Yet, the U.S. is different in a meaningful way. Here, abortion has historically been framed as a personal right to privacy. In many other countries I’ve studied, abortion is viewed more as a collective right that is inextricably tied to broader social and economic issues.
Initially, for some of those autocratic leaders, limiting access to abortion and contraception was a strategy to gain the approval of the nation’s religious leaders. The Catholic Church held great power in Italy and Spain, as did the Orthodox Church in Romania. At the time, these faiths opposed artificial birth control and still believe life begins at conception.
Restrictions on reproductive rights also aimed to increasebirth rates following two world wars that had stamped out some of the population, particularly in the Soviet Union and Italy. Many political leaders saw procreation as a national duty. They designated women – white, heterosexual women, that is – specific roles, primarily as mothers, to produce babies as well as future soldiers and workers for their regimes.
As energy use rises and the planet warms, you might have dreamed of an energy source that works 24/7, rain or shine, quietly powering homes, industries and even entire cities without the ups and downs of solar or wind – and with little contribution to climate change.
The promise of new engineering techniques for geothermal energy – heat from the Earth itself – has attracted rising levels of investment to this reliable, low-emission power source that can provide continuous electricity almost anywhere on the planet. That includes ways to harness geothermal energy from idle or abandoned oil and gas wells. In the first quarter of 2025, North American geothermal installations attracted US$1.7 billion in public funding – compared with $2 billion for all of 2024, which itself was a significant increase from previous years, according to an industry analysis from consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.
As an exploration geophysicist and energy engineer, I’ve studied geothermal systems’ resource potential and operational trade-offs firsthand. From the investment and technological advances I’m seeing, I believe geothermal energy is poised to become a significant contributor to the energy mix in the U.S. and around the world, especially when integrated with other renewable sources.
A May 2025 assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey found that geothermal sources just in the Great Basin, a region that encompasses Nevada and parts of neighboring states, have the potential to meet as much as 10% of the electricity demand of the whole nation – and even more as technology to harness geothermal energy advances. And the International Energy Agency estimates that by 2050, geothermal energy could provide as much as 15% of the world’s electricity needs.
For generations, Maori people in New Zealand, and other people elsewhere around the world, have made use of the Earth’s heat, as in hot springs, where these people are cooking food in the hot water.Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images
Why geothermal energy is unique
Geothermal energy taps into heat beneath the Earth’s surface to generate electricity or provide direct heating. Unlike solar or wind, it never stops. It runs around the clock, providing consistent, reliable power with closed-loop water systems and few emissions.
I'm a big fan of Seanan McGuire's "October Daye" fantasy series, so I was intrigued by this story told from the viewpoints of two major characters: Toby herself and her new husband, Tybalt, King of Cats. Here are my reviews of the duology.
Sleep No More, by Seanan McGuire (DAW)
October Daye’s magical life has unfolded over the past
many volumes, from her awakening from being transformed into a fish to her rise
in prestige and power among the aristocracy of Faerie to her enemies-to-lovers
relationship (and marriage) to Tybalt, King of Cats. She’s impulsive,
rebellious, insightful, and passionate, all things that Tybalt and her many
friends love her for. If she has gained influential allies, she has also made
even more powerful enemies. First on that list is Titania, and Titania is now out
for revenge.
October wakes up one morning, content and unquestioning
in her life as a changeling handmaid to her sister, as well as any other purebloods who
feel like bossing her around. She’s not even entitled to defend herself, and
the worst part is that she accepts all this as the natural, perfect order.
Then strangers who claim to know her begin to appear, and the
edges of Titania’s bespelled paradise begin to unravel. Toby doesn’t know whom
to trust, especially when her ability to work blood magic starts to free others
from the enchantment. The only questions are whether this small band will be
enough to overcome the stranglehold Titania has wrought over reality and if Toby
will survive to see the end of it.
One of the challenges of a long-running series is the point
where all the logical “next adventure” stories have been told but readers want
more-more-more-of-the-same. One solution is to spin off other series featuring
minor characters. McGuire has taken a different approach, which is to turn the
reality of the original series inside-out, allowing the reader to become
re-acquainted with central and minor characters as Toby figures out which is her
real life, gathers a resistance force, and goes up against the Mother of
Illusions, the Summer Queen herself. For those familiar with the series, it’s a
grand reunion-with-a-twist. Therein lies much of its charm. The book has all
the strengths of a well-developed world and beloved characters plus all the
freshness of throwing the heroine into a snakepit of dangers unlike anything
she has faced before.
At a Senate hearing on Sept. 9, 2025, on the corruption of science, witnesses presented an unpublished study that made a big assertion.
They claimed that the study, soon to be featured in a highly publicized film called “An Inconvenient Study,” expected out in early October 2025, provides landmark evidence that vaccines raise the risk of chronic diseases in childhood.
The study was conducted in 2020 by researchers at Henry Ford Health, a health care network in Detroit and southeast Michigan. Before the Sept. 9 hearing the study was not publicly available, but it became part of the public record after the hearing and is now posted on the Senate committee website.
At the hearing, Aaron Siri, a lawyer who specializes in vaccine lawsuits and acts as a legal adviser to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said the study was never published because the authors feared being fired for finding evidence supporting the health risks of vaccines. His rhetoric made the study sound definitive.
