since we have returned from the depth of obscurity. And there's been a couple books on my radar in my hands and on my shelves that I wanted to mention. I had astute and avoided reading space opera for a while while I was writing one.
And I finally decided to, it was time to crack one open. The first one I elected to open was The Outside by Ada Hoffman, which is this wonderful, weird crossover between space opera and sort of Lovecraftian horror, cosmic horror. Oh, that's a rich field. Yeah.
Lots of good stuff like that. Yep. And it's pretty interesting. Lots of post-singularity entities flying around.
And I'm about six chapters into it. And it's got a gorgeous cover. Got to cover, got to cover one's an award for something. I had read her stuff in, I believe she had been in Asimov's a couple of years ago.
And I really liked it. So yes, I picked it up and started following her on Twitter and lots of really creepy imagery and lots of good spaceship tech and lots of good far future transcendent tech as well that I'm really into. Who did the cover? I'm actually trying to look that up right now.
And who's the publisher? It is Angry Robot. Okay. Lots of good stuff from them.
So yes, let me check on that. Okay. So the cover was by Lee Gibbons. Okay.
And it is gorgeous. I have to ship in the wake of all these giant constructing metal tentacles. Very very cool. But yes, it's nice to read a pretty trippy space opera in 2019.
The last one that had really blown my mind with the way it was playing with technology was the Apotheosis Trilogy. I'm not going to remember who wrote that, am I? Asstandre Swan. That's all right.
Yep. I love those books and this book felt a bit like that. Next on my pile, I was going to be Lyndon and I got Edges follow up to her nanotech succession books because those are still some of my favorite 90s space operas. I had been doing some book shopping both here in Atlanta at the Fine Booknook bookstore and also up in Chattanooga at the Fantastic McKay's bookstore with its cavernous interior.
And I spent several hours up there and I walked away with a few things and I walked away with a lot of things which is a few things that have actually been on my mind lately. One of them is found a copy of The Soul Singer of Ternos by Art of Mayr. And I knew I had read some mayr. The Fussy Book maybe?
It could have been that. It could have been that. But the thing that I sort of remembered as I was rereading this was there was a point where I would actually look at the spine of a book and see that it was an ace fantasy in the early 80s and there were all these slender volumes that had these spectacular covers and they were real trippy fonts and layouts. And I didn't have this book but I knew I had some others.
And they always did such a gorgeous job of presentation and fonts and the way things were laid out. And I started reading it and now I'm actually finding myself in a mood to go back and revisit a lot of those little ace fantasies from back in the day. But also Art of Mayr, my gosh, you could write the hell out of a scene. And yeah, the book really, I read it in a hotel room up in Chattanooga while it was up there and it really knocked me down a couple times.
And a lot of it has to do with the fact that there's such a fine grain structure to the way the sentences are done. And it had been a while since I had seen that level of craft work going on in a book so small. It reads like a much larger book. Yeah, Mayr died in 2012.
And her output was pretty impressive. And she also has a sizable following of her stuff on Goodreads as well. Two other things that I wanted to talk about real quick. Number one was another one of my used books.
Finds that made me very happy was a Starblaze edition of Fire from the Line Dark Sea by the author who came to know his SP sometime under his original name. And I always grew up his last name. I had always heard it as Sukaruru, something along those lines and apologies if I'm mispronouncing that. But it's a book of short stories and collections that was put out by Starblaze which is pretty wild illustrations too.
Illustrator is down here as Lindarin and so it says, yes, there's interviews, there's some partial scripts, there's some short stories, several of which I had never read before. And gorgeous edition, I found this at Bookmook fairly cheaply too. It was put a Donning Company publishers were the ones who put out Starblaze. Donning Starblaze always had beautiful books.
Yeah, the cover itself is back to me. Really, really nice. And my other big used book find was also from Bookmook and this was last week it was the first ever used copy I had found of Alan Moore's Jerusalem. And it was a hardcover and they were letting it go for way less than what the books sold for.
And trust me, I had been looking for one because I knew there were several different editions of this. The big trade, the big floppy trade, the two trades in the box set. And I had been, every time I had read the ebook and I had listened to the audiobook and I said, you know what, I want to see what are the odds of finding a copy and a used bookstore. And it finally happened after a couple of years.
So that's the one with the really nice maps in the was it the end covers? Yes, the end papers by John Colthart, that was the map in Northampton. And I started reading the first few chapters and then I put it down and I said, nope, if I start this book again, it'll take me way too long. And I've got other things I want to read too.