As the head of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, when I encounter new scientific claims, I always start with the question “Could this be true?” Then, I evaluate the evidence.
I can say definitively that the study by Henry Ford Health researchers has serious design problems that keep it from revealing much about whether vaccines affect children’s long-term health. In fact, a spokesperson at Henry Ford Health told journalists seeking comment on the study that it “was not published because it did not meet the rigorous scientific standards we demand as a premier medical research institution.”
The study’s weaknesses illustrate several key principles of biostatistics.
Study participants and conclusions
The researchers examined the medical records of about 18,500 children born between 2000 and 2016 within the Henry Ford Health network. According to the records, roughly 16,500 children had received at least one vaccine and about 2,000 were completely unvaccinated.
The authors compared the two groups on a wide set of outcomes. These included conditions that affect the immune system, such as asthma, allergies and autoimmune disorders. They also included neurodevelopmental outcomes such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, autism and speech and seizure disorders, as well as learning, intellectual, behavioral and motor disabilities.
Their headline result was that vaccinated children had 2.5 times the rate of “any selected chronic disease,” with 3 to 6 times higher rates for some specific conditions. They did not find that vaccinated children had higher rates of autism.
The study’s summary states it found that “vaccine exposure in children was associated with increased risk of developing a chronic health disorder.” That wording is strong, but it is not well supported given the weaknesses of the paper.
Timeline logic
To study long-term diseases in children, it’s crucial to track their health until the ages when these problems usually show up. Many conditions in the study, like asthma, ADHD, learning problems and behavior issues, are mostly diagnosed after age 5, once kids are in school. If kids are not followed that long, many cases will be missed.
However, that’s what happened here, especially for children in the unvaccinated group.
About 25% of unvaccinated children in the study were tracked until they were less than 6 months old, 50% until they were less than 15 months old, and only 25% were tracked past age 3. That’s too short to catch most of these conditions. Vaccinated kids, however, were followed much longer, with 75% followed past 15 months of age, 50% past 2.7 years of age and 25% past 5.7 years of age.
The longer timeline gave the vaccinated kids many more chances to have diagnoses recorded in their Henry Ford medical records compared with the nonvaccinated group. The study includes no explanation for this difference.
When one group is watched longer and into the ages when problems are usually found, they will almost always look sicker on paper, even if the real risks are the same. In statistics, this is called surveillance bias.
The primary methods used in the paper were not sufficient to adjust for this surveillance bias. The authors tried new analyses using only kids followed beyond age 1, 3 or 5. But vaccinated kids were still tracked longer, with more reaching the ages when diagnoses are made, so those efforts did not fix this bias.
When a junior at an Orange County public high school in Florida visited the school library to check out a copy of “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac, it wasn’t in its Dewey decimal system-assigned location.
It turns out the title had been removed from the library’s shelves because of a complaint, and in compliance with Florida House Bill 1069, it had been removed from the library indefinitely. Kerouac’s quintessential chronicle of the Beat Generation in the 1950s, along with hundreds of other titles, was not available for students to read.
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law in July 2023. Under this law, if a parent or community member objected to a book on the grounds that it was obscene or pornographic, the school had to remove that title from the curriculum within five days and hold a public hearing with a special magistrate appointed by the state.
On Aug. 13, 2025, Judge Carlos Mendoza of the U.S. Middle District of Florida ruled in Penguin Random House v. Gibson that parts of Florida HB 1069 are unconstitutional and violate students’ First Amendment right of free access to ideas.
The plaintiffs who filed the suit included the five largest trade book publishing houses, a group of award-winning authors, the Authors Guild, which is a labor union for published professional authors with over 15,000 members, and the parents of a group of Florida students.
I’ve spent the past 26 years training English language arts teachers at Arizona State University, and 24 years before that teaching high school English. I understand the importance of Mendoza’s ruling for keeping books in classrooms and school libraries. In my experience, every few years the books teachers have chosen to teach come under attack. I’ve tried to learn as much as I can about the history of censorship in this country and pass it to my students, in order to prepare them for what may lie ahead in their careers as English teachers.
Legal precedent
The August 2025 ruling is in keeping with legal precedent around censorship. Over the years, U.S. courts have established that obscenity can be a legitimate cause for removing a book from the public sphere, but only under limited circumstances.
In the 1933 case of United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, Judge John Munro Woolsey declared that James Joyce’s classic novel was not obscene, contradicting a lower court ruling. Woolsey emphasized that works must be considered as a whole, rather than judged by “selected excerpts,” and that reviewers should apply contemporary national standards and think about the effect on the average person.
In 1957, the Supreme Court further clarified First Amendment protections in Roth v. United States by rejecting the argument that obscenity lacks redeeming social importance. In this case, the court defined obscenity as material that, taken as a whole, appeals to a prurient – that is, lascivious – interest in sex in average readers.
The Supreme Court’s 1973 Miller v. California decision created the eponymous Miller test for jurors in obscenity cases. This test incorporates language from the Ulysses and Roth rulings, asking jurors to consider whether the average person, looking at the work as a whole and applying the contemporary standards in their community, would find it lascivious. It also adds the consideration of whether the material in question is of “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” when deciding whether it is obscene.