One book that I read several months ago, but I do want to recommend everybody. If you have not gotten it, is the anthology The Future's Female, which is edited by Lisa Yassick, who is here in Georgia. And you have to go to the launch party for that as well. She was doing sort of a history of women's involvement in science fiction.
There are 25 stories in it. A lot of them I've read before, see Elmoore's Blackout's Kiss, Only a Mother by Judith Merrill, Pelop, M. Schweller. And there were a couple entries in here that I was really happy about.
She reprinted Mr. Sakhrasen's Halt by Mildred Klingerman. I'm a huge Mildred Klingerman fan. I think I've gone through three copies of her book collection, of her short story collection.
And it was nice and there. It was an Asina Henderson story that I don't think I have. Today, People's Story or something or other? I'm not remembering.
I just remember that when I picked it up. Oh, it was there a rat. It was there a rat. So, yes, I read that.
That was very good. And the book that's currently looming on my radar and I have read, you know, I haven't gone through the table of contents. I'm familiar with a lot of the stories here. But once again, there's a lot of stories I have never heard of before is Big Book of Classic Fantasy by the Vandermeer's.
And just looking through the table of contents, I'm going, I have no memory of this. I had the exact sensation reading their book of the weird and reading their Big Book of Science fiction. And I commend them highly for the way they put these massive collections together. But I'm looking forward to jumping into this bad boy.
Once again, there are stories by authors that I'm familiar with, but the stories that I've never heard of before. So I'm looking forward to getting lost in that for a bit. Yeah, those collections are always bargains considering how many pages they are versus the price. Do you have the physical copy or the ebook?
I have the ebook. It will probably break down and get a physical copy just to match the other two. Because I've gotten for punishment that way. Sure.
You don't expect to be moving any time soon, I assume. Oh, wait. Now is it this point. So what's been in your grubby little hands there?
Well, a bit of a follow up to our last episode in that it feels like it was almost immediately after we recorded the episode where we talked about DC, you know, shutting down vertical and stuff. DC said they're shutting down Mad magazine. So I mean, I never never bought Mad that much when I was a kid. I mean, a lot of my friends did.
So I read it that way. I mean, talk about a vast, vast imprint upon the youths of many, you know, kind of say that we can't support something as odd as that. Yeah, it was funny because this last weekend, the episode of Senguli that was on the TV had a clip of him actually meeting the artist who did the Senguli skit in Mad magazine, eight page parody of the show. I remember them.
I think it was 60 minutes that a story on them once where they visited them and they talked about all the odd stories like how they went to. It was like something weird like America, Samoa. They went to the one guy you've subscribed there because he was going to drive his subscription and they wanted to persuade him to keep on subscribing. You know, I just remember lots of classic parodies like, you know, they're taken on 2001 and what, Planet of the Apes and I mean, Dirty Harry and Kung Fu, you know, the TV series and all sorts of stuff.
So a tip of the hat to Mad and then something that I want to bring everyone's attention to over at Tor.com, friend of the podcast and someday we'll get them on here. Fabio Fernandez is covering Jean Wolfe and he had a introduction article for the reread and then the first major bit of coverage was the Fifth Head of Cerberus, which is a trio of novelttes put together under one cover. It's not a novel. It's not a fix up like say, a fan vote would do a fix up of a bunch of unrelated stories and change the characters and stuff to make it all quote unquote one book.
I mean, it's three related stories, but it's not been rewritten to fit into one novel. And I think I first read the first one in like orbit number one or orbit number two, one of the first orbit anthologies, the annual anthologies that name and night came out with that my library, bless its little heart would buy every single edition that it came out and I would be like one of the first people to read it. I have no idea if anybody else in that town read any of these, but I always was. So the Fifth Head of Cerberus and actually right before you called me tonight, I was finishing up the first third of that book.
So I'm already behind in his planned reread because he's just came out with a second article, this time covering Jean Wolfe's rather odd little book piece, which was something that we planned to cover at some point. We never got around to it. So maybe someday if we can. I was not in the mindset to read that book when we were thinking about doing that.
I had great difficulty and I went back something that John said while we were talking about the potential of doing that episode. I went back and I started reading it and this time my brain was a bit more tuned to it. Well, someday someday we'll do some gene wolf or other oddities because it means the funny thing is the next thing about Jean Wolfe is in addition to what Fabio does is that he's the subject of I've got two podcasts in my feed, one called Alzobo Soup and I'll include links to everything. The other one is the Jean Wolfe Literary Podcast and they both cover his stuff in detail.