Another decision that is particularly relevant for teachers and school librarians is 1982’s Island Trees School District v. Pico, a case brought by students against their school board. The Supreme Court ruled that removing books from a school library or curriculum is a violation of the First Amendment if it is an attempt to suppress ideas. Free access to ideas in books, the court wrote, is sacrosanct: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion.”
These 23 books were removed from Florida school libraries under Florida HB 1069. In his ruling in Penguin Random House v. Gibson, Judge Carlos Mendoza named them and stated, ‘None of these books are obscene.’Illustration by The Conversation
The Village
Library Demon-Hunting Society, by C. M. Waggoner (Ace)
I often dive into books without
reading the description, and in the case of The
Village Library Demon-Hunting Societyby C.
M. Waggoner, this yielded many delightful surprises and plot twists. I picked
it up thinking I’d find a cozy mystery, conveniently forgetting the “demon-hunting”
part of the title. Indeed, the opening is very cozy: a small town, a quaint
library with older, single librarian sleuth (Sherry Pinkwhistle, great name!) with
eccentric friends and a sweet beau, and a murder mystery. As she investigates, she
realizes something is not quite right. A suspect confesses but not all the
evidence fits. Sherry wonders why her little town has a disproportionate number
of murders and why she is always the one to solve them, much to the annoyance
of the local sheriff. And why, at the peak of the chase, the town is cut off
from the outside world.
At this point, things go seriously
demon-pear-shaped. Supernatural forces are at work, creating the same Murder,
She Wrote scenario over and over, while preying on Sherry’s private guilt.
By the time the sheriff yells at her in an inhuman voice that she must
investigate another murder, all Sherry’s suspicions are in full play. It’s off
to the library to do research!
Despite the demon-hunting weirdness,
the cozy quality and Sherry’s intrepid librarian superpowers never failed to
deliver a great read. The moral for demons and murderers alike: Never mess with
a librarian.
The Make America Healthy Again movement has generated a lot of discussion about public health. But the language MAHA proponents use to describe health and disease has also raised concerns among the disability and chronic illness communities.
I’m a researcher studying the rhetoric of health and medicine – and, specifically, the rhetoric of risk. This means I analyze the language used by public officials, institutions, health care providers and other groups in discussing health risks to decode the underlying beliefs and assumptions that can affect both policy and public sentiment about health issues.
As a scholar of rhetoric and the mother of an autistic child, in the language of MAHA I hear a disregard for the humanity of people with disabilities and a shift from supporting them to blaming them for their needs.
Such language goes all the way up to the MAHA movement’s highest-level leader, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It is clearly evident in the report on children’s health published in May 2025 by the MAHA Commission, which was established by President Donald Trump and is led by Kennedy, as well as in the MAHA Commission’s follow-up draft recommendations, leaked on Aug. 15, 2025.
One key concept for understanding the MAHA movement’s rhetoric, introduced by a prominent sociologist named Ulrich Beck, is what sociologists now call individualization of risk. Beck argued that modern societies and governments frame almost all health risks as being about personal choice and responsibility. That approach obscures how policies made by large institutions – such as governments, for example – constrain the choices that people are able to make.
In other words, governments and other institutions tend to focus on the choices that individuals make to intentionally deflect from their own responsibility for the other risk factors. The consequence, in many cases, is that the institution is off the hook for any responsibility for negative outcomes.
Beck, writing in 1986, pointed to nuclear plants in the Soviet Union as an example. People who lived near them reported health issues that they suspected were caused by radiation. But the government denied the existence of any evidence linking their woes to radiation exposure, implying that lifestyle choices were to blame. Some scholars have identified a similar dynamic in the U.S. today, where the government emphasizes personal responsibility while downplaying the effects of public policy on health outcomes.
A shift in responsibility
Such a shift in responsibility is evident in how MAHA proponents, including Kennedy, discuss chronic illness and disabilities – in particular, autism.
In its May 2025 report on children’s health, the MAHA Commission describes the administration’s views on chronic diseases in children. The report notes that the increased prevalence in “obesity, diabetes, neurodevelopmental disorders, cancer, mental health, autoimmune disorders and allergies” are “preventable trends.” It also frames the “major drivers” of these trends as “the food children are eating, the chemicals they are exposed to, the medications they are taking, and various changes to their lifestyle and behavior, particularly those related to physical activity, sleep and the use of technology.”
Extensive research shows that genetics accounts for most of the risk of developing autism, but the MAHA Commission report discussed only lifestyle and environmental factors.Dusan Stankovic/E+ via Getty Images
There’s nothing inherently wrong with studying the environmental factors that might contribute to autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders. In fact, many researchers believe that autism is caused by complex interactions between genes and environmental factors. But here’s where Beck’s concept of individualization becomes revealing: While the government is clearly not responsible for the genetic causes of chronic diseases, this narrow focus on lifestyle and environmental factors implies that autism can be prevented if these factors are altered or eliminated.
While this may sound like great news, there are a couple of problems. First, it’s simply not true. Second, the Trump administration and Kennedy have canceled tens of millions of dollars in research funding for autism – including on environmental causes – replacing it with an initiative with an unclear review process. This is an unusual move if the goal is to identify and mitigate environmental risk factors And finally, the government could use this claim to justify removing federally funded support systems that are essential for the well-being of autistic people and their families – and instead focus all its efforts on eliminating processed foods, toxins and vaccines.
Even more worrisome is the implication that autism is a kind of damage caused by the environment rather than one of many normal variations in human neurological diversity – framing people with autism as a problem that society must solve.
How language encodes value judgments
Such logic sets off alarm bells for anyone familiar with the history of eugenics, a movement that began with the idea of improving America by making its people healthier and quickly evolved to make judgments about who is and is not fit to participate in society.
Kennedy’s explanation for the rise in autism diagnoses contradicts decades of research by independent researchers as well as assessments by the CDC.
Even if organic foods and a toxin-free household were the answer to reducing the prevalence of autism, the leaked MAHA Commission strategy report steers clear of recommending government regulation in industries such as food and agriculture, which would be needed to make these options affordable and widely available.
Instead, MAHA’s supposed interventions would remain lifestyle choices – and expensive ones, at that – left for individual families to make for themselves.
Just asking questions
Kennedy and other MAHA proponents also employ another powerful rhetorical tactic: raising questions about topics that have already reached a scientific consensus. This tactic frames such questions as pursuits of truth, but their purpose is actually to create doubt. This tactic, too, is evident in the MAHA Commission’s reports.
MAHA rhetoric thus continues a troubling trend in the anti-vaccine movement of calling all of science and Western medicine into question in order to further a specific agenda, regardless of the risks to public health.
The MAHA Commission’s goals are almost universally appealing – healthier food, healthier kids and a healthier environment for all Americans. But analyzing what is implied, minimized or left out entirely can illuminate a much more complex political and social agenda.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a
family of readers. Admittedly, on my
mother’s side of the family, some of them mostly read the Bible or religious
works. Others, like my mother and
grandmother, loved the “sweet” Romances of the period. My uncles loved Westerns and police
thrillers. My father’s parents, on the
other hand, were serious Leftists and read serious Leftist books, like DAS
KAPITAL in the original German. Both
sides, however, believed in reading aloud to children. They also believed in public libraries.
From the time I was big enough to
walk the ten blocks or so to our local branch, my grandmother and I made a
weekly trip to the library. She loaded
up on genre reading for her, and I loaded up on books from the children’s
section, mostly animal stories, which I particularly loved. As soon as I could read, I read a lot, well
beyond that illusory category, “grade level”.
That’s when the trouble started.
Not from my grandparents, I hasten to add, but from the other adults
around me.
When I was an older child and young
teen-ager, back in the 1950s, I began to hear entirely too often, “You
shouldn’t be reading that book. It’s not
for you.” No, I hadn’t picked out a book
with too many big words or too much sex, nothing from the “Adult” section of
our public library, no Leftist tracts, either.
I had committed the sin of liking Boys’ Books.
It may be hard to imagine now, but
there used to be fixed categories of Boys’ Books and Girls’ Books. Boys got science fiction, adventure stories,
historical stories of battles and exploration.
Girls got junior Romances, stories of girls helping others or setting up
their own homes, horse stories, and . . . well, I never found much else in that
section of the library. Some were well
written, like the “Anne of Green Gables” books or the “Flicka” horse
stories. Most struck me as utter crap,
even at thirteen, particularly the junior Romances, such as the Rosamund de
Jardin “Marcy” series. Oh yes, I can’t
forget the forerunners of “self help” books.
Those available for girls in the 1950s centered around “how to look
pretty and get a boyfriend.” I never
noticed any self help in the Boys’ section.
They, apparently, didn’t need advice.
What I wanted were the adventures,
the battles, and the science fiction.
Among the Boys’ Books, I discovered Roy Chapman Andrews and Robert
Heinlein’s YA novels, along with a lot of lesser writers whose names, alas, I
have forgotten but whom I loved at the time.
When I went to the library desk to check these books out, the voices
started. “Are you getting those for your
brother? No? Why do you want to read those? They’re for boys. You should look in the Girls’ section.” No librarian actually prevented me from
taking the books home, mind. That was
reserved for my mother. “Why are you
reading that junk?” was one of her favorite phrases. “It’s not for girls. Take those back. Get some good books.”
I read most of Heinlein’s YA books
while sitting in the library. Why risk
taking them home and getting nagged?
When as a teen, I graduated to SF for grown-ups, the disapproval escalated,
too. My mother helpfully tried to get me
to read proper female literature by checking out books for me. I dutifully read them -- hell, I’d read
anything at that age, from cereal boxes on up -- but I never liked them. Finally, she gave up.
Death at a Highland Wedding (A Rip Through Time Novel)
by Kelley Armstrong (St Martins)
Death at a Highland Wedding is the fourth
installment in Kelley Armstrong's “Rip Through Time” time-travel novels
that feature modern-day homicide detective Mallory Atkinson, who has slipped
150 years into the past to Victorian Scotland. By now, three books later, she's
developed meaningful relationships with the people around her and is using her
training as an assistant to undertaker Dr. Duncan Gray and Detective Hugh
McCreadie. That’s all the backstory a reader needs, since Armstrong skillfully
weaves in the relevant material as the plot unfolds. The important thing is
that Duncan and Hugh, along with Hugh’s independent-minded sister, Isla, know Mallory’s
true identity and trust her investigatory skills.