I mean, short stories, the novels Alzobo Soup just finished the first four books of the Earth cycle. The Jean Wolfe Literary Podcast covered things like Source Wars House and even the great never reprinted novel of Operation Ares as well as a lot of the short stories. So that's been fascinating to read the short stories and listen to their coverage. So those are recommended and then there's the Earth mailing list, which I've been a member of since I think the 90s.
It's been a long time and Jean Wolfe is one of three people that I like reread multiple times and I'm members of three mailing lists that are devoted just to a single author. That would be the Jean Wolfe mailing list, the Patrick O'Brien mailing list and a mailing list devoted to Thomas Pinchon. So it's odd that all three are authors that you can read and reread and discover new things. If you listen to the audio book versus reading a paper or electronic copy and see two of the three have had movies made from their stuff.
I can't imagine, I know it's been rumored on a couple of occasions that there'd be an Earth movie or things like that, but I'm not holding my breath. So hats off the Fabio for doing this and I recommend everybody read it over at Tor.com once again I will include links of the stuff that's coming up so far. And I can't say that I've really gone as crazy as you have in buying anything, but I did score one quote unquote rarity by Isaac Asimov, an easy introduction to the slide rule, which for some freaking reason I have no idea considering, I mean especially in paper back, it is a skinny book. But if you look at some of the prices of the used copies, you're like, what, why is this so expensive?
Luckily I lucked into this one for really cheap. This is a lot of X library. Good condition to have it in paperback, but I wanted the hardcover because the paperback is really, I mean you could like look at it sideways and lose it because it's so skinny. It is a short book, but I am a no longer quite so obsessive collector of slide rules.
I mean back probably in the 1990s I bought a lot. Back in the 1990s there was a whole lot of, there was a lot in the market. Now it's a lot harder to buy them. And then like when I was going to move into another mechanical device, mechanical calculator, that was when William Gibson wrote Pattern Recognition and talked about the CURDA calculator.
And all of a sudden those became totally uncollectible by ordinary mortals like me because they became too damn expensive. So that was my one book, book purchase in quite a while of the used market. Just haven't seen anything really that I wanted to go pursue. I already have Alamoore so you know, holy I'm a dwarf somewhere.
So a couple, I mean one bit of news that people may have missed is that I got laid off last November so I was out of work for several months. I'm back to working once again underemployed but employed. So my reading rate has fallen off but I really, I would manage to get through 37 books so far this year Jeff. So you know for a while there I was really burning through it.
And I mean we talked in the past how I kind of fallen out of love with reading and it was mostly because my job at that point was reading and reading and reading legal documents and you know hundreds of pages long and helping implement changes and reading other contracts and vendor treatments. And so you know I was getting kind of burned down on reading. So I'm trying to fall back in love with reading and as such I've read a couple of classics again this year like for example Andre Norton. I reread The Time Traders and Galactic Derilech which are two of the four books in her Time Traders series and this is I mean if you like Stargate and stuff like that I mean it's the book was revised I think after the Cold War was over but I mean it is a product of the Cold War where the Soviets and the Americans have developed time travel and they're trying to basically do a Cold War in time.