Now the four are off to a beautiful highland hunting lodge
for the wedding of Hugh’s younger sister. All is not well, however. The new gamekeeper
has been laying traps that threaten not only local wildlife but the poor folk
accustomed to traveling freely over the estate. Soon, Mallory and her friends
are caught up in a series of increasingly bizarre mysteries that culminate in
the murder of one of the guests, for which the inexperienced young constable
arrests the groom.
The combination of time travel and murder mystery would furnish
an entertaining read, but Armstrong goes further. Her sensitivity to relationships,
the vulnerability of women in the 1870s, especially those without rank or
money, and Mallory’s compassion and quick insight all make for a deeper story.
It’s not necessary to have read the preceding volumes to enjoy Death at a
Highland Wedding, although you’ll likely want to gobble up as many of the
adventures of Mallory and her friends as you can find.
Deborah J.
Ross: Tell us a little about
yourself. How did you come to be a writer?
Katharine
Kerr: From childhood on, I’ve
always loved to read. Somewhere around age 8 I realized that books did not just
magically appear – they were written by people! And I vowed that one day I’d be
one of them. I never lost sight of that goal, even when my life turned very
difficult in my 20’s. I just kept reading and kept writing for practice. When I
finally finished a novel, FLICKERS, that is, a family saga such as was popular
in the 1980s, I realized I’d need an agent. People ask me: how did you learn
how to get published without the internet? The answer always seems to surprise
them. I don’t know why. I went to the public library and looked up the subject
in the old-fashioned card catalog. Lo and behold! There was a whole shelf of
books on the subject. I read several and followed their advice.
DJR: What inspired your
book, Haze?
KK: For some time, several years really,
before I started work on it, I had a scene in my mind. A derelict, probably an
addict, was sitting on the sidewalk in a far future city when a military
officer came striding to offer him redemption . . . for something, I didn’t
know what. But they turned out to be Dan Brennan and Captain Evans. I started
writing from there.
DJR: How does it relate to your other hard
sf?
KK: When I wrote POLAR CITY BLUES, back in
the 1990s, I didn’t realize that it was the beginning of something longer.
After years of working on the Deverry Saga, I wanted to write a one-off,
something that ended! One of my friends, Kate Daniel, thought otherwise. She
wrote almost all of POLAR CITY NIGHTMARE even though my name’s on the cover –
commercial reasons, of course. In these two books, Humanity have settled only a
few exoplanets. The dominant species are the Kar-Li and the H’Allevae (known as
Hoppers), but the Leps are represented too, under the condescending name of
“lizzies”.
In a short story I wrote, “Its Own Reward,” another
sapient species appears, the Val Chiri Gan. This story takes place a long while
before the Polar City pair, when the Old Earth is dying. They may reappear in
ZYON. I’m not sure yet.
SNARE and PALACE are two books more closely linked to
HAZE. Both are victims of the sudden closing of the same interstellar
shunt. PALACE was another collaboration.
I had nothing to do with the sequel, however, and unlike PCN, my name certainly
belongs on the cover of PALACE itself.
Charlie seems like an average guy, having given up his career
as a journalist for substitute teaching that barely pays for groceries and cat
food. He’s kind and sweet, a sucker for a cute cat or two. His current dream is
to buy a landmark pub, although it’s unlikely the bank will approve the loan.
To make matters worse, his siblings want to sell the house they jointly own.Then his
long-lost Uncle Jake dies, and before Charlie realizes what’s going on, he
finds himself heir to a supervillain business and the target of his uncle’s
rivals, a cabal of rich, soulless multinational predators. Along the way,
Charlie discovers a knack for negotiating with wisecracking sentient dolphins
who threaten a strike if their demands for better working conditions aren’t
met, intelligent spy cats who communicate via typewriters, and a terrifyingly
competent henchwoman.
It's all brilliantly witty but with an undercurrent of thoughtfulness.
Again and again, Charlie demonstrates how logic, common sense, and an utter
lack of deference to bullies can and do prevail. The dialog is top-notch, as
are the reversals and plot twists. Having grown up in a union family, I
heartily cheered for dolphin workers’ rights.
Katharine Kerr is one of the most versatile writers of
speculative fiction. Although many readers know her best for her long-running “Deverry”
fantasy series, she also writes superb urban fantasy and hard science fiction,
with such works as Polar City Blues and Freeze Frames. Now she
returns to a far future when interstellar civilization depends on travel
through hyperspace stargate shunts. Kerr’s universe is richly detailed,
enormous in scope of space and history, replete with ancient grudges between
sapient races, current politics, and plots-within-plots. And a mystery: the shunts
are supposed to be permanent, anchored at each end to nearby planets, but
something—or some ONE—has accomplished the impossible and destroyed a shunt. Which
vital route will be the next target?
We are drawn into the story through Dan, an immensely
talented starship pilot capable of linking with a ship’s AI to navigate the
shunts. Like other pilots, he uses the drug Haze to blunt his craving for the
transcendent experience of hyperspace when he’s not working. But Haze is highly
addictive, and Dan’s use of it has gotten him cashiered out of Fleet, destitute,
and turning tricks on Nowhere Street on a backwater planet to feed his habit.
When Fleet offers him a way back to his old job, under the care of his former
lover, Devit, and enough Haze to keep him functional, Dan doesn’t have a
choice. There’s a reason he’s refused treatment for Haze addiction, a secret he
guards with his life. Disguised as merchant traders, he and his new crew begin
investigating the disappearance of the shunt. And that’s when things start to
go seriously wrong.
Kerr’s use of Dan as an initial viewpoint character who introduces
us to this world is brilliant. He’s at turns fallible, aggravating, and heart-breakingly
attractive. The offspring of a noted film beauty, he’s been genetically
modified to be sexually irresistible to both men and women, and to
unconsciously respond to their advances. Devit has been the only person in his
life to care about him as a person, but at a terrible cost. In this society,
both bisexuality and polyamory are widely accepted, but relationships like
theirs are fraught with challenges. Anyone who’s ever loved a person with
substance abuse issues knows how painful and impossibly difficult it can be. As
Devit grows closer to legendary cyberjock Jorja, their problems and the choices
both must face become more urgent.
As the mystery unfolds, with a nuanced pacing of plot
reversals and surprises, layers of both human and alien cultures emerge. One of
the more fascinating of these is the relationship—sometimes symbiotic, often sullenly
adversarial—between human pilots or cyberjocks and the AIs that run ships,
stations, archives, and more. Scholars find themselves at cross-purposes with
the military that is supposed to protect them. Old feuds between species simmer
just below the surface. The revelation at the end is highly satisfactory, meticulously
plotted, and a fresh surprise.
It's hard to list the strengths of this remarkable novel
because there are so many. They include exceptional world-building, social
systems and relationships, hardware and AIs, and most of all, the characters.
People find themselves trapped with no healthy way forward, like Dan and Devit.
They try new strategies and alliances, not always successful. As they confront
new situations or old ones come back to haunt them, they struggle to move
beyond the past. Wounded, recovering, and scarred, their lives can never be the
same. In other words, Kerr’s fully rounded characters change and grow in ways
that drive the story forward.
Award-worthy and highly recommended for lovers of space
science fiction.
I wrote this post in 2011. Still true, perhaps even more so now.
Some years ago - like maybe a decade - most of my jewelry was stolen. None of it was very valuable, although there were some pearls and jade and a little amber, and a lovely pair of moonstone stud earrings. But, as is the way of things, each piece had a story that was part of my life. That was the real value, and hence the deepest loss. I'd had some of them since my childhood, and some had been gifts from loved ones who've since died. Some of it was my mother's.
I went through the expected rage and frenzy, scouring local flea markets in the forlorn hope that I might spot a piece or two. Of course, I did not. When that stage had run its course, the police report filed (and, doubtless, forgotten), anger turned to grief, and grief to acceptance, and acceptance to looking in a new way at what I'd lost.
I wrote in my journal that the thieves had taken bits of minerals, crystals, shells, fossilized tree sap, but they could not steal:
the stories in my mind the books I've written my children the redwoods my dreams my friends their kindness and generosity to me my capacity for joy...
Is there such a thing as a cozy high fantasy with a female battle-orc
heroine? Elves, dwarves, enchanted swords, necromancers…and spicy romance
novels? Yes to all of this, because Travis Baldree has invented the subgenre!
Bookshops & Bonedust is a delightful prequel to Legends
and Lattes, although each works beautifully on its own.
Recuperating from wounds incurred in the hunt for a powerful
necromancer, battle-orc soldier-of-fortune Viv finds herself in the sleepy
beach town of Murk with nothing to do. In desperation born of overwhelming
boredom, she follows the literary suggestions of Fern, the ratkin owner of a
dying bookstore. Any fantasy reader worth their salt knows what comes next! Not
only is Viv drawn into the enchanted world of novels but she sets about
reviving the bookstore, complete with a surprise appearance by the elf author
of fabled romance adventures. Along the way, Viv encounters a gnome with a chip
on her shoulder, a retired mercenary turned baker extraordinaire, a mysterious traveler
in gray, and a talking bag of bones. All is not hunky-dory in Murk, however,
for the necromancer responsible for Viv’s injury is still on the loose…
These are not just devastating losses. When death is sudden, violent, or when a body is never recovered, grief gets tangled up with trauma.
In these situations, people don’t only grieve the death. They struggle with the terror of how it happened, the unanswered questions and the shock etched into their bodies.
I was widowed when I was 36. In July 2020, my husband, Brent, went missing after testing a small, flat-bottomed fishing boat called a Jon boat. His body was recovered two days later, but I never saw his remains.
Both my personal loss and professional work have shown me how trauma changes the grieving process and what kind of support actually helps.
To understand how trauma can complicate grief, it’s important to first understand how people typically respond to loss.
Grief isn’t a set of stages
Many people still think of grief through the lens of psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief, popularized in the early 1970s: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
But in fact, this model was originally designed for people facing their own deaths, not for mourners. In the absence of accessible grief research in the 1960s, it became a leading framework for understanding the grieving process – even though it wasn’t meant for that.
Despite this misapplication, the stages model has shaped cultural expectations: namely, that grief ends once people reach the “acceptance” stage. But research doesn’t support this idea. Trying to force grief into this model can cause real harm, leaving mourners feeling they’re grieving “wrong.”