So you've got these teams of agents that go back into the past and dresses the natives or the inhabitants of that particular era and blend in because they're trying to track down there's extraterrestrial technology that has shown up on earth and you know it's clear that in like part way through the first book that aliens have crash landed on earth so there's a race between the Soviets and the Americans to get some of the technology. So it's a fun series I mean her books are very short but they're very fun. She has a lot of great characters I mean they're all you know the books of the era for young adults you know what we would call young adult fiction now you know it was mostly roughly teenage boys I mean if you think of like a lot of Robert A. Hyland of the period Max Jones was could have been a teenager even though he wasn't you know so it's a lot of that kind of thing but you know she's got really sympathetic aliens interesting plot a lot of history a lot of different cultures her universes like in her more space operate type stuff like Star Rangers you know very well realized for Zero Stone you know there's like these ancient races that loom over the present day not everybody's a rich person I mean in Zero Stone the character is basically a beggar so you know I really enjoy her stuff and then I will put a link in the show notes but I read or reread speaking of William Gibson pattern recognition twice this year because I was on a panel with the incomparable the parent podcast we talked about that book and Blue Ant and you know began the main character and Casey with her weird allergy to brands and things like that so you know that was a double reread and I may get through the other two books of that trilogy this year but I'm probably gonna try and finish up his new book or I mean it's not so new anymore except for God to it yet before the next new book comes out even though that's been delayed a couple times is now allegedly coming out in January so I really ought to read the first one in the link series before the second one in the link series comes out you know once again I suspect he is going to accidentally come out with the trilogy even though he swears you never never starts out writing a trilogy they always seem to end up that way that I read three books by Glenn Cook because he got around to writing a new book in the black company series so that was a good excuse to start rereading the black company series and once again I mean the black company and Shadow's Linger which are the first and third books wonderful stories especially Shadow's Linger which is got I mean black company is kind of like your straightforward fantasy military type of setting with you know big battles and stuff like that magic and battle magic and whatever but then Shadow's Linger really turns the whole thing on the head and it becomes a really creepy horror story with this castle that basically eats people so you know that's a good story but then the weird thing was the one in the middle the new one I mean I was kind of disappointed I mean I really love Glenn Cook but this one he just had stuff going on that I mean the basic premise of the story or one of the big big premises the story is that the black company gets hired by the big baddie who is opposed to the really big baddie but unless she's a big baddie and they're working for her but then they decide to work against her by helping another match line to be known as the white rose so the various characters in the black company have the secret that they know that the white rose is out there I mean go after the one source was known as the lady but in Port of Shadows the new book the main character Kroger basically is psychically influenced by various people who work for the lady but manages somehow to not let loose the big secret that he's been carrying and it just it just didn't feel right to me so I don't know what the story is I mean I think he's working on another new book this was an expansion I think of one or two stories so maybe it's just it should have saved a short story rather than been filled out I'm not sure maybe it'll grow on me with a reread but it was a little bit of a disappointment that I did read to or reread in both cases to buy Jean Wolf before this whole reread by Fabio was announced I read reread the Shadow of the Torturer which is the first book of the Earth cycle just trying to as Jean Wolf is an author again like Thomas Pinchon and Patrick O'Brien the other two I mentioned earlier I think he's an author that bears reading and rereading because you discover new things whether it be I mean especially this cycle he really dealt deep into the language so you know you can spend time reading something that you look up the words you're like ah you know that's what he means and there's a lot of illusions too I mean he's often called a Catholic writer I don't personally find he's very Catholic in his writing but he does use a lot of Catholic references like saints so you look at the main characters and you can find the names of saints and you know you and you look at the lives of that saint and see if it is reflected in the writing usually not but you know it's a fun little puzzle then the other one that I read by him was stories from the old hotel which is a collection mostly because of the Jean Wolf literary podcast they are covering a lot of the stories so I'm trying to reread all the short stories or read ones that I've missed as they cover them so that I'm kind of familiar with the plot once again before I listen to the episode of podcast then I did a reread of George Algefinger when gravity fails which is a classic cyberpunk story in a very different setting than the usual kind of US you know cityscape this is set in the Middle East and I'm not sure how much he came up with I think he came up with them what they call the motties and the daddies which are like personality implants you know definitely it's got this whole feel I think of I don't say Casablanca crossed with what's the other classic Blackbird I'm Altis Falcon you know it's just this you know this weird psychopathic murderer going around and main characters hired to find him and there's you know a lot of a double crossing going on and people skipping out on town and leaving him holding the bag and you know him getting beat up and so it's it's it's a great and war kind of tale and then the two others I want to mention is I started rereading again you know trying to get it back into love with reading John McPhee who was not science fiction is nonfiction as a matter of fact he wrote a series of books which were collected in one big big big book called Anals of the Formal World which is about geology and the original intent of the book was he was going to drive across the United States following route 80 exploring the geology of the United States with different geologists and the first book is based in the range and it's worth it in that book just to read there's like a 30 page long table of contents a narrative table of contents and it's just the the the writing is musical you know just the whole way he describes geology and it's definitely not a science book where you know you're going to learn about clients and anti-clines or betting or whatever with diagrams or whatever but it's just a wonderful way of importing knowledge without making it painful and finally I've been working my way through the works of Clifford D.