In reality, mourning is often lifelong. Most people go through an acute period of overwhelming pain right after the loss. This is usually followed by integrated grief, where the pain softens but the loss is still part of everyday life, returning in waves.
She's a Ranger, a wild and savvy
knife-fighter, determined to get help in finding her partner who's lost on the
treacherous northern border. He's a scholar who sees visions, eager to escape
the confines of city life and the shadow of his charismatic mother. With the
assassination of a beloved leader and the city in turmoil, the two have only
each other to turn to. What begins as a rescue mission turns deadly as together
they unravel the secret that lies beneath Laurea's idyllic surface.
Reviews:
"A
beautifully constructed fantasy with characters who grow and mature before the
reader's eyes and who are engagingly human while being fantastically heroic.
Her writing flows and the point of view switches are interesting and exciting.
This book is a keeper." Rickey
Mallory, Affair de Coeur
"A
style and manner reminiscent of McCaffrey's Crystal Singer series." The
Bookwatch
"An
unusual saga that starts slowly but builds to a startling climax." Sherry
S. Hoy, Kliatt
"Solid
characters and a well-designed world make for good reading." Philadelphia
Press
"The
plot moves briskly from crisis in Laureal to capture by the Norther barbarians
to discovery of the true meaning of the Northlight of the title, with ample
foreshadowing from the mysterious spooky something in the air of the frontier.
And the culmination quite satisfactorily evokes the sense of wonder." Tom
Easton, Analog
Labyrinth's Heart completes the “Rook and Rose”
trilogy by M. A. Carrick (in real life, Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms). The
story began in the Venice-like city of Nadežra with the arrival of con-artist
Ren, bent on impersonating a long-lost cousin of an aristocratic family and
thereby worming her way into rank and riches. An uneasy peace between the
nobility and the natives they oppress barely holds in the city. Between the
Robin Hood-like Rook (which turns out to be not an individual person but a
vocation transmitted through a magical mask), gangs tussling for territory, and
the mind-controlling medallions left over from “the Tyrant,” Ren soon finds
herself acting several, mutually incompatible roles. One of them, by the way,
is a reader of special tarot-like cards, a “patterner.”
At the beginning of Labyrinth's Heart, Ren’s
precarious balancing act comes crashing down with the arrival of a scheming
social climber who knows her true story and will not stop at pressuring Ren to
get what she wants, even at the expense of Ren’s now beloved family. Ancient malice
awakens, the oppressed classes rise up against tyranny, and mystery piles upon
mystery.
The three volumes weave together old evils, cursed clans,
transcendent magic, political corruption, social upheaval, and a love story or
two. Together, they form a long, slow simmer of a story that shines with its
sympathetic characters and rich cultural setting. The cards used for
“patterning” divination are particularly vivid, with a cohesion and archetypal
resonance that makes them utterly believable. (The authors designed a deck of
these cards that will soon be available.)
I’m a huge fan of the work of the authors and I loved these
books. However, since this is a review, I must offer a few caveats. One is that
the volumes should be read fairly close together. It had been several years
since I read the middle book, and I found myself struggling to recall too many
events, characters, place names, and clan relationships.
Two, a corollary, is that Labyrinth's Heart is not
a stand-alone. There’s simply too much backstory for a book entire in itself,
although the authors make a valiant attempt to supply synopses of previous
books, character lists, glossary, etc.
Three is that one challenge of such a long, complex story
lies in the sheer number of characters, each with a backstory. The inevitable
result is that Ren, who was the front-and-center protagonist at the beginning,
fades from time to time into a lesser position when everyone else’s story comes
to a climax and resolution. Along with that complexity comes a multiplicity of
endings. It’s a bit like the final volume of The Lord of the Rings,
where the story does not end with the destruction of the One Ring or even with
the hobbits returning home. Indeed, it goes on for chapter after chapter, and
so, too, does the “Rook and Rose” saga. This is a good thing for readers who
are sad to say good-bye to this marvelous world and its people; not so much for
those who want a single, definitive “they lived happily ever after.”
A minor point is that Grey Serrado (Ren’s love interest,
among other roles) has grown up thinking he was cursed (what looks like
psychological child abuse turns out to have a basis in reality). How that came
about and how it’s resolved play out in Labyrinth's Heart. The problem
for me is that I never picked up on his being cursed in the first two books, so
I was a bit taken aback when it became an important secondary thread. All these
are minor quibbles, however, compared to the grand, sweeping scope of the
books.
I leave you with one
of the many beautiful, poetic lines from “Rook and Rose”:
Now, a new study that we conducted with a team of colleagues suggests that dogs might have a deeper and more biologically complex effect on humans than scientists previously believed. And this complexity may have profound implications for human health.
How stress works
The human response to stress is a finely tuned and coordinated set of various physiological pathways. Previous studies of the effects of dogs on human stress focused on just one pathway at a time. For our study, we zoomed out a bit and measured multiple biological indicators of the body’s state, or biomarkers, from both of the body’s major stress pathways. This allowed us to get a more complete picture of how a dog’s presence affects stress in the human body.