Symak years and years ago this small press was going to do all the short stories of Clifford D. Symak and they sold subscriptions and for the collections and I foolishly went out and bought a subscription to the whole thing and it delivered two volumes never came out with the rest even though I wrote for years and years to email them and complain a bitch to bone and they said they would oh yeah we'll reimburse you they never did well luckily the short stories did eventually come out from another publisher and I've been working my way through the collection so I reread a new folks home which the title story is this judge or lawyer who's you know retired gets hurt and fall you know finds this robotic house in the woods which heals him and it turns out that it's part of a galactic law kind of network where you're called upon to help render judgments upon intergalactic cases so the story ends with him rereading or starting to read all these galactic wall books so he is ready for his new life as a you know as a galactic judge I mean that you know it's Symak was what was called a pastoral writer and you know some of his stories are very pastoral I mean but some are not there's a lot I mean the way this the series this collection is I think twelve volumes ten volumes they kind of go chronologically actually I'm not even sure they do chronologically but they include everything and he's written some real dogs I mean they include his westerns and I like I just can never get through any of them but then there's stories like the thing in the zone or there's the one about the paleontologist who discovers you know he goes into the cave and finds these freshly painted paintings and it turns out that the guy who's been working with him is actually in the enter fall who somehow or another became immortal so you know he makes a friend with someone every now and then just so he has someone to talk to so you know there's a lot of that kind of very poignant stuff that Symak probably broke when he was kind of young but he was able to obtain either between the pastoral stuff and the sense of a poignancy you know do the agent or whatever you know I mean his book the Goblin Reservation is one of my favorites at the Weerwolf principle City of course is a classic collection which became a fix it fix up novel so you'll always be worth worth rereading some Symak every now and then so and there's you know a couple dozen other books and we'll see where I go for the rest of the year I'm heavily reading a lot of history World War II history right now and rereading the gene wolf and I even goodness helped me listen to the mccato of five different versions of the mccato over the weekend so now now I'm reading a book about Gilbert and Sullivan because I mean I have like a couple books of lyrics but I'm reading a book about the London of Gilbert and Sullivan so there you go you never know where I'm gonna go Jeff that's all you know it's funny you mentioned Andre Norton the artist may our book that I got the ace fantasy so you might remember the back page of Ace of Anisees always had the order forms yep oh yeah you get other books and the one on the very back pages for Andre Norton and the Defiant Agents goes for a buck 95 yep and Storm Over Warlock goes for a whopping 250 and you had to cut out the bottom of the page and send it to the Ace Science Fiction Book mailing service right a dollar for postage and handling if one book is ordered 50 cents per book if two or more right and then you had to add your own sales tax now to write your address in on a piece of paper and on the opposite side of that is more science fiction adventure from Ace and we got World Warlock in spite of himself by Chris Dashiff oh my goodness. We're by Niven Rachannon's World very slow lagrin and Highline's Expanded Universe goes for a whopping 395 so this was from the highlight or the high point of Ace right before the market fell out that time which was like maybe a seven or so was one of the more. No this is an 8-3 edition yeah but I recall it was like 85, 86 at the market like it floated yeah but you know they had they had so many nice trade paperbacks that was when I got the a really nice trade paperback of Piper Federation yeah I came out with the rest of HP and Piper stuff and yeah it was like the trade paperbacks of the various magic books by Niven and you know all the illustrated stuff heavily illustrated stuff.
I think I actually ordered a bunch of pole Anderson stuff through one of these coupons I have this weird memory of it I had read something it might have been fire time I forget and it was a fire time fire time is del Rey or balanced on the del Rey but aced it to the flandry the Nicholas Von Ryn and a bunch of the independence they had a lot of pole Anderson yeah and I just remember finding reading one and finding that thing on the back and I just but there's no pictures of the covers it's just the titles the author and the price right oh god I'll show up he's the sick right and this is in my adulthood too this isn't even in my childhood I'm reading this yep that's crazy wow that's okay that's a lot of work to go through to order a black man that's well no that's you know it's the the act of reading and the act of obtaining books both in physical space and and you know the online stuff which didn't exist when we were first got into the the fever a shabbat of buying every science fiction book that we got our hands on right it's a weird I read it's first when did you first have a book store within let's say walking distance oh within walking distance I didn't but when I grew up in Springfield Mass the bus that came one block from my house would drop me up in front of Johnson's bookstore in downtown Springfield which was a two building two story massive bookstore that also did art supplies and it was there that I found you know it was there that I got my my del ray catalogs back in the 70s it was there that I bought foundation and Lord of the Rings and Dune right and they ended up expanding their science fiction section when when del ray and ace and all those guys were really picking up the pace in the wake of Star Wars when you know they realize I was a market for it so they actually built a larger science fiction section and every Wednesday we go down there after school and see what new books came in and then you know we had Walden's and Walden books and I don't think we had be Dalton where I was and of course there you could actually you know go up and order a book they'd let you order books at Johnson's Duke it took them so long it was such a big place it was like an old school department store you know but yeah so I got into the habit of ordering books that they didn't have on the shelf and once again they would you know I'd say hey is the new you know catalog by certain publishers out and they would say yes and and in the case of del ray you know we talked about this before del ray catalog was full of all those great reprints that they did right and you know best of collections that they did and that was my first taste of CL more in Cordo English Smith and writers like that who weren't you know currently publishing and then I'd read the back of Galaxy magazine and they'd have book reviews and they would talk about these new books by people and I would go I've never heard of this book this is an interesting idea I want to read this and I'd go off and go off and order it but yeah just walking into the Johnson's book store and looking around the science fiction section that was that was browsing at the time well if the kids don't mind an old guy talking I mean T.N.E.K. New Jersey there were no bookstores until we moved out in 1970 there were two magazine stores that had some books like I got a couple books that way that's for example where I got Jerome Angels the making of the Kubrick's 2001 there was a supermarket kind of the next town over Hackensack and they had a rack and that was where I read Doc Smith they had those wonderful Jack on covers on I read the whole series was where parents would go on Saturday the shop they would just like drop us at the book thing and I would fork my way across the you know that and a couple other weird lines like I think Harry Roden and a couple others at that point we moved to Kinellon and eventually there was a bookstore but my main book purchases as it was whereas my parents would go to various flea you know rubbish sales and flea markets and there would be tons of SF book club volumes either for my birthday or Christmas you know that in the library so until we bring T.N.E.K.K. or I see Kinellon so around 1976 was when we finally got a bookstore and I started buying books there for example I got the somehow or another I heard of Donaldson's trilogy for the you know the L.R.F. War and Lord Fowlsbane order those in hardcover I got a hardcover copy from the University of Illinois of the world of flesh and the devil by J.D.
Bernal which is a nonfiction essay that inspired people like Clark and Stableton and others and then when I went to Rutgers was when I was in a town with bookstores and man that's when things really took a while because we had a great second hand bookstore called Pyramid no half half thoughts which had the dark side of the moon rainbow with the what do you call it the spectrum painted on the sign and we would you know I would go I would work in the cafeteria I would get my paycheck and we would go over to the chief thrills record store and go through the use racks and find I've been there yep what you know when stuff was out and then we would go over to half thoughts and we would hit the shelves for the books and then buy a six pack of beer between the three of us and listen to records and read books there was a the the only other really big bookstore moment that I had was when my first wife and I were up in Canada for a honeymoon and we were in Toronto at the Galleria and quite accidentally stumbled across the world's biggest bookstore that was what the sign out front set I think it was a WH SNIS right that's the book store that's featured in um short circuit the robot goes in there and reads everything and it was massive and we sort of went our separate ways and found each other about half an hour later each with a shopping cart fickle full of books penguin classics I mean this was stuff we had never seen before right and we looked at each other and I said look I'll make a deal with it we put all this back we go have fun for the rest of the weekend whatever money we've got left we come back here and do this because this is ridiculous and so we agreed and we did go back in our last day up there and we probably bought about about a 200 bucks of books so but yeah that was the last time I actually said look this is something I need to be in so what we would myself from back then would consider our modern world magic in that way well I'm amazed that I have a thing in the I can carry with me with like 10,000 books on it yeah and you know people look at it like why don't you put so many books on there so like because I can yes are you gonna read them all it's not the point because I can well there's something I've been doing lately is I'll have a folder on my phone where I'll have quite a few books that I've read or books that I remember and stuff like that a lot of times they're from SF can and or their books that have my favorite scene or my favorite quote on my favorite paragraph or something like that and if I find myself in a discussion about genre writing I can pull my phone out and go yes this was you know here's an example of what I'm talking about type of thing and instant you know the second best thing to instant recall some right it's another brain yes I know it's out of settled with us well that's a lot of books we talked about yep and I didn't even scratch the surface the ones on my to do list but we can talk about those later there's always a later there's always a little later so folks we will have links to everything that we mentioned here and we will probably be back before too long to either talk about other books that we've gone through or other things that have happened there are some science fictional events and TV shows and movies and other goodies that are going to be coming our way in the next few weeks that I'll probably jump on if possible and we should definitely talk to speaking of things being jumped on we should talk to mr. Paul B were one of these days because he's just back from reader time ah yes I've been following him on Twitter and I was watching the weather channel about how bad the weather was and in his hometown when he got home yep sounds so if he survived we should talk to him at some point yes but only a piece of right right all right well thank you very much Jeff yep good talking to you and we will talk again soon goodbye take care