When a person experiences a stressful event, the SAM axis acts quickly, triggering a “fight or flight” response that includes a surge of adrenaline, leading to a burst of energy that helps us meet threats. This response can be measured through an enzyme called alpha-amylase.
At the same time, but a little more slowly, the HPA axis activates the adrenal glands to produce the hormone cortisol. This can help a person meet threats that might last for hours or even days. If everything goes well, when the danger ends, both axes settle down, and the body goes back to its calm state.
While stress can be an uncomfortable feeling, it has been important to human survival. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to respond effectively to acute stress events like an animal attack. In such instances, over-responding could be as ineffective as under-responding. Staying in an optimal stress response zone maximized humans’ chances of survival.
Imagine that you own a small, 20-acre farm in California’s Central Valley. You and your family have cultivated this land for decades, but drought, increasing costs and decreasing water availability are making each year more difficult.
Now imagine that a solar-electricity developer approaches you and presents three options:
You can lease the developer 10 acres of otherwise productive cropland, on which the developer will build an array of solar panels and sell electricity to the local power company.
You can select 1 or 2 acres of your land on which to build and operate your own solar array, using some electricity for your farm and selling the rest to the utility.
Or you can keep going as you have been, hoping your farm can somehow survive.
Thousands of farmers across the country, including in the Central Valley, are choosing one of the first two options. A 2022 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that roughly 117,000 U.S. farm operations have some type of solar device. Our own work has identified over 6,500 solar arrays currently located on U.S. farmland.
Our study of nearly 1,000 solar arrays built on 10,000 acres of the Central Valley over the past two decades found that solar power and farming are complementing each other in farmers’ business operations. As a result, farmers are making and saving more money while using less water – helping them keep their land and livelihood.
A hotter, drier and more built-up future
Perhaps nowhere in the U.S. is farmland more valuable or more productive than California’s Central Valley. The region grows a vast array of crops, including nearly all of the nation’s production of almonds, olives and sweet rice. Using less than 1% of all farmland in the country, the Central Valley supplies a quarter of the nation’s food, including 40% of its fruits, nuts and other fresh foods.
The food, fuel and fiber that these farms produce are a bedrock of the nation’s economy, food system and way of life.
But decades of intense cultivation, urban development and climate change are squeezing farmers. Water is limited, and getting more so: A state law passed in 2014 requires farmers to further reduce their water usage by the mid-2040s.
The trade-offs of installing solar on agricultural land
When the solar arrays we studied were installed, California state solar energy policy and incentives gave farm landowners new ways to diversify their income by either leasing their land for solar arrays or building their own.
There was an obvious trade-off: Turning land used for crops to land used for solar usually means losing agricultural production. We estimated that over the 25-year life of the solar arrays, this land would have produced enough food to feed 86,000 people a year, assuming they eat 2,000 calories a day.
There was an obvious benefit, too, of clean energy: These arrays produced enough renewable electricity to power 470,000 U.S. households every year.
But the result we were hoping to identify and measure was the economic effect of shifting that land from agricultural farming to solar farming. We found that farmers who installed solar were dramatically better off than those who did not.
They were better off in two ways, the first being financially. All the farmers, whether they owned their own arrays or leased their land to others, saved money on seeds, fertilizer and other costs associated with growing and harvesting crops. They also earned money from leasing the land, offsetting farm energy bills, and selling their excess electricity.
Farmers who owned their own arrays had to pay for the panels, equipment and installation, and maintenance. But even after covering those costs, their savings and earnings added up to US$50,000 per acre of profits every year, 25 times the amount they would have earned by planting that acre.
Farmers who leased their land made much less money but still avoided costs for irrigation water and operations on that part of their farm, gaining $1,100 per acre per year – with no up-front costs.
The farmers also conserved water, which in turn supported compliance with the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act water use reduction requirements. Most of the solar arrays were installed on land that had previously been irrigated. We calculated that turning off irrigation on this land saved enough water every year to supply about 27 million people with drinking water or irrigate 7,500 acres of orchards. Following solar array installation, some farmers also fallowed surrounding land, perhaps enabled by the new stable income stream, which further reduced water use.
Irrigation is key to cropland productivity in California’s Central Valley. Covering some land with solar panels eliminates the need for irrigation of that area, saving water for other uses elsewhere.Citizen of the Planet/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Changes to food and energy production
Farmers in the Central Valley and elsewhere are now cultivating both food and energy. This shift can offer long-term security for farmland owners, particularly for those who install and run their own arrays.
Recent estimates suggest that converting between 1.1% and 2.4% of the country’s farmland to solar arrays would, along with other clean energy sources, generate enough electricity to eliminate the nation’s need for fossil fuel power plants.
Though many crops are part of a global market that can adjust to changes in supply, losing this farmland could affect the availability of some crops. Fortunately, farmers and landowners are finding new ways to protect farmland and food security while supporting clean energy.
Farms are much more than the land they occupy and the goods they produce. Farms are run by people with families, whose well-being depends on essential and variable resources such as water, fertilizer, fuel, electricity and crop sales. Farmers often borrow money during the planting season in hopes of making enough at harvest time to pay off the debt and keep a little profit.
Installing solar on their land can give farmers a diversified income, help them save water, and reduce the risk of bad years. That can make solar an asset to farming, not a threat to the food supply.